Why is GURPS' dick sucked so much here?

>>43767849

Recommending GURPS in every thread is a meme.

Liking GURPS is a thing, however, that some folks do unironically. I hear it's pretty good for gritty modern settings with firearms.

>>43767849
The name stands for Generic Universal Role Playing System, and it is exactly that. It can run any setting, any theme, any genre, in any time period, however it does not do anything exceptionally well.

My advice is that if you want to homebrew as much as possible but you don't want to make a game system from scratch, run it in GURPS because it will run it well, no matter what it is, but if you know of a system that is built to do what you want it to do, then run that instead.

The game itself is complicated at first glance. This is because it has a rule for absolutely everything, however it is recommended that you toss out any and all unneeded rules and use only the rules that are relevant to the game you are playing. The system is built specifically to allow you to do this without breaking the system in half in the process. This all means that while you as the GM can customize the setting to be what you want it to be, it requires you to know the ins and outs of the system so that you know what to include and exclude, and that you spend a good amount of time before running the game determining what you want to use from the system and what you want to toss out, which optional rules you want to use, and what modifiers you want to implement if any, as well as what skills are available, what point value the players are, and other such things.

Once you get all the front loaded crunch out of the way, the game runs surprisingly smoothly.

To expand on the previous posters' points a little, the reason recommending GURPS is a meme is because that's its purpose, to serve as an option for ANY situation.

So, no, it's not by any means the best system out there, but it is a viable option for essentially any campaign, and therefore, potentially the solution to any given issue you're having with it.

It's like, say, a Swiss Army Knife. If your friend asks you for "a tool" without being super specific, you hand him a Swiss Army Knife, because it's a mediocre version of a high number of tools. So recommending GURPS became akin to the "Have you tried not playing D&D" meme; in that, often, the complaints people have are direct results of the systems they're using. So unless they get more specific, or explain how they want to solve it IN system, the GURPS suggestion is technically valid.

>>43767969
>however it does not do anything exceptionally well.

Can this meme die?

>>43767969
>>43768072
\thread

>>43767969
I would also like to mention, for the record after having said this, that I personally am a massive fan of GURPS. All settings have their weaknesses, and trying to get a game system to do something it wasn't designed to do is more trouble than it's worth, but with GURPS, it will do whatever you want, whenever you want, however you want. It won't always be pretty, or super efficient, or fancy, but by god it can run it.

>>43768087
plz, let this die, gurps can be almost perfect at any thing if enough effort is put at the rules assembling phase.

>>43767969
>however it does not do anything exceptionally well.
The funny jack of all trades master of none meme. Next we'll do the "no flavor".

>but if you know of a system that is built to do what you want it to do, then run that instead.
That's a terrible advice.

It's a meme.
GURPS is a dinosaur and an unplayable piece of shit at that. It can do anything, but it's shitty to play.
So, on one hand you have the memers that only shill it because of the meme and on the other hand the grogs that love their unplayable piece of shit because MUH SPLATBOOKS.

>>43768985
>So, on one hand you have the memers that only shill it because of the meme and on the other hand the grogs that love their unplayable piece of shit because MUH SPLATBOOKS.

Kindof a ridiculous claim, when in general the recommendation is to keep it to as few books as you need for your campaign.

DnD and Pathfinder are the games that go full SPLATBOOKS.

Because it deserves it

Well, I came to post intelligently and helpfully, but
>>43768130
this

So, instead, I will start an argument.

>>43768963
>>43768971
If you can name one thing that GURPS does exceptionally well, you disprove this meme/opinion.

I like GURPS, but I cannot think of an example.

>>43770110
How do you define something done exceptionally well?

In my opinion GURPS has the most enjoyable melee combat, with a massive array of options to take out every opponent differently and get around their various defenses.

What I feel it does truly exceptionally well is building the character you envisioned it as. You can mix and match so many options to alter things until they function like you want them to.

>>43770175
>How do you define something done exceptionally well?
If you have no definition yourself it makes no sense to bitch about it.

>>43770110
Modern gunplay.
Tactical combat, be it action-movie martial arts, fantasy skirmishes , not!Jedi duels, or the aforementioned firefights.
An adherence to heroic realism while still allowing for characters outside this scope.

GURPS also has a large number of well designed out magic systems that are higher in both quality and quantity than both dedicated fantasy systems, but I don't know if that qualifies as doing something exceptionally well. Still a point in its favor in my opinion, though.

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>>43770005
>DnD and Pathfinder are the games that go full SPLATBOOKS.

>>43770206
Nice sidestepping. He's asking what's YOUR definition, nignog. "Does something well" is already a vague and subjective measurement, and "does something *exceptionally* well" is even more so. Give us what you consider the hallmarks of doing something exceptionally well and we'll see how many boxes GURPSfags can check off.

>>43770249
>Not going full splatbooks and banning core.
It's like you don't want a campaign that's actually fun.

>>43770254
He didn't ask me, he asked another anon.

>>43770268
>Ban core.
>No more main rules, no more combat, 95% rolls disappeared.
Anyone ever really banned core that hard?

>>43770294
Going by posts in /pfg/, yeah, most people, what with all the homebrews and 3P books required to make the system work.

>>43770175
In this instance, I define something done exceptionally well as: One aspect of the rpg experience executed in a way that is objectively superior to many, or most, other rpgs.

Examples of this would be: modern gunplay, well designed magic systems, or character building.

So... yeah.
That was a short argument.

>>43770206
>requesting clarification of terms is nonsensical bitching
Nignogs gonna nignog

>>43770110

For a start, it's a rules-heavy system which doesn't suck. If you like rules-heavy stuff (and the evidence strongly suggests that a lot of people do) you've basically got later-versions of D&D, White Wolf, the 40k RPGs and GURPS of those, WW just sucks completely, and the other two do pretty badly when taken out of their usual game-modes. GURPS also offers more detail than any other playable game I've seen.

Realism. GURPS handles realism as well as any other game I've tried. It's a better gun-nerd game than Ops and Tactics and almost as good a sword-nerd game as RoS. It works really well for police-procedural and technothriller games. BRP is a strong competitor, but it fails to build on it's very solid rules-base with the kind of high-quality supplements GURPS provides.

Being an actually adaptable system. The only things which are more adaptable than GURPS are either fucking unplayable or so rules-light they barely qualify as a full game.

>>43770363
>GURPS does "being rules heavy" exceptionally well.
There is literally no sane argument against this statement.

>>43770351
Objective superiority is nearly impossible to manage.

GURPS character building in general is NOT objectively superior. It takes time and a lot of system knowledge to make a character, but it is extremely versatile in WHAT you can do and I've never been disappointed with an outcome so far.

5E in comparison is objectively faster and doesn't require system knowledge if you follow the simple builds. But on the othet hand it doesn't give you many, if any customization to do.

>>43768985
A perfect example of the uneducated repeating a meme they don't even understand.

>>43767849
>Is it really the best RPG system out there?
No.

>Or is it just a /tg/ meme?
Yes.

>>43770434
Ah but you see, my good anon, they are *both* objectively superior!

One is superior in ease and speed while the other is superior in versatility.
Superiority need not be perfection.

>>43767849
I dont see people complaining about d&d being in the same situation on almost every single other place

>>43770481
There is no "best" RPG system out there and although it is undoubtedly a meme, it is not *just* a meme as others have pointed out.

>>43770363
>realism as well as any other game I've tried
not phoenix command, sword path glory, rhand morninstar mission

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>>43770509
>No best RPG

>>43767849

It's by far the best SYSTEM. Obviously, you need a setting to have a game, and the whole point of GURPS is that it isn't married to a pre-generated setting.

So if you're trying to play a game concept that doesn't exist in the commercial canon, then GURPS (or a related system like FATE which I also hear is good) is your only option. If you're trying to cross over between two wildly disparate kinds of setting (like D&D-style adventurers encounter Cthulu or discover they're NPC AIs in a virtual reality MMORPG), then once again GURPS is your only option.

The real question is this: Can GURPS handle a setting better than a game system that specializes in it? That is, does it do vampires better than VtM, cyberpunk fantasy better than Shadowrun, or dungeon fantasy better than D&D? That's a much more complicated question.

"Jack of all trades master of none" is a meme, and IMO it's mostly false. If you're willing to put in the work, GURPS can in fact be a better shadowrun than shadowrun, a better rogue trader than rogue trader, and even a better D&D than D&D. The system is just rock solid and elegant as hell even if you don't use its cross-genre features.

BUT. The problem is that the GM has to do all that up front work. As a game creation kit, GURPS is fucking amazing. But you can't just crack open a couple books and be off and running. Especially since even the cool pre-gen settings like Banestorm, Technomancer, and Infinite Worlds don't have a long list of source material. If I want to play SW, I have a vast library to build a game world from, plus movies, fiction, and tv shows. If I want to play Banestorm, I have a hardback, a couple pdfs, and some Pyramid articles.

That's also rough because many times you and your players just want to whip up some characters and go. And you don't know if a campaign will take off or be stillborn.

So, if the GM is willing to put lots of work up front, then GURPS is best. Most of the critiques are bogus.

>>43770668
Fucking autists man...

>>43770791

Wait, are you complaining about autists or advocating sex with them?

Either way you've earned a wry and cynical smile.

>>43770815
I'm trying to figure out if he's calling Finnish SJW's autistic, or if he's saying that people who can't accept the GOAT RPG are autistic.

>>43770505
For some bizarre reason people on this board find it less absurd to suggest DnD for all sorts of genres than the game designed to actually do that. I have lost count of the number of times people ask for an RPG to run a concept perfect for GURPS yet the guy saying use D20 gets less shit.

On another note, just because a system is designed for a setting does not mean its going to be any good mechanically or even at running its own setting. Yet people seem to think that is the case, why?

>>43771774
>use d20
Not just d20. Usually 3.PF, not even a variant or another d20 game.

>On another note, just because a system is designed for a setting does not mean its going to be any good mechanically or even at running its own setting. Yet people seem to think that is the case, why?
People never actually read FATAL.
But, you know, it's a system MADE for fantasy adventures, so clearly, it's better at it than GURPS!

>>43771774

Because 95% of the RPG market mostly plays D&D. It's the system they know, so they know how to tinker with it.

If this were 15 years ago, we'd be seeing all the same threads about how WoD can be modded to support all kinds of shit and that GURPS is crap. But the funny thing is, in those days GURPS really was pretty crappy.

Basically, I'd run or play D&D in a fantasy game because the work for the GM is mostly already done. Yeah it's not quite as good a system, but effort:outcome ratio is better.

>>43770529
>phoenix command
>sword path glory
>hand morninstar mission
ROLEMASTER PLEB

>>43767969
>The name stands for Generic Universal Role Playing System, and it is exactly that. It can run any setting, any theme, any genre, in any time period, however it does not do anything exceptionally well.

Tacticool. Gritty Near Anything. Crossovers.

>>43771774
It's a mental block. Most people believe that "multipurpose" or "generic" means swiss army knife or red mage, "jack of all trades, master of none."

Because the universe is fair.
So if one game's development is focused solely on some limited and specific mechanics, themes, and settings, because it isn't spread thin, it has to be better.

People are uncomfortable to think that one generic thing can be better than several proprietary specialized things.

I feel like their should be a word for this.

>>43770434
>GURPS character building in general is NOT objectively superior. It takes time and a lot of system knowledge to make a character, but it is extremely versatile in WHAT you can do and I've never been disappointed with an outcome so far.
>5E in comparison is objectively faster and doesn't require system knowledge if you follow the simple builds. But on the othet hand it doesn't give you many, if any customization to do.

You're comparing apples to oranges here. Strawman

>5E in comparison is objectively faster and doesn't require system knowledge if you follow the simple builds.

> if you follow the simple builds.

>GURPS is better at fantasy than 3E, Pathfinder or FATAL

Y'know guys, there's scoring a point, and then there's scoring a point by setting the bar so low it's hard to miss.

>>43770791
>Fucking autists man...

If you read a few paragraphs in it you'd have seen that the game system was designed to be harsh and uncomfortable. Not like FATAL, but in a sense of realisim and this is bad. Because in their country of origin it's nearly impossible to get convicted for rape or gang rape.

One of the rules of the game is that you're literally not aloud to laugh things off.

It's trying to incite discomfort.

>>43772027

Magic Systems: both MtA style improvisational magic and now, thanks to Sorcery, the best spell creation system out there.

Spaceships has the best spaceship design system IMO. You can build a Starfury, a TARDIS, a 40k cruiser, or the Death Star, and they are all mutually compatible and easy to create and use in-game.

HEMA-style combat (though a few fringe games do it much better). Gritty realistic modern combat (as you point out).

With Social Engineering, GURPS is now at or near the top in social/manipulation/relationship intensive settings.

"Favored by deity" characters are done better in GURPS now than any other system, so long as you have your pyramid articles handy. I can't think of any other system that does it well.

>>43771960
Its not just fantasy games, I have seen people suggest D20 or even Pathfinder for almost every genre possible including ones that have nothing to do with magic or melee combat.

>>43772073

Actually I agree with him on this one, and I'm a huge GURPS fan.

If your version of "better" means rolling up characters very fast, like in a pick-up game or at a con, then D&D is far superior. If you mean "I have a character concept and want to craft exactly that" then GURPS is much better.

OTOH, Christopher Rice's article in the last Pyramid is addressing that. It lets you work through character creation like a Chinese menu. At that point, a GM can hide the point totals from character creation entirely. Of course, you need the GM or a worldbook or someone to do all that precalculating for you.

>>43772136

Oh I know. My point is that people do that because D&D is what they know. But that in its own niche there really are good reasons to use it even if GURPS does dungeon crawls better.

>>43772073
>>43772168
Yeah, I didn't say D&D 5E was better, just that almost -always- it will be faster to make a D&D 5E character.

But that said I also find GURPS character creation to be a lot more fun, even if it takes me days to complete a character I'll be happier than making any D&D character.

