I was rereading Gurps Powers after a thread on the Big Purple made me get out the book to examine statting a demon.

 I've been put off by the complexity of GURPS 4E and while I've read it, never made use of it.

I've played 3E off and on for many years, and run many Horror and other "no specific engine" games with that.

Yet, as I'm looking at it now, in the new light of having reread M&M2E and it seems to me that other than my dislike of "2 books needed" setup, that Gurps 4 is actually better, more logically constructed, and in many ways simpler, than M&M2E--so why doesn't it get more love "in the wild?"

You kind of answerred your own question.

 Many people have this "knee-jerk" reaction as you put it against there being two corebooks for GURPs 4/e...yet similiar people seem to have no problem with D&D having 3 "corebooks".

TO BE ACCURATE: GURPS 3/e really needed people to get THREE books after a cetain point - the main GURPS book, Compendium I and Compendium II. The new version boils down all that stuff into just two hardbacks.


In general, fourth edition is easier and smoother than 3rd edition GURPS.


- Ed C.

I think the lack of clear division between 'ordinary' advantages and disadvantages and 'supernatural' ones is a very real stumbling block for a lot of gamers.  I'm an old GURPS fan and I have a problem with it!!!

I mean, in 3e I could just hand over the main book to a new player and trust anything they took out of it was fine, and I could steal the older pre-compendium suplements for other useful, campaign specific advantages and disadvantages. Now its a painful process of weeding, rejection and going 'um...look for the little head icon' or what have you.

Metaphorically: Its flying a jet through skyscrapers. Sure, its possible, maybe even fun for an expert, but for that guy on his second flight lesson? Sheer terror followed by a firey explosion.

Quote from: SpikeI think the lack of clear division between 'ordinary' advantages and disadvantages and 'supernatural' ones is a very real stumbling block for a lot of gamers.  I'm an old GURPS fan and I have a problem with it!!!

I mean, in 3e I could just hand over the main book to a new player and trust anything they took out of it was fine, and I could steal the older pre-compendium suplements for other useful, campaign specific advantages and disadvantages. Now its a painful process of weeding, rejection and going 'um...look for the little head icon' or what have you.

Metaphorically: Its flying a jet through skyscrapers. Sure, its possible, maybe even fun for an expert, but for that guy on his second flight lesson? Sheer terror followed by a firey explosion.

That's in large part my issue with it, it's just not as user friendly.  I liked Gurps for gritty and/or historical games, I tended to use it for real world settings, I don't want to spend chargen vetoing stuff the players ask for.  That and it makes just way more to wade through.

For me Gurps lost its way with Compendium I, it just tipped it over the complexity edge for me, not least because much of the stuff in Compendium I made damn all sense when removed from the supplement it was originally written for.

I love GURPS. It's complexity isn't as bad as it seems at first, and serves a purpose.

It seems that there are lots of special cases and niche rules. In a way it's presented like that to spell things out. Ultimately, though, most rules tie together in a way that makes sense.

For example, the character sheet for 4th and in part 3rd. Each skill seems to have three stats. The actual level, the adjustment from base stat, and the point cost. It boils down to something simple though, really the skill level is the adjustment from base stat. Every thing else is for convenience and can be derived from the adjustment. But it LOOKS complex at first.

(I've started to just record the adjustment for skills, I have not tried it in game yet but I think it'll work just fine, also it highlights that different base stats could be used depending on what the character is trying to do with a skill)

Also in the first two core books there are THREE combat systems. Each one building on the previous one. It adds to the heft of the books, and complexity of the written game. The combat system, however, is really a single one with optional levels of detail.

The other thing is choice paralysis. Approaching character generation from the shopping mentality can be daunting. Templates help, but it kinda becomes its own worst enemy by seeming to offer MORE choices. When people new to GURPS cotton on to the idea that they need a character idea first and build to that, the choices become a blessing. Also in a long long campaign those choices help prevent characters from ending up statistical clones of each other, all with the same skills and options.

The book layout and texture puts me off, actually.   It's not that there are two books; it's that the books feel and look cheap and magazine-like to me.  The paper, the supergloss, all that.

I passed over them in the store a few times, in favor of whatever else seemed interesting, before eventually picking them up because of this.

Even now, they aren't my first pick off the shelf when I want to sit about on my couch curled up in a blanket and just toy about with ideas - which is the situation in which campaign ideas often "gell" for me.

What's wrong with 4e? 15 years of 3e. I've got my hardback GURPS Basic Set. I never use Compendium I or II, except for the compiled ads/disads/skills listings, so that's a red herring. And between me and my group, we've probably got 95% of all the supplements ever released. We know the rules we use (note, that's not ALL of them - its a buffet, innit?) like the back of our hands.

So, we don't need 4e.

You could say, I guess, that we're what's wrong with 4e.

That said, I do have the two new 4e Basic books. But I'll almost certainly never use them.

As I've said before, SJG lost a guarenteed sale of every supplement they could put out for 3e, from my group, when they shifted to 4e. I know plenty of people will take up the slack, but I can't imagnie we're the only GURPS players in the world who took that tack.

I played 3e for about a year before 4e came out, so I wasn't to deeply inculcated in third edition.  As far as detailed, internally consistent, simulationist rulesets go, nothing beats GURPS, in my opinion.  You can take that system and stretch into all kinds of insanity and it still holds up.  I just found that it didn't address my gaming style after a while, but theoretically speaking, I consider it to be a work of technical genius.  I have no experience with Hero 5th edition, so that could be comparable as well, as there seems to be equal proponents on both sides.

