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).