The only comparative method is to pick a template and change nothing about it, that way you've got a paper cutout of the "class" in GURPS and it takes the same time as a 5E character. Assuming you don't spend a lot of time considering the options they usually give you.

I highly prefer GURPS and I am a huge fan of its variety and options, but I think that 5E will win the speed contest.

>>43771960
>in those days GURPS really was pretty crappy
It was basically the same, man. They took out a couple things (like DB on armor and SS), tweaked some point costs and condensed the Compendia into the 4e Basic Set, but 3e never was "pretty crappy".

>>43767849
Yes

>>43772283

Organization matters. Consistent, cleaned up rules matter. Polish matters. Having the rules for something spread over five books is a problem. Don't underestimate the value of cleaning up and consolidating everything.

3e turned a lot of people off on GURPS, including me, and it was 5-6 years after fourth ed came out before I bothered to take a look. And even then, it was because Transhuman Space was so good that it was worth reviewing the rules to see what I could do with it.

GURPS supplements have always been first rate, don't get me wrong. But the core system really only came into its own in 4e.

>>43772132
>"Favored by deity" characters are done better in GURPS now than any other system, so long as you have your pyramid articles handy. I can't think of any other system that does it well.

Yeah, the Reaction Roll approach is a really good way of handling Divine Intervention.

Divine Favour Clerics feel very different to Wizards.

>>43772037
>I feel like their should be a word for this.
The false belief that one side can't be better than the other? The South Park fallacy perhaps?
>>43772132
You can build a Starfury, a TARDIS, a 40k cruiser, or the Death Star, and they are all mutually compatible and easy to create and use in-game.
We must settle the who would win debate once and for all!
On topic I think we've hit a lull in the anti GURPS memes, you still get some but when GURPS was being talked about in the last month or so the pro GURPS side has reached critical mass first so the haters get debunked.
To answer OPs question. As explained above there is no "best" system but GURPS can't sell on its setting so it needs solid rules and it has them, GURPS is a good choice when you need a mostly realistic game but not when you need Batman to last 20 seconds or more against Superman.

>>43767849

GURPS probably is okay if you intend to never play anything but GURPS.

For the rest of us, here's an example of what every GURPS game of yours is ever going to look like:

>You spend literal days autistically pouring over books, double checking optional rules and tweeks, trying to get everything perfect for the campaign you have in mind, before you even begin to touch the actual construction of your campaign. No, you're *just* figuring out which books and which rules are actually going to apply
>Your players, if not intimately familiar with the system, will require your help to make a character, because you are likely asking them to read a minimum of two 300~ page books
>First session, they will always, always, ALWAYS want to remake their character because they forgot to take whatever randomass skill/power/something that would've played into their character concept well but they managed to miss during char gen, because there's a hundred trillion options for them to consider. Likely, this will occur when your PC realizes he forgot to take some crucial skill that he didn't realize he needed
>In your first combat scene, the second-by-second combat will drag the game to a screeching halt. Your only real option here are to run with people who are intimately familiar with the system while enforcing a 10 second time limit on their turn, because newbies certainly aren't going to have a fucking clue what to do, no matter how many action card printouts you make, so you sit around for minutes trying to resolve a singular second of ingame action
>You remind yourself the hard way that GURPS is just a meme system and to just run a different game next time

It is by far one of the worst games I've ever tried to run and by far one of the hardest to teach systems. There is basically no way to have fun with this game unless you are an autist or you know GURPS inside and out and are playing with similarly autistic GURPSfags.

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>>43773463

>poring over
>tweaks

>>43773390
>GURPS can't sell on its setting

Which is a shame, because GURPS has some fucking fantastic settings.

Technomancer (modern day magic, US military necromancers, atomic liches, literal ghost writers), Reign of Steel (Terminator, but done better), Abydos (city of christian necromancers), Transhuman Space...

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>>43773463
>first game run in GURPS
>took me about 4 hours of prep to get all the rules I wanted to use in the game and stat every weapon that would appear, and to help make everyone's character
>my players are happy with their characters, and I'm happy with how their characters turned out
>combat took 1 minute between four people and five minutes the second time between another four people

You just suck.

>>43773634
>combat took 1 minute between four people and five minutes the second time between another four people

This is how I know you're lying.

>>43773463

>You spend literal days autistically pouring over books...

Then don't do that? If you say you were being autistic, that isn't the fault of the game. You're just being autistic.

>Your players, if not intimately familiar with the system, will require your help to make a character, because you are likely asking them to read a minimum of two 300~ page books

Players with new systems typically need help from the DM, that isn't a bad thing. Asking them to read full books is unnecessary - did they actually need to learn much more than GURPS Lite, which has most of the rules you'll use covered in about four pages?

Really, that smacks of your inability to parse detail, or a common problem of unfocused DM's - trying to use everything, and forcing the players to suffer for it.

>First session, they will always, always, ALWAYS want to remake their character...

This isn't actually a bad thing either. First time characters aren't always perfect - what you usually do is tell them to wait until after the session is over. Adding that "one crucial skill" is pretty easy when literally all you do is move 1 point around.

>...Your only real option here are to run with people who are intimately familiar with the system while enforcing a 10 second time limit on their turn, because newbies certainly aren't going to have a fucking clue what to do...

You enforced a 10 second time limit on turns, because the players hadn't gotten to grips with the cards you threw in their faces?

Why didn't you just print a combat cheat sheet and tell them the basics?

One second rounds, you can do one of the actions listed. Claiming that it's hard reveals that either you didn't actually manage to read the rules at all, or there was a massive failure to show the players the rules - possibly because you made them memorize a sourcebook or two?

I've taken brand-new gamers, and pure-DnD gamers through GURPS, while learning the system myself, and it was pretty easy.

>>43773700
>You enforced a 10 second time limit on turns, because the players hadn't gotten to grips with the cards you threw in their faces?

Do you have difficulty with reading comprehension?

I am saying that GURPS combat is slow as shit because you are going to second-by-second combat detail, and that the only way to satisfactorily speed it up is to enforce time limits and play with people who know the system.

>>43773684
Why? You have one action you can take in your one second turn, how is that hard to grasp?

Plus with how lethal combat can be if a skilled (read, combat skill above 10) person involved, it's not unusual to see people killed in one shot to the throat or something like that.

It literally should take a couple of seconds for each person to say what they do, and then to make the necessary rolls. You and your group may actually be retarded.

>>43773749
>I am saying that GURPS combat is slow as shit because you are going to second-by-second combat detail, and that the only way to satisfactorily speed it up is to enforce time limits and play with people who know the system.

And that's bullshit.

A DnD combat turn is 6 seconds... but you can normally only do 2 things in it, only one of which is an attack.

A GURPS combat turn is 1 second, in which you can normally only do 1 thing.

The difference isn't as big as you seem to think.

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>>43773782

>GURPS isn't slow
>It's on par with D&D

>implying D&D combat isn't slow

>>43773782

>One turn, two actions
>One turn, one action
>Ergo, it takes twice as long to resolve the same amount of action

Checkmate GURPSfag

>>43773749
My issue is the opposite.

Like, playing the game, the turns go relatively quickly...

...but when you look at the actual results, they're absurd because of the 1-second thing.

It's pretty dumb when a whole fight is over in like ten seconds.

>>43773824
What group are you playing with that you can't grasp combat?

It honestly takes a handful of minutes at the most. I've had an encounter where the players stormed a police station and killed like 7 people that took 10 minutes. Just hand them a sheet with all the maneuvers on it, and with that, and the thing called a 'Character Sheet" they should be able to piece together how to do things even without guidance.

>>43770110
space horror

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>>43773867

>GURPS
>Horror

GURPS is the one system you use if you actually *want* to crunch every last detail of a setting out.

Why the everloving merciful fuck anyone would use it for a horror game is utterly beyond me.

>>43773862
I think you meant pretty realistic, Anon.

>>43773862
Most fights are over quickly, especially gunfights. GURPS: Tactical Shooting I think mentions that the average police shootout was 3-13 seconds.

Combat between a group of well trained individuals in any time, who aren't Gladiators or wrestlers doing it for the crowd, are usually brief bursts of action. But if you don't like it, use the cinematic rules, or just double everyone's HP if you're feeling really lazy.


>>43773900
It works really well. I've run better CoC games with GURPS than CoC.

>>43773866
>What group are you playing with that you can't grasp combat?
>implying

Who said I couldn't grasp it? D&D combat (Well, mostly 3e/4e) gets slow as shit once you get past the early levels, that's just a fact.

>>43774011
I'm in the boat that we usually have 2 DM's who alternate in my group. One uses GURPS, the other Pathfinder.

The average Pathfinder combat encounter is an hour long slog that happens once or twice a session, the average GURPS combat encounter by our other DM never lasts more than 30 minutes and are usually tense as fuck, and rare. But it honestly depends on the group.

>>43773463
No see here you are just calling people who do not have a learning disability autistic.

>>43773900

Thing is, even the GURPS players who like to crunch every detail? They don't actually use them in play most of the time.

GURPS has lots of rules, purely as aids for when those situations come up - if the group wants to use them. The only "mandatory" rules are in GURPS Lite - which is about all you need for horror.

It's fast, delivers realistic-enough results for reasonable actions and has a neat sanity/shock system. The Horror book is also extremely well written.

>>43773862
Have you looked at the Last Gasp article? Introduces action points, basically micro-FP that every action in combat takes. If you run out of AP, you either need to take a few second catching your breath or spend an FP to keep going despite the fatigue (the rules also rework how normal FP works; spending any amount can be a real kick in the nuts).

The result is the combat now has an ebb and flow to it, with people exchanging blows in a fierce flurry of action, and, if no one scores a decisive blow, stepping back to recover. Along with making combat less berserker ATTACKATTACKATTACK, it also facilitates cool stuff like battle monologues and pauses, and it also allows skilled combatants to take a defensive approach to combat at let aggressive opponents tire themselves out.

>>43773900
To be honest, I like GURPS's approach to madness a lot better than most CoC stuff I've seen. In GURPS, you roll vs. will when you see spooky shit; if you fail, roll 3d6, add your margin of failure, and check the table. Higher results fuck you up more, adding mental disadvantages or even putting you in a coma in the worst cases. In my opinion, that feels a lot better than "lose 1d10 Sanity Points."

>>43774011
In my experience, that's mostly due to HP bloat; it takes forever to take out an orc with 45 with your 1d8+4 longsword. Conversely, a single hit can incapacitate, cripple, or even outright kill most human-scale enemies in GUPRS (assuming proper scaling of damage vs. DR; a rusty broken sword would need quite a few hits to underarmored areas to take down a knight in plate). The only time GURPS combat gets long is when it's versus master-level fighters because Dodge and Parry get so high and people forget about Deceptive Attacks.

>>43773900
No GURPS is the system you use if you want a point buy system with well thought out, simple to use mechanics.

And you are not required to stat everything in the world, the book outright says you shouldn't.

>>43770110

GURPS literally is Spelljammer... but better than Spelljammer ever was.

>>43770110
>If you can name one thing that GURPS does exceptionally well, you disprove this meme/opinion.

Modern gun combat. Alone it works really well, better than all of the other most popular systems. But no system does it better when you throw Tactical Shooting into the mix.

>>43772168

See though, a proper comparison between simple D&D builds and simple GURPS builds would be basically a basic D&D build versus a GURPS Lite character.

And there won't be any planning issues for later on as you level up. (though 4 and 5 fixed this somewhat)

The issue is that D&D style character creation is spead out across levelups, while GURPS is ferociously front ended

>>43773540

IOU.

>>43774094
>Have you looked at the Last Gasp article? Introduces action points, basically micro-FP that every action in combat takes. If you run out of AP, you either need to take a few second catching your breath or spend an FP to keep going despite the fatigue (the rules also rework how normal FP works; spending any amount can be a real kick in the nuts).

I need this

>>43774624
Pyramid #3/44 Alternate GURPS II. Same issue also introduced abstract wealth, turned Mass Combat into a more tactical game, and introduced the damn-near universally used Survivable Guns rules.

>>43774689
>and introduced the damn-near universally used Survivable Guns rules.

That is a huge generalisation. And those rules don't really account for the fact rifle bullets actually are more lethal than pistol ones.

>>43772878

Plus the stuff like you see in Impulse Buys where you can use Serendipity to dictate plausible coincidences that favor you.

In oWoD, true faith was essentially a psi power (or just another form of generic magic, in MtA). In D&D, Divine magic is a different power source, but the spell mechanics are fundamentally the same. Again, basically just another form of Wizard.

DF gives a unique feel to your clerics and I haven't seen another game that pulls anything like that off.

>>43773540

Yeah, I love that one, too. But compare that one softcover with the gigantic volume of stuff you can use as sources for Shadowrun, D&D, SW, ST, etc.

>>43773700

Really, the guy you're quoting is illustrating a genuine problem with GURPS. Which is that there aren't any safety rails. You can be as persnickety as you want about details, turn on all the rules options, and then complain about complexity.

With D&D, there aren't many if any options, so an idiot DM has fewer mistakes he can make. GURPS gives players and GMs lots of power, which if they're idiots is power they can use to magnify their fuckups.

>>43773463
It only took my Only War group 3 sessions to learn enough to get through combat and skill rolls without asking for help when we switched, you just need to keep at it.

>>43774094

My issue w/ action points is that it adds a lot of complexity and you don't get much improvement in exchange. It's a great rules option, but not something I'd use in most campaigns myself and certainly not something that I'd want to be core.

>>43774531

Don't agree w/ this. The fair comparison is between two characters of similar in-universe capability. It's just objectively harder to make a Sorcerer in GURPS than D&D.

But with that said, I still prefer GURPS and think their sorcerers are more rewarding.

>>43774793
>you don't get much improvement in exchange
I disagree. I find the action-pause-action cycle very rewarding, dramatic, and decently realistic. I feel that it adds a new dimension to combat. It also elevated HT above an attribute you only buy up for insurance.

