Why I'm Sticking With GURPS

[Mailanka]

So the "Why I've stepped away from GURPS" thread is finally dead, and I thought I would share some counter-thoughts. I wanted to do this separately because I didn't want to seem to be arguing against the OP of that thread. Rather, he got me thinking about why I still run GURPS. I understand most of these threads devolve into "Me too," but perhaps this thread will inspire similar introspection in you that the other thread inspired in me.

First, I want to state some of the reasons people often have (stated or otherwise) for sticking with GURPS that aren't valid for me. These aren't enough for me to stick with GURPS:

I'm a diehard GURPS Fan!
Some people seem to stick with GURPS because it's GURPS. They have a giant pile of GURPS books and nothing else, or they have huge brand loyalty, they don't really know anything else. I'm a collector. I have tons of books from a variety of lines littering my room, and uncounted PDFs. I'm constantly encountering new system ideas, new setting concepts. I'm not stuck in a GURPS ghetto talking about how great it is. Instead, I've seen the world, and I keep coming back to GURPS. I'm constantly re-evaluating favorite systems, seeing if I can replace them, and while the edges of my broad GURPS love gets chipped at, by and large, the core reasons I like GURPS stick around.

GURPS can do anything!
It can't. It doesn't handle high-level Supers very well, for example, and even in the genres it can handle alright, it does them in a GURPSy kind of way. You can't really turn GURPS into D&D or Fate, for example. Oh, sure, you can hack the system and rewrite powers and turn the system upside down until, if you squint, in the dark, it looks close enough. But if you want that, why not just go with the original in the first place? No, I don't buy "generic and universal" to mean "It can do anything." It means GURPS can cover any genre of story in a GURPSish kind of way. GURPS supers will not play like M&M3, but it'll still be supers. GURPS sci-fi will not play like Nova Praxis, but it'll still be sci-fi. GURPS wuxia will not play like Legends of the Wulin, but it'll still have serious kung-fu action, and so on. There's still plenty of room for other games out there.

GURPS is generic!
This is certainly true, but it's not unique in this regard anymore. I can "run anything" in Fate, Hero, True20, D20, BESM, Tri-Stat, OVA and numerous other systems that I can't think of off the top of my head. It used to be having a single, swiss-knife system was a real sell. Now, people have lots of those at their fingertips and seem to be looking for something else.

GURPS is easy!
In some senses, it is. But we're lying if we say it doesn't have a serious learning curve, and I find working out a decent setting/campaign takes tons of upfront work. I don't come to GURPS because I can cobble together a setting in the blink of an eye. I've been playing 13th Age, for example, and it's shockingly quick and easy when it comes to session planning and world-design. GURPS can't claim to have that.

GURPS is realistic!
I think this is a misunderstanding regarding some of the concepts I'll talk about later. But my GURPS Chambara game is not more realistic or historically accurate than Legend of the Five Rings. A GURPS Supers game isn't any less absurd than Marvel Heroic Roleplaying or M&M3. There's nothing inherent in the GURPS system that makes it more grounded in reality than any other system. In fact, pretty specifically, you can race pretty far from reality if you choose. It has psychic powers, magic spells and super-science ultra-tech right there in the core book. Your game of force swords and TK jumps is not "realistic."

[Mailanka]

All that said, I do find GURPS terribly compelling and it keeps drawing me back again and again. I dislike the above because they are either untrue, or they undersell what I think makes GURPS such a great game in the first place. GURPS isn't going to find success by trying to be something to everyone. People already have their preferred dungeon crawling system, for example, and if you tell someone that GURPS can do everything their preferred DF system can do, they'll ask "Then why bother to change?"

I think GURPS has some elements that make it stand out, that make it unique and special. These, to my mind are the selling points of GURPS: the things it can do that nothing else can.

GURPS is detail-oriented
When you create a GURPS character, setting or plot, you can't help but work out the nitty-gritty details to everything. GURPS will offer you free points if you can write down 5 highly specific quirks about your character. It asks you to think about the different divisions of medical specialization your doctor might have. It offers you a complete book full of teensy tiny little powers called Perks that will make your character unique. It's a game where you count bullets, can argue about the merits of this car vs that car, or this gun vs that gun. It's a game that, when asked about a "generic sci-fi setting" asks "Er, what do you mean by generic?" It has book after book of rigorously researched and thought-provoking ideas that will add lush, lush detail to your games.

