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Old 01-30-2021, 10:48 AM   #1
jackcelso
 
Join Date: May 2015
Location: Brazil
Default will there be a 5th edition for gurps?

hi i live in Brazil, and i heard a humor about a 5 th edition.... its is true?
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Old 01-31-2021, 03:37 AM   #2
johndallman
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Default Re: will there be a 5th edition for gurps?

I don't think there'll be a new edition any time soon, for several reasons:

Sales. Currently, GURPS supports one full-time employee, the Line Editor (Sean Punch, "Kromm") plus sharing production and management staff with other products. Compiling and publishing a new edition would be several person-years years of work, during which pretty well all other GURPS publication would stop, and people would drift away. And then there would be the problem of updating 200+ fourth edition supplements.

Market conditions. TTRPGs are not selling nearly as well as they did in the 1990s. Kickstarter allows SJG to find the people who will buy a product, fairly efficiently but there aren't huge numbers of them for GURPS.

Lack of need. Fourth Edition is holding up rather well, and worthwhile supplements are continuing to be produced. The early 2020 printing of the Basic Set added some useful rules that have appeared in supplements.

Some years ago, Kromm expressed a personal opinion that the thing that could stimulate a new edition would be a new form of electronic publishing that was more capable than PDF. So far, that has not happened. I have done some thinking about what would be required, and while there's nothing impossible about it, the amount of software development that would be required can't be funded out of TTRPG sales. A new publication format would have to be created for some other purpose.

SJ Game are also not keen on "edition churn", creating a new edition of a game simply to stimulate fans to buy it all over again. That's laudable.

There is significant fan support for GURPS. The commonest activity is blogging, and the GURPSday feed at Gaming Ballistic is a good place to find out what's happening. My own contribution is co-editing a fanzine, The Path Of Cunning (link in signature) with RogerBW.

There are also third-party publishers: Gaming Ballistic publishes licensed supplements for the GURPS-based Dungeon Fantasy RPG, and the Prime Directive RPG from Amarillo Design Bureau, Inc. does classic Star Trek under GURPS.

Last edited by johndallman; 01-31-2021 at 04:33 AM. Reason: Added fan and third-party paragraphs.
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Old 02-16-2021, 01:02 PM   #3
Pmandrekar
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Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Oregon, WI
Default Re: will there be a 5th edition for gurps?

Quote:
Originally Posted by johndallman View Post

Lack of need. Fourth Edition is holding up rather well, and worthwhile supplements are continuing to be produced. The early 2020 printing of the Basic Set added some useful rules that have appeared in supplements.

(Snip)

SJ Game are also not keen on "edition churn", creating a new edition of a game simply to stimulate fans to buy it all over again. That's laudable.

There is significant fan support for GURPS. The commonest activity is blogging, and the GURPSday feed at Gaming Ballistic is a good place to find out what's happening. My own contribution is co-editing a fanzine, The Path Of Cunning (link in signature) with RogerBW.

There are also third-party publishers: Gaming Ballistic publishes licensed supplements for the GURPS-based Dungeon Fantasy RPG, and the Prime Directive RPG from Amarillo Design Bureau, Inc. does classic Star Trek under GURPS.
Agreed. Unless there is something that is agreed to be missing from GURPS 4E, our 4E supplements are all working just fine, thanks. Even the switch to 4E from 3E wasn't really as big of a change as many other systems. At most, I would welcome a 4E supplement with tricks and house rules that people use (although a lot of those ideas are available online anyhow)

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