GURPS Essential core books

[Hugin]

Originally Posted by trooper6

I own Action 2...also the DF and Monster Hunters lines...because I habitually get all the pfs of new GURPS stuff that comes out, not because they are fundamentally all that useful to me.

And I don't think much about Action, never think about Monster Hunters, and only selectively use bits of DF. Why?

I'm gritty, "realistish" GURPSer...or I suppose a "method actor GURPSer" and all of those three lines are cinematic 250cp sorts that discourage the creation of well-rounded humans in favor of heroic archetypes. All three of those lines feature recreating the niche based class model that you get in D&D through templates. And I don't like that. I prefer PCs that are not classes. Not Fighter, Driver, Slayer...but this gal was a blacksmith and after her village burned down from the Orc invasion of '02 she became a rambler and sellsword, he passion is mythological stories of the time of the Gomar and can tall you almost anything you need to know about that culture. These genres reduce/delete social status and all the social elements that brought me to GURPS in the first place. All those skills left off the skill lists...too fluffy, to far away from the Action! are the skills I value very highly. I'm always encouraging my players to take more of then...so a line that removes them altogether is not going to be for me.

I get the feelings those books aren't for me--which is cool. The DF line has a bunch of things that can be adapted to less cinematic games--Treasure Tables for the win!--but when I think about the gritty spy game I want to run, with full well-rounded characters who don't mimic character classes. I don't think Action.

Take another look at Action 2 Exploits. There are a lot of cool rules that can apply to any game, such as the chase rules, the BAD rules, hacking rules, etc...