I'd rather run GURPS Cabal than Mage: the Awakening because the former demands and rewards deep research into the occult and allows for huge variation between two different mages. I'd rather run GURPS Zombies than All Flesh Must Be Eaten because I want to count bullets and fret about survival logistics, DayZ style. I'd rather run GURPS Martial Arts than Legends of the Five Rings because I want to pay attention to footwork, the variation between different katanas, and to see each move, blow-by-blow, second by second. GURPS lets me get exactly the character I want, because GURPS brooks no vague half-descriptions such as "I dunno, like your normal human fighter. Duh."

GURPS is concrete
Most games have high levels of abstraction. In D&D, for example, our cleric had spells like "Astral Seal" and "Trumpet of Awe." I still don't know what those looked like, and only had a vague idea of what they did. They were so abstract, that people made fun of the names, suggesting it was a Trumpet of awwwww, and that the Astral Seal was a spiritual sea mammal. One of my female players refuses to play D&D for that reason. "I had no idea what was going on."

She doesn't have that problem with GURPS. What you see is what you get. Because of the details listed above, every question is carefully answered. Because of how the system works, anything you can try to do is covered somewhere by the rules in highly concrete terms. People make fun of the digging rules, but those digging rules mean we can work out real-world numbers. How fast would someone with ST 100 be able to dig beneath a castle wall? We can answer that in a way that you can actually picture. What would alien life be like on a silicon world? GURPS can give you those details. And what exactly does that martial art move? GURPS actually explains it in such a way that you could physically act out what's going on.

This means I can see it. She can see it. We can all see it. And if someone just explains what they are trying to do, I can easily turn that into rules.

GURPS is really exciting
In GURPS combat, whiff beats whittle. That is, the character is fine unless he gets hit (which happens rarely) in which case he's in a world of pain. I'm not saying that this is inherently better, but it's ideal for some genres, especially action genres where we would expect a single bullet to floor someone. GURPS is one of the only games I can know where people will, after the fight is done, collapse in exhaustion and talk about how terrifying that fight was, despite the fact that they don't have a single scratch on them.

GURPS scales well
Because of its extreme detail, you can run very, very low powered characters that remain detailed and dynamic. For example, an extremely low-level WoD character runs aground a "lack of options" problem really quickly, as there's only so many shades of incompetent that the system can do, to the point where it had to invent a new system for handling kids that wasn't "Look, they have a 1 in most of their physical stats." GURPS doesn't have that problem. It can even run negative point characters that have some skills and advantages, if you allow it. And it scales up pretty nicely too. I've been surprised how well it's handled 500+ point characters. It doesn't do supers well, but high-octane action heroes (with or without powers) it handles with aplomb.

This fact, especially on the low end, especially paired with the "really exciting" comment above is why GURPS is always my system of choice for horror.

GURPS supports very academic gaming
I'm not saying a GURPS game should play like a dry college lecture. It really shouldn't. But because GURPS is so grounded and concrete and demands such detail, it really supports and rewards research. There's a reason GURPS books have such an excellent reputation for universality and detail: That's how the system works.

Even without GURPS Vehicles, if I wanted to run the Fast and the Furious in GURPS, with highly detailed and nuanced vehicle catalogs that had player fussing over their cars for hours (which is the whole point of the grease-monkey action genre!), then all I'd need to do is flip on Top Gear and open up Wikipedia and start to do my homework: Find top speeds, acceleration rates, weights, prices, come up with what I think is decent handling and what isn't and begin to build my catalog. I could even come up with modifications you could make to a car, what sort of skill penalties and monetary costs that would require. I could easily burn months on this, and when I was done, I would come out with not only more knowledge of how cars work, but how to make them work in my game and be fun. And from this academic study of cars would spring a balls-to-the-walls game of car chases and heists, with loving attention paid to the characters' cars, who are nearly characters in their own right, an extension of each PC's personality.

I like it when my games push me to understand something new, and allow me to illustrate that new thing to my players, and no system rewards that like GURPS.

GURPS excels at world-building
Because GURPS is detailed, concrete and rewards research and thought, GURPS has some of the best setting-creation books I've ever read. Now, I don't need help writing settings. I have professionally published setting material that I bet some of you have actually read. And even with my credentials, GURPS helps me, because it forces me to think. It brings up ideas I'd never thought of before. It creates rigor and internally consistent logic. I outlined one of my sci-fi races and a friend praised me for their believability and internally consistent logic, and I had to admit that most of that came from GURPS Space, and I just took the results they gave me and made it compelling and visual. I breathed life into the clay figure that GURPS had readily delivered to me.