Still, this sounds more like an opinion issue than anything else; you just don't find it as reward as I do, and that's 100% fine. I agree that hell no it shouldn't be core, fuck that noise; no bones about it, Last Gasp is complex, not every group will find it worth it, and including it in the basic set would only worsen GURPS's stigma of being Bookkeeping: The Game.

>>43770529
>phoenix command
Don't know the other ones, but how long to you want one round of combat to be?

>>43774689
>and introduced the damn-near universally used Survivable Guns rules.

Speak for yourself gaylord.

>>43770434
A simple gurps build takes 0 seconds you can play a 10 in everything human being with no skills or advantages just spend all your points buying resurrections as needed, is pretty fun desu

>>43775125
I was pondering the efficacy of a 0 point human character that just burned all his points as fate points for automatic successes whenever it mattered. Could probably be nearly God-like for a long enough time to disrupt things if you are talking about 150 character points and up.

>>43775320
In theory, you gain 2-3 points a session anyway.

You could let this happen if you have a GM that is amused by the concept and thinks you can handle it.

>>43775733
Could make it even wilder and crazier by putting just some points in wild talent, luck, and gizmo, wild talent being modified with some enhancements to recuperate faster than once a session. Then you can be improvising every single skill and being lucky enough that it is likely to work no matter what, and if it doesn't, burn some fate points.

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>>43767849
> TL;DR version:
Suggesting it every thread: inside joke.
Sometimes, it actually is a good suggestion though.
Actually liking it: valid opinion.
No, it's not perfect/the best, but it is quite good.
Some people don't like crunch, and therefore don't like GURPS.
If you like/don't care about crunch, then it is quite good.

At the end of the day: opinions are opinions.

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>>43774252
Standard magic + RPM
Spells can get enhancements with extra energy
spells can reduce casting time with extra energy
Magery 0 free for humans
Magery 1+ must take "only one college" or "only two colleges"
PC mages can take a wildcard Magic! skill that covers one college or thematic area
Add +2 to +3 d damage per energy point to spells (make them like guns)
Non-mage PCs can take a Wildcard skill of their choice
add in cinematic gunfighting rules
and wooden spaceships plying the currents of hyperspace with their force screens (life-sustaining and laser-blocking)

Primary races are humans.

And that's how I ran magical space pirates: The age of sail, in space. Shit was rad.

>>43776049
It's not an inside joke though. A lot of people honestly believe that it would work for almost anything and that's why they suggest. And you could argue about it being the best for most things. Hell, I only think Mouseguard is better for a game where you play as small woodland creatures. Everything else I would prefer to use GURPS in. Everything.

Also you can run it with as much crunch as you want. GURPS-Lite is great, and ULTRA-Lite is as rules lite you can go without getting into narrative or beer games.

>>43770668
"If not played in jest or ironically..."

Why would you even do that? What value does "ironic" gang rape gameplay have?

People are fucked.

I'll tell you one thing for certain: if you ever want to learn how to run, how to GM a good game, you pick up the GURPS book associated with the genre you are trying to run, you skip the 5-15 pages of rules, and you read the rest of the book.

No other system goes into "how to run X" better than GURPS does, and it includes crossover suggestions, how to avoid pitfalls and traps of the genres, and how to engage players effectively. It doesn't matter if your running D&D, Traveller, Exalted, Legends of the Wulin, Call of Cthlhu, or Don't Rest Your Head, you want to learn how to run, pick up a GURPS book close to your source material, and give it a read. (I'd suggest Lensman for Exalted, really - they're both ridiculously over the top. GURPS average human is a 50 point character, and 500 is a four-color superhero, while a starting Lensman character is 3,000 points.)

>>43770110
>If you can name one thing that GURPS does exceptionally well, you disprove this meme/opinion.
>I like GURPS, but I cannot think of an example.

Mashups. GURPS does multiversal "every genre on ever genre" games extremely well, due to its very nature. Granted, the two main competitors are RIFTS and World of Synnibarr, so it's a low bar to hurdle, but it's still the best thing out there for it.

>>43776308
>It's not an inside joke though.
It's both.
It is a joke.
The joke goes, "What system should I use for-" "GURPS!"
The fact that there is truth to the joke does not negate the fact that there is a joke.

>>43772132
>thanks to Sorcery, the best spell creation system out there.
Elaborate.

>>43776985
>Not being an XD edgelord.

>>43779915
Not that Anon, but Sorcery is the new hotness in term of magic systems. The short version is that characters buy up the Sorcery advantage; that advantage determines the power of both improvised spells and learned spells. Learned spells are much more powerful, but they need to be bought with character points. Improvised spells are much weaker but they can take any shape.

Mechanically, Sorcery is a specialized form of Modular Abilities; for every 10 points you spend on that advantage, you get one modular point you can invest and re-invest ad nauseam in nearly whatever you want. Improvised Spells are you investing those modular points in a custom advantage like Innate Attack, Affliction, etc. that represents your spell. Learned Spells use the Alternate Abilities system; the spells are built the same way as Improvised Spells, and as long as the final cost is less than the amount spent on Sorcery, the player only pays 1/5 the full cost to permanently learn them.

In practice, Sorcery can be a lot of fun because it allows sorcerers to have big, iconic spells while still maintaining their flexibility. Bigby from D&D fame, for example, if made in GURPS with the Sorcery system, would be able to cast any sort of spell as an Improvised Spell, but the ones he got famous for are all variants of Telekinesis that he bought as Learned Spells. Secondly, because the sorcerer has to rely on weaker Improvised Spells for their flexibility, it's harder for them to be the universal situation solver they are in some games. To steal 3.PF terminology, they're the two flavors of Tier 3 combined: capable of doing one thing quite well, or capable of doing all things but not as well as specialists, depending on if they're using Improvised or Learned Spells. Their spells are better put towards supporting party members than replacing them.

I wouldn't call it the *best*, but it's certainly solid and very fun.

The meme rundown:

>good at everything but doesn't excel at anything
The only specialized setting systems that I preferred to GURPS were Shadowrun and MouseGuard. I've run better horror campaigns than CoC allowed me to, better D&D than PF et al. Was insanely good for Xcom and Wuxia campaigns. Sadly, no experience with supers.

However, it depends on the group, and not on the setting. I've seen people using PF for XCom - if it suits them, I have absolutely no problem, and would not recommend GURPS.

>1001 splatbooks
Firstly, GURPS is truly modular, and if you don't understand how to choose appropriate rules, you are either biased or retarded. Read 'How to Be a GURPS GM' for an excellent example.

Secondly, the amount of splats that are routinely used in 3.5/PF is absolutely mind-boggling.

>GURPS is complicated
It is not - however, it is complex (balanced out by modularity).

>Too many rules!
Firstly, it is explicitly stayed one is not supposed to use all the rules.

Secondly, the rules in GURPS (except for a couple of outliers - 3E remnants) are self-consistent and logical. 3.5 and PF, however, have gazillion of ad hoc rules, and fucking noone has any problems with learning those. PF is objectively more complicated.

>muh realism
It is actually quite cinematic by default and can be done even moreso. For instance, it isn't as lethal as everyone claims; some stats are made less realistic so the options would still be fun (shields (Basic) are more sturdy than in reality; bows deal more damage and have less severe range penalties, etc)

>ha-ha, no downsides, heh?
Have you noticed how modularity is a key concept here? Well, here's the catch: it can be very challenging and even exhausting for a GM to prepare a campaign. 3.5 and PF and many other systems work much easier out-of-the-box.

>>43785001

>Literally the only way GURPSfags can make their system look better is claim that it's better than 3.5e and CoC, both known for being garbage systems

Like, you do realize you just make your system look worse every time you have to kick on the low hanging fruit, as if being better than bottom of the barrel tier games is some kind of accomplishment, right?

Also

>Read 'How to Be a GURPS GM' for an excellent example.
>I have to read a read a literal, standalone, specifically made How To GM This System book to actually successfully GM this system, because apparently the 300+ page rulebooks aren't enough to read
>GURPSfags still think this doesn't reflect poorly on their waifu system
>To top it all off, they still cannot comprehend that in order to decide which of the "appropriate rules" to use, you still need to actually know them so you can decide if they fit into your game, ergo reading 1001 splatbooks, likely narrowed down to only 3 or 4

Like, I don't even care about GURPS, I have no horse in this race, but it just baffles me every time I see the GURPSfags acting like this.

>>43786348
I've been told by my players I'm a great DM, and I never read the "How to be a good GURPS DM" thing.

I also can tell at a glance what I need because it's like shopping with a list and I'm not a brain dead retard.

And you do have some horse in this race. You are in a GURPS general, calling people who use the system fags. Lying, and repeating stupid bullshit.

>>43786395
This isn't GURPS General. This is bait thread.

>>43781808
>Sorcery is a specialized form of Modular Abilities; for every 10 points you spend on that advantage, you get one modular point you can invest and re-invest ad nauseam in nearly whatever you want. Improvised Spells are you investing those modular points in a custom advantage like Innate Attack, Affliction, etc. that represents your spell. Learned Spells use the Alternate Abilities system; the spells are built the same way as Improvised Spells, and as long as the final cost is less than the amount spent on Sorcery, the player only pays 1/5 the full cost to permanently learn them.

See, that shit is where my eyes just glaze over and I want to reach for another system that's not so convoluted.

>>43786489
Perhaps A Game of Pretend would be more your speed?

>>43786482
Huh. I see that now.

Thanks. I'll be leaving now.

>>43786489
>See, that shit is where my eyes just glaze over and I want to reach for another system that's not so convoluted.

Okay, I don't use Sorcery (yet) but let me translate it for you:

Every time you level up your Sorcery (which requires 10 xp) you get 1 point to use in off the cuff spells.

Learning spells is hard and costs a chunk of exp.

However, you can use your special points to temporarily learn other spells, take them out of the spell and then reinvest.

There is a system for just INVENTING spells on the fly.

You can spend your EXP on sorcery levels and get more power, and a slight increase to your spell slots both in what you can load and how many. Or you can spend your EXP to get a spell permanently in a way that acts like a feat.

Sounds like a good Ars Magica set up, actually

>>43786582

Oh I understood the concept, it just sounds way too complicated to be good for play. I don't want to do all that at the table, and I especially don't want to wait while someone else does all that.

>>43786489
There is a dozen of magical systems in GURPS. You deliberately ignore the ones which are completely worked-out, with hundreds of ready-to-use spells; you proceed with a crunchy system instead and complain how it is crunchy? Anon, I am afraid you suffer from either meme bias or brain damage. If it is just the former, you are always welcome at GURPS General to ask for an advice.

>>43786637

>deliberately ignore

Hey, I wasn't the guy who pointed this Sorcery thing out as the best magic system ever. I just read his description and then commented on how it doesn't strike me as something I'd want to play with.


>meme bias or brain damage

Well, fuck you too. Defensive labeling much?

The only time I got close to GURPS was when it was suggested to me for a supers game. I remember getting GURPS Supers and GURPS Powers, trying to get into them, and they felt like doing tax forms.
Now you can call me a retard or whatever, but in a market that's oversaturated like that of RPGs, I don't see the value of investing that much time to learn a system that needs me to do a lot of work when there are ready-made alternatives (that are probably designed with more specific goals, becuase System Matters).
GURPS does have some great sourcebooks - I've used Weird War and Infinite Worlds - but as a game to actually play it's unappealing.

>>43772375
3e was something that needed to happen to have the cleaned-up 4e. 3e grew organically across the hundreds of supplements. There were bound to be problems and inconsistencies, especially since most of the books were written by different people who hadn't read all the other supplements.

However, once you have that library of things built up, you can look through them all and start looking for ways to condense them down into a simpler form. The Compendia were an attempt at that, but the major rewrite of 4e was what really let SJG clean up the system.

It's a lot like the splat bloat in 3.PF, except GURPS got its bloat cleaned up.

>>43777095
>a starting Lensman character is 3,000 points.
Holy fuck I never got around to reading that book that can't be real.

>>43786927
It's real. Lensman are really that absurd.

It's not a bad system if you're looking for something fairly realistic and you have the patience for chugging through hundreds of pages of rules and splats. It's very modular and will fit any setting or campaign.

Personally, my "problem" with GURPS is that it's far too weighty a solution for the problem it's trying to solve. I think of it as a reader going through a fiction novel. I'm interested in the relative traits and skills of a given character, and that's really it. I don't need a sheet full of numbers and several hundred pages of reference material to be looking up.

I think if someone took Fate, stripped out its "look at me I'm such a unique narrative game" bits, and tacked on the best mechanical parts GURPS like its 3d6 resolution system, you'd have something really nice and clean to use.

>GURPS has a massive trove of rules and mechanics useful to run any kind of game
>Using all those rules is insane and it's actually discouraged by the system, telling you to keep it as simple as possible with a 17 pages long manual being the bare minimum for the system to run smoothly
>idiots think that they need to use all the splatbooks and rules to run a barely decent game of gurps

It's like wanting to build a cruise ship to cross a river and then complaining that you have to build the whole thing, while the only thing you need is a fucking launch.

>>43786977
>17
GURPS Lite is 32 pages.

Can somebody explain why GURPS 3e gets hate? Is it just because there's multiple, different rules for the same thing because two authors have decided they need something that wasn't in the Basic Set?

>>43786348
>ergo reading 1001 splatbooks
Someone can correct me if I'm wrong here, since I don't know GURPS, but my understanding is that GURPS splatbooks are mainly fluff and all the rules are in the 2 core books. The splatbooks just show you how to use the rules in the core books to to tailor the system to that particular genre that the splatbook is concerned with. Is that how it is?

>>43787115
>all the rules are in the 2 core books.
Most of them. Some of the specialised things from supplements (ex. Ritual Path Magic) are new.

In 3E you had a lot more of the genre-specific rules and 'here's a bunch of skills that we didn't realise you'd need when we wrote the Basic Set'.

