1st Edition Old West vs 2nd Edition Old West

[Stormcrow]

Originally Posted by pzmcgwire

I thought the sourcebooks would be a standalone reference for a milieu,

In the original scheme, that's how GURPS worked. The Basic Set was indeed basic, being the barebones of the system, with a bias toward humans and medievalesque fantasy, and each source book added the rules that transformed the basic rules into a complete genre.

But when genres had overlapping elements, this led to repeating rules in books, and people who bought these books were paying for multiple copies of the same rules. GURPS was reorganized with the Compendiums, making the "generic" rules much more complete, and second or third editions of source books outsourced everything they could to them.

But even the Compendiums were not really everything, and when the fourth edition came around, they decided that the Basic Set would contain, more or less, all the rules, and source books would merely help you configure those rules. There have been a lot of exceptions to this, but to be fair it's been twenty years and the Basic Set really can handle most things. (I get irked when a new supplement says you only need the Basic Set but then freely uses quirks, perks, modifiers, and other add-ons from other books without explaining them.)