What is your favorite genre and how well does GURPS handle it?

[mburr0003]

Personally I'd give GURPS an A or A+ in pretty much everything except the "Simulating the annoying levels and classes systems" category, which it can do, but if you're going to be that limiting on Player build options (even more so than Templates are)...

[Lovewyrm]

GURPS does superheroes very well.
It's just that DC/Marvel and the like "superheroes" are cartoons on the same level as Popeye in mechanics, but with a realistic paint.

When Popeye pulls a rug from under your feet, you could end up anywhere and doing anything that falls into his current wishes or the situation at hand.

You could be at the end of a room and he pulls the rug from your feet and you fly onto a stool, at a table, with a plate and a spoon and you'd be compelled to eat it.
Or you could fly into some object, and a related object then clobbers you in an amusing fashion.
And so forth.
And that's just a rug pull, a punch from Popeye truly has no limits and can even completely transmogrify any creature or object. He has full dominion over reality with his punches.

So...the way to truly and accurately play Popeye in GURPS is not to try and stat him out (especially if his creators were still alive)
But to take the character sheet and write "It's Popeye!" in big green letters over it, and then just use Rule 0 and GM fiat to play him. Otherwise you'll be fighting GURPS, which puts vermin...vertex...vermicelli.... believability at its core, at every opportunity.

Likewise, even something as 'benign' as the Hulk.
The Hulk punches something and because his comics and cartoons and movies are rendered realistically (mostly anyway) you could be excused for just going along with it when something goes flying through a window, or even a wall.
Or him jumping through walls and stuff, etc.

But all of that is not because of his "stats" but because even though it's rendered realistically, his punches and actions apply cartoon physics to the things he interacts with.

Of course a system like GURPS will have troubles replicating him 1:1 verbatim.
But that's cause again, the character that is to be emulated is flawed, not because GURPS sucks monkey butt at supers.

It's cause most supers are cartoons without rhyme or reason, and GURPS, without just going "It's Superman!" like you would have to do with Popeye...wants believable characters... so...apply creativity to that.
Making more believable characters out of the caricatures that are supers.

[Donny Brook]

Originally Posted by tbone

Out of curiosity, are there specific weaknesses you've found?

If it's more of a broad "just doesn't feel right to me", there's nothing wrong with that. But when people do have concrete objections, those are always interesting to hear.

I'm sure there's a big subjective component to my opinion. The result of using GURPs to simulate that other game feels to me a bit like turning Pachelbel's Canon into a ring-tone.

[lordabdul]

The funny thing about this thread is that we are GURPS fans evaluating how good GURPS is, so IMHO what we're really evaluating is how good a particular GURPS sourcebook is and how well we implemented its advice and/or extra rules.

There's a chicken-and-egg thing here in the sense that GURPS is generally good at handling things through a simulationist lens in which the bell curve resolution system rewards expertise with a non-linear ability to take on penalties to achieve more things. Or something like that. So if I want to approach a given genre in a simulationist way with blah blah blah, then of course GURPS will be pretty good at it.

Running a GURPS Supers game as a simulation of what happens when hero A with superpowers X deals with villain B with superpowers Z works fine. But it's harder to run a superhero game that wants to entirely focus on what it *feels* like to be hero A dealing with villain B, about teamwork and not letting your friends down. Such a game would require a system focused on who the hero is, not what they can do, and what the hero feels, not how many HP they have. ST/DX/IQ/HT are useless in that sort of game, and GURPS does that very poorly because you basically have to reskin the entire system. That's where you grab a game like, say, Masks.

Another example is how 7th Sea handles successes as narrative beats for things to achieve in a scene. There is little need to quantify things, in the sense that you don't need to look into how far away something is, how heavy it is, or whatever. It plays very fast and conveys the feeling of swashbuckling heroics much better IMHO than GURPS Swashbucklers. But on the other hand, GURPS Swashbucklers provides a more visceral feeling of doing feints and ripostes and so on that you don't get in 7th Sea. So it depends on what you want the game to be *about*.

[Mark Skarr]

Originally Posted by lordabdul

But it's harder to run a superhero game that wants to entirely focus on what it *feels* like to be hero A dealing with villain B, about teamwork and not letting your friends down. Such a game would require a system focused on who the hero is, not what they can do, and what the hero feels, not how many HP they have. ST/DX/IQ/HT are useless in that sort of game, and GURPS does that very poorly because you basically have to reskin the entire system. That's where you grab a game like, say, Masks.

Well, considering that I found Masks to be a sub-standard game. Everything you've said here is just missing the point.

That's all role-playing. It was GURPS where my character James Ryder went from having powers, to losing them*, to getting trained by Bruce Wayne, to learning why you don't ever want to be Batman, to asking the Immortal Wizard for his indulgence and taking the mantle of Captain Marvel when he realized that he couldn't beat Bat Tyrant by himself. This played out over more than a decade of real time. What, in GURPS, prevented me from feeling any of the emotions that he felt when he couldn't continue helping his friends because he burned his powers out (saving the world)? How would a bad, PbtA game like Masks have made that any better? How would Masks have even handled that much character progression and changes? Talk about having to reskin a system.

Everything you're saying has, literally nothing to do with the system and everything to do with the GM, the player, the other players and the game. Masks is no better than GURPS in that regard. Quite the opposite. GURPS having abilities you get to define and unlimited options is far better than the cookie-cutter options from anything PbtA.

Having read both GURPS and Masks, as a game there is nothing the latter can do that the former cannot do better.