>>43787115
They mostly specialize or expand on things. But yes, usually it's mostly advice on how to run, for example, a horror or mystery game and stuff related to that.

For example, Ultra-Tech talks about future technologies and also offers a bunch of equipment related to this. Bio-Tech talks about biomedical advances, cloning, genefuckery etc and offers templates and what not for various genomes. Mysteries talks about setting up a thriller kind of game with secrets and clues etc. Offering some information on poisons and the like and it also talks about what powers might be disruptive to the plot (mind reading etc)...

None of these for example would apply if you're running an Age of Sail (TL4) voyage across the Atlantic.

>>43787115
A lot of it is self explanatory.

Lands out of Time will help you do dinosaurs, Horror will do horror, Space will help you do science fiction to any level of detail you want.

>>43787169
>None of these for example would apply if you're running an Age of Sail (TL4) voyage across the Atlantic.
Then you'd probably want 3e's Swashbucklers and the Supporting Cast - Age of Sail Pirate Crew.

>>43787182
If you wanna include 3e stuff.

Personally I'd probably just go with basic and low tech. Depends on the game tho. Cinematic swashbuckling might be better with Martial Arts and/or the Action books. If dealing with voodoo magic and the like, RPM might be a good addition.

>>43787206
If you don't use the 3e books your genre advice is going to be thin on the ground in some places. You don't have to use the mechanics you maroon.

>>43787215
Fair enough.

>>43787069
Poorly edited 3e Basic Set, essential or near-essential rules in the Compendia and sometimes in other books, Vehicles.

>>43787612
Does Basic Set Revised fix the editing problems?

Savage Worlds is better than GURPS.

>>43787706
No it isn't.

>>43786949
I knew that they were the inspiration for Green Lantern - and Green Lantern's Power Ring is some serious bullshit - but I had no idea they were so OP.

>>43767849
GURPS isn't bad, but it's not specially good either. I used it to GM a short Conan campaign and felt it was lacking that little something to make Conan really feel epic. What I mean, is that your badass barbarian character isn't that much better than the average guard. The badass character can maybe suck one blow more, will deal one or two points more of damage, and have a slightly better chance of hitting, but that's it. This is mainly due to the bell curve of 3d6. Once your stat goes above 10, one or two points more in a stat or skill don't make such a difference.

>>43787828
Were you using dodge and parry and other fancy shit? How about Hard to Kill and extra HP? Any of the cinematic rules?

>>43787828
>Once your stat goes above 10, one or two points more in a stat or skill don't make such a difference.

They make a massive difference - 14 is good enough for a skilled mook, but when you get up around 16 or higher, you can start using more powerful attack types that penalize your success roll, such as Targeted Shot: Neck.

>>43787828
>>43787847
Oh yeah, here's the official GURPS Conan splatbook. Mechanics are 3e, and the Mass Combat chapter can be replaced with the 4e PDF supplement, but the advice on the Conan Campaign is still good.
http://www.uploadmb.com/dw.php?id=1448278926

>>43787828
There is an absolutely huge difference between someone who is strong, very fit, has combat reflexes and high pain threshold like Conan and a normal guard.

>>43787982
Normal guards also have combat reflexes and high pain threshold. It's pretty much what differentiates them from commoners.

>>43787878
I only used the basic book and the splat book. Level 14 = 90.7% chances of success, level 16 = 95.3% chances of success. Guess you have to buy the GURPS Melee supplement to make combat a tad exciting (or simply play something else).

>>43787847
Yes, we used dodge and parry and other fancy shit like hit location and whatnot, but we didn't use the cinematic rules.

>>43788316
Targeted Attacks are in the basic set, bruh. Deceptive Attack too.
Don't get salty for getting called out.

>>43788316
>Normal guards also have combat reflexes and high pain threshold

No they do not. Even many PC combat templates don't have both by default. And the only way to get combat reflexes before TL6/7 training methods are developed is extensive combat experience or being born with it, neither are going to be common among random guards who have skill 11/12 with their weapons at best
and do nothing but break up brawls and levy tolls.

>>43786673
>I just read his description and then commented on how it doesn't strike me as something I'd want to play with.

Eh that's fair enough. GURPS' big thing with magic is having a bunch of systems of varying complexity, flexibility and GM adjudication, and people tend to really like one system compared to the others.

That anon who explained it went a bit heavy on the mechanical rear end though.

>>43786722

Supers is one of those genres that I've not been a fan of using GURPS for. I feel the system works better with more restrained power levels (and stuff like DR's pricing annoys me)

>>43788412
Giving everyone that might ever get into a fight HPT and CR takes a lot of the fun out of fights too. Someone with both should stand out as a real tough bastard.

>>43787735
By the end of the series the forces involved are weaponizing solar systems.

>>43767849
GURPS is a meme

Move on

>>43768985
You haven't ever played gurps in your life, have you?

GURPS is a joke and suffers from worse bloat than 3.pathfinder

The one time I tried to play it, I got so many headaches in CharGen that I told my GM I didn't want to play anymore

>>43790276
I have seen a group of six people who have never even played RPG's before make characters just fine.

Especially since everyone is supposed to get together and make characters together with the GM there.

>>43771987
I don't think Rolemaster can make a claim to handle anything more realistically than Sword's Path: Glory's several dozen tables of different parts of the body at a square inch resolution with all damage adding up to a %-chance to die from complications several days later.

There's tables and then there's "My game is a pen-and-paper version of the US ARRADCOM computer wounding model." SPG is written by a guy who took a look at Rolemaster and said MORE REALISM PIKERS!

>>43790276
Why did he allow or encourage you to grapple with everything available?

People should know to have the discipline to leave well enough alone, or use templates appropriate to the setting.

In the former case they even have little icons next to all the options telling you whether or not something is "realistic" and further, whether it's physical, mental, etc..

In a realistic campaign you can dispense with most if not all advantages because they are literally magic bullshitery.

A great deal of skills will be mostly irrelevant in most campaigns too, although as they themselves note, if you do a "multireality roadshow" (my words, not theirs) you will get more diversity. Even then though, you could still spend your entire adventuring career as an I-Cop in Johnson's Rome or a similar species of backwards world fighting the Raven Division and "Goddamn Planeswalking Nazi's" (my words again) and you would basically have a range of useful skills for that setting.

>>43776985

Never played this, but I'm assuming that it's like when hipsters are racist. Like, it's irony, man! We're totally making fun of that sort of thing! Except they're not. It's just an excuse to be a racist, while ALSO being self-righteously against racism when it's convenient.

I have a friend who's a federal appointee. Anybody who disagrees with him politically eventually gets called a racist. Especially people who are already minorities. But if you've ever ridden public transit with him and seen the look on his face, you know that behind the self-righteousness lurks someone with major prejudices of his own. He's projecting in his contempt for others the feelings he has that he can't deal with.

It's like when hard core feminists are into drunk hookups, or into being a bottom/sub in hardcore BDSM (I've seen both, but never both in the same person). On one hand you have the "all sex is rape until proven otherwise" attitude that sex is pure exploitation and everything is misogyny. On the other, they keep putting themselves into situations where they act those kinds of scenarios out again and again. All that hate and contempt really comes from self-loathing directed outward.

And this isn't limited to the Left. How many anti-gay christian conservatives have been caught cruising for anonymous gay sex? (And I know more than a few who HAVEN'T been caught. Yet.) More than a few have been caught drinking and gambling excessively.

People who obsess over something are often overcompensating for what they see as their own character flaws. That ironically-racist hipster has found a way to give voice to his own repressed racism in a way that lets him maintain his self-image. That's the kind of person who plays a gang rape scenario ironically. It's a way to explore their dark side while still denying that it's there.

>>43779915
>>43781808

I *am* that anon, and he described it better than I could have. Thanks.

>>43786489

Yeah but you're missing the point.

In Sorcery, you have a spell list and a Sorcery ability. Every spell has a description and a point cost.

You can buy any spell whose cost is equal to or less than the cost of your Sorcery ability. Spend the XP, then write the spell on your character sheet. At that point, you can spam the spell to your heart's content for one FP per casting.

You can also spontaneously cast minor spells you don't know, kind of like "cantrips" in D&D. Any spell whose point cost is less than your sorcery level can be cast spontaneously like that, without bothering to officially learn it.

Got it? That's much easier than spell-casting in shadowrun, similar in complexity to casting spells as a Wizard or Cleric in D&D, and only slightly harder than casting as a Sorcerer in D&D.

Now, what that other anon posted that made your eyes glaze over are the under-the-hood rules for how SJGames designs the spells. Those are rules your GM can use to create a spell, if he wants. Or you can just play with the spells in the book that are already precalculated for you.

The beauty for a GURPS GM is that the spell creation rules use the exact same costing system as the rules for Psi powers, Superhero abilities, Vampire Disciplines, and all other advantages. Sorcery works using no new rules that weren't already in Powers or the Basic Set. This means it's easy to learn, easy to create new spells, and easy to tinker with the Sorcery system itself to make it fit a particular game concept or setting. Like making it Corrupting, based on alliances with spirits, making it limited to certain kinds of spells like elementalism or healing, etc. But you can happily use the system as written and never bother with any of this.

>>43791340

I've gotta say it sounds a lot more fun when you describe it. His description made it sound like filling out tax forms.

>>43786612

You do that at character creation. Once. When you learn a new spell, you spend the XP and write it down on your character sheet. When you cast a spell, you spend a FP and follow the rules listed for the spell. When you cast spontaneously, you look up a spell to cast in the sourcebook, one whose point cost is lower than your Sorcery rating.

Where's the complexity? The only way you'd do all that at a table is if you're designing new spells on the fly, which the book specifically says is not permitted.

This is a general problem with GURPS. If you play GURPS the way you play D&D or ShadowRun, then it's a better system than either of those systems, and usually much simpler. But you get people who immediately crack open the most complicated customization rule options but then bitch about how complicated they are. It's like they can't control themselves. Would it be better if someone blots them all out with a magic marker so you're not tempted?

>>43786673
>Hey, I wasn't the guy who pointed this Sorcery thing out as the best magic system ever. I just read his description and then commented on how it doesn't strike me as something I'd want to play with.

I am that guy. I said it was the best spell creation system ever. And I stand by that. Can anyone show me something better?

Mage: The Ascension allows very flexible casting (its equivalent in GURPS is Ritual Path Magic). But it doesn't have a spell creation system. Most game systems and settings simply leave it to the GM to create something that "looks right". In D&D 3.5, the Epic Level Handbook has the epic spellcasting rules, which aren't bad but are far less balanced and more complicated than GURPS Sorcery.

But don't let that stop you. If you think you've got a better spell creation system -- something that is flexible, easy, and balanced -- then by all means let me know. I'm not saying that rhetorically. I really would love to see good alternatives.

>>43786722

I don't have Supers, so I'll have to take your word for it. But if that was your first exposure to GURPS, then I understand you being overwhelmed by it. You're diving deep into the most complicated part of the game for a GM-- the power creation rules-- and then creating a bunch of powers from scratch.

GURPS is at its best for newbies (even GMs experienced with other games) when it's mostly precalculated for you. Dungeon Fantasy does that, leaving you with a menu of options that are right there and ready to play. Transhuman Space does most of that, too. With gritty realism games, you get the same effect because there isn't much precalculation necessary at all.

That's a weakness with GURPS, the lack of precalculated crunch to take the load off the GM. You can find it in PDFs and Pyramid articles, but those are usually read by hard core GURPS enthusiasts who don't need it.

GURPS also really, really needs a Bestiary.

>>43786873

Was 3e a necessary step on the path to making Fourth Edition so great? Yes, absolutely. Was it a great game in itself? No, precisely because it grew organically and had mutual inconsistencies.

Games bury themselves in their own accumulated rules creep, and then do a new edition to consolidate the best of it, clean it up, and shake off the rest of the crap. I don't blame Pathfinder for being Pathfinder. AD&D had the same problem, as did every edition of nearly every successful RPG.

Even Fourth Edition is starting to accumulate its layer of cruft. The process has been very slow because whenever possible Kromm has been smart about guiding people back towards rules and systems already present in the Basic Set. 4e benefits from its own completeness. It owes a debt to 3rd ed, but that doesn't make third edition a good game in itself.

>>43790443
>Why did he allow or encourage you to grapple with everything available?

Lazy GM. This is a genuine problem with GURPS that I think its critics are perfectly justified in bringing up. It requires a LOT of up-front work by the GM to get the campaign options laid out appropriately.

Instead, the lazy GM tries to wing it, or pawn it off on his players by letting THEM use the power creation rules. Which is a trainwreck, especially when the players have never played GURPS before.

GURPS requires the GM to do his preparation in advance. Once the game is underway, it's superb, but nobody denies that this is an issue.

>>43791748
The need for the GM to do the work and take a firm hand on things is a necessary price to pay for its versatility.

>>43791403

Yeah but it was also accurate and highlights what an experienced GURPS GM will see as its elegance and simplicity.

There's a big difference between GURPS players and non-players in terms of expectations.

For a non-GURPS gamer, Sorcery is a simple system where every spell takes one second to cast, costs one fatigue point, and is infinitely spammable once you know it. Each spell costs points and requires the Sorcery advantage. Spells that cost up to your levels in Sorcery can be cast regardless of whether you know them or not. Spells up to the point cost of your Sorcery can be learned but you have to actually buy the spell with XP. Spells that cost more than that can't be bought at all (raise your Sorcery instead).

Simple? Simple. To a non-GURPS player, THAT'S what makes sorcery great. Best of all, there's a long list of spells pre-calculated, so you never need to touch the spell creation rules if you don't want to.

