GURPS 4th Edition RPG Announced

Grizzletooth writes "According to GamingReport, at the GAMA tradeshow in Las Vegas today, Steve Jackson Games announced they will release the 4th edition of the GURPS pen-and-paper role playing game. The Steve Jackson Games site has updated its official GURPS page to reflect this announcement." For those not in the know, the GURPS FAQ page explains: "GURPS is the 'Generic Universal RolePlaying System.' It starts with simple rules, and builds up to as much optional detail as you like. The basic rules system is designed to be playable in any background: fantasy or historical; past, present, or future."

Fluffy Article

Half the article talks about the the books appearance, leather, colors, hardback. Wheres the details in the article?

Sean Punch, GURPS Line Editor for the past nine years, and David Pulver, a key contributor responsible for many of the core GURPS supplements, took two years to break the system down and rebuild it, guided by a decade and a half of gamer feedback. The new rules are designed to enhance the key strengths of GURPS: compatibility with all genres and flexibility for the GM. You'll still recognize it, but a lot of little things - and a few big ones! - are different.

I guess I expected a little more details in the article about actual changes in 4, other than the mention of the need for a conversion guide from 3.

Haven't played Gurps in over 10 years, but I remember how easy it was to switch genres game, from mid-evil to tech weapons in game, was rather impressed compared to D&D. But then I moved on to Battletech.

Humm, Maybe its time to pick up version 4 and teach the Kids how to play .

Woo-hoo!!!

I have to admit that I like GURPS its a really good system but it REALLY needed a revamp. Better layout and organisation of its rules and where and when ceratin things applied would be so cool.

I can't wait. I bet my local game store is gonna be a happy bunny when it comes out thats for sure. ;)

I might have to RPG again

What other system allowed for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to battle my Dwarf Mage Bruticus?

Re:I might have to RPG again

Meh. Character creation under Palladium was always a gigantic PITA -- particularly when you got into working out combat skills. And then after that, you're extremely limited in what your character can do forever after.

And of course, their HP / SDC / MDC system grew increasingly broken as they moved on into Rifts, where looking at someone funny can easily crush a tank.

I remember how impressed I was with GURPS after having used Palladium for a few years. More when I sat in on a session of RIFTS last year and wound up having to struggle with all of the problems in the Palladium system.

GURPS could certainly be a lot better, but it's pretty nice so far, I've got to say.

That said, I'm not looking forward too much to 4e unless it's a very substantial improvement. That means paring things down so that combat and skill resolution are extremely easy and fast to get out of the way. The magic system could also stand to be totally redone, and GURPS needs quite a bit of work in extreme circumstances, e.g. 250pt+ characters, especially with heavy duty magic, superpowers, or cybernetics. Right now it's a bit too geared towards characters that aren't terribly far from ordinary.

Funny thing about RPG systems

Because different groups have different ideas of how the game should be played, the rules as written usually don't actually matter as much as one might be led to believe, scanning through all the pages of different rules and statistics and options and tables as I remember doing when I was younger. When it comes down to it, all the material, the minatures, the sourcebooks, the rulesets - all are just tools to help along the storytelling, and fun reading in between sessions.

They do help in some aspects, I have to admit, but if you figure you can do a better job yourself, then you can easily roll your own with the guidance of a meta-system like FUDGE [fudgerpg.com]. The difference between it and something that's big by design like GURPS is mainly a matter of the fluffy pieces of detail, stuff like the exact effects of consuming a case of beer or getting hit with a radiation blast of 1000 rads or how far characters should be able to jump.

Re:Funny thing about RPG systems

You can also get rid of the dice alltogether.
The big flaw behind all rpg games is the idea that randomness is at the heart of reality and at the heart of good games.
Not that I dislike one game of rpg with dice, it can add spice to an action, but as a model to represent reality it is flawed.
Take that football player doing the run of his life, do you think the roll of a d20 against his capacities actually render in any way what is actually happening on the field?

Going further, my group and I even suppressed all rules:
We realized that the rules were basically just a way to force everybody to be coherent with the rest of the group and with the adventure.
We immediatly realized we didnt need that, because nobody in the group wanted to take advantage over the others, but rather wanted the adventure to be really good, from a story telling point of view.
We then realised we that we were actually creating a story alltogether and that it was what mattered. A collective creation based on improvisation, on inspiration and on a collective sense of what the setting is (if we do a cthulhu run, nobody go into machine guns).
At this point of understanding, a gamemaster was not necessary anymore, just a scenarist who knows the grand trend of the present adventure, and tries to keep it on track, but all other players can add content whenever they feel like, it just has to please aesthetically the group. (so meta gaming discussions and rants about bad dice rolls have been replaced by vivid discussions when one tries to convince the others his last idea is actually worth keeping in the flow of the story).

