What GURPS needs... now

[Propjock]

As someone whose given up on GURPS for the last few years of gaming, I've been reading this on/off for the last week with interest. Finally made it through all of the posts!

I decided that I agree much with those that say open up GURPS more for 3rd party contributions; that evocative settings/adventures are a key to get someone to try a RPG; and that the "everything is good the way it is, what else could you reasonably do" attitude is stifling. To the extent that 97-pages of debate ensued to try and break up the latter is refreshing to me.

Speaking of my mind on the OP:

Sample size of one anecdote, but I've bought way more RPGs than I've played on the strength of genre/premise/promise. Never on the rules. How did I get into GURPS then? By way of GURPS Steampunk. I was intrigued enough by the gamification of a (then) nice sub-culture that I discovered 4e. I would have never went the reverse way even if I had found it on a shelf.

What have I regretfully largely abandoned GURPS for lately? Exile Games' Hollow Earth Expedition/Ubiquity. A 10-year old game originally created by a small team - and supported mainly its creator.

The Ubiquity mechanics are strikingly similar to GURPS in the use of points/skills/talents (advantages)/flaws (disadvantages). It was never designed as a generic/universal system, but could be with one major revision (which Jeff has hinted at being a future project). For a range of swords & planet, steampunk, pulp, modern, golden age supers, retro SF, or urban fantasy it might as well be generic/universal.

I'd rather game the HEX settings with GURPS mechanics, but I don't because (back to the OP) what GURPS needs now for me is one consolidated 4e updated book of templates (ideally in a new format that's consumable for newbs as already discussed) organized by genre. Since most of my gaming is done with people who aren't GURPS (or even RPG) experienced saying you can build anything is not helpful. Even with char-gen sessions, some people struggle. Templates should be the solution here. Some just want to get to the playing part and having ready to go 4e templates in one place supported by amazing art would really help get people excited and make my GM life easier.

Right now it's a lot of running around for me to find supplements (maybe decide if it's worth buying) that are close and convert 3e versions of a template or create my own. I get so frustrated by this process that I just give up and go with the "detailed enough" HEX archetype based system that lets me get with a group and finish chargen in about an hour session.

I get that GURPS isn't about rails, but that's the ultimate incarnation of GURPS. The anything aspect is the siren song of GURPS, but realistically I'm not actually playing it since the ultimate incarnation is nigh unreachable with my time/effort constraints without some more stepping stones (be it templates, monsters, adventures, settings). So here I am, a GURPS fan, introducing other casual friends to RPGs or running roll20 games and not using GURPS. It's not that I can't get it done in GURPS or don't know the approaches to take to trim and select rules. It's that relative to other good enough options I don't have time to do that.

If the sjgames stance is to run more GURPS games as the cheapest publicity/marketing then help GMs make and run games. There's a whole stack of easy and not so easy things to be done here from collecting 1-page adventure seeds published for free (written by the community) on a GURPS microsite, to evocative pre-gen characters/templates, to creating a suite of online tools that GMs/Players can use to manage their games and campaigns (if there were one game that would benefit a crazy amount by modern web tooling it's GURPs).

[kmunoz]

Originally Posted by Propjock

Even with char-gen sessions, some people struggle.

The fact that "character generation session" is even a thing is part of the problem.

I love GURPS. I can't GM with any other RPG because they all give me a rash.

But boy do I wish character creation didn't require algebra, an astrolabe and higher order physics.

"Character generation session" is death.

I can *begin running* a D&D *campaign* 30 minutes after the group first sits down, Day 1.

Try that with GURPS and your egg timer will go off right around the time you've finished writing down your character's Size Modifier.

And I play with kids (ages 11-14) as well as adults (ages 41-44). I can't expect half of my gaming group to be able to do the math required to make a complex character. And that's even with one of the kids being an actual, frightening genius. Even she can't generate a GURPS character using just pencil and paper, if she wants to play anything other than a meathead with an axe.

So yeah - what GURPS needs now is a book of templates. And an official printable index organized topically (rather than by keyword).

Dungeon Fantasy will take care of some of this, in that it will be template-heavy and the index will be, well, the index (since it's a self-contained system). But that's no longer GURPS per se.

The day some young upstart game designer manages to pull off D&D style character creation/development with the universalism and realism I find in GURPS is the day I leave GURPS. Characters are a chore in GURPS, and chores are *not fun.*

[trooper6]

Interesting. Because for me GURPS character creation is one of the highlights of GURPS for me. I love it. A lot.

And I find GURPS character creation pretty smooth and easy. Way easier and more intuitive than Shadowrun 5e, for example.

Now, I don't tend to run Supers, so that might be part of it. But character creation has never been a issue for me. Do I do a character creation session? Depends, I'll either do it one-on-one or group depending on the campaign conceit.

But, that Session 0 has become so crucial to making sure everyone is on the same page, we have the same expectations. Doing it makes the subsequent campaign so much better. It has become so crucial that I do it regardless of the system I'm running.

[kmunoz]

Originally Posted by trooper6

Interesting. Because for me GURPS character creation is one of the highlights of GURPS for me. I love it. A lot.