To a hard core GURPS GM, the advantages are totally different. First, you can convert any advantage in GURPS into a spell. That lets you essentially reproduce any magical effect in fiction or another RPG setting. Second, it uses the existing mechanics for Advantages, so there's nothing new to learn. Third, it's just a clever application of the existing rules in the Basic Set. It relabels some mechanics for clarity, but the book has callout boxes that explain how they did it, which lets you either mod the Sorcery rules themselves or create your own separate magic system. Fourth, the above points mean that it's already thoroughly playtested and balanced against psi, cybernetics, divine favor, other magic systems, etc. So you can just drop it into any campaign you want and it'll work.

Sorcery rocks whether you are new to GURPS or a very salty dog indeed... but the reason why it rocks will be different depending on how you play.

>>43791851

Not for Dungeon Fantasy it isn't. The trick is that they pre-calculate everything for the most common roleplaying campaign concept.

I get why they don't have every power cataloged for every situation, but they need to do more to have pre-generated powers, NPCs, and monsters. Just because the GM *could* do this himself doesn't mean he should have to.

>>43790336
>I have seen a group of six people who have never even played RPG's before make characters just fine.

One of my friends was in a shelter and one of her friends liked RPG games.

I gave her my soft cover GURPS 3 Basic set to hand to her.

Homeless Trans Woman started making characters in a day and carried the book around with her.

There seems to be a significant number of people who just don't grasp that rules-heavy systems are what most people seem to enjoy.

Yes, GURPS is more complicated than Risus, or even Savage Worlds or Call of Cthulhu. If you enjoy rules-light games or even rules-medium games, it's probably not going to work well for you.

But most people don't actually play rules-light games. The vast majority of gamers play Dungeons and Dragons, which (in most editions, as actually played) has similar complexity to GURPS. Those who don't play D&D usually play White Wolf games, which are not only rules-heavy but actually very badly written. For the vast majority of gamers, GURPS is a more streamlined and elegant system than the one they are currently using and far more flexible.

You might say that those systems are all too rules-heavy, but the fact of the matter is if you like rules-light games, you are in a pretty small minority. None of the supposedly more accessible games actually sells a fraction of what GURPS does or has an equivalent player-base. Despite what hobby game designers say, most gamers like complexity. They like having lots of options to choose from. They like detail.

>>43793276
>If you enjoy rules-light games or even rules-medium games, it's probably not going to work well for you.
GURPS Lite.
http://www.warehouse23.com/products/SJG31-0004

>>43793276
>White Wolf
>very badly written

I'm of the opinion it's their organizational skills that lack, not the writing. WW needs good editors badly.

>>43793276
>There seems to be a significant number of people who just don't grasp that rules-heavy systems are what most people seem to enjoy.

That's not true.
Mot people don't like "rules-heavy" systems. Most people like the one rules heavy system they are familiar whit, that's why 90% of people play some sort of D&D and use it even when it's clear that it doesn't fit.
Also, most people don't want to bother with having to work upfront too much for getting into a game.

>>43793450

During their glory years of the 90's, they concentrated on writing quality rather than editing, organization, or game balance. Many books were published without even being playtested. They'll admit it themselves.

Much of what we quote as examples of bad writing, especially the snobby more-literary-than-thou stuff, was really the kind of thing that everyone writes but that a good editor weeds out. If there's one thing they didn't lack for, it was talented writers.

>>43793752
>Also, most people don't want to bother with having to work upfront too much for getting into a game.

That might be why GURPS provides templates which do most of the hard work of character creation for you. They are in the basic set and every genre or setting book. Making a character with a template consists of picking about half a dozen options from a handful of short lists (10-20 items in each one). It's literally as simple as picking out your class and options in D&D.

The last time I made a character with a new player, it took about fifteen minutes, including explaining what each option did and coming up with a character backstory.

People who say you need to read through every advantage, disadvantage and skill in the game have apparently only skimmed the first half of the main rulebook and never actually used the system as intended.

The most popular GURPS series in the Dungeon Fantasy line, which is basically D&D using the GURPS rules. Characters in DF are expected to be made from templates and you get basically the exact same character classes that D&D has. The next most popular series is probably the Action line, which has exactly the same approach. Templates are absolutely emphasised as the way the authors intend you to make characters most of the time.

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1MB, 861x1169px

>>43767969

pls stop

>>43794095
>Much of what we quote as examples of bad writing, especially the snobby more-literary-than-thou stuff, was really the kind of thing that everyone writes but that a good editor weeds out.

If you edited out all the bad writing from White Wolf books, there wouldn't be anything left. I don't see how you can claim that they had good writers when there is absolutely no evidence of good writing.

Maybe it's true that even good writers will produce shit without a competent editor, but the end product is apparently indistinguishable from what I would expect a bad writer to churn out.

It's not the best RPG system, not even close. The fans that insist that it is aren't really substantially different from the 3.5 fans that will torture and contort their system in all manner of depraved ways to try and fit it to a particular genre rather than just learn a new system.

That said GURPS does grit fairly well, and I would say it's pretty well-suited to modern tactical games.

>>43794420
How is this not a meme?

>>43794465

GURPS doesn't require any torture or contortion to fit a genre, it's literally designed to do just that.

>>43794554
Yeah OK. That's why any discussion of how to use it for a particular genre involves the application of any number of optional rules, which may be buried in some obscure sourcebook or another. Why the starting up a game is described as using a toolkit to construct it. Fuck off, you bloody preacher.

>>43794700
>which may be buried in some obscure sourcebook or another.

In almost all scenarios you'll need 1-2 books. Can you think of a genre that requires more?

>>43794700
Using the tools that are presented is torturing a system to fit a genre?
Making 3.PF run a gritty cyberpunk game is torturing the system; it is in no way meant to run that sort of game and has no tools to assist that sort of game. Having to look through a GURPS splatbook only counts as torture if you're such a fat, lazy piece of shit that the physical exertion required to open and read a PDF causes trauma.

1/10 got me to respond.

>>43794843
>1/10 got me to respond.

There is literally no fanbase on /tg/ so perpetually defensive as the GURPS fanbase. You take any criticism as a personal offense, and constantly proselytize for your pet system.

Yes, applying a dozen fucking optional rules is torturing the fucking system. Just because one of Steve Jackson's writers came up with the optional rules, rather than the GM himself doesn't change the fact that the system is being butchered to meet the genre.

Also GURPS is designed in such a way that doing anything high powered requires so many points that it's actually harder to not break the system's math than it is to accidentally break it, and character creation becomes even more of an exercise in boundless tedium than it already fucking is.

>>43794916
>Using official rules = torturing the game
Kay brah, whatever you say.

>>43794985
>implying optional rules are in any way substantially different from houserules

So, how again are you meaningfully different from a 3.5 fan that applies extensive houserules to his game to make it run different genres?

>>43794916
>Also GURPS is designed in such a way that doing anything high powered requires so many points that it's actually harder to not break the system's math than it is to accidentally break it, and character creation becomes even more of an exercise in boundless tedium than it already fucking is.

This is basically the only thing I agree with.

GURPS has issues, not with balance, but with tracking, when you get up that far

>>43794916
You seem to be confused.

Using the system as its fully intended to be used is not 'butchering it'. They keep pointing out you only use what you need.

>>43795021
Are you somehow incapable of grasping the fact that GURPS is designed to be used that way?

Does it offend you that a system would be designed to be light and basic by default and also be modular enough to run any level of detail you want well?

It has the best character creation imo, followed by Eclipse Phase.

>>43795098
>Using the system as its fully intended to be used is not 'butchering it'. They keep pointing out you only use what you need.

That's a defense akin to doing something in an ironic fashion. It's a blatant deflection of criticism. What makes a GURPS fan different from a particularly devoted 3.5 fan?

>>43795145
>Are you somehow incapable of grasping the fact that GURPS is designed to be used that way?

What difference does that actually make? You're taking the core system and butchering it so that it will (if you squint at it from just the right angle) look like the genre you're attempting to model. What is the actual, meaningful difference here? People took the d20 system and made all manner of things with it (Mutants and Masterminds springs to mind) so what makes GURPS so fucking special and its fanboys so much different from a 3.5 fan that alters his system to suit his needs? Is it the obsessive devotion to the GURPS writers that makes the fans think their design is infallible?

>>43795214
Why do you insist on using totally inaccurate terms like 'butchering'? Do you not realise how easy it is to make GURPS run various genres?

GURPS can run fantasy, modern and future games on the same system and do it well with very little effort. Whereas DnD falls apart if you try to do things much different from what its intended for.

Give an example of a genre you think requires 'butchering' the game. With actual reasoning.

GURPS a shit

>>43795214
And how is it 'deflecting' criticism.

Anybody who criticises a generic system for being designed to run different genres and having modular rules to support that is an idiot.

>>43795356
>Why do you insist on using totally inaccurate terms like 'butchering'?

Call a spade a spade.

>Give an example of a genre you think requires 'butchering' the game. With actual reasoning.

Fantasy or sci-fi that's in any way different from what the authors conceived of fantasy or sci-fi as (so different magic or technological development). Show me how GURPS can do a magic system different than the core magic system without applying an optional rule (which as I said previously, is no different from a houserule).

>>43795382
>Anybody who criticises a generic system for being designed to run different genres and having modular rules to support that is an idiot.

You haven't addressed the central point. How are these modular rules different from houserules? Being written by an official SJG's author is not a substantial difference.

>>43795425
>show me how GURPS can do something differently without doing anything differently

The fact you see one of GURPS greatest strengths as a weakness is baffling. It has 5+ magic systems so people can use the one that works best for what they want to do, that is a GOOD thing. Its not even slightly the same as having to houserule a game for something its not designed to do.

You do realise that having a way to do different magic systems would by definition require optional rules right?

Why would you put in all the work necessary to build a subset of GURPS rules anyway? It'll still have the same bland, unsatisfying mechanical feel. Running a particular genre or setting well requires bottom up design. It's why unfocused generic systems always suck.

>>43795538
>Its not even slightly the same as having to houserule a game for something its not designed to do.

You still haven't explained how so. Is it the authority that comes from a SJG writer?

>>43795543
>bland, unsatisfying mechanical feel

Go ahead, explain why you think that. Because I have never seen someone actually explain what the hell this even means. And you are ignoring the fact GURPS runs multiple genres better than systems designed 'from the ground up' to do so.

And you seem to be vastly over-estimating how much work is required most of the time.

>>43795450
>>43795603
No, first you explain how its possible to give people a choice of magical systems without having optional rules. Then explain why being modular by design and giving people options is a bad thing.

Because until you stop deliberately pretending that its as difficult to make GURPS run fantasy as it is to make 3.5 run anything other than fantasy there is nothing to discuss.

>>43795603
The sorcery system is an alternative magic system. It uses the system of advantages defined in the basic set, and further extrapolated in powers. Every single one of those rules is an extrapolation of an existing rule, so it is an alternative magic system that doesn't use any optional rules. Sorcery can be reverse engineered with the Basic set, and mostly only borrows calculated point cost for more exotic powers from the Powers book.

Therefore, an optional magic system that uses 0 optional rules.

>>43795739
Don't bother. And technically yes it is, the entire magic system or letting people have powers at all is optional.

The entire damn system is because that is how GURPS works. And then people come along, don't actually read the book and assume it works the same was as DnD. Then come on here and complain it has too many rules because they thought you should use all of them all the time.

Odious personal habit :responding to Angry idiots on the internet

What would you cost that as fellow GURPS anons? Is it -2 or -3 reaction roll? And how much should it be reduced because its unlikely that you will be exposed?

Or should it be a compulsive behavior? If so how many points I'm leaning for -10

Anons was it worth the points? Have you spent them well? Why did you not just take poor, or pyromaniac surely that would have been a better option.

>>43795708
>No, first you explain how its possible to give people a choice of magical systems without having optional rules.

It isn't, now stop dodging the fucking question.

>Then explain why being modular by design and giving people options is a bad thing.

Because you should learn a properly designed for the task, rather than perversely jamming everything into GURPS. There are several specialized options that are easy to learn.

>And you are ignoring the fact GURPS runs multiple genres better than systems designed 'from the ground up' to do so.

And they will always feel exactly like a GURPS game. Also, prove it. The only reason GURPS doesn't attract substantial criticism from its fanbase is because it's a fucking religion to its fans.

>>43795708

Core mechanics influence how a game feels to play. Rolling a d20 feels different to rolling a d10 pool feels different to rolling 3d6. By binding itself to a single, generically implemented core mechanic, GURPS binds itself to a single rather dull mechanical tone. This is all based on the assumption that GURPS really is a 'Universal' system, even though it seems much more inclined to realistic/gritty stuff.

Look at other generic systems, like FATE and M&M. They're both flexible, but the core dice system of each is tuned to the premise. The high variance and critical rate of d20 is excellent for superhero and comic book antics, while the minor variation provided by the FUDGE dice facilitates the softer, storytelling focus of FATE.

This gets even clearer when you look at specific systems. Unique dice mechanics like Don't Rest Your Head, Houses of the Blooded or Legends of the Wulin add to what makes those systems interesting and fun to play, incorporating the themes and tone of the game into the very fundamental rules of the game.

But GURPS? Despite claiming to do everything, it lacks that. And, in my experience, that makes it fundamentally unsatisfying to use.

Now, looking at the 3d6 implementation as a focused core mechanic? It makes sense- It's one designed for more 'authentic', grounded gameplay, with a focus on reliability and a solid base value rather than extreme swing, as well as enough granularity to allow a lot of mechanical nuance. But that is a core mechanic only suited to a narrow slice of genres. It doesn't fit with anything more than a step or two away from 'Realistic' settings and storytelling, which I fund fundamentally undermines GURPS's universality.

>>43795425

>Fantasy or sci-fi that's in any way different from what the authors conceived of fantasy or sci-fi
Can you give an example of what that would be? Ultra-Tech and Biotech covers everything from TL9 Cyberpunk to TL10^ Star Wars to TL11 Furfaggotry to TL12 posthumanism. What setting ISN'T already conceived within the rules?