As a matter of fact, being the scenarist of the last story, a cthulhu one, i even had no scenario, just a starting (gloomy gory insane unsane) point, based on the players wishes of characters (one of them was a coroner; so i had to have a body). They didnt know that there was no scenario, but believing in it, they created it themselves pretty easily. It was amazing to watch.
A funny exemple, a new player to the group, who actually didnt take seriously the fact that he could add content, to the question:
"what do you see now that your in front of the house (I just described)?"
answered, expecting to kinda make fun of the process:
"a chinese man!"
"what does he look like, where is he?"
"No, non, NO, I WAS JOKING!"
"hmm i like the idea, let's keep it"
the others:
"yes, a chinese man, at night, on the other side of the street" "yes, watching us from the shadows" "his face is motionless" "oh yes, but he has seen we've seen him (going into character) this guy gave me the shivers. Let's go into that house, we have to ..."
Imagine the face ot the new player as this flowed naturally.
And since, i later read a description of what the fungi of mi-go look like when they desguise at human, this player even managed to bring into the story the enemy. Which was neat, since my story already had strage fungis in it.
Tell me about randomness!

Applicable to computer RPG's?

I don't know much about GURPS but I'm curious: is it possible to use GURPS in a computer RPG, like the AD&D rules have been used? Or is it much more geared toward paper and pencil games?

About time!

I've been waiting for SJG to get off their butts and put out d20 GURPS.

Superman versus the Hulk

The Test to any system is can you "realistically" convert superheroes to the system. We had an interesting experiment to see if Gurps could be used to convert Marvel and D.C. characters for battle. Who would win:

Superman versus the Hulk.
Converting this to Gurps was interesting. Using the comic meeting of the two as the base we had to include the disadvantages. In a quick battle Superman wins with his intelligence, but the NOTHING can stop the savage Hulk. The disadvantages included in the Gurps Supers helped big time.

Batman versus Daredevil
The Batman wins. He plays dirty. Discovers that Daredevil is a one trick pony. But the setting was a big x factor. Don't run into the devil in Hell's kitchen.

Ah GURPS

The system you may or may not like, but most of the World Books are works of genius; most are also designed that the background and creative material are sharpely separated from the GURPS underpinnings, allowing for easy adaptation to other game systems.

Of course, it's the flexibility inherant in the GURPS system that allows them to put out a Conan fantasy game, a Time Travelling book, a 'Robots Took Over The Earth' book, and a book about Bunnies, all on the same shelf.

But does it...

I've never taken a close look at GURPS. I wonder if it fixes my two major pet peeves about fantasy combat in every system I've ever seen:

1. The net benefits of full plate mail outweigh all other armor configurations. That's pure nonsense, but the rules make it so "middle" armors like chainmail (which should be the most useful armor for a fighter) are only for people who can't afford full plate.
2. The net benefits of the "longsword" outweigh all other weapons. Staves and axes, in particular, which should be fantastically effective, always pale next to the longsword (which isn't even a real weapon).

Steve Jackson Games: A company still not recovered

Steve Jackson Games changed direction in 1991 (I think) when they were raided by the US Secret Service. Before that they'd basically made small wargames and strategy games. I think their cash cow was "Car Wars", but they also had success with Ogre, Raid on Iran, and Illuminati.

After the SS raid, they seemed to derive their primary income from GURPS. And starting in about 2000, they began supplementing that with gag card games like "chez geek", "munchkin", and "ninja burger".

Frankly, the pre-SS SJG was a lot cooler.

GURPS is great

For those not in the know, GURPS is a great platform for building your own pen and paper RPG. Especially fun is crafting your character's personality from a huge list of positive and negative traits - nothing quite like playing a one-eyed kleptomaniac midget with a high IQ

Too little, too late

I wanted something like GURPS for years for assorted modern-day and SF campaigns. Unfortunately, Steve Jackson games refused to issue the metric version of GURPS in English, and I flat out refuse to run a science fiction game in old-fashioned units. Feet and inches and hogsheads are OK in pseudo-mediaeval games like D&D, for flavor, but I don't want to be working out storage capacities of starships in cubic feet or laser energy in ergs.

Then WotC released d20 under an open license, and now I can get Call of Cthulhu and d20 modern and T20 (Traveller d20) and mix and match as I like, and do all the SF stuff in metric. SJG had their chance, but I think d20 is going to wipe out GURPS.

That said, I may yet pick up a copy of GURPS 4th Edition if they drag it into the 20th Century. (Well, the 19th really, but let's not be too pedantic...)