GURPS: Community Thoughts?

[DesertHawk]

I recently read through a thread about Dungeons and Dragons, and the discussion renewed my curiosity in PnP roleplaying. I had always been interested in DnD, yet I had never known anyone willing to give it a go.

About a year ago, I had talked a few friends into giving PnP roleplaying a try. I figured it would be fun since we had already done alot of online(forum-based) rp'ing. For whatever reason, though, DnD was completely out of the question for them. After doing some looking around for a PnP system, I stumbled across GURPS. I was originally really taken in with the modular nature of the game. Being able to apply generic/general sets of rules to just about any setting sounded like a blast to me. After discussing it with a my friends, they were game for at least a demo run of the system. I purchased the two core books and began pouring over them. I started constructing my own mini campaign with it's own unique setting. I drew maps, designed items, created NPCs, and started setting up a general flow of the story arcs and variety of possiblities. Before I knew it, I was lost in the minutiae of details. I ended up scrapping the whole project and went back to playing video games ( =P I have a bit of a bad habit in not finishing what I start).

Anyway, I'm really considering trying to pick it back up again. However, I think originally I tried to tackle too grand an idea. Perhaps even the choice of GURPS was not the best. Maybe I should have started with something a little more structured? Since I already have the materials for GURPS, however, I think I might just stick with that for now.

I ask, though, if there is anyone in the community who has had some experience playing with GURPS? What are your thoughts on it? Are there any simple campaigns some PnP n00bs could try out first? Is there another good PnP system (non-DnD) that newbies could easily start out on?

 

[Wildrow12]

GURPS is a little too wild for my blood (but then again, my first and only experience with the system was a Robotech conversion a friend had).

Non-DnD gaming huh? Well, that gives you alot of options. Eden Studios makes stuff that are pretty easy to wrap your head around (like "All Flesh Must Be Eaten" and The Army of Darkness RPG), that are really fun to play.

"Little Fears" is also alot of fun, if you can get your head into playing a horror game where your player characters are little kids.

"Mutants and Masterminds" by Green Ronin, has a really in-depth character/super powers creation system (it's a superhero game, after all) but it has one of the easiest and most streamlined combat/task resolution systems I've ever worked with.

These are good places to start. Feel free to ask if you need more ideas.

 

[DesertHawk]

@Wildrow12: Thanks for the info, I'll definately do some reading up on the other games that you mentioned.

 

[DesertHawk]

Hmmmm... To add a little more discussion value, What do you think makes up a good Pen and Paper Roleplaying System? The combat? The Loot? The capacity to handle non-combat related challenges? Free flowing gameplay vs strict rulesets?

 

[Wildrow12]

Depends.

I personally think it has to be a combination of things.

1. Is it a fun idea?
2. Is the system too clunky to be usable?
3. Is it just a rehashing of old games?

Loot and monsters is kinda pointless since a good GM knows how to adjust their favorite beasties, challenges, and loot to make sense in virtually any game. After all, in the world of imagination, ANYTHING is possible to a creative mind.

I once ran a D20 Modern game without magic (kind of a gun-fu game set in the late 80's) where common tropes and monsters were made into more realistic forms (i.e: Orcs were just a very human Eastern European Crime Syndicate known for strong arm tactics, "Daikatana" was the name of a powerful handgun, etc).

 

[Deacon Cole]

Hmmmm... To add a little more discussion value, What do you think makes up a good Pen and Paper Roleplaying System? The combat? The Loot? The capacity to handle non-combat related challenges? Free flowing gameplay vs strict rulesets?

Oh man. One thing you definitely do not want is my opinion on the subject. So here it is.

First thing when discussing roleplaying games is the term should be defined. What is a roleplaying game? This is useful in understanding what preconceptions are being brought to the table.

For myself, I define roleplaying games as games where the in-game elements can be use in terms of what they actually are.* In practical terms, this means you can do anything with, say, a Dungeons & Dragons dagger that you could with a real dagger. You can pick your teeth with it. You can trim your nails with it. You can shave your bikini zone with it. And also make several dagger-sized holes in a person's body with it.

