GURPS 4e could have handled supers well, more's the pity.  It comes so close but the buy Super Effort Strength, look up level on The Speed / Range table, calculate Damage and Base Lift is just clunky.  True it means that at high levels super strength massively outpaces ranged attacks which does model the comics well but it gets into the points range where simply buying 20s in every attribute is cheaper.  600 points incidentally.

So if you had your druthers, how would Stats scale?

consistently?



A x2 at 100 points is how first edition originally handled it but that doesn't work for Superman within the reasonable points boundaries.

The problem is that a 1001 Strength isn't really proportionately better than a 1000 Strength.  There's also the relative relationship to enhanced move or area effect mind control to consider.

Someone on the SJG site suggested that what super strength should really do is reduce the weight, DR, and HP of objects rather than increasing strength and I have to admit that's an interesting observation.  Supers don't tend to smear everything they touch.

Personally I'd like it more direct and straight forward than that.  Probably a super strength advantage that allows cheap purchasing like they used in 3e.  Let's see, 90 points for the advantage and 1 point per point for strength after that, so a 20 still costs 100 points I suppose.  Includes the ground pressure equalization for free but it's a cinematic advantage.

As someone who practically memorized GURPS 3e, taking a break and then trying to read the 4e books was daunting to me, partly because they rewrote the wording of everything and changed some subtle things, and partly because they stuffed in almost every character trait from almost every worldbook (of dozens) into the Basic Set. In my decades of GURPS play, I never used any of the abilities you mentioned for anyone, because Extra Attacks in 3e was for Chop Suey kung fu heroes who were Trained By a Master (~30 points by itself), the accelerated time thing is a super-hero ability, and the mind control advantage sounds like a weird sci fi/fantasy thing that would only have been on a monster or vampire in 3e, not just something to casually consider getting instead of Literacy or Acute Hearing.

So even though they tried to sort of simplify/streamline/improve 4e, in some ways even a veteran GURPS GM can find the 4e Characters book overwhelming.

The point costs aren't arbitrary if you understand the whole system (the abilities you mentioned are for Supers or PSI or Chop Saki games and also cost high background costs), but the GM needs to understand them enough to pick and choose what's allowed or makes sense and give the players templates that explain that and limit their choices to things that will make sense. New players given the Characters book with no guidlines will no doubt have the WTF experience you had, or worse, think they can pick anything cool and then be disappointed when the GM says no or (even worse) if a GM doesn't say no and then the game is bizarre because the GM let them make a weird character with extra limbs and who knows what else.

I saw "GURPS--what the hell?" and figured that pretty much said it all.:-)

I've lobbied for more sorted and easier starting point products for years and years.

Quote from: David Johansen;837039I've lobbied for more sorted and easier starting point products for years and years.

Likewise. From gaming from a couple of the regular writers and listening to their stories, I feel it is a leadership issue (Sean Punch and Steve Jackson), along with a low priority due to the success of Munchkin and board games for the company.

Yeah the circle of writers is effectively a clique but from talking from a few of them they are "in" because they write well the material that Sean Punch and Steve Jackson want for the line. Most of who I talked too are well aware of GURPS weakness in beginner products and ready to run products.

Change is possible but even then they bork it in subtle ways particularly Dungeon Fantasy. I.e. it oriented to 250 point characters.

GURPS has become the model train manufacturer of the RPG world. They seem completely uninterested in expanding their appeal, and a few moments perusing the forums makes it obvious that most of the fan base is interested in going further and further down the verisimilitude rabbit hole. Which is cool if and only if the grunt work can get disguised and the end results are simple and playable. Some things I've seen fall into this: fixing Strength damage, changing how scaling works... but most of it is literally physics majors being self-indulgent.

For all the system tweaks that could happen (and I don't think they're anywhere as severe as the tweaks between say, DnD 3.5 and 5e) the single biggest thing GURPS could do is throw out their fucking style guide and hire some contract user experience designer. The way they present information is just godawful. Hand a new player a template and see if they can make heads or tails of it. And if the player is mildly dyslexic, they're never going to get through it.

Of course, that would mean irritating the old guard, but I think it would be worth it.

Quote from: estar;837090Likewise. From gaming from a couple of the regular writers and listening to their stories, I feel it is a leadership issue (Sean Punch and Steve Jackson), along with a low priority due to the success of Munchkin and board games for the company.