I do, too, as an individual player. But as a GM it is unpleasant, because most of the time I'm playing with people who don't know GURPS very well.

Originally Posted by trooper6

But, that Session 0 has become so crucial to making sure everyone is on the same page, we have the same expectations. Doing it makes the subsequent campaign so much better. It has become so crucial that I do it regardless of the system I'm running.

I think part of my perspective comes from the fact that I'm having to do a lot of the groundwork to make my players comfortable with the buy-in to GURPS. As I say above, most of my players tend to be GURPS newbies or novices. They know D&D or some other much simpler system, and I convince them to try GURPS.

One of the great things about GURPS is that you can do just about anything, so using super generic templates is counter-evidence. Which means creating characters out of whole cloth is (currently) a necessity.

But every second that passes in character creation is one more second where my players might wonder what they're going to be having for dinner, or whether they left the stove on, or why oh god why did they agree to this. Now if I were one of the players, I'd be having the time of my life. But I can't assume that I'm typical in that regard. As an advocate for the system I have to *assume* my new players are a hard sell, until I'm shown otherwise.

I can run a one-off in GURPS using pre-gen characters, and sometimes I do, but that's not what I'm after. I'm not trying to evangelize GURPS more generally (i.e., by running a demo), I'm trying to evangelize the use of GURPS long-term for the group.

The way around the problem that I used most recently was to do a one-off with mostly pre-gen characters, and then start over with a proper campaign and new, whole cloth characters. That sort of worked. But it begged the question: why should I have to do this in the first place?

Originally Posted by trooper6

Now, I don't tend to run Supers, so that might be part of it.

I run into this problem when players try to make *wizards.* Skill and spell selection becomes a slog. In fact, it's because of the wizards that I tend to start my groups at 100 points rather than a more comfortable 200. Because giving a wizard 200 points at the starting line is like throwing him into a sack full of bees.

[trooper6]

Originally Posted by kmunoz

I do, too, as an individual player. But as a GM it is unpleasant, because most of the time I'm playing with people who don't know GURPS very well.

I very often play GURPS with people who are new to GURPS. There are two groups of people I'm very skeptical of wanting to play GURPS with. D&D players and GURPS players. D&D players, I find, are really resistant to playing anything but D&D...they are a hard sell for anything, doesn't even have to be GURPS. GURPS players are often...grognards and not always pleasant to play with. If I find compatible GURPS players I'm super happy. But I'd much rather play GURPS with someone who had never played an RPG before than I would play with a GURPSer who is inflexible and dogmatic in ways I'd rather not hang out with.

I find new people are totally fine with GURPS character creation.

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by trooper6

I find new people are totally fine with GURPS character creation.

I find that new people are totally fine with nearly any system, so long as you talk with them about "character concept" and "story" and "campaign role." It's more actual play where the different systems are uneven in quality, in my experience.

[whswhs]

Let me add to my last two comments that I think I'm seeing multiple agenda here.

* "I want GURPS to be a game that I can introduce D&Ders to and have them be willling to play it."

* "I want GURPS to be a system that I can use to introduce new people to roleplaying, and have it be accessible."

* "I want GURPS to be a system that someone who's never played in or run GURPS can pick up and figure out how to use for the campaign they really want to run."

My ideal agenda is the second; in practice I sometimes have to go for the first. Obviously I don't go for the third!

Those three probably call for different approaches. We might suppose that Dungeon Fantasy addresses the first, so how to address the other two is more the question.

[trooper6]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I find that new people are totally fine with nearly any system, so long as you talk with them about "character concept" and "story" and "campaign role." It's more actual play where the different systems are uneven in quality, in my experience.

Yep! I agree. I find new people are often much easier to get into a system than people who are really fixed with one game only.

[ericbsmith]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I find that new people are totally fine with nearly any system, so long as you talk with them about "character concept" and "story" and "campaign role." It's more actual play where the different systems are uneven in quality, in my experience.

I've stressed this to a lot of people. At a local convention I had a slightly heated discussion with a couple panelists regarding this (they weren't fond of GURPS). Frankly it doesn't matter if you're playing D&D, Storyteller, Call of Cthulhu, or GURPS, if you shove a book at somebody that's never read it and tell them "Make a character" and do nothing else then they are going to be dissatisfied with the character creation experience. One of the problems, I think, is that too many people are used to doing that with D&D.

What makes D&D or Storyteller character creation so "quick and easy" to a lot of people isn't the simplicity of character creation, it's the familiarity with the system. Once people get familiar with making characters in the system things get much simpler, and using character concept, story, or campaign role can be ways of guiding that character creation in any game system to make it simpler.

GURPS is more complex than those systems, but it isn't massively more complex, it can just seem like it because of the long list of traits and the indecision most people get when faced with too many choices. And offering streamlined and cut down lists of traits (ala Dungeon Fantasy or After the End or Monster Hunters) is certainly another way of dealing with the "too many choices" problem, however the guiding hand of the GM is a better one (and helps even if you are using templates).

[lachimba]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I find that new people are totally fine with nearly any system, so long as you talk with them about "character concept" and "story" and "campaign role." It's more actual play where the different systems are uneven in quality, in my experience.

Also I've found (some) people in conventions will try anythign new, just because it in on.