Where roleplaying games go wrong is that designers try to have rules for all of this stuff. Okay, maybe not rules for shaving your pubic hair. But rules bloat is as old as the hobby, which began when Dungeons & Dragons was published as a supplement for the wargame Chainmail.

It's actually a paradox or a conundrum. One of those things. Roleplaying games have the ability to allow the players do anything yet the game design is hurt by this because a well-designed game is a focused game.

If you've ever tried to design a game with some depth, you've probably caught yourself adding a little more clay than you needed, either to improve the shape of your original slab, or to cover problems in an older layer of clay. Unfortunately, there's no upper limit to the amount of clay you can slap on, although your game can become unwieldy pretty early in that process. Maybe you gave up when the game got too complex to play, or maybe you decided it was finished because it just couldn't sustain any more "fixing." Either way, most beginners who try to fix one rule by adding another, eventually become frustrated when their games bog down without really becoming more interesting.

Yet some of your favorite games, and many of the "classics" you grew up with, seem to have almost no rules at all. The rules for Chess fit on the inside of the lid. So why are there so many volumes written about how to play it? In my opinion, the strategy in Chess is a product of the simplicity of the rules. This is a game which has evolved through generations of playtest, and so these aren't just any rules, they are exactly the right rules and nothing else. Can you say that about your latest game?

I wish that article was still online somewhere.

In trying to do everything, roleplaying games wind up doing too much and become unwieldy as a result. The latest edition of the Hero RPG game is 600 pages. That's ridiculous. Even if someone read all of those rules, they probably would remember all of them.

This rules bloat is typical, hence the lengthy quote above. But it is difficult to pin down how to make this happen. How can you use the in-game elements in terms of what they are, doing anything with them that would be possible with a real object, and still have those actions carry in-game weight.

I don't think anyone has adequately explored the possibilities of this yet. Currently, last time I checked (which was a few years ago now but I would be shock if things had changed overmuch) most games are trying to hard to "model reality" to have rules that can cover ever conceivable possibility... although I think that's not really accurate, but it is the mindset that seems to be present during design and during play.

There is also an "indie" scene which focuses of so-called "story games." After dealing with that for a couple years, I abandoned it in disgust. These aren't really story games since all roleplaying games make a story. What the games themselves do is offer mechanics that passes control of the story from one person to the next, possible allowing someone to wrestle control away from the others. That's not storytelling. That's fighting over the spotlight.

I don't think a good balance has been struck for the "game" side of the equation yet. I've been toying with more focused games set on a certain scenario with very specific areas where the freeform use of elements come into play, but I haven't got anything even remotely usable.

It would be nice is such a game did exist, but I think roleplaying games are a stillborn medium. It's not even forty years old and most of what it does, or people use it for is done by another medium, video games. And while video games cannot really replicate roleplaying games, only borrowing the dice rolling mechanics and such, it close enough for most so the attention to roleplaying games is left in the hands of precious few enthusiasts, dropping the chances that a Mozart of the medium will ever appear.



* Yes, this means all those stats and abilities on the character sheet are rubbish

 

[DesertHawk]

While I'm not particularly familiar with tabletop gaming, GURPS has intrigued me, being the original basis for the Fallout games, and I've made a few observations. GURPS seems to be to tabletop gaming what ArmA: Armed Assault would be to the first-person shooter. GURPS is utterly filled with minutiae, probably being the most true-to-life tabletop game I've ever seen. This serves you well if your tastes run to it - with my favour for realism and plausibility, mine probably would run towards it. However, those minutiae come with costs - much more detail has to go into each campaign, particularly with statistics and dice rolls, and the gameplay can get quite slow as a result.

I think, despite selling itself as a modular, generic game, that the greatest strength of GURPS is its ability to simulate realistic scenarios, particularly modern firearms scenarios. A GURPS game might go quite well in a modern city, a brutal Wild West or in a war-torn battlefield from any time up to the modern game, but the statistic systems guarantee that your characters will always be vulnerable and endangered. It probably wasn't the best choice as a first tabletop system, particularly with all of the detail, but if you're ever in the mood for a brutally realistic game where your characters have to keep themselves out of trouble, or at least keep their heads down, look straight back towards it.