To be more specific, the way that Powers took the idea of breaking down Advantages into components (either negative or positive) and using that to build practically anything, took the system to level of mechanical detail that makes the game the ultimate simulationist tool.  I played in a sci-fi campaign where we knew ahead of time that our characters were going to have powers unleashed in them.  We spent many sessions getting into the world, building up our characters before we got those points to spend.  When we did, we (with our GM) had such a cool, customizable range of powers.  My guy was all about drunken imperviousness (kind of like a vulgar version of Concrete, the comic) and one of his powers was to power barf on people.  Just the specificity and detail of the build of his powers was amazing.  It also created all kinds of granular paths of power development that made for a lot of fun and creative strategic thinking.

Also, SJGames is a cool company.  They totally reacted to the fan outcry over the initial cover (with the raygun dildo) and came up with a much nicer design motif (again based on fan input).  Their podcast is all about gaming fun, not just SJGames products and Kromm will pop up anywhere with very helpful answers.  

You guys should check out the first 3 or 4 pages of this thread to see some gaming goodness that got squeezed out of the GURPS tube:

http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=364589

I've heard about the raygun dildo cover one too many times. I gotta have a link!

Quote from: The_ShadowI've heard about the raygun dildo cover one too many times. I gotta have a link!

My google fu didn't have enough chi.  I tried and failed.  Anyone else?

Quote from: KoltarYou kind of answerred your own question.

 Many people have this "knee-jerk" reaction as you put it against there being two corebooks for GURPs 4/e...yet similiar people seem to have no problem with D&D having 3 "corebooks".

Far be it from me to defend D&D... from a player's perspective though, there is only one book to deal with, the PHB.  And a pretty large chunk of the PHB is just spells.  For the DM, a large chunk of the DMG is basically a swag of magical items, and of course the MM is just lists of monsters.  In other words, the volume of rules is relatively small.  D&D does tend to scale though.  So as players grow in power, the GM needs to be familiar with more feats, higher level spells and more powerful monsters.  But for a starting GM, the game is simple.

By comparison, GURPS feels much more overwhelming.  Sure, you can start simple, and slowly introduce more and more rules as you learn the game.  But that doesn't make it any less overwhelming in appearance.

GURPS 4 is too damn complicated.  That's really it.  They aimed for the hardest of the hardcore players that spend hours in GURPS Vehicles and the like, and went in all kinds of wierd, HERO5-ish directions with the overall complexity and lack of modularity.  

It lacks that simple, straight-forward core that 3e did, and it's resultant modularity, instead choosing to try and cover absolutely everything it possibly can in the core book, and wound up a convoluted mess because of it.  

It's not a bad game if that sort of major gearheadedness is your bag, but it just went too far for me.  I just wanted GURPS 3 with a few mechanical tweaks, and maybe a little wider selection of stuff in the corebook, instead I got page after page of details, and effects-based advantage system, over a dozen different damage types each with unique effects, and just generally a whole lot more than I wanted dumped in my lap all at once.

Quote from: J ArcaneGURPS 4 is too damn complicated.  That's really it.  They aimed for the hardest of the hardcore players that spend hours in GURPS Vehicles and the like, and went in all kinds of wierd, HERO5-ish directions with the overall complexity and lack of modularity.  

It seems more modular to me, not less. What's more 4e does not cater to those guys more than 3e did. In fact, it's less to their taste, as a read through the SJGames forum's GURPS sub-forum will show.

QuoteIt lacks that simple, straight-forward core that 3e did, and it's resultant modularity, instead choosing to try and cover absolutely everything it possibly can in the core book, and wound up a convoluted mess because of it.  

It's still there.

QuoteIt's not a bad game if that sort of major gearheadedness is your bag, but it just went too far for me.  I just wanted GURPS 3 with a few mechanical tweaks, and maybe a little wider selection of stuff in the corebook, instead I got page after page of details, and effects-based advantage system, over a dozen different damage types each with unique effects, and just generally a whole lot more than I wanted dumped in my lap all at once.

There are actually no more damage types than 3e had - it's just that they are actually explicitly spelled out for you, so there's no more "bullets do crushing damage that isn't really crushing", and "fire does plain damage with these exceptions while acid does plain damage with those exceptions". Instead bullets do piercing of a particular size, fire does burning damage, acid does corrosive damage, and that tells you all you need to know about how the damage is applied. It's much simpler, really.

I'm a huge fan of SJG. I'm a former GURPS player who moved on eventually to other things after many years of playing 3rd edition. When 4e came out, I was happy and didn't mind at all the two setup book. But I ended up not being excited at all.

GURPS 4th didn't change enough for me. It's cleaned up a bit and I would probably have liked it better when I used to play GURPS but I've moved on to less complex and GURPS is still way too complex for my tastes. On top of that, SJG's release schedule for the game is not thrilling me at all.

I crunched the numbers when it came out, made a few characters and tested combat and it's a fine game with nothing wrong. But this level of detail is totally useless for me and for each and every single gamer I know.

Quote from: J ArcaneGURPS 4 is too damn complicated.  That's really it.  They aimed for the hardest of the hardcore players that spend hours in GURPS Vehicles and the like, and went in all kinds of wierd, HERO5-ish directions with the overall complexity and lack of modularity.  

Hogwash!  They're all but erradicating Vehicles from the core for fuzzy "because I thought so" stating.  They may at some point get around to publishing a pdf of vehicle design but it won't be a book release.

Anyhow, what bothers me is the stat block bloat.  Especially when power modifiers are involved and with the various stats you have to list for skills these days, the stat block makes Rolemaster look awfully clean and straightforward.

Also, GURPS is very much a game where you need a copy of the rule book to make a character and the beginning player pretty much has to read the damn book to make a character.  As such the fifty dollar buy in for Characters is a real road block and I'm not likely to run GURPS in the future.  Even though I have around $400 in GURPS4e as we speak.

Also, the sixteen pages wasted on Infinite Worlds material instead of sf vehicle stats will piss me off until my dying day.