This is why I find the "GURPS needs a setting!" argument to be such a red herring. Setting aside the fact that GURPS already has tons of settings, GURPS is a game about building your own game, your own setting, your own world. That's what sells and that's what it excels at. If you want a game where you can quickly cobble together some campaign without thinking about it, I can think of systems that would be far better than GURPS. GURPS excels at making you think. So when I want to think, I want GURPS.

TL;DR: I stick with GURPS because GURPS excels at making you think. So when I want to think, I want GURPS.

[Tomsdad]

I came to GURPS late. I was aware of 3e, brought 4e when it came out and took 6 months to get going with it.

For me I knew I was on to a winner, because it not only matched my sense of verisimilitude, but it did so in a joined up interconnected way. Most 'realistic' systems I have come across end up posing more questions than they actually end up answering, GURPS (99% of the time) answers it's own questions. If I had a complaint it might be that the question raised and the answer give may not appear on the same page every time, but it quite often does.

But even more impressively, it does this while still being flexible enough to tackle different genres and play styles. i.e it doesn't seem to break, and given its scope and flexibility that's pretty amazing!

Down the subsequent years this impression has only strengthened. It's a rare day when I find something in another system that I think couldn't be done by GURPS at least as well if not better (and also while filling the gaps that system leaves in other areas).

Do I wish that the release schedule was as busy as the 3e one apparently was, yeah of course (but then there's never enough of a good thing). But I find this mitigated by the the fact that there are not many system releases that don't cover a lot of ground and provide a lot of material.

GURPS is the only system I buy PDFS for, (which I have to go to the trouble of printing and binding them to make them personally usable), which for me is high praise indeed especially when you consider how moved over to PDFs the system is.

[Mailanka]

Nothing releases like it used to. White Wolf certainly slowed down (and, arguably, died). Palladium is slower and mostly just revisits old hits. D&D might be as well-supported as it used to be, or more, but it's also splintering into more editions than before (5e, Pathfinder and 13th Age all seem to be solid contenders, and there's still lots of people playing 4e, 3e and OSR).

I don't think looking at the "good old days" is any good. Instead, I say those systems that get solid, consistent and long-term support are pretty extraordinary, especially in this day and age of stand alone books. And honestly, while the PDFs are slimmer, I think the 4e library is looking, to my eye, close to the size of the 3e one. E23 suggests they're both about 200+.

Of course, I'm biased as GURPS is one of the few RPGs I'm interested in that's seriously supported. I'm no longer largely interested in D&D, WoD has also been eclipsed (I'm tired of hassling with their shoddy die-mechanic, and what I do enjoy I can get just as easily from other systems), and many of the games I would happily and rabidly support with my dollars seem uninterested in putting out supplements. So perhaps other games do receive this kind of support and I simply don't notice.

[Blind Mapmaker]

Very good posts, Mailanka. You put many things I like about GURPS into better focus than I haven been able to. I used to stick with the realistic, generic and easy (for players), but academic, detail-oriented and concrete are really better descriptions of the system and what we like about it.

The world-building focus I figured out on my own. Maybe it was due to the fact that I recently lent a friend half a dozen of GURPS genre books for her doctoral thesis on world-building in literature. She still keeps thanking me every time she sees me ^^;

I kind of disagree about the 3rd and the 4th Edition library being the same size though. That might be true for titles, but 4th Edition also includes Pyramid and while the magazine has been very gurpsy since the switch and is rightly numbered among the GURPS supplements, Pyramid 2 probably had a similar amount of GURPS content over the years (if a bit more haphazard).

Personally I wouldn't have gotten into GURPS as much as I did without those good old 120-136 page 3rd Edition books on real-word, mythical and fantastic subjects and I regularly use them in play. They hit a nice sweet spot between too in-depth and too light that I still miss from the PDFs. I like the huge 4th Edition hardcovers, but sometimes I find myself wishing that this cool supplement on medieval cathedrals or renaissance fantasy or gladiators could have really used those extra 40-50 pages. But then again sometimes those pages come around in very nice little packages, e.g. Psionic Powers, Low-Tech, Dungeon Fantasy, Thaumatology etc.

Don't get me wrong, I don't want the "good" old times back, but I am a bit sad that GURPS doesn't have the same straight off the shelf attraction of the 3rd Edition anymore. I think the advantages make up for it, though.

Sorry for the derail.

[Jürgen Hubert]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

Nothing releases like it used to. White Wolf certainly slowed down (and, arguably, died).