>Show me how GURPS can do a magic system different than the core magic system without applying an optional rule
Clerical magic, Psionics, "bard songs" and Chi are featured in the basic set, but I guess those extremely varied magic systems don't count because they're featured in core.
So other than that, Sorcery is an alternative system built directly from Advantages and Alternative Attacks, and Ritual Path Magic uses the basic system for skills and advantages to build a unique and balanced take on more time-consuming magic.

>>43795835
This is spot on.
GURPS doesn't "run multiple genres better than systems designed 'from the ground up' to do so."
It runs multiple genres in a GURPSy way. (and BTW; there is no single right way to "run a genre"). In some cases the match is perfect. In other cases the game works but is not very inspiring.

>>43795835
But WHY is it dull?

And no, the 3d6 preventing wildly variant results can fit in any genre. It depends on how common you want severe results to be.

>>43795824
>it isn't

So thanks for admitting you are just wasting time then. I am not dodging anything, you realise almost every system ever written has SOME options right? Do you get offended every time you read an RPG book that has variant magic or character creation systems?

>perversely

There is nothing perverse about using a system as its intended. People want a well designed set of mechanics that can handle many genres, there is nothing wrong with that. Why would you use the 'specialised' option if its poorly made? Being specialised gives it no benefit whatsoever if the core mechanics are crap.

>And they will always feel exactly like a GURPS game

So? And no, it does not get criticised much because people who use it actually read the books and don't have irrational prejudices against modular systems.

>>43795425
>Show me how GURPS can do a magic system different than the core magic system without applying an optional rule (which as I said previously, is no different from a houserule).

...that is an amazingly self-serving definition.

"Show me how GURPS can do custom things, but you can't use the rules for custom things - BECAUSE I SAY THAT MAKES YOU LOSE AND ME WIN"

>>43795824
I can assure you it's not a religion, my religion is actually rather incompatible with having another religion, and Kromm is a gay.

>Because you should learn a properly designed for the task, rather than perversely jamming everything into GURPS.

GURPS is properly designed. It's not perverse, and implying so indicates how you mentally shore up fucking RPG games. They aren't stuffed in there, all the extra stuff are interpretations of existing rules you can use to add depth or flavor. Everything they add can be reduced to the basic set.

>And they will always feel exactly like a GURPS game.

God forbid GURPS feels like GURPS. That would be stupid.

>>43795835
This is a new one. I haven't heard that because it uses 3d6 it is a bad game yet. And while GURPS does default to 'Heroic Realism' as they like to call it, the system works well for games of any realism setting, especially with the degrees of success and failure.

>>43793752
>Also, most people don't want to bother with having to work upfront too much for getting into a game.
and thats ok, they just dont play gurps, in the same way people just dont listen to death metal or harsh noise

>>43795990

Where did I say it was a bad game? I said 3d6 has its own mechanical tone, and it makes sense if assessed in that niche. Outside of it, however, or presented as something universally applicable, it becomes rather weak and dull.

>>43795952

The same way your favourite condiment would get dull if you applied it to every meal. Even if you really enjoy a particular flavour, there are some dishes that would work better with something else, and restricting yourself to just one thing limits what you can experience.

I like GURPS because it's detailed. When I'm creating my character, I can make anything I want, not just generic classes, hen I attack I have many options, not only "roll to attack".

btw http://forums.sjgames.com/showthread.php?t=122106

>>43795990
>This is a new one. I haven't heard that because it uses 3d6 it is a bad game yet.

Some people really like masturbating over the artistic merit of their paintbrushes.

Gimmick dice are just that, gimmicks.

They can work decently enough, but tend to be put on a pedestal as far more important to the game than they really are - "it's integral to the cosmic horror genre, that we use a d100 and crit by rolling under 1/5th of our skill", "a dicepool game where your expert character rolls 30 dice has a strong visceral feel that emphasises your power".

>>43796021
But RPG's are not foods.

There are plenty of genres where the specialised RPG's are crap, it does not matter how much 'flavour' they have if the underlying system is poorly made or awkward to use.

And a well run swashbuckling pirate game is not going to feel dull just because you also used GURPS for the operational operators game, the diplomatic caravan trading game and the sword and sorcery game before.

>>43796113
Since we are doing this, you have said this thing multiple times.

>There are plenty of genres where the specialised RPG's are crap

Care to give some examples of genres where all existing games are crap? Or are they crap becuase they are not GURPS?

>>43796021
> I said 3d6 has its own mechanical tone, and it makes sense if assessed in that niche. Outside of it, however, or presented as something universally applicable, it becomes rather weak and dull.

This statement doesn't even make sense.

>>43796021
Applying brown mustard to every meal doesn't make mustard objectively dull. It means you need to start using other condiments. However, you don't seem to be arguing that GURPSfags need to expand their horizons (some certainly do; a gaming community that never tries anything new grows stagnant and its ideas incestuous, which is why I'm still constantly picking up new games in PDF share threads). Instead, it sounds like you're arguing that GURPS is, on it's own and in a vacuum, an inherently dull choice of mechanics.

Pick an argument and stick to it. The 'optional rules = houserules = torturing the system' troll stuck to his guns and look at the number of replies he got! Being impossibly stubborn about something will generate more nerdrage that constantly changing what you're arguing.

>>43796139
For one, Call of Cthulhu isn't very mechanically sound. And people have been complaining about d20 for decades.

GURPS is a fun alternative. A system isn't crap because it isn't GURPS, a system is crap because it's crap. Hell, I use GURPS and love it, but I try other systems all the time, I just go back to GURPS most of the time.

>>43796142
>This statement doesn't even make sense.

And again comes the turbo-defensiveness,

The 3d6 bell-curve distribution of results means that there are going to be less wildly varying results in contrast to other systems. You said the same thing earlier.
This is not a good or bad quality of the die roll, per se.
But there are some genres where it's not desirable, and a different dice mechanic is more suited. Take DRYH, where you can add die to the roll for greater results but at great costs.

It's not that hard to grasp.

>>43796139
Well I can only think one a single RPG that would be better for a realistic medieval combat game.

And I cannot think of any games beyond very obscure, obtuse ones that handle realistic gunplay better.

>>43796195
d20 is not a genre. The d20 system is the extrapolation of D&D 3.5's system into something that would have been generic, and while that has numerous issues, it's because it tried to be generic. If you mean d20 ad D&Desque fantasy, that's a genre where there is a ton of competition, and it's pretty clear that there are some D&Disms that while inelegant as game design are considered an intrinsic part of the genre.

Call of Cthulhu is not a genre either, and there are at least 5 games specific for Lovecraftian horror that do things differently. Trail comes to mind, and that's the prime example of a game designed around a couple of basic principles for the genre.

>>43796291
Aren't the vast majority of fantasy RPG's in some way based on DnD?

>>43796139
>Care to give some examples of genres where all existing games are crap?

Care to give some examples of good specialised games?

If the *most* popular game for any given genre is worse than GURPS, that's reason enough to play it.

There may yet be some perfectly crafted yet completely obscure game lurking somewhere, and that's fine.

Not everyone wants to find it, learn it at a DM-level, and then persuade their players to learn it.

GURPS is better than the most popular games in the largest genres, and therefore takes vastly less effort and has the largest return on investment.

>>43796347

>GURPS is better than the most popular games in the largest genres, and therefore takes vastly less effort and has the largest return on investment.

Citation needed

>>43796365
>citation needed

Pray tell, how would one provide a 'citation' for one RPG being better than another?

>>43796347
>If the *most* popular game for any given genre is worse than GURPS, that's reason enough to play it.

Do you seriously believe this?
Also no. You have made a claim, you prove it.

>>43796224
>turbo-defensiveness

I was more commenting that the term 'mechanical tone' was retarded. I don't see how the die being able to vary widely has much effect on making the system stronger or weaker. I've never played a game that had the goal of making my rolls vary insanely in relation to my skill. And GURPS has similar rules for things like that. Including 'fate' points the player can burn, and a couple of neat ideas in a few of the pyramid issues.

So, the best argument the anti-GURPS brigade can come up with is that GURPS is bad because it doesn't use a novelty dice-rolling system.

Here's a newsflash; novelty dice rolling systems add fucking nothing to a game. They don't make it 'taste' different. They are just a way for wankers who want to be game designers but can't actually be bothered to put effort into writing to distinguish their shitty rules-light, background-light, research-light, effort-light 'game' from the dozens of other shitty novelty dice mechanics loosely attached to a concept put out by other wankers.

And for the guy who can't understand why optional GURPS rules are better than house rules; it's because the rules for GURPS are written by professional writers, playtested and edited by people who know what they are doing. This distinguishes them from some random shit that one person though was a good idea, which is what house rules are. Incidentally, most rules-light systems are also some half-baked shit that some idiot thought was a good idea and put almost no effort into developing, making them a lot closer to house-rules than the stuff you get in GURPS supplements.

>>43796291
You know what he meant, though I don't think GURPS is better than any genera except when it comes to the tone of the game.

If the game is going for some semblance of realism, then GURPS is very good at it. It's the best at Horror, if you want a realistic horror game. It's the best at gun combat, if you want a game with realistic gun combat. It's the best at Sword and Sorcery games, if you want a realistic sword and sorcery games. Same for Post-apocalypse, cyberpunk, steampunk, spys, wuxia, military fiction, courtroom drama, detective thriller, medieval historical fiction, ect.

No matter how cinematic your rules, or how high the point cost of the game, or if the players are hurling fireballs while flying on the back of a dragon. GURPS is grounded, always at least partially, in realism. So for some people, it will always be better, and for some people, it will always be the worst.

>>43797160

This is a good point actually, GURPS is a "hard" system, driven by logic and rationale, if you're a fan of "soft" stuff like Freeform and GM fiat, GURPS probably isn't for you.

>>43797133

I'm finding it hard to believe you've actually played other games if you think core mechanics don't influence the gameplay. How you do fundamental task resolution in a game affects every aspect of it.

In Don't Rest Your Head, every dice matters. A larger pool increases your chance of success, but also makes it more likely that you'll pay a hard price for it. How it accomplishes this, and what each dice pool means and how they interact, is a key part of what makes the system work.

Or, something GURPS could never emulate- Multiple actions, with different values, on the same roll. Legends of the Wulin's dice pool system allows the generation of multiple results, allowing complex mixtures of actions and a lot of combat depth within a single round.

None of this is saying that GURPS's core mechanic is bad. It's saying that, compared to a system designed to a specific task, GURPS can feel lacking because it lacks that fundamental tuning to an idea. GURPS has that for realistic games. It works really well for that. It's the eternal insistence that it's better for everything else as well which is objected to.

>>43797453
>Or, something GURPS could never emulate- Multiple actions, with different values, on the same roll

Why not just roll more than once? It seems like an easy thing to do. It's three die, pick them up and give them another toss.

You also seem to be using systems with very unique ideas as your example. DRYH isn't as much a system as it is rules for the game. So of course GURPS can't run a DRYH game better than DRYH can. Your logic ultimately relies on comparing GURPS against contrivances, and using flawed arguments to say that 3d6 is imperfect because it won't allow you to do something you have poorly defined.

Also nobody is saying GURPS is the perfect system for everything. Usually the people who play GURPS know the system and don't suggest it for things where it wouldn't work. They suggest it because when an OP says "Hey, what's a good system for X", GURPS is usually an answer that works. You have some sort of persecution complex.

>>43796457
>Do you seriously believe this?

Option A is inferior to Option B.
Therefore, Option B is preferred.

So, uh, yeah?

GURPS Dungeon Fantasy is better than any edition of DnD at doing what DnD claims it does.

GURPS Monster Hunters is better than World of Darkness.

There may be other games in those genres that do very good jobs of it, but GURPS does as well - and comes with doing a dozen other genres very well.

It's pretty simple. TTRPGs are not a mystery cult, there's no need for pointless complication.

>>43786395
>And you do have some horse in this race. You are in a GURPS general, calling people who use the system fags.

>He's never seen "[thing]fag" before

Get the fuck out of here reddit.

>>43798893
>if you don't call people fags you're reddit

You're a fag, fag.

>>43799045

>If you get immediately defensive when you're called a GURPSfag because OH MY GOD HE CALLED ME A FAG you're reddit

Oh hey check it out it's the thing I actually said, faggot.

>>43798277
>It's pretty simple. TTRPGs are not a mystery cult, there's no need for pointless complication.

But then why would anyone play GURPS?

>>43797671
>Also nobody is saying GURPS is the perfect system for everything

Actually, I think that's exactly what the GURPS fans in this thread are doing. Doing anything other than saying GURPS can perfectly emulate any genre brings them straight out of the woodwork.

>>43786395
>calling people who use the system fags
>>43799045
>>if you don't call people fags you're reddit
You're an idiot.
I am a writefag and a drawfag.
You are an idiocyfag and a faggotryfag apparently.
see
>>43798893
>>He's never seen "[thing]fag" before

>>43799303

Could you please cite one such GURPS fan? Because I think you're talking out of your ass.

>>43797133
>And for the guy who can't understand why optional GURPS rules are better than house rules; it's because the rules for GURPS are written by professional writers, playtested and edited by people who know what they are doing.

These are the same designers who designed a system where you can destroy the world with a scant number of points. By what logic should I assume they know what they're doing?

>>43799352
Right here >>43768087 >>43768971 >>43768963

>gurps can be almost perfect at anything if enough effort is put at the rules assembling phase

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>>43799364

M8 literally any generic system collapses when a power gamer gets a hold of it. Mutants and Masterminds, Wild Talents, literally all of them suffer from this "issue."

It stops being an issue when you realize that such is the price of freedom.

>>43799406
Mini Six.

>>43799397
The first two are completely reasonable, there are some things that gurps does well and just because something is built to do something doesn't mean it does it well.

In the end you're left with one faggot.

>>43799397
#1. Implies GURPS does certain things exceptionally well
#2. Implies GURPS is indeed a master of some specific genres. (It is for example better at D&D style gameplay than any edition of D&D is, it's better at WoD than WoD), but not necessarily the best.
#3. Claims GURPS can be almost perfect if you put enough work into it, which is WAY different from your claim back in >>43799303

Care to try again? Do you have anything more substantial that doesn't rely on moving the goalpost, or?

