Need Advice: Making GURPS Approachable For the Non-gamer/Non-geek

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Turhan's Bey Company

This strikes me as the big problem. One of your players has no apparent interest in the subject matter of the campaign. It doesn't matter how friendly or not the rules are if she isn't into the themes of the game. What I'd recommend is to find out something she's into and trying that so that she's got at least some familiar signposts. You've mentioned not being into fantasy, sci-fi, and action adventure, all of which do not bode well. But what is she into when it comes to movies and fiction? Westerns? Romances? With the right GM and approach, you can do just about anything with GURPS, but you need to find the right subject matter to engage your audience. That's step one. Step two follows from that.

I think that's completely sound.

I mostly run campaigns in the fantastic genres, because those are what my players like. But I've run a campaign with no fantastic elements, set in France ca. 1710, not long after the War of the Spanish Succession, where all the characters were students at an academy of fencing taught by a somewhat eccentric swordmaster. GURPS worked very well for that. If one of your players isn't into fantasy, offer her something in a realistic genre.

The other thing that I would say is that it's best not to start out with a pregenerated character; the player isn't likely to have much sense of buy-in, and all the numbers will be confusing. Start out by talking with the player about what kind of character she would enjoy playing, and fit that information onto the character sheet. Then, when you play, you can ask her just to narrate her character's actions, and ask her, when appropriate, to roll against X—and if necessary, tell her where to look for X. If she's already come up with a character concept out of her head she'll have a better sense for what the character can do.

[thalcos]

I think everyone here has some good advice. I think it mainly boils down to genre (pick one everyone likes!) and hiding rules complexity to an appropriate level.

I almost always start out new GURPS players with a one-shot adventure. One shots require less commitment and can be streamlined more easily. They can easily be tuned to people's interests - i.e. running a horror adventure for Halloween when everyone's in the mood. (I've always had good luck with pregenerated characters for one-shots, though definitely keep them more simple than "real" characters -- fewer advantages and disadvantages, crazy powers, etc.)

For new players, I usually run combats theatre-of-the-mind and avoid most of the advanced rules, maneuvers, etc, unless the player describes something the rules would cover and I can adjudicate quickly ("I aim for his head!")

I also abstract away a lot of the second-by-second nature of GURPS turns, and let people have more agency. It's more natural for new players to say "while he's fighting off the zombies, I refuel the car" without breaking it up into granular phases.

[psych0nurse]

I think the advice on finding out what the player's interests are is important. I've introduced several new players to the hobby in my time and, without exception, my approach has always been to find out what kind of stories or hobbies they enjoy first, and build from that. In my experience, everyone nerds out to SOMETHING, the trick is simply finding it and weaving an entertaining story around it.

[hal]

In the late 1980's, my wife was in the same boat - no background in movies, not any experience with the genre via books.

What got her into the hobby, aside from her knowing how to fence, was simply this:

"Don't worry about the rules. If you can imagine it, GURPS can handle it."

she didn't start with magic, but by the time she did become interested, GURPS MAGIC became the the ONLY book for role playing she has ever read. She hates to read honestly.

My wife joined the gaming crew as a means towards enjoying the socializing involved with role playing, and the ability to simply have fun letting her hair down (so to speak).

It is now 2021, 30+ years later, and there are times when she nudges me to keep the gaming alive. Right now, my face to face crew consists of three gamers, all older than 60, and we're doing an Old West campaign set in 1867. Next campaign may be Sci-fi or Fantasy, or even Swashbucklers.

It all started with "if you can imagine it, GURPS can handle it".

I should point out that having cut her teeth on GURPS, she will never play Dungeon Fantasy. Why? She loved GURPS MAGIC, DFRPG magic is too restrictive for her, too uncreative.

So, my advice? Do not reach her the rules at first. Handle the decisions she makes in game play saying "you slash your blade at their face? Ok, your skill is 14 minus 5, you need a 9 or less. Roll". If she keeps attacking the face, roll vs NPC Will saying "no one wants a scar on their face, your opponent uses defensive attacks, at -1 to attack, but +1 to defend."

They will learn by what you do with your NPCs more than anything. By making it immersive from the start, you draw them in. Describe pain as nearly crippling (-4 penalty) to mildly painful (-1). They will learn better that way...

[Keampe]

Lot of really good advice here. The only thing I'll add to it is not to underestimate her.

People can really surprise you.

- Shane

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by hal

So, my advice? Do not reach her the rules at first. Handle the decisions she makes in game play saying "you slash your blade at their face? Ok, your skill is 14 minus 5, you need a 9 or less. Roll". If she keeps attacking the face, roll vs NPC Will saying "no one wants a scar on their face, your opponent uses defensive attacks, at -1 to attack, but +1 to defend."

