You know, I’m not really sure where I am with RPGs. I like them, but not in the way I used to. Just a few months ago, I would have bought anything I thought sounded cool. I own over 200 RPG manuals, so it came a surprise when I stopped feeling good about buying them about a month ago. I felt like there was no RPG I could justify buying anymore because I had so many, there wasn’t anything I didn’t already have.

Which, interestingly, ties into rediscovering GURPS, which is what this post is going to talk about.
My first game system EVER was GURPS. Specifiably, the Discworld Roleplaying Game, also known as the funniest game book ever written.

Anyway, I loved GURPS to death. Even though I never played and RPG before it, the idea of a totally classless RPG was CRAZY to me. The rules had a logic to them I wasn’t expecting, the whole thing made sense. It didn’t even use those funny dice I heard so much about. IT only needed three six-sided dice, which I had from playing the MechWarrior collectible miniatures game.

To make a long story short, I then bought a few dozen different games, played almost none of them but Savage Worlds, and then I found myself a few months ago. Somehow hating GURPS, a game I only played five times and loved. I then looked through my GURPS 3rd and realized GURPS how much I loved GURPS when I was thirteen.  So I bought fourth edition GURPS.

Skip here if I’m getting to boring

GURPS fourth feels like a beast from another age in a lot of ways. So many games these days are really tightly designed, without many quirky details. Most also have abandoned the silly idea that and RPG needs to represent reality. GURPS does neither, it explicitly lists rules for every fucking thing the authors thought seemed like a good idea, and all of them are to be ‘realistic’.

This kind of thing drives me up a wall in most systems, but GURPS is weird in that it has five-thousand rules, but all of them are are easy to understand. In fact, GURPS is one of the easiest systems to explain to new players I’ve ever found. It uses a very brute force method of design, where the authors simply took the most obvious choice for everything. Of course, I might just think it’s obvious because my gaming assumptions are all subconsciously based on GURPS, but it seemed really intuitive when I learned it.

When I say this game has rules for everything, I really mean it. It’s got rules for radiation, bleeding, infection, magic, psychic powers, superheroes, robots, strangulation, all types of armor, making gadgets, vehicles, an entire sub-system of character creation is dedicated how your players deal with dimensional and time travel! But the crazy thing is you don’t have to use any of them if you don’t want to. It has rules for it all though, so you don’t have to wing it.
Unless you want to wing it, of course.

So I should talk about the jewel in the crown of GURPS, which is the character creation system. It’s a point based affair, with only one type of points for everything. You have basic attributes, skills, advantages, techniques, and you can get points by taking disadvantages. In fact it’s one of the earliest systems that rewarded you in some areas for taking drawbacks in others. If you know anything about gaming, you’ve encountered this stuff before. GURPS just has, again, rules for anything.

You really can make any sort fo character you can thing of out of one book in GURPS 4e. But a sad consequence of the rules is that if you have players (like I’ve had for a number of years) who don’t think of characters, they just pick the most powerful traits they can find, GURPS will not immediately reward them for making a character with more personality, something I rather like in allot of indie RPGs.

Which is pretty much how I’m going to sum up GURPS. It’s a box of Legos, really. A bunch of fun, colorful blocks that you can build to make just about anything. Sadly, if someone doesn’t know what to build out of the blocks, you’ll probably end up with a rather random collection of pieces of different clashing colors that don’t match up well.

Hey, that sounded like a conclusion

It could be, but one huge aspect of GURPS I need to talk about. GURPS has an awful GMing section. It’s filled with advice that has nothing to do with running a good game. For example, it has a whole sidebar on mapping of all things, and specifically how to make it HARDER for the players. It will often tell you to not make encounters too hard or too easy, but not tell you HOW to not make an encounter too hard or too easy.

And the biggest problem is that it doesn’t tell you how to use GURPS. It doesn’t explain how to choose which of the thousand-and-one rules you’ll need for your campaign. In fact, it only barely touches on using the rule like that at all.

So, you could say GURPS is like getting a PC today with a manual for an Apple 2. Sure, you can probably figure out some stuff from it, but you’ll still be way off.

Wait, but you like it?

Hell yes! GURPS doesn’t explain how to use the rules well, but they CAN be used well. It gives you everything you need to run just about anything, it just doesn’t explain how, which is kinda sad. But the thing is, I did learn how to run a game. I learned it from Spirit of the Century, I learned it from The Shadow of Yesterday, I learned it from MouseGauard. My experience with a lot of games I bringing to GURPS, and it’s awesome.

So, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going decompress after writing this ludicrously long post. G’bye!