Eeeesh.  So has anyone settled how many angels can dance on the head of a pin yet?

That being said, a few stray comments:

* Like Estar, I'm wondering what it takes to get some folk to understand the sentence "I strongly recommend starting with GURPS Lite."  Flattery?  Bribery?  Remission of sins?  72 virgins in Paradise?  You'd think we'd never said it for the impact it seems to have had.

* Sure, CRK, I'll grant you this much: the great majority of GURPS players and GMs learned the system in earlier iterations of the Basic Set.  So stipulated.

So what?  That's like saying that no one can have a material opinion on how hard it is to learn 5th edition D&D, simply because the overwhelming number of D&D players didn't start with 5th edition.

That's bullshit, and you should know it.

I've taught players unfamiliar with GURPS how to do 4th edition.  I've taught BSIII.  I've taught BSII.  I've taught BSI.  And hell, I was one of the thirty lucky bastards who got handed a couple of spiral-bound books and asked to GM the system cold in playtest.  No biggie: I've learned dozens of systems over the years, from OD&D on forward.

A lot of people out there can say much the same, and as far as learning new systems go by now, the many gamers who've been in this hobby for decades have figured it the fuck out.

Are games harder to learn nowadays?  That's defensible: page counts for damn near every major longstanding, multi-edition game have catapulted.

Is GURPS?  Well, for the alleged extreme difficulty of 4th edition, exactly what's changed?  Did the number of stats double?  Are there vastly more or vastly fewer skills?  Are there no longer Contests of Skills?  Have there been major changes in how damage works?  How stats govern skills?  Do we no longer roll under a certain number on 3d6 to do things?  Does GURPS work with percentiles now, or exploding dice pools, or bennies?

Nope.  It's been tweaked.  There are organizational changes.  There's full-color, slick interior pages and better illos.  Stats have different math and a straight-line progression.  A few other things.  This is not a radically different system.

Fourth edition is generally simpler than third.  It just has a high information density.  I've maintained that GURPS Lite needs some genre specific supplements to maximise its effectiveness, for a long time now.

It isn't as much about the system as the presentation.

GURPS 4th has less books containing the core-ish rules. So less book hopping. But it is still GURPS in a nutshell.

I think that if you're not a total fanatic of either yet, GURPS 3e and 4e are both sufficiently similar that the main factor in choosing should probably be which sourcebooks you can get your hand on and which ones you'd want to use.  3e had a lot more licensed settings, for example, as well as some very excellent historical setting books.

Quote from: RPGPundit;824806I think that if you're not a total fanatic of either yet, GURPS 3e and 4e are both sufficiently similar that the main factor in choosing should probably be which sourcebooks you can get your hand on and which ones you'd want to use.  3e had a lot more licensed settings, for example, as well as some very excellent historical setting books.

To this I will add that even if you go with 4E, the 3E historical setting books are still useful. The bulk of the book will be useful as is, only NPC stats will need adjustments.

Quote from: Exploderwizard;824866To this I will add that even if you go with 4E, the 3E historical setting books are still useful. The bulk of the book will be useful as is, only NPC stats will need adjustments.

Exactly.  Honestly, gamers are far, far, far, far too hung up on conversion issues, and make them out to be vastly more difficult than they need to be.

For my part, I've cribbed some Pathfinder setting materials.  Of course the stats aren't expressed in GURPS terms.  But who cares?  Not being a moron, I can figure out -- quite easily -- how relatively tough a certain character is, what her attributes and abilities are, that sort of thing.  I can -- quite easily -- express that in GURPS terms.  No muss, little fuss.

I'm going to point out one issue with GURPS that's actually what I feel is the main problem with the system at the entry level: you actually have to read the rulebook to figure the game out, and reading the rulebook can be an onerous task since so much of the Characters book in 4E is embedded with genre-specific advantages and disadvantages.

Actually learning the basics of how to play GURPS is trivial since you can grab 4E or 3E Lite and figure it out pretty quick, but moving from that to the core (for either edition) requires a bit of effort. 3E has the advantage that it's core is still reduced to a specific set of advantages, disadvantages and skills most common to a sort of "modern/historical baseline" with most of the additional material in supplements or the Compendiums I and II. 4E is effectively just the 3rd edition core plus the Compendiums I and II combined, with a cleanup of various rules which are on the surface minor changes but actually made some decent improvements. So if you think of 4E's two books as "GURPS 3E+the two compendiums" in equivalence it's not bad. I know that during my 3E days I had to use at least CI and much of CII for most of my active gaming, so to me core 3E was effectively three books.

However, to get back to my point that you actually have to read GURPS core to appreciate it, what I mean is that it really doesn't gel for most as a system until you've really immersed yourself in the rules and mechanics and taken some time to figure it out, or at least try to get the principles behind it and....most importantly....understand just how much of GURPS core is designed to be optional. For example, all the core combat rules you need are actually at the end of GURPS Characters. You can use those rules as presented and never have to expand into the options in GURPS Campaigns if you don't want, even if you use everything else in GURPS Campaigns to provide equipment and other options. The game will not break, although your game will feel different in tone and pace from the guy who's running a gritty Spec Ops campaign with all combat options turned ON.