I strongly dislike anything PbtA, as they're cookie-cutter, pick-from-a-list games that aren't really RPGs (Whswhs commented on this a long time ago, and his experience and view almost exactly reflects mine). If you like them, by all means, play them. I don't.

[*]-He never lost his ability to talk to animals because, for all its usefulness (the Bird Mafia and other examples), it was also his comic-relief power. Like, when Krypto suggested that his Legion of Super Heroes name be "Speak Boy."

[sjmdw45]

I don't know Masks and barely know PBtA, but I'll point out Hillfolk a.k.a. DramaSystem as a game that does well something GURPS does almost not at all, and vice versa.

DramaSystem is a game that's mostly about players talking to each other in character in scenes that are set up (mostly by the players) to explore their dramatic poles and emotional tensions. It devotes very little attention to what the characters physically do, and a lot of attention to pacing and how the players do it.

GURPS is basically the opposite, and in fact you could make a nifty hybrid system by ripping out DramaSystem's rudimentary procedural engine and replacing it with GURPS. Dramatic scenes would then use DramaSystem rules (which consist of things like voting afterwards on whether the instigating player's emotional petition was granted or denied by the other character in the scene), but if a dramatic scene ("I want your forgiveness for tattling on your sister to my father") leads naturally to a procedural sequence ("I need you to break her out of jail first") play can shift into GURPS mode until the procedural question "can you break her out of jail?" is resolved.

I tried this once with D&D 5E and DramaSystem but it was a bit tricky to balance the modes, and it basically turned into straight D&D after the first part. Never really went back into dramatic mode. I probably need more practice and better procedures.

Anyway, where GURPS tends to fall down is 1.) chargen, 2.) pacing, but it's good at 3.) task resolution. And it doesn't have to be bad at pacing, but you have to invent your own procedures or steal them from other games. (Most other RPGs are also bad at pacing although I get the impression PBtA probably is not.)

I would not care to play in a game of GURPS run by a new GM that was trying to solve a Sherlock Holmes-style mystery. Too much danger players like myself will end up spinning our wheels as the GM struggles to find the right level of granularity, and we might burn a lot of time on things that matter to the characters but not to solving the mystery, i.e. pacing issues. A more experienced GM would probably be fine-ish because they'll hopefully have procedures they've invented in the past for similar situations, even if they aren't written down anywhere.

[lordabdul]

Originally Posted by sjmdw45

I don't know Masks and barely know PBtA, but I'll point out Hillfolk a.k.a. DramaSystem as a game that does well something GURPS does almost not at all, and vice versa.

Yep, I think you got my point.

And it's not about taste (I actually don't like PbtA much, including Masks).

DramaSystem is another good example, thanks. Probably even a better example than Masks and 7th Sea! You can obviously play Iron Age people raiding neighbouring clans in GURPS, but that game will feel and play a lot different than the same game done with Hillfolk. A "genre" is more than a setting and some tropes. GURPS doesn't do "Iron Age drama" very well, just as it doesn't do "superhero teen angst" very well either. As the saying goes, if it's not on the character sheet, it's not what the game is really about. The GM and players can carry a lot of weight, but they need support from the system too. That's why it's hard to do investigative horror with D&D. GURPS has a lot more mileage and range within the simulationist approach, but it can't do everything else too, nor should it.

[SilvercatMoonpaw]

There's also an individual's own comfort with expected procedure: I'd hate playing DramaSystem, since I have difficulty "talking through" practically anything. By contrast, I'm much more comfortable with the "rigid procedure" way to use GURPS: identify task, find trait on character sheet to use, make necessary rolls, interpret results, repeat if necessary. That's why I have GURPS. If GURPS was altered so that it needed to be played a different way, I wouldn't have any use for it.

[Rolando]

I have being playing/gamemastering more narrative games recently and find all of them bring things I usually already do with GURPS.

Most of those mostly-flavor-rules-light games have some special thematic rule or srules that try to evoke the stile and genre. And those are easily portable to GURPS, most of the time those rules are just arbitrary "play this way" or GM tips and tricks to capture the genre feel.

I like playing other games and find some of them quite good but I'm sure a GURPS version would be simple better because you will be able to play it like the author intended or in multiple other ways.

I know this is not a comparison thread, but I do believe GURPS handle flavor and narrative play from the get go, surely more so than weak and poor systems like FATE.

By the way, I have gamemastered anime, fantasy (hig adventure, fary tale, alice in wonderland like surrealism, historic and some more), sci fi (space opera, exploration, military sci fi), steampunk, pulp, horror and many other genres in GURPS, with many different people and no one ever told me or felt the game feels the same nor lacking something. i do know and handle the rules easily, and let the players concentrate in the game (and adventure) and not the rules most of the time though.

[ericthered]

The drama system is orthogonal to "procedural play", and in fact recommends bolting on another RPG to handle it (it recommends Gumshoe, but I think that's just because its the same company). I keep on looking for an opportunity to play it with Gurps.



Gurps is capable of enourmous changes in Pacing. We recently had a player temporarily drop out from our game who has an aversion to heavy number crunching. This coincided with a campaign featuring long sightlines, full military gear, and high tech weapons. Our game has drastically changed its pace, with players now doing things like spending 15 minutes discussing the best type of ammo to use against robots (and enjoying themselves doing it), or figuring out the best moment to shoot (the most critical question of this game is usually "how long do you aim for?") Both styles were fun, and both were legit gurps.