This is nothing recent, not at all.  John Nowak (a noted Car Wars writer) was in my group for a time, and I remember him going through the roof when the first edition of GURPS Special Ops came out.  "What the hell, is the United States Army opening up recruiting stations on Krypton?" he bellowed?  That was 25 years ago, long before Munchkin was a big deal.

Quote from: JonWake;837107The way they present information is just godawful.

I've long thought that one of SJG's enduring mistakes with 4th edition was to NOT put GURPS Lite in the front of the book, with a "These are all the rules you need to play the game" in big honking red letters on the first page.

The page after the Lite section was done, there'd be GIANT honking red letters saying:

"Everything before this are the essential game rules.  Everything after this are rules and stuff that help add richness and depth to the game.  All these rules are freaking optional!  You don't need them in order to play.  You can do without them if you don't want to use them.  You can pick and choose which ones you want. Steve Jackson won't come to your home to take your books away if you don't use them, and God won't kill a kitten.  We mean it."

I'm just going to point out that Gurps is the one game I wish had gone OSR. I'd finally get a fantasy game in one book using these rules, and everything already designed for it instead of wasting hours trying to make something from the "toolkit" approach.

GURPS' only good use is in a video game. Only nuts would play a video game with pencil and paper.

I'd be more for making Lite a bit more complete and less dense.  Bigger type and more artwork at least.  Say it comes in at 100 pages and includes some magic and high tech stuff or something.  Because nothing says," "Everything before this are the essential game rules. Everything after this are rules and stuff that help add richness and depth to the game. All these rules are freaking optional! You don't need them in order to play. You can do without them if you don't want to use them. You can pick and choose which ones you want. Steve Jackson won't come to your home to take your books away if you don't use them, and God won't kill a kitten. We mean it," than making it the core book and moving everything else to a supplement."

Quote from: danbuter;837206I'm just going to point out that Gurps is the one game I wish had gone OSR. I'd finally get a fantasy game in one book using these rules, and everything already designed for it instead of wasting hours trying to make something from the "toolkit" approach.

I agree. I didn't follow everything SJG was doing but if I recall correctly they never put out their own campaign world for a fantasy game. They should have written up a Greyhawk-like supplement and said "Here's our sandbox world, here's 10 modules to adventure through, have fun." Complete with maps, templates, weird magic, crazy NPCs, bizarro monsters, the whole shebang. But they never did.

Hero should have done that too.

Quote from: JonWake;837107For all the system tweaks that could happen (and I don't think they're anywhere as severe as the tweaks between say, DnD 3.5 and 5e) the single biggest thing GURPS could do is throw out their fucking style guide and hire some contract user experience designer. The way they present information is just godawful. Hand a new player a template and see if they can make heads or tails of it. And if the player is mildly dyslexic, they're never going to get through it.

I mostly agree with this. Even before 3e came out, the good GM's I knew would come up with well-written intros to their own campaigns, explaining the world and how to make characters for it, with lists of what was available and so on. Or, they'd do a spoken introduction and help the players make their characters. The 3e and 4e "templates" are a shorthand for this, but even I find them dense to read and in need of translation to a more digestible form, especially because it's not clear whether they should be taken as a character example or a list of possible traits, and how common/needed or rare/optional the listed things are, etc.

Quote from: Doughdee222;837245I agree. I didn't follow everything SJG was doing but if I recall correctly they never put out their own campaign world for a fantasy game. They should have written up a Greyhawk-like supplement and said "Here's our sandbox world, here's 10 modules to adventure through, have fun." Complete with maps, templates, weird magic, crazy NPCs, bizarro monsters, the whole shebang. But they never did.

They've done some of this, but you might not notice since there were so many worldbooks published and the one like this is called GURPS Fantasy, which is actually a worldbook for a world called Yrth, which has a few adventure and content supplements for it, but not enough. I agree that it would've been good to do a lot more of this, so GM's would have more examples of what kinds of things to actually make for their own games, and nice maps and counters and characters and combat-ready characters and useful stuff. With so many settings, the content books are usually only a few per each, e.g. GURPS Conan with two or three programmed adventures. For 4e there is Infinite Earths, but that's a parallel universe setting. And there's GURPS Traveller... but ya, I'd say you're right, that would be good to do / have done.