Most gamers today (and for the last decade or two) are more used to "reference book" formats for rules....rules you basically get and then skim for the parts you need as you go along. GURPS is a reference book, too....but you need to know what you're looking for to find it, essentially....and to do that you need to get good and familiar with the core rules, regardless of whether its 3rd or 4th edition. That's very counter-intuitive to a generation raised on D20 system mechanics where every set of rules runs on the same core principles with a "need to know" design. Plus, most other RPGs usually give you a messy set of tools to build stuff, but tons of front-loaded premade content. GURPS is the reverse: a very clean set of building tools, but you need to dig into the genre books to find any premade content--at least in 4th, which really leans on the very useful template/archetype system to help players out.

Actually, to the OP: if your goal is to make life easier for your players, it makes more sense to go with 4E since it really did expand on and make templated archetypes extremely easy to use. The concept was punched around to varying degrees in 3E, but the format in 4E actually makes the GM's life much easier when it comes to introducing new players.

Quote from: Ravenswing;824880Exactly.  Honestly, gamers are far, far, far, far too hung up on conversion issues, and make them out to be vastly more difficult than they need to be.

For my part, I've cribbed some Pathfinder setting materials.  Of course the stats aren't expressed in GURPS terms.  But who cares?  Not being a moron, I can figure out -- quite easily -- how relatively tough a certain character is, what her attributes and abilities are, that sort of thing.  I can -- quite easily -- express that in GURPS terms.  No muss, little fuss.

I run GURPS Fantasy and have a bunch of template describing people from various walks of life at different levels of experiences. So when a D&D module says there are two city guards at a gate, I just use the guard template that has the closest set of gear to the module's description. If a NPC is describe as an experience court wizard, I have  a template for that.

With this in hand it is pretty easy to just grab anything and run with it.

Does it play the same as the original. No it doesn't. It usually winds up being grittier and more "realistic" feeling than the original especially if it is a D&D module. For example a 50 point city guard could manage to get a critical to the vitals and end your day right there.

One key trick for a novice GURPS referee is to build a binder of these templates

Quote from: Exploderwizard;824866To this I will add that even if you go with 4E, the 3E historical setting books are still useful. The bulk of the book will be useful as is, only NPC stats will need adjustments.

I don't play GURPS anymore. But I still have most of the sourcebooks that came out for it that I refer to a lot for my other RPG.

Quote from: camazotz;824890So if you think of 4E's two books as "GURPS 3E+the two compendiums" in equivalence it's not bad.

The one thing that made me upgrade from 3rd to 4th edition was the re-arranging re-defining of the Strength, Fatigue, Health, and Hit-Points and how they work. They kind of bothered me how past editions used them. Then I dropped out of GURPS entirely about 9 years ago. But continued buying just the sourcebooks.

Quote from: Exploderwizard;824866To this I will add that even if you go with 4E, the 3E historical setting books are still useful. The bulk of the book will be useful as is, only NPC stats will need adjustments.

Yup, absolutely true. On the whole the two editions are still very similar to each other, particularly from the point of view of someone who isn't a hardcore GURPS fan.

Really, the biggest change is in the points costs.  The ratings are largely compatible it's just the points values will be off.

Given that GURPS is a points driven game that derives its balance from point totals some may feel this is an absolute catastrophe.

Quote from: David Johansen;825253Really, the biggest change is in the points costs.  The ratings are largely compatible it's just the points values will be off.

Given that GURPS is a points driven game that derives its balance from point totals some may feel this is an absolute catastrophe.

Which is a misnomer. Points only balance characters at creation. It's a mechanism for fairness. Trying to use that as a yardstick measuring bad guys is going to be time-consuming and painful. Most of the GM's you read about on the SJG forums approximate numbers for key stats and go from there (for foes, NPCs...).

Some people on the forums don't think anyone should ever have an Attribute over 12.  Really, the stat normalizers very nearly ruin the sjg forums.

Personally the make the points balance or die is more of a HERO thing.  GURPS is a little looser than that.

I'm no GURPS Guru, but I do love 3e for low mana fantasy. I found it very simple to run for a group of players who had never done any roleplaying before. I helped them make the characters they wanted (a knight, a squire, a Drizzit clone, and a thugish Thief) then played in a very 'tell me what you do and I'll tell you what to roll' style. The skills, and especially the defaults, worked very well for that type of play.

I took a look at 4e when it came out, but couldn't get into it 3e isn't exactly the most exciting read, but 4e was drier than a camel's arsehole. Not sure why I didn't grokk it, maybe I'm just comfortable with my battered copy of 3e. Anyway, going back to Warthur's OP and based on his responses I'd say 3e is the way to go.

If people want a tool to help with eye-balling encounter difficulty in GURPS 4e then the latest edition of Pyramid magazine has something for you (Link)