They will learn by what you do with your NPCs more than anything. By making it immersive from the start, you draw them in. Describe pain as nearly crippling (-4 penalty) to mildly painful (-1). They will learn better that way...

I haven't quite done it that way myself, mostly because I have the character sheet in the player's hands. But I do invite the player to narrate their character's actions, and then ask questions about what's on their character sheet: Do you have skill X? Okay, how high is it? Okay, it's dark, so you're rolling at -3, so roll N or less. Narrative is central. And when I'm describing outcomes, I do that in narrative terms.

Your method seems like it could be workable, in a somewhat similar way. It keeps the player's focus on telling the story of what the character is doing in ordinary language, with a minimum of gaming arcana.

[Opellulo]

In my experience introducing Roleplay games to new players has two main obstacles: Setting and System, and the first is more often than not the major one.

SETTING - One of the main advantages of GURPS is the fact of being generic so starting with "Fantasy" may not be the best choice. Start with something everybody knows, and for this TV Series and movies works like a charm because they give the basics in world-building, characters, and expectations for the players. Maybe a Small City Mystery or an exploration are more fitting; talk with your players, find a common interest and start from there. Also in this way you can give the players specific PCs: it's not a generic "monster hunter template" is literally Geralt of Rivia, that helps a lot the role-play part

SYSTEM - GURPS can be quite obtuse and very intimidating, to soften the impact try to give your players bare-bone character sheets: with only the basic attributes, advantages/disadvantages and the relevant skills WITHOUT any point cost or any secondary stats printed on (you can also go the extra step and convert the numeric values to descriptive ones if you feel it's needed). So in this way the players have a script to work with without having to worry much about the mechanics. You then keep the detailed sheet for yourself to check anything and you can then introduce new mechanics while the players get more experienced.

If this is starting to look like a improv session it's because... It is! Just note that this system is an hell of a job for a GM so plan accordingly.

[benz72]

Originally Posted by Turhan's Bey Company

This strikes me as the big problem. One of your players has no apparent interest in the subject matter of the campaign. It doesn't matter how friendly or not the rules are if she isn't into the themes of the game. What I'd recommend is to find out something she's into and trying that so that she's got at least some familiar signposts. You've mentioned not being into fantasy, sci-fi, and action adventure, all of which do not bode well. But what is she into when it comes to movies and fiction? Westerns? Romances? With the right GM and approach, you can do just about anything with GURPS, but you need to find the right subject matter to engage your audience. That's step one. Step two follows from that.

Very much this. If she's into cozy mysteries, or true crime, or the Scarlet Pimpernel run one of those to get her comfortable with the rule structure before trying to get her into an unfamiliar trope with equally unfamiliar rules.

[Cpt_Clyde]

Good for you for spreading the GURPS love to beginners!
My attempts at including our wives in our games was deemed "successful" by going SUPER lite on the rules (at least to start out). I ran a modern day tomb-raider style game. They each had the 100pts for main 4 attributes. And 10/10/12/14 skill level to allocate among the 4 "skills" which were actually a wildcard skill/catagories. The skills were "Criminal" (any kind of deception, theft, break/enter, stealth etc.), "Combat", "Tech" and "Archeology".

So the character sheet was literally this:
Name:
ST: HP: Combat:
DX: Will: Criminal:
IQ: Per: Tech:
HT: FP: Archeology:
MV:
Gear: pistol, knife, rope, etc.

I just kept throwing out modifiers for each task and thanks to the depth of GURPS, the veteran "combat" oriented husband was able to still enjoy some advanced fisticuff scenes with advanced combat maneuvers and all.
We played for about 8h total on this and the wives got surprisingly REALLY into it. They were fairly aloof to start off but their competitive natures starting coming out lol and surprised the husbands as a sweet conservative wife made me almost blush when she used her "Criminal" skill to seduce and distract my slimey villain in a gala scene. Was a lot of fun so maybe it would work for you too.

I also have had some success using my Randos2Heroes procedures to introduce newcomers to hex/dungeon crawls. It allows me to run games with zero prep and generate thedungeon/hexcrawl terrain randomly on the fly. and the character creation step also generates a peasant character in 10mins by rolling for stats. Yields a weak character with 1 advantage, 1 disadvantage, a job skill and combat skill. Then you can award character points at whatever pace you like and allow them to improve their PCs and learn the system slowly as they acquire more traits and open up more game mechanics instead of dropping a stack of GCS sheets on them. Here's some video examples of the process if interested.:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL..._xEytiSCECOM76

Good luck!

[mook]

If you do manage to reel 'em in, I find this character sheet great for starting out first-timers, especially non-gamers.