GURPS would be more successful if it were more friendly to new players

[josha]

Now that I've evaluated it further, flipping through a friend's GURPS books are reading GURPS Lite; I've started to recognize it as a good system. However, I'm reluctant to start playing due to the enormous size of the core rulebooks and the enormous price that comes with them. GURPS Lite doesn't really include enough to play, and I don't want to rush out and buy the books just yet. What should I do?

PS. I'm mostly interested in gritty, low-powered military games.

[David Johnston2]

So basically the only thing you need is a weapons table for the specific campaign?

[Kalzazz]

What setting are you thinking of? Instead of GURPS 4e if you are interested in say WWII you could buy GURPS WWII . . . . all of the stuff in those books are WWII pertinent

My personal suggestion to new players/DMs has always been 'start off with anything and everything goes'

[Landwalker]

Originally Posted by josha

GURPS Lite doesn't really include enough to play, and I don't want to rush out and buy the books just yet. What should I do?

GURPS Lite certainly does include enough to play, but it doesn't include enough to GM (or at least, to GM the majority of games). So what you should do is have a GM who has the core books. The GM fills in the blanks, tells you what equipment does, gives you a couple of extra skills that would be pertinent to your particular campaign, and voila, you're off. You, as a player, don't even have to know most of the mechanics (Influence / Reaction rolls, healing, etc.). Provided you know what you want to do, conceptually (Talk my way past the guard, seduce the prince, bleed to death, whatever), the GM can handle the mechanical side of things.


Edit: The bottom line is that, if you aren't willing to buy the Basic Set, you can get by with GURPS Lite just fine as a player. At that point, the only thing that needs to be friendly to a new player is the GM.

[Christian]

Actually, I do not know many RPG systems, where you can get the basic information for as low a price. We are talking about $75. Compare this to the price for only the basic books. D20 modern alone is $80, and is by far not as universal. The 3 basic DSA books is €95 (~$120), and that's for just ONE setting ... Sorry you'll have an hard time to find a roleplaying game that sells for less than $50 for the core rules alone. If you want to have it well rounded (as GURPS basic and characters is), then you'll easily get above $100.

[Diomedes]

If you are running a low powered game with mundane characters, you can probably do character creation with just the traits in GURPS Lite and not the full lists in Characters. If, as sounds likely, however, you want relatively detailed combat, you will want to get Campaigns for the full combat system. (I started my GURPS collection this way; I picked up Campaigns at a going-out-of-business sale at my FLGS and didn't bother to get Characters for the better part of a year.)


Edit: The generic weapons are in Characters, though, so you might want to take a gander at High-Tech: Weapon Tables for a list of modern and pre-modern military hardware.

[josha]

I'm not interested in WWII as much as near future warfare similar to Battlefield 2142. I'm also only interested in GMing.

[cosmicfish]

Originally Posted by Landwalker

GURPS Lite certainly does include enough to play...

Yes and no. My biggest problem with GURPS Lite is that it isn't generic. In an effort to cram the massive set of rules down to 32 pages (or whatever it is) they omitted magic, psionics, superpowers, and everything above TL8. Since almost all of my gaming experiences have included one or more of the above (I can only think of one exception, ever), I consider this a significant limitation - you are basically limited to playing contemporary and historical mundane characters... Yay!!! I think the book could have been twice as long, included ~8 pages for each of those topics, and been a much better intro to the game.

Ironically, as I mentioned in another (now closed) thread, I also think that the "basic set" is too heavy - it's like a restaurant menu with 1000 items on it, most of them "build your own". Most of the real crunchy rules could have been moved to a Game Design supplement that would do for characters what Vehicles did for ... vehicles.

[josha]

Originally Posted by cosmicfish

Ironically, as I mentioned in another (now closed) thread, I also think that the "basic set" is too heavy - it's like a restaurant menu with 1000 items on it, most of them "build your own". Most of the real crunchy rules could have been moved to a Game Design supplement that would do for characters what Vehicles did for ... vehicles.

I agree. The basic set should have been one 250 page book.

[DanHoward]

Originally Posted by josha

I agree. The basic set should have been one 250 page book.

Which would have both players and GMs complaining that there isn't enough detail for either group to do what they want. There is no alternative than actually reading the rules if you want to GM a game. Best if you can play in a few games before GMing but that can't always happen with a group that is experimenting with a new system.

Why not just start a game rather than being scared that you can't do it. Use GURPS Lite and give everyone pregenerated characters. Run through a few sessions in your world to get the players familiar with both the setting and the rules. You can use the simple combat rules in GURPS Lite perfectly fine. You'll only need to look up the Basic Set combat if someone asks "can I do this?" If nobody ever does then you'll know that the Lite combat rules are all that you'll ever need for this group. After this they can generate their own characters and start the campaign that you really want to run. Personally I'd keep the first set of characters and use them as NPCs later in the campaign.