Actually, it would be more accurate to say that they (or, rather, Onyx Path Publishing) switched to the same model as e23 - online-only releases. Of course, they also have access to Print On Demand facilities that e23 hasn't, yet...

[SCAR]

For me there are 2 things about the GURPS system which for me beats any others I've tried.

The first is the core dice mechanic of 3d6. Really. I'm a mathematician, and wonky maths in the dice mechanics just bugs me.
The flat probability of a single d10 or d20 or even d% just doesn't feel right.
I can see the concept behind the Savage Worlds d4,d6,d8,d10,etc. system, but the maths is just broken.
I've enjoyed Exalted and Scion campaigns, and there is no doubt that rolling 20+ dice can be fun, but counting them can get slow and dull quite quickly, and past a handful of dice the probabilities tend to flatten out.

The second is the detailed and consistent mechanics.
I don't necessarily want to use all of the different fiddly mechanics in every game, but knowing the detail is there, and it all ties together, I can use whichever bits are appropriate for the setting/campaign, the particular scenario/situation, and even how I feel at the time.
It's also good to find that new books, and rules, etc. are consistent with the existing rules, abilities, etc. GURPS has very little 'Power Creep' from new books (even after nearly 10 years for Fourth Edition!)

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by SCAR

The first is the core dice mechanic of 3d6. Really. I'm a mathematician, and wonky maths in the dice mechanics just bugs me.
The flat probability of a single d10 or d20 or even d% just doesn't feel right.
I can see the concept behind the Savage Worlds d4,d6,d8,d10,etc. system, but the maths is just broken.
I've enjoyed Exalted and Scion campaigns, and there is no doubt that rolling 20+ dice can be fun, but counting them can get slow and dull quite quickly, and past a handful of dice the probabilities tend to flatten out.

Fate uses a similar "add dice together" bellcurve, quick to add, no funky-maths-for-the-sake-of-funky-maths. The only real problem with it is that it uses dice you can't pull out of any board game or find on any street corner.

And the rest of the system isn't necessarily going to feel the same either. It's actually a classic example of what I'm talking about. Like GURPS, it's generic and can "handle anything," but it'll do it in its own way, and GURPS does somethings that I want (like that intense detail and encouraging me to think through my worlds and a lack of abstraction) better than Fate. Of course, sometimes I want Fate, but that's why Fate hasn't replaced GURPS for me.

[Tomsdad]

Originally Posted by Mailanka

I don't think looking at the "good old days" is any good. Instead, I say those systems that get solid, consistent and long-term support are pretty extraordinary, especially in this day and age of stand alone books. And honestly, while the PDFs are slimmer, I think the 4e library is looking, to my eye, close to the size of the 3e one. E23 suggests they're both about 200+.

The juxtaposition of this and the LOTR threads made me laugh, "this is the 3rd age of gurps-earth, the age of soft backs is passing we must now look to PDFs..."

;-)

[simply Nathan]

For me, the reasons I'm sticking with GURPS are mostly gamist:

Point-Buy character generation.
The only RPGs I played at tabletop before GURPS were super-simplified d20 fantasy dungeon crawls. My perceptions of character design having been colored a year or two prior to that by JRPGs, the "character class" I most wanted was a warrior who could wear mail without impeding his spellcasting, wield a sword and shield, cast healing spells, cast fire and/or lightning-based attack spells, and some combination of sleep or teleport-to-town.

In D&D wizards using shields or armor (even if multiclass), clerics using blades, or a caster knowing both healing and effective damaging spells were all big no-nos and the multiclass/dual-class rules (which were not the same thing for some reason) were extremely unfavorable.

In GURPS I just have to see what the prices are for these abilities, add them up, then see if that fits my character building budget. If it doesn't, that means my GM wants me to play something less powerful so I should think of another character concept. And while looking through the traits, I find other nifty things that are either fun to play or logical things for him to have. For now, it just seems to be missing a dedicated Warp Our Whole Party Back To The Last Town We Were At spell which, overland adventures being as fun as they are, I would want more as proof of concept than anything else at this point.

Active Defenses, DR, and Wounding Multipliers.
Once I learned how these things worked, I loved them; finally a game in which armor worked the way it does both in the videogames I was introduced to fantasy roleplay through -and- felt consistent with reality checking! Armor absorbs energy from the attack before it wounds you, rather than making it less likely to not hit at all and still do full damage if it penetrates even a little.

