Friday, September 5, 2014

. . . but GURPS is Big

GURPS is flexible, but GURPS is big.

Yesterday I talked about what I see as a big strength of GURPS, demonstrated.

Today, I want to address what I see as some of its flaws.

GURPS's big flaw is its very depth of choices.* There is a lot out there. It's very completeness, and its plethora of choices that often go in diametrically opposing directions (cinematic rules vs. rules for more realism), makes it tough. It's a big elephant, and while you can eat it a bite at a time it's not clear without some experience, guidance, or specifically narrowed supplements (like the Dungeon Fantasy, Monster Hunters, and Action lines), or settings like Madness Dossier or Banestorm.) And many books, like my own GURPS Martial Arts, are there to make the whole thing bigger.

I get that, I really do.

It's not an easy game to just hand someone and say, play this. It's a system for making your imagination into a shared experience, not a pre-set game with its own assumptions. You can't turn to some kid and hand them a GURPS Basic Set and expect they'll figure out what to do with it. Because you can go so many different ways with it, it's tempting to try to go in all directions at once.

I reject the idea that GURPS is "half a game" or an "incomplete game." It's complete - you have everything in the toolbox even in GURPS Lite to run a wide variety of games, and enough in GURPS Basic Set to play any number more. The supplements after that merely expand or demonstrate what you can do with the basic tools. It's no more half a game than white box D&D is half a game just because you have to make your own dungeons.

But the very size and variety of what's in it makes it a game that demands you know what you want and how to cut it down to size. It's a potential strength (see my last post - flexibility), but it's equally a problem until you get a handle on how to manage it. I think it's worth the effort, but I totally get how much people like a completely "solved" mesh of game rules to game world right out of the box. The GURPS supplements do that, but even then, the many dials you can set means you kind of have to know what to see and where to set them.

How to Be a GURPS GM, which I'm reading now, goes a ways towards helping people do that. My own posts try, too. But it's something I think will always be off-putting to people about the entirety of the GURPS system - it's a big, big toolbox, and not everyone wants or needs that.


* Something that Jeremy French brought up yesterday, even as I was starting work on this post.

16 comments:

  1. Maybe a Pyramid article could codify various play styles and genre conventions into some number of presets - campaign Tones or Styles - independent of genre/setting. Off the top of my head: Hack/Slash, Action/Adventure, Four-Color, Cinematic Widescreen, Simulationist, Gritty, Tacticool, and so on. And without actually reprinting rules from published GURPS material (though that would be nice) the article suggests "packages" of rules and optional rules across all available GURPS books, with page refs, articulating why the options were chosen and how to implement them. Building on your idea of dialing up the detail, the article could explain how that might be done: "When the Action-Adventure hero is bleeding out while defusing the bomb, making temporary use of the optional Bleeding Rules on p. B420" and the like. How can action-hero brawlers kick each other in the head for turn after turn because fights have to be long and dramatic? Answer: Hard to Subdue. In other words, find all the rules that are ideally suited to modeling Genre Convention and bundle them up. This saves the overwhelmed would-be GURPS GM the hassle of reading *all* the books and choosing the combination of rules ideal for his game. Because fundamentally you're spot on: GURPS' biggest advantage is its biggest flaw. It can do almost anything, but knowing how to make it do that is *really* hard.

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    1. Ooh, I walked into that one. Thing is, my knowledge of GURPS 4e is too thin, and what I remember of 3e is tool old. I'd consult, on the qualitative end of things. :)

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    2. Well, there is the Pyramid Write Club to help with these sorts of things . . .

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    3. I think you've been beaten, andi. And since Peter and Douglas are both in that club (I'm assuming), they'll know if you don't follow through!

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  2. My experience is that GURPS issue among the larger hobby is solely one of presentation not content or design. Designing your own game from a toolkit for a campaign has limited appeal. Even Fate, the current market leader among toolkit RPGs, has standalone RPGs. Until that changes GURPS will relegated to being a niche within the larger hobby.

    When that does changes, I believe that GURPS' design and clarity will make it a real contender among non D&D RPGs.

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    1. This comment has been removed by the author.

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    2. I'm not sure what you mean. GURPS has a couple of stand-alone games that don't require Basic Set. Licenses, to be sure, but they exist already. What else are you looking for? Generic stand-alone games along those lines?

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    3. Something like Fantasy Hero Complete.
      https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/herogames/fantasy-hero-complete

      a GURPS Fantasy Complete. I would prefer that it targeted normal level character rather than the over the top 250 pt level of Dungeon Fantasy. But if it a Dungeon Fantasy Complete I could live with that.

      Then all I have to do is say "Buy Dungeon Fantasy Complete" to a prospective GURPS player.

      Then if they are interesting the possibilities of a toolkit RPG then buy into the full line.

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    4. That might be doable. DF is out, because the costs in cannibalizing the entire line in the hopes that costs might be recouped would be huge. But a new, separate, normal-powered one-book solution might be possible since it would be treading new ground.

      It would be nice to hear that it was pitched. I'm working on too much DF at the moment to shift gears back to lesser-powered stuff, but I'd love to see it.

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    5. As someone that loves reading about your DF work (and DF in general) I would be sad if you want to lower-powered stuff.

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  3. Basically what GURPS needs is a 6th edition Runequest to its Basic Roleplaying/D100 System.

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  4. It seems like most games hand the GM a burger, with fries and a drink in the supplements. GURPS is more, "Here's a cow! These supplements contain other farm animals!" A lot of folks, all they wanted was a burger, and now they have to get out the cleaver, and the meat grinder, and the thing, and the other thing... For new GMS, Andi's right. GURPS needs a bit more "How to make a burger" content, I think, and less "Here! More cows!"

    It's not something I think would be workable for SJG, but a series of posts that take a particular game and say "Here are the dials for playing X" would be nice. The various genre books are like that, but they're still like walking into a restaurant, not just getting your burger. (Horror, for example, covers ALL horror; if you just want to run a CoC-style story, you still need to do a fair bit of tweaking before you and your players sit down for that first character creation session.)

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    1. Putting analogies aside, what supplements would be what you want to see more of? Not in general, I mean in specific?

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  5. The third edition seemed more approachable, more readable. The sidebar style was great, as it took some of the wall of text feeling out of reading. I was really disappointed when I saw the formatting of the fourth edition. The more recent books are much better, of course. But, the core books are still a bit to chew.

    What I would like to see are some "lite" expansions. Magic Lite could be based on the magic chapter in the basic set, with just a few changes. Fantasy Lite could pick a few bits out of DF, and away you go. At 5-10 bucks for a PDF, it would sell. You can always do the up sale to the full books.

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    1. I tried to plant the seed for this sort of thing with Steve himself in my interview with him last week.

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