New to GURPS and needs some guidance.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by awarnock

Hi yall! I'm a Pathfinder player who's recently got the itch to run a sci-fi campaign with mechs, starships, aliens, and mercenaries (No Amorphous blobs of carbo-silicate, though.) I've looked and from what I can see, GURPS is probably going to be the best system for what I want, which is a mashup of cyberpunk, space opera, and real-robots mecha.

That said, I've never played GURPS before and the only place I know of that might even have a group is an hour and a half away. What would be a good way to get my feet wet? I have the Basic Set (both volumes), and I understand the How to be a GURPS GM book is a good place to start as well. Is there anything that I would need, or anything that would make my life easier as a GM, beyond that?

Thanks in advance, and I hope that this isn't too annoying to everyone. :D

Most people are glad to see another GM embracing GURPS, and will do what they can to help.

GURPS Spaceships volume 1 will make your life a lot easier. It's an excellent resource for easily making a wide variety of spaceships and starships. And if combined with the right issue of Pyramid volume 3 (I forget which one, but others can tell you), it can even be used for making mecha and other ground vehicles and all types of aircraft.

It's very coarsegrained, but my own speculations into trying to make it slightly more fine-grained always suggest to me that it's not worth the bother. And with the "split system" rule having become official as of one of the later Spaceships supplements, it's much less necessary; perhaps not necessary at all.

I'm a bit hesistant to tell you to buy all the supplements for GURPS Spaceships, though, since for a new GM that's a serious cash outlay, given that most of their pagecount consists of spaceship writeups, with each supplement having very, very few new rules and options.

But do get the GURPS Spaceships core book.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by Captain Joy

Get an application that allows you to make GURPS characters. The official Steve Jackson games one that runs on Windows is GURPS Character Assistant. The unofficial and free one that runs on anything is GURPS Character Sheet.

Last time I checked, GCA was extremely well supported with data files for almost every official GURPS supplement ever published. Or at least every 4th Edition one.

Is it needed? In theory, it's fast and easy to make a GURPS character, so you can do it by hand. In practice, I always find myself tweaking, raising and lowering points in skills, again and again and again, back and forth, to try to match a budget. The OP's players may also appreciate it if he has a character creation aid on his computer for them to use.

Also, I always want a character creation aid, no matter what RPG system is used, no matter how simple it is (although I find actually simple RPG systems to be not worth using). Because it's always faster with a computer than without, and I'm a speed optimization freak. If the system in question doesn't have such an aid, I'll make one with a spreadsheet, just a quick-and-dirty one.

So I'll say that buying GCA is a good investment. Even more so for a new GM who will benefit muchly from getting a feel for how character creation works, very much including from a players' point of view, doing it on a finite point budget. It helps create both empathy and sympathy for the player situation, and better enables him to assist his players once it becomes time for them to make their characters.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by Peter Knutsen

Last time I checked, GCA was extremely well supported with data files for almost every official GURPS supplement ever published. Or at least every 4th Edition one.

I think that's a bit of an exaggeration. There are datafiles for a lot of books, but certainly not all of them (not for Madness Dossier, as I recently discovered, for example), and most of them only include equipment from tables (and not even all the tables - High-Tech is missing all the grenades and melee weapons).

[lachimba]

Originally Posted by awarnock

Hi yall! I'm a Pathfinder player who's recently got the itch to run a sci-fi campaign with mechs, starships, aliens, and mercenaries (No Amorphous blobs of carbo-silicate, though.) I've looked and from what I can see, GURPS is probably going to be the best system for what I want, which is a mashup of cyberpunk, space opera, and real-robots mecha.

That said, I've never played GURPS before and the only place I know of that might even have a group is an hour and a half away. What would be a good way to get my feet wet? I have the Basic Set (both volumes), and I understand the How to be a GURPS GM book is a good place to start as well. Is there anything that I would need, or anything that would make my life easier as a GM, beyond that?

Thanks in advance, and I hope that this isn't too annoying to everyone. :D

Is it the best system for you?

I ONLY GM GURPS at the moment so while I would use it, im not sure if its for you.

A mashup of cyberpunk, space opera and real robots mecha?

How cartoonish? How real*?

Depending on your answers I might even go with Toon for Ghost in the Shell or Feng Shui 2 for the matrix


Just run yourself a few GURPS combats etc and see if its for you.


* and by real I mean as much to its own internal integrity.

[soulnafein]

Also consider Gurps Interstellar Wars. In one book you have quite a lot of information for a space campaign: you have templates for characters and spaceship, the description of a world and suggestions for campaigns ideas.

[shawnhcorey]

Templates will make your life much easier. And you should use them for NPCs as well as PCs.

Creating a template is easy. For example, to create soldier template, create a typical soldier. Give him the advantages, disadvantages, and skills a typical soldier would have in your campaign. Then at the top, where you would write the character's name, cross out "Name" and write "Template" in there instead. Done.

If you have aliens in your campaign, you'll need racial template for each. Create them the same way. The difference is that all characters, both PCs and NPCs, have only one racial template (human being the default) and it cannot be modified; it has to be taken "as written".

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by soulnafein

Also consider Gurps Interstellar Wars. In one book you have quite a lot of information for a space campaign: you have templates for characters and spaceship, the description of a world and suggestions for campaigns ideas.

I don't think GURPS Traveller, whether ISW or not, is a mecha-friendly setting. That may well matter a lot to the OP.