>>43799397
How the fuck is saying "GURPS can actually do some things well" equate to "ITZ TEH PERFECT SySTEM 4 EVERYTING." Because that's what the first two are arguing; "jack of all trades master of none" is bullshit because GURPS does a handful of things *exceptionally* well like firefights, detailed combat, and gritty settings. Point in your favor, though, you did cite one faggot who called the system "almost perfect" under the caveat that it required intense GM preparation.

Literally no one called it the perfect system for everything. Thank you for proving that.

>>43799441

Never heard of it. Upload it.

But so help me if it's some Risus-tier-complexity game, you should know you have no leg to stand on. Of course you can't power game a system with no depth to it.

>>43799397
Well, not the guy you're arguing with, but that anon did use enough qualifiers to render his statement pointless.
Being "almost perfect at any thing" with "enough effort" is a far cry from being "perfect for everything."

>>43799557
Yeah, I didn't even bother commenting on the first two, they were entirely unrelated to the point.

>>43799445
>>43799503
>>43799510
>>43799557
You know what? You're right. I'm acting like a complete faggot. Sorry guys, I'm out of here, I concede.

>>43799609
well I didn't argue you with you, just commented on the last one, good talk anon.

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Well, the thread was answered four posts in.
Here we are at over 250 posts.
I think I did well for starting my first /tg/ argument.

>>43799609
...goddamn that's weird. Have a nice night, I guess?
It's weird remembering that people on 4chan are actual people with different opinions and not faceless shitposting machines.
Sorry that got a little heated Anon.

<3

>>43799653
I dunno, I just got wrapped up in a dumb point without much ground to stand on.

>>43795425

You didn't actually give an example. I'm assuming by "butchering" you mean campaign options? Go ahead, name one that butchers the system and how it qualifies as butchering?

Also, if you bothered to read up-thread, you'd see that GURPS Sorcery is an alternate magic system that uses RAW out of the Basic Set, no options required. It's just precalculated for her pleasure.

So far, you've blathered on for about five posts trying to bull through on sheer persistence. Repeating an argument isn't the same as supporting it.

So like I said, you've made a claim, go ahead and support it.

>>43795985

He got desperate. People challenged him to name a campaign option that butchered the system and explain why he felt it did so. He couldn't, so he instead demanded this magic system thing. Which people actually produced, then hammered back asking him to answer the fucking question: If he's so adamant that campaign options butcher the system, then give and example. Which he still can't do. So now he's on about 3d6 and "it just gives me sad feels"

He'll keep throwing out claims, ignore when people refute him, and try to stay on the attack, changing the subject as needed to keep up the pressure.

Hilariously, some of his points are answered up thread, but I assume he's trying to shit things up enought that people don't notice. .

>>43796090

Yeah, basically true. There are things to be said about different dice rolling systems... but they're minor overall.

The main advantage of 3d6 isn't the bell curve directly. It's that it elegantly treats fixed number bonuses and penalties so that they are always impactful without being unbalancing. Whereas in D20 you have that "don't roll a 1 / must roll a 20" cliff.

>>43800459
>So now he's on about 3d6 and "it just gives me sad feels"

Actually, that's someone else. I admitted to acting like a moron.

>>43796170

Same guy. He got pwned on the butchering-the-system argument and went reaching for something else. He never did give an example of what rule he felt was butchering; eventually he just ran out of excuses to dodge it.

>Make a stupid argument
>Get refuted
>"don't be defensive!"
>You've been refuted, got any response?
>Make argument again, Make it sound like a declaration.
>Get refuted again, anon points out that you still haven't responded to being refuted.
>Try to deflect by insisting that your opponents produce evidence to prove some point they haven't made and that doesn't help you anyway.
>They respond, then point out that you've still been refuted again and again.
>Get desperate and restate your original claim again, Use profanity to hide the fact that you've been refuted again and again.
>Refute again and laugh at him.
>Switch to an entirely new argument. Try to sound like a different anon.

Once his "butchering" point was, well... butchered, he shifted to his new "square dice are unexciting" claim. At this point he's getting easier and easier to just laugh at.

>>43797310

Except that I run it that way, all the time. I cut my teeth in roleplaying on oWoD. So I prefer narrative games with narrative encounters.

GURPS is excellent for that. Apart from changing "roll high on a handful of d10s" to "roll low on 3d6", the narrative impact of the system is minimial. I don't use minis or a combat map, just like w/ old school narrative systems. Which is how I like it. GURPS gets the job done much more cleanly than WoD (either version), and all the rules are in place in the Basic Set (and Lite).

Just because I *could* use all the gritty realism rules doesn't mean I should. Admittedly, most GURPS players are crunchier, but that doesn't mean the system isn't fine for naarrative styles.

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>>43800819
>I don't use minis or a combat map

>With a system that uses a second-by-second granularity combat system

>>43800580

I hadn't gotten to the bottom of the thread. You have to admit that the argument kind of shitted up what was turning into a pretty nice discussion of GURPS's strengths and weaknesses.

>>43800897
Yep, hence why I said I was acting like a faggot. That said, I've never seen a GURPS player admit any weakness except poor scaling at higher power levels.

>>43800959
Character gen is a huge block into getting into the game, though GCS and a good GM really help smooth that out. But if your GM just throws a couple of pdfs at you and says to get to work it'll suck.

>>43767849
GURPS is like Python: the second best for anything you want to do.

>>43800861

1 second per combat round isn't about granularity and micromanaging. It's about keeping each player's turn very quick and simple.

The idea is, in most games you have a combat stretch out for an hour or more. But each individual player only gets brief, infrequent slices where they need to pay attention. The rest of the time is spent waiting.

In GURPS, especially if you keep things simple and don't turn on high-complexity options like hit locations, you whiz through a round very quickly. A player takes a discrete, simple action, rolls, and then moves on. So the time you spend waiting for initiative to roll around back to you is reduced. Meanwhile, thanks to active defenses, enemy NPCs attack you and you still have something to do during their rounds, which are ALSO short and sweet.

It also means that what in many systems is a complicated move, an action of its own with its own special rules, is in GURPS just a different and novel way to string together the same standard actions. (Martial Arts does introduce ways to be more complicated as options, but I don't use them.)

So, yes, second-by-second play supports rather than undermines highly abstract narrative play styles.

>>43800959
>I've never seen a GURPS player admit any weakness except poor scaling at higher power levels.
Character generation is quite time-consuming and it requires lots of effort on the GM's end.

So now you have.

>>43800959

Scroll up for examples. I even wrote some of those posts outlining weaknesses of GURPS.

It's just the usual claims of what's wrong with GURPS are bogus. It's not a perfect system, and some of its flaws could and should be addressed, but most non-GURPS players aren't familiar with those weaknesses.

>>43801032
>but most non-GURPS players aren't familiar with those weaknesses.

This is a general problem with /tg/ dialogues about any rules-heavy systems. The expectation is that you need to have an intimate familiarity with a system to have any validity in disliking a system, but the only people who are likely to have an intimate familiarity with a rules-heavy system (barring the rather ubiquitous 3.5 that seems somewhat inescapable) are the people that liked it enough to get familiar with it.

>>43801064

Well, like I said, scroll up and you'll find several good critiques.

Btw, this applies to all RPG systems, not just rules-heavy ones.

>>43796139
Dungeon World

Is there a rule for playing GURPS without using the shitty one-second turn rule?

>>43798277
You are delusional.

>>43799510
You cannot say with a straight face that "GURPS does X better than X" and expect to be taken seriously.

>>43803252

That's not an answer to his question. Your post makes no sense.
What are you actually trying to say?

>>43800819
>Just because I *could* use all the gritty realism rules doesn't mean I should. Admittedly, most GURPS players are crunchier, but that doesn't mean the system isn't fine for naarrative styles.

And you have no idea what a narrative system is.

>>43803331

Well, him and countless other fa/tg/uys.
In their defense, though, it's not like it's a very sharply defined term. But even a really vague, overly broad definition would have to stretch pretty hard to fit GURPS.

>>43803256

What do you mean? What's shitty about 1 second increments?

>>43803256
If you want to overhaul the entire basis of the combat system and EVERYTHING that relies on one second turns sure.

On the note of fiat, the book outright tells you that you can fluff rolls behind the screen when not doing so would harm the game or ruin everyone's fun. Especially in cinematic games, the example given is not allowing a swashbuckler to fall off a chandelier and break his spine when he does the dramatic swing to a balcony.

>>43803348
The only reason I have ever seen given is by people who watched too many movies and think its 'unrealistic' that a fight can end in five seconds.

>>43804389
What kind of movies do people watch where mooks don't drop as soon as the main characters even look their direction? Most longer fights in movies are usually between incredibly skilled and special characters. Even in GURPS you can have fights lasting for minutes with the right opponents.

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>>43804566
Those are the ones people seem to focus on though.

In reality a sword fight between two people usually ends in a few seconds in real life, especially if one person is much better than the other.

On a related note though, in the recent film Sicario it was nice to see what would actually happen if gang members tried to fight Delta Force. Instead of the 'special' forces getting stomped to make the main character look badass. That is about how I imagine a party of GURPS operators fighting mooks going down.

>>43798277
"GURPS IS PERFECT!!1!"

>>43800981
Goddamn, that's a really helpful comparison.

>>43800981
what if what i want to do is inject code in a Zenoss check?

>>43809951
Not really, as people have pointed out GURPS is the best option for some things.

GURPS is a lot of work. It is a fine game, but it is a lot of work.

>>43767878
Thats pretty much the onlt thing its good at besides low fantasy and near future scifi. If you want to play anything else you're better off playing a specialist system, especially if magic casting is involved in any way

>>43811468
>RPM, Sorcery, and the systems from Thaumutology not being GOAT magic systems.

topkek

>>43773463
No i think your just retarded

>>43811468
>You're better off playing FATAL because it's a system made for fantasy rather than GURPS.
Okay champ.

>>43787115
Yeah, pretty much. I've been using GURPS for 6 or 7 years now and I've never needed anything but the player and GM books to run a game.

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>>43803326
I think this anon gave a "this one iz crap, too" answer. Not him, tho.

>>43811530
>Oh wow, a system thats mediocre looks pretty great when compared to a system thats unplayable.
Way to cherry pick champ.

There are plenty of specialist systems that do their genera far more justice than GURPS could. Would you play a shonen game in GURPS over Anima? How about a high powered super hero game or space opera in GURPS, instead of Wild Talents or Traveller, you could do it but the latter would do it better.

GURPS may always be a viable option but that doesnt make it the best

>>43811468
You really think the awful magic system in DnD is better than even the default one in GURPS?

>>43811995
I'm genuinely curious how any of these systems does their genre better than GURPS. I haven't played either of them, but what makes them better at their thing than GURPS?

What is the deciding factor for a genre done better?

>>43812939
Why awful? Are you sure it's just because you don't like it to give a rating so bad?

>>43804389
My complaint about one second increments is that they tend to create a situation where all participants use their time in combat extremely efficiently. There's rarely anything like the moments of panic or stopping to catch your breath, or the occasional lulls that appear in combat.

>>43814244
Moments of panic, catching your breath and etc aren't regularly used in any systems I am aware of. There is the Last Gasp rules for needing to catch your breath in combat and moments of panic could be anything from a failed morale check to mental stun from surprise.

>>43811510

Thaumatology kind of sucked IMO until RPM and Sorcery (and to some extent magical styles) came along. At that point, all those cool mechanics finally could be coupled to a decent core system.

The default magic system isn't *terrible*, but it's not great. RPM and Sorcery are genuinely brilliant.

>>43815162
Is there any rpg besides GURPS that does something like Ritual Path Magic? GURPS is all I've ever played, but it is such a phenomenal thing, I'd almost like to know if they straight ripped it off of someone else, or if it is the canonical subjective one way GURPS *can* do magic better than (almost?) any other system.

Besides RPM, all other magic seemed like "buy/learn a spell, add it to the menu of attacks and skills that exhausts a finite resource, but ultimately does something that someone (anyone) else can do" Noun/Verb magic comes close, but even though RPM is a simplification of that, it seems like a completely logical progression as well.

Only gripe I have now is that I wish RPM was more integrated into the canon power system like Divine Favor and Sorcery so that the spells from any/all would be easily ported... probably could be retooled a bit so that a spell requires energy equal to the character points needed to learn a spell multiplied by some number to either jiggle that number up or down as appropriate.

>>43814841
That's generally why most systems have rounds longer than one second, to account for the fucking around you see in combat: so combatants aren't hyper efficient robots, and often incorporate systems for gaining extra attacks or actions through experience and training.

>>43815596
Give me one system that has that as a reasoning rather than just arbitrarily deciding such things on a "reasonable" scale instead.

Also does it matter if the "fluff" part of your "turn" has you take a breath if you're really just an autonomous murder bot during the "entire" mechanical turn? Are we talking mechanical aspects where you need to take a break or just all fluff?

>>43815696
>Give me one system that has that as a reasoning rather than just arbitrarily deciding such things on a "reasonable" scale instead.

Part of that "reasonable" scale is this fact. So, literally every system. At the basics of the medium, D&D had minute long turns entirely to accommodate for the fact that a lot of shit would go on in a melee that wasn't just the combatants mechanically exchanging attacks.

See, this is what gets people's patience when it comes to GURPS. The fans are literally incapable of admitting that there is any aspect of the system that could have been done better, isn't totally realistic, or even more inconceivably, was done better by another system.

>>43815754
So it had no mechanical aspect and was just a number of time set to X to make sure people could imagine other things than attacks. The thing is that you haven't convinced me that the 1 second increment with 1 action is any worse than 6 second increments with Action, Move and Minor, or whatever, so I don't know why I should be admitting some kind of loss here. GURPS lies on the edge of realistic-cinematic style by default. It is just a mechanical pain to add in, seeing how the Last Gasp handles it adds more bookkeeping, but it might make combat feel more real and give you different tactical choice.

