Opinion: Do GURPS game masters put more work into their campaigns

[Layander]

Do GURPS game masters put more work into their campaigns than people who run other settings, or is that just a personal issue I have? Sometimes I feel, or know, that I put to much effort into my game world, is that a common trait for people who run GURPs compared to other games?

[Blind Mapmaker]

Well, I think it's mostly that other games often offer a lot of prepared stuff you can (or should be able to) use out of the box. GURPS only got a standard setting in the 4th Edition Basic Set (and that is only a suggestion) and things go on from there. If you have a GURPS setting with good support supplements (Transhuman Space, Monster Hunters, Dungeon Fantasy) you still need the locations and the adventures. That means a lot of work creating your own stuff or re-working things from other systems. There's a lot of work for the GM right there.

I'm not sure about D&D (having never played it much), but when I started playing RPGs with The Dark Eye (basically the German equivalent to D&D with a bit more focus on social and puzzle stuff) we basically bought our adventures pre-made in the shop and only inserted small scenarios in between them. That also needs some work adjusting things for your party, but it is vastly less than writing or converting adventures. That is not necessarily bad, because I don't think we would have gotten very far without that kind of help, but it makes GURPS quite different from the big RPGs like D&D, Pathfinder, Call of Cthulhu etc. It's something for GMs who already like making up their own stuff - they need a carpenter's toolbox, not a finished wardrobe to go to Narnia.

If there were a dozen adventures for every GURPS setting book, things would probably be very different.

[Ed the Coastie]

I put a lot of work into pretty much any game that I run, if for no other reason than to mesh a published adventure into my campaign setting. If I don't watch myself, I will do this to the point of obsession...naming or renaming all of the NPCs, altering the module's backstory, and frequently re-writing the entire thing so that all of my changes are integrated into it.

But yeah, GURPS is worse because there are very few published adventures for it and so I develop my entire campaign pretty much from scratch.

[NightHawk]

Originally Posted by Blind Mapmaker

Well, I think it's mostly that other games often offer a lot of prepared stuff you can (or should be able to) use out of the box.

I agree, I have been spending most of my time on developing the setting. Which in turn leads to a lot of extra things, like locals' special characters, custom equipment, shops, etc.


In most other games I just picked up a module and delved into the world. I am not overly concerned about the lack of out of the box material but I would like to see more locations pdf's and maybe a pdf line of worlds for different Genre.

[Jürgen Hubert]

In my personal experience as a GM... no, not really. I'm still fairly lazy when it comes to session prep, and I find it rather easy to improvise NPC stats.

[NightHawk]

Originally Posted by Jürgen Hubert

In my personal experience as a GM... no, not really. I'm still fairly lazy when it comes to session prep, and I find it rather easy to improvise NPC stats.

Don't you find it a lot more work to "improvise"?

[Bruno]

I run lots of games in D&D 4e, and I manage to cajole my players into the occasional GURPS 4e game (Dungeon Fantasy as a rule).

In both cases I may steal a 1e-4e D&D adventure, but I nearly never leave anything well-enough alone. Running a 1e-3e adventure in D&D 4e requires quite a bit of winging it, as much as running it in 4e GURPS does, and I build my own monster stats in both games.

A bigger difference is that there's 4e D&D modules that require less winging it, and there's more 4e monsters for me to start from for my tinkering base. GURPS 4e has more monsters lurking around in various publications than people give it credit for, but nothing like the enormous bestiary for D&D 4e.

Similarly there's a decent sized library of D&D 4e traps, treasure, and even weird terrain hazard things (although those tend to be much more "sketch" ideas than worked examples). GURPS isn't nearly as fleshed out in those areas (although DF8 is flippin' amazing, and the D&D 4e library of terrain stuff is usually abstract enough that it takes just as much work to implement in both systems, despite being "native" to 4e).

I've got enough GURPS resources (uh, nearly all of it that isn't modern or futuristic) to hand, and enough GURPS rattling around in my head, that I don't run into a big difference.

Notably, it takes spending lots of money in D&D to get the prep advantage - the difference is more that there isn't that stuff to buy for GURPS, not that D&D has better value-for-dollar.

[Peter V. Dell'Orto]

Originally Posted by Layander

Do GURPS game masters put more work into their campaigns than people who run other settings, or is that just a personal issue I have?

Honestly, from reading a lot of early edition D&D blogs - it's just your personal feeling. Lots of people in a lot of work for their games, regardless of the system.

Some systems come with more pre-made stuff, but I find that just means the GMs put in effort elsewhere.

(A quick edit here - I'd say you spend a lot of time reading, digesting, and integrating pre-published stuff if there is a lot of it, and more time generating from scratch if it doesn't - but the time and effort is still spent.)

I think "GURPS GMs work harder on their campaigns" is just an incorrect statement.

[Jürgen Hubert]

Originally Posted by NightHawk

Don't you find it a lot more work to "improvise"?

Nah.

I mean, sure, I come up with plot elements and things like that. But actual game stats? Those are figured out on the fly more often than not.

And that's easier to do in GURPS than in, say, d20 since it's easy to justify just about any stat value within the system.

[Anaraxes]

The GMs in my group, including me, spent a lot of time on their D&D campaigns as well. Or invented their own system to go with the campaign.

If there is a correlation, it might go the other way around. People inclined to be world-builders are attracted to GURPS. But they'd be doing the work no matter what system.