Date Reviewed: July 25, 2009
(Updated Sept. 2010)
Critical
Kobold Rating:
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That's the sound of a good game!
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GURPS is not only the sound
this kobold reviewer makes after eating a plateful of salmon past
its freshness date, it's also a venerable role playing system
hearkening back to the mid 1980's. An acronym for Generic
Universal Role Playing System, GURPS is now
in its fourth incarnation. The Basic Set consists of two books, the
Characters book and the slightly shorter Campaigns
book. Interestingly, as a set, the Characters book has pages
numbered up to 328, and the Campaign volume picks up from
there with page 329 as its first page. You can therefore reference
rules and pages from the set without having to specify which book
the material is in.
I'll be reviewing and
describing both books here, as the set they were intended to be, so
the review may run a little long. Bathroom breaks are acceptable, if
you can do so quietly.
BACKGROUND
INFO
As a true generic system, GURPS sets out to
act simply as a framework for designing absolutely any type of
campaign your group wants to run. The Basic Set can be used to craft
settings for a medieval fantasy game, historical Renaissance, World
War I, space opera, gritty pulp 30's noir, super heroes, Gothic
horror, post apocalyptic, time travelling, Muppets, you name it. The
Basic Set is filled with prit' nigh everything you need to make any
or all of these settings pop to life. You can emulate any other role
playing game on the market with GURPS, ostensibly.
For the longest time (um, say, twenty- plus
years), I rather ignored GURPS. I guess I was so busy with my
pre-packaged game worlds that I never saw the need for a universal
system. Truth be told, after first getting the GURPS Basic Set
and perusing the books, I wasn't impressed. I believe I was letting
the fact that I personally didn't need a generic universal role
playing system tarnish my perception of the books.
But I let what I'd read percolate in the back
of my little kobold brain for a while, and then came back to GURPS
later with my curiosity piqued. I've read so many games lately that
were almost what I wanted. Whose mechanics were almost
what I liked. What if this GURPS thing was flexible enough to
mix and match any setting, genre, mood and theme? What if it could
really allow me to create juuuuust the game I wanted, from scratch?
I had to find out.
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CHARACTERS
The Characters volume gets us started.
Unsurprisingly, it deals with whipping up a character for play. Game
Masters first decide how powerful they want their players'
characters to be by assigning Character Point limits. Players will
use these points to buy abilities and skills for their PCs. A
"normal" hero will have between 100-200 points. By comparison, a
young child may have only 25, and a demigod or horrific demon lord
come to Earth may have 750 or 1000 points. (I'm going to refer to
these as "C-Points" from here on out.)
ATTRIBUTES
To use their C-Points, players start by buying
their four Basic Attributes:
-
Strength
-
Dexterity
-
Intelligence
-
Health
Every basic ability starts at "10". To raise
theses scores, players can spend C-Points, or they can lower these
scores to gain more C-Points to use in other aspects of char-gen.
GURPS personalities can have scores anywhere in the 1-20 range, but
most normal adult humans will have between 8 and 12 in each
attribute.
After you set your basic attributes, you
determine Secondary Abilities.
-
Damage
is how much ass-kicking you deliver bare-handed in a fight.
-
Basic Lift
is the weight you can tote before movement penalties or hernias
become a concern.
-
Hit Points
are your ability to sustain wound damage and keep comin' back
for more. They begin equal to your Strength.
-
Will
measures your resistance to psychological stress.
-
Perception
is your overall level of alertness.
-
Fatigue Points
are physical energy reserves. Losing these will tire you or make
you lose consciousness, but is unlikely to be
lethal.
-
Basic Speed
measures your reflexes and physical reaction time.
-
Basic Move
is how much ground you can cover using your own two feet.
Your scores in all the secondary abilities are
derived from your Basic Attributes. (For example, Basic Lift is
based on your Strength multiplied by itself, then divided by five.)
Again you can use C-Points to raise your secondary scores, or you
can lower some ability ratings to earn some C-Points to apply
elsewhere. Higher attributes means higher skill scores, which is a
good thing. (I'll explain the game's resolution system later on, but
higher numbers on your PC sheet are always advantageous.) |
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CHARACTER
ASPECTS
Now, from here on out, every trait, aspect,
skill, and power your PC has are bought using your remaining
C-Points. The first half of the Characters book is dedicated
to lists and descriptions of choices, broken up into Advantages,
Disadvantages, Skills, and various powers such as Magic or Psionics.
A beneficial skill or advantage will cost you C-Points, while a
Disadvantage will give you points. Even things such as your wealth
level, and therefore social status, are bought with C-Points. An
"average" wealth status costs nothing, but you can spend C-Points to
become Wealthy, or Filthy Rich. Conversely, gain some C-Points by
lowering your status to Poor, or Dead Broke.