Wounding Modifiers make the differences between cutting weapons, poking weapons, and smashing weapons actually meaningful while my experience in D&D told me the only real difference between a fighter with a sword, a barbarian with an axe, and a cleric with a mace was that the cleric's weapon had a weaker coolness factor. "Blunt weapons only" never really felt like a meaningful limitation to me there, just an arbitrary one.

Characters having to actively dodge or block attacks keeps players invested in combat even when it's someone else's turn. I like the way this plays out in practice as well as in theory.

Spells in the default system are fatigue-powered and skill-based.
Learning a spell in the same manner as any less esoteric skill makes perfect sense to me on a logical level. I might gripe about the details of certain spells' prerequisites or costs, but the fact that they are ultimately skills is something I would never want different.

Spellcasting burning up energy from a reserve listed on the character sheet feels more natural to me (and fits better with the RPGs that formed my expectations early on) than Vancian slots-per-day ever has or ever will; when magic is effectively an art and science in-universe FP and ER make more sense.

Spells-per-day only makes sense to me if an outside intelligence (a cleric's god or a demonic the caster made a pact with) is being arbitrary about what it's letting you do. Or if it's limited to 1 spell per day ever, just because it burns up so much energy that it takes a full day to recharge every single time; different energy pools for different "tiers" of magic don't make sense unless there's an exchange rate between the, or at least not to me.

Wizards can heal!
What good is your magic if your best spell is "Do slightly less damage than a typical street punk with a knife"? Wizards being able to heal means that they finally have a reason to justify their existence aside from rule of cool (robes and pointy hats are stylish!), rather than being something frail as an enemic housecat, unable to wear even the lightest armors without gimping his feeble spellcasting ability, and forbidden from using weapons other than sticks and knives ("I can't use a spear; it has to be a stick or a knife, not both!"). And in GURPS the above statements about their physical shortcomings are only true if the player treats ST and HT as dump stats, and then gives them Vows against using things other than the genre-approved trash.

And even in DF where the best healing a wizard PC can have argued for him by RAW is Minor Healing ("It's a prerequisite to a large chunk of the Necromancy college, dear beloved GM!") the wizard is assumed to be human and no more killable than the other humans, and there are spells worth looking into learning that don't directly do anything to HP in either direction.

Clerics can be ignored or made distinct from "Wizards, only better." One thing that always always always bugged me in d20 was that a cleric was just a better version of the wizard; inability to use edged weapons (and thus the best ranged weapons) and slightly smaller hit die made fighters and rangers better choices for pure combat ability, but I was always bugged by the cleric's god granting miracles using the exact same game mechanics as a wizard's arcane spellcasting. This really frustrated me, given my peculiarly specific religious views.

In GURPS I can give the cleric's two signature abilities, Heal Wounds and Hurt Or Inconvenience Undead In Some Way, to wizards in the form of spells and drop the idea of a god (much less The God) giving miracles-on-demand to people a fixed number of times per day, in a way that can be dispelled just as easily as a mortal using knowledge and willpower to exert control over His creation. Or if I really want the idea of a holy warrior (since I love Paladins as a concept), I can give him Powers with the Holy modifier (possibly Cosmic too, for how my metaphysics go) and if I want to allow him to request specific miracles I can use Divine Favor.

In short, I like the way GURPS handles spellcasters by default better, and how it supports handling my rarely-desired Holy characters in a way other than being more spellcasters with a different power source.

Once I got over the learning curve, hex grids and 3d6 weren't so bad.
I will always have a place in my heart for the d4, d8, d10, d12, and d20. I do and always will think a square grid works better for rectangular building structures. But there's just something really reassuring about using 3d6 and a target number to roll under for nearly everything, and the hex grid gets rid of the nastiness that is diagonal movement (jokes about straight movement aside, that's not a problem when actually playing, just when switching over).

Furries!
My first reason not to be at least partly a gamist one (combat rules, character building, and dice; one archetype being simply superior to another). GURPS has a price structure and trait list in place that allows me to build the races I want to play as or populate my world with, and check them for balance at a glance.

Points don't work perfectly for this, and some traits have a tendency of costing considerably more or considerably less than they ought to for their amount of utility ("Because it's rare" doesn't really work for exotic racial design, because I might want a race with an unusual body feature to be as common as humans or even more). However, this is still far superior to trying to just give ability score adjustments and racial features and hoping the end result isn't better than an elf or dwarf and causing drama over it.

I love playing exotic non-human characters in RPGs. I love roleplaying them online even when there are no game rules connected to them. I even like playing them when it's a mechanical disadvantage to do so and I get no points from it; just because I'm a gamist doesn't mean I'm a powergamer.