I would have to say that you are pretty dead-on with your comparison to ARMA regarding GURPS's capacity for simulated realism. Although I never did get a game beyond the planning stages, I went through just about every page of the two core books. There's an embarrasingly huge number of rules packed into those two books. Beyond those, there are the many supplement books covering different genres and settings. Combining all of these rules presents a very intimidating first glance at GURPS.

I will say, though, my first stab at GURPS failed because I did not heed the warning in the beginning of one of those books (at least I think that is where I think I read it =P ). That warning being to only use the rules that best suit the game at hand. I ended up trying to account for just about everything. As I understand it, GURPS rules serve to provide a framework for games to be about as simplistic or complex as desired. The problem I found with the rule books, however,is that many of the rules and gameplay mechanics are sort laid out all at once in several different sections. Because of the sizable amount of content, I had a hard time determining what would have been a good starting point. I couldn't really get a basic grasp of the general game flow, let alone decide on which aspects I wanted to concentrate on (Although, I'm sure my inexperience with PnP RPGs on the whole may been a big factor in this). While the books do occasionaly provide situational examples for many individual rules, it doesn't really give a simple or clear view on how an entire session or game would play out. More general examples would have been nice.

I recently took a look at the GURPS-Lite PDF offered by Steve Jackson Games. It's a stripped down version of the rules. Perhaps I'll have some better luck with that for now, and perhaps sprinkle in some of the more advanced stuff from the rule books.

 

[Eclectic Dreck]

I've never actually played a PnP game, in spite of what evidence one might find on my bookshelf. The systems in play fascinate me, and while I'm sure I'd really love to play at some point I just can't find a group of people who I feel I could actually tolerate associating with. I mean this in the kindest possible way but there are limits to the depths of nerdiness and poor hygene that I'm willing to explore and sadly, everyone I've met thus far who plays PnP games falls below the threshold on at least one of the two.

That said, from what I can tell, there are really three distinct types of PnP games. First, you have those built on the D20 system - essentially a modular version of the rule set used in D&D. D20 Modern for example is essentially D&D set in magical modern setting (or not - the rules allow magic to be removed). Since it seems that D&D is the most popular game, the D20 system has a lot of followers and most smaller game systems are built using it's rule set.

Then, you have GURPS, which like D20 provides a core set of rules from which one can build a game. The system itself leans more in the direction of homebrew than the other options, but there have been several notable entries into the series that people who aren't me know a lot about.

Finally, you have "everything else" from the d10 system found throughout the World of Darkness games, to the D6 system used in Shadowrun and Silloutte (The sytem governing Heavy Gear). Many games that use their own custom system also have conversion into D20.

The core difference between the systems is, more or less, how they calculate failure or success. In D20, all checks involve using a modified roll on a 20 sided die and that is compared against a threshold. Generally speaking, this means you either entirely succeed or entirely fail - margins of error do not naturally occur within the system. Thus, if you make an attack with a sword, then first you check to see if you hit, then you make a second roll to determine damage. In other systems, such as the WOD or Shadowrun, you instead use the concept of a pool of dice. When an action requiring a check is required they roll a number of dice determined by the setting and their skills against some target number. Then, they count the number of dice that met or exceeded the target number, subtracted by the number of dice that equaled the failure number. The key here is the system allows for differing levels of success. A single 'hit' means a narrow success, no hits means a general failure and negative 'hits' measures a critical failure. Thus, in shadowrun to use an example, if an attack is made with a handgun, one rolls to determine the degree of success, adds the result to the base damage pool of his weapon and then calcualtes any other applicable modifiers and the result is how much damage is done.

Of the two methods, the D20 system seems to be generally simpler to deal with because the threshold of success is often explicitly stated or arbitrarily assigned, but the other systems tend to provide a better analog for reality. Of course, all I know about these games has come from simply reading the rule books and there is probably a pretty significant difference between reading the rules and actually applying them in a game.