I've felt much less than a mechanical murderbot in GURPS than any of the DnD editions I've played, but I've only played 3.5, 4E and 5E so far. That's just how I feel though.

>>43795886
No, you misunderstand, anon. This gentleman is under the misconception that the Core book is the entire game, and everything else, the splats, the optional rules, is warping the system to make it fit your needs. What he fails to understand, is that the splats don't introduce new rules, but rather new uses for the things in the core book. He also fails to recognize the difference between homebrew and utilizing a system that's already been fully realized and balanced by the game developers, but I'm attributing that to him being a pointless argument starter.

>>43815548
>Is there any rpg besides GURPS that does something like Ritual Path Magic? GURPS is all I've ever played, but it is such a phenomenal thing, I'd almost like to know if they straight ripped it off of someone else, or if it is the canonical subjective one way GURPS *can* do magic better than (almost?) any other system.

Don't think so. The only system off the top of my head that I can think you can say they 'ripped off' was the syntactic magic, which first showed up in Ars Magica.

How is the combat in GURPS? I hear there are a lot of options for characters during combat and looking at the books that seems true. Are the options useful (aiming, evaluate, called shots) and balanced or are straight "I hit the guy" rolls still better?

I'm looking for a system that gives the players lots of meaningful choices in combat, rather than victory by attack bonus or lucky rolls.

>>43816423
GURPS favor the better fighter, but a clever fighter can work around this. Unless they're heavily outclasses the options will matter, especially if you opt to use the Martial Arts options as well. Feinting, grappling, slamming, shoving and other moves can be cleverly used to take down powerful foes.

Many options still exist outside of the maneuvers, such as what weapon to use, what armor to wear and all that stuff. It usually boils down to Highest Skill + Best Suited Gear wins. Shield and Sword is the most versatile generally and thus offers the least weaknesses with the least pros. A spear is best to keep people away, because it is hard to approach someone with a long reach. Tripping is devastating, disarming can be tough and if you use hit-locations you can make even a shiv become dangerously lethal.

>>43816138
Also many of the splats and optional rules introduced either in Pyramid or into the wild are by the original designers themselves, and expand on the intentions they previously had anyway.

Like how some of the optional stuff you can do with very little work pares point blank shotgun damage a bit, and also makes melee still very nasty by most game standards, but less so in comparison to firearms or innate attacks. Just the Low Tech suggestion of "Oh, it doesn't penetrate and cause cutting damage unless you exceed the DR by a certain amount is pretty big. Even under standard, probably too high melee damage that makes armor pretty good. If you go further and reduce overall damage/penetration, it's even better. The "Deadly Spring" stuff that basically says "Yeah No, your bows and crossbows aren't THAT good, also matters. It kind of jives with the notion that smaller hunting bows and crossbows, along with just generally bad bows, are dicks at penetrating armor. Any armor. Especially stuff like mail or better, but even relatively cheap armor.

On the other hand some such weapons aren't very hard to use really, and a bunch of fishwives who got an afternoon's instruction once and practice occasionally can be a nasty little nuisance with crossbows like that on a wall. (With medieval medicine, getting shot in the face or eye with a pissy little 1-3 damage crossbow, well that can kill you. Or get you killed, whether by making you fall off a ladder, or because you bled like a stuck pig for a while after getting shot and are too weak and disabled to seriously make a good fight when you get inside. Or maybe you get an infection and die screaming in surgery or from the infection anyway.)

>>43816536
Adding onto this I played as a skilled swordsman and because I was up against an orc wearing armor I opted to attack his unprotected neck. It made my cutting damage increase and he had no armor to cover himself with so it all counted for injury, at a small penalty to my roll to hit. Things like this can give very meaningful choices in combat, and fights change drastically depending on enemies and their numbers. A straight 4v4 is hugely different to a 4v1 and 4v12. Beinh overrun is incredibly lethal.

>>43811995
>space opera in GURPS, instead of Wild Talents or Traveller

Wow, it's almost like you don't know about GURPS Traveller. Which has a vast library of supplements including fourth edition support.

>>43814244
>>43814841
>>43815596

Every game system has a very aggressive action economy. Not because one round = some arbitrary length of time, but because it's the most limited resource in the game.

In oWoD, we have V:tM. The best physical discipline by far was Celerity. Eventually they went through several cycles of nerfs before it was brought under control. In W:tA, Rage provides the same mechanic, and allows even newbie werewolves to go toe-to-toe with powerful enemies like vampires and survive.

In Shadowrun, at least in 3e which I played, initiative and reaction were the almighty stats of combat. A well optimized character had several rounds worth of actions in every turn. Again, the action economy was all-important.

In D&D, from the very first core book, the action economy has been paramount. Extra attacks per attack action, the Haste spell. Quick, 3.x and Pathfinder players, what spell will your 20th level Wizard cast first? Time Stop of course, where you action for more actions. The only edition where this hasn't been true is 4.x, and that's due to draconian restrictions on the action economy that only illuminate how important actions are.

All four of these systems have different round:in-universe-time ratios.

The only difference here is this. With GURPS, many good actions like spellcasting and shooting a bow take multiple actions to do. Even melee types should be using feints and evaluates between swings. You're not expected to attack every round. So when you lose a round due to a stun or crowd control effect, it's not the end of the world like it can be in one of those other games.

>>43767849
Why are the dicks of "Why is GURP's dick sucked so much" threads sucked so much here?

Is it really the best topic out there? Or is it just that /tg/ has no imagination?

>>43816996
>Even melee types should be using feints and evaluates between swings.
What stops you from doing a melee attack every turn? I'm reading the combat rules at the moment but it hasn't all sunk in yet.

>>43817103
A Feint can lead to a devestating attack, since you'll know how affected your enemy will be. If you know his chances to avoid your attack is horribly slim you might opt for a more dangerous move to take him down. Evaluating also gives nice bonuses to use if you can reliably fend off the other's blows.

Nothing is an absolute stop by default, but other options can be better.

>>43815548

Mage: The Ascension. Those are the two that come to mind. M:tA was a landmark of a game when it came out, but it was also something of a mess. Second edition under Phil Brucato turned it from a great idea into a great implementation and suddenly flexible spontaneous improvisational magic was playable.

Obviously Ars Magica came long before and also was both innovative and anticipated the great ideas in MtA. As another anon points out, Syntatic Magic was a first swing at this and really does have a very very similar mechanic.

Ritual Path Magic doesn't "rip them off" but it definitely borrows the best of those ideas and develops them rather than being something new itself. IMO it's a further development that improves structure and playability-- kind of a Mage 3rd edition that strips out the post-modernist nonsense and greatly improves the system as a game system. RPM with Threshold-limited magic option from Thaumatology is very very close to M:tA.

>>43817103
Nothing's stopping you (unless your GM broke out the Last Gasp rules), it's just not the best strategy most of the time.

If your opponent is skilled enough that you're trading attacks and defenses, it's probably in your best interest to feint to penalize his defenses or step back and evaluate (that +3 bonus to hit can be sacrificed as part of a deceptive attack). A brief interlude in attacks can help score that decisive, fight-ending blow.

Similarly, if your opponent is a brick wall, evaluate can be used to lessen the penalty for attacking a high-risk, high-reward hit location like the Face (-5), Skull (-7), or Eye (-9); more obscurely, you could also do a feint to counter the bonus the enemy gets for you attacking with a Telegraphic Attack, netting a larger bonus you can put towards hit locations.

>>43815548
>Only gripe
> Divine Favor / Sorcery / RPM integration

Yes yes yes. I agree, but that's a natural next step in the evolution. First we'd want to see the final core magic system written up: a skill/energy based magic system similar to the current core system, only with a spell creation system like you get in every other power system.

THEN you can release a Grimoire that gives you a long happy spell list, perhaps even the one in Magic, but written so that each spell has its stats when designed as a Divine Favor effect, an RPM effect, or a Sorcery Spell. Especially the latter, because once it's written up as a Sorcery Spell you can then freely convert it to any other kind of power like a Chi power or Psi ability. That's basically the Grand Unified Theory of spell creation systems for GURPS right there.

For non-GURPS junkies, it means you have nearly any effect you want already written up and precalculated, ready to use.

For hard-core game system nerds, it means you could take the D&D 3.5 Spell Compendium, or Shadowrun's Street Grimoire and do a perfect spell-by-spell conversion to GURPS using RAW. Or create any spell you could possibly imagine for that custom setting you've crafted.

One thing you'll never have is a perfect canon RPM-->other spell system conversion rule, because RPM is a "soft" improvisational system based on GM judgment on the fly. Like MtA is. It simply won't ever have hard and fast conversion rules, because avoiding hard and fast rules is why there's an RPM in the first place. But extensive spell-by-spell guidelines will sharpen GM judgement and make this much easier to adjudicate.

>>43817229
Both Divine Favor and Sorcery represent supernatural effects as Advantages; DF just hides the points. Learned Prayers are the same as Learned Spells (Advantages bought as AA's for 1/5 cost), and the cost directly determines the prerequisite level of Divine Favor and in turn roughly determines the minimum Reaction roll required to produce the effect if requested by a General or Specific Prayer.

>>43816423

GURPS combat is hugely flexible. So there's no "one way" it works out. The GM gets a ton of campaign switches to allow him to get the exact system he wants.

The first spectrum you select along is the narrative --> map axis. At one extreme, you could do abstract ranges (short/medium/long). At the other, make the ranges more precise (number of yards). From there you get to maps and minis rules.

Next is the cinematic/realism scale. At one extreme, you have people getting thrown around by explosions and mighty blows but able to quickly get back up and into the action once combat is over. In other words, cinematic, like most action movies. It can include genre conventions like "bullet-proof nudity" which justifies characters in stripper gear, or sexy armor somehow protecting them. At the other end you have gritty realism in combat, where getting hit will seriously fuck you up. And after combat, you have to deal with blood loss and crippling. Death is a dead-serious possibility.

Finally, complexity. You can add stuff like hit location tables, weapon damage and breakage, an extensive combo system, the Action Points / exhaustion system, etc.

A huge newbie mistake I see in GMing is turning on all the options. Even the ones that are mutually exclusive, like doing bulletproof nudity AND gritty realism. It's best to be sparing and start simple.

The biggest newbie mistake for PLAYERS is that they overlook Aim, Feint, and Evaluate actions. You feel like you have to swing your sword every round because that's how you play D&D. But if instead you use this current round to set up for a good hit next round, you're much less likely to miss vs a skilled opponent. As opposed to flailing around missing round after round.

The other big mistake is players not realizing how bad it is to get hit with a sword or shot with a gun. Sounds silly, but in other games you can get run through a few times and still be in the action, so people are used to that.

>>43816561
>Deadly spring vs default bows

This is a good example. But it also reveals two other things that have happened in RPGs in general.

Keep in mind, when most of the games like D&D were written, the historical literature was saying that swords were very heavy and clumsy, cleaved open armor like an axe, "studded leather", and that bows routinely penetrated armor. Oh, and that katanas are uber. ARMA and HEMA (in part inspired by these games) spurred a call for better scholarship that eventually started dispelling these myths. That process is still under way. So older games are written with these assumptions in mind and many gamers still expect things to work that way. A lot of movies, books, tv shows, etc. are built with those in mind too.

So GURPS trying to be realistic has had to retcon a lot of its material. Like the rule that a third of the weight of an edged weapon is its scabbard-- they'll freely admit that this was meant to reflect better scholarship that was around in time for Martial Arts and Low Tech, but came out AFTER fourth ed's basic set were published.

But you also sometimes want to run a game where a bastard sword weighs five pounds and thieves all wear studded leather. To honor a genre. So even now they want those options available.

It's actually a tricky problem. Cool Ethnic Weapon rules are a great way to handle it moving forward, especially as weapons and martial arts styles go in and out of fashion. But in a game like Dungeon Fantasy, you just give players what they expect and politely tell historical realism to fuck off.

>>43817103

The other two anons answered it perfectly. I'll only add that everyone asks that when they learn the combat system.

What happens is that very skilled fighters can spend a lot of time swinging and missing (being parried/dodged/blocked) each other. Those non-attack moves set you up to get a devastating hit on someone a round or two later.

Or let you focus on defense in a gritty realism fight, because as I said before, getting hit with a sword can kill you even if you kill the other guy. Just as in real life. There you use evaluates and feints while you patiently wait for an opening. (It goes pretty fast in a duel.)

I'd do some mock combats with a friend to see what I mean. Just create a few very simple fighters of various types and duel a few times to acquaint yourself with the rules.

Several players I've talked to have their "ah HA! this game rocks!" moment when they realize that the system is rewarding good tactics without heavy-handedly imposing them. You CAN swing every round, but it's smarter to fight more realistically. It ties in with 3d6... those bonuses and penalties always matter, and you can accumulate bonuses to offset more difficult (ie has a skill penalty) maneuvers that are more likely to be game-winners. But there's that nirvana when you realize they they pull this off with a few very simple rules-- the tactical complexity just emerges naturally.

>>43817353

Exactly, but what I'm talking about is precalculating it all, showing the same effect using different systems, and applying it to a fairly complete spellbook.

As a GM who knows GURPS, sure, I can take any advantage and make it a Psi power, Chi power, Sorcery spell, or DF spell. Once the core advantage is written, I can convert between them within a minute or two.

But new GMs can't do that. Or don't want to (understandably). And players like selecting from a catalog.

The current Magic book is a long list of spells valid only under one spell system and totally unrelated to Advantages you use anywhere else. There's no way for a GM to write new spells or modify existing ones, other than just winging it.

It's a little like a 4th ed Bestiary. On one hand, yes you could just create any animal or monster you want. On the other, that's a huge amount of work and a big library of worked examples makes like much easier for everyone.