The GMs job is to let players know which of all
these choices the players may buy. "Combat Reflexes" may sound like
a gnarly Advantage to buy for 15 C-Points, but perhaps the GM is
running a game where your PCs are children in a fairy tale, a la
Chronicles of Narnia, and she doesn't feel it’s appropriate for
your 11 year old school boy to have the ability to quick-draw a
Glock. Similarly, it may be perfectly cool in a galaxy-spanning
space opera to have an alien PC with the "Extra Head" advantage
(only 15 C-Points… per head! ), but it would look a tad out
of place in a Victorian investigative game in the vein of Sherlock
Holmes.
Due to the all-setting-encompassing nature of
GURPS, Advantages run the gamut of possibilities. Some
examples include: Clairsentience, Cybernetics, Doesn't Breathe,
Fashion Sense, Dark Vision, Military Rank, Microscopic Vision,
Rapier Wit, Slippery, and Unkillable. There are oodles of
them listed. I'm talkin' metric oodles. Like, 300 of 'em. Just about
any ability you can imagine can be brought into the game by using
one of the gimmicks listed here.
Disadvantages are chosen by the player
to add character to their… uh, character, and to gain a few more
C-Points. Disads include such fun choices as Alcoholism, Easy to
Kill, Enemies, Greed, Klutz, Sadism, Short Attention Span, Weirdness
Magnet, and the ever-popular Social Disease. Again, there are tons
of them to choose from.
Disads may be "bought off" during game play by
spending C-Points later, if you have a good in-game reason.
F'rinstance, you could choose Combat Paralysis to gain 15 C-Points,
making you sort of a useless, whimpering lump when the group is
trying to fight their way through a mob of vicious ghouls guarding
the exit to the haunted tomb. But perhaps after several game
sessions of watching your comrades wade knee-deep in bodies, you've
become inured to violence, and the GM may allow you to spend points
to remove the Combat Paralysis hindrance.
Sometimes, the GM may assign you a Disad, if it
fits the storyline. For example, maybe your PC was caught staring
into the blinding flash of a photon grenade, and the GM slaps you
with the Blindness hindrance for a few scenes.
SKILLS
Next, we move on to
Skills. Each skill is linked
to an ability, either basic or secondary. The Accounting skill, for
example, is based on Intelligence.
You buy skills with C-Points, but there's a
catch or two. Every skill is also rated as Easy, Average, Hard, or
Very Hard, based on relative criteria. The Beam Weapons skill is
Easy, because anyone can be taught to point a laser gun and pull the
trigger. Not very complex. ("Just make sure the barrel is pointed
away from you, cadet.") Astronomy, however, is a Hard skill,
requiring education, training, equipment, time, experience, and
concentration.
To buy skill levels, you need to compare the
difficulty of the skill with the level of mastery you want to have
in that skill. An Easy skill costs one C-Point, and equals your
attribute. But harder skills require more points to be equal
to your attribute. (There's a handy chart for all the skill costs.)
To illustrate, let's assume your foul-tempered
goblin PC has a Dexterity of 12. You want Brawling (an Easy skill)
and Blowpipe (a Hard skill), both based on Dexterity. Brawling for
one C-Point equals your Dexterity score, so you now have Brawling at
12. But Blowpipe is a Hard skill, and so spending one C-Point on
that skill only gives you a score of your [Dex -2]. So
your Blowpipe score is only 10. You can spend more C-Points to
increase your Blowpipe rating, but according to the chart, you'll
need to spend four C-Points to get it equal to your Dex score of 12.
Clearly, PCs concentrating in harder skills are
going to have fewer areas of expertise, while PCs staying to Easy
talents will be able to afford much more of them, becoming the
proverbial Jacks of All Trades. Many skills can be used untrained,
using a default score. These are skills anybody could take a shot
at, such as Acting. If you're not a trained actor, you can still
give it a go using a default score of your IQ -5. There are rules
for specializing in skills and specific techniques as well, and any
skill that's somehow not on the extensive GURPS list can be added
with almost no effort by the GM, based on common sense.
Listed skills cover the spectrum of Tech
Levels, so Alchemy can be found with Bicycling, Brain Hacking,
Economics, Electronics, Exorcism, Erotic Art, Intelligence Analysis,
Monowire Whip, Scuba, Vacuum Suit, and Zen Archery. |
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MAGIC
The next section of GURPS Characters
deals with Magic. PCs can buy the Magery advantage, and then they
use either Fatigue Points or Hit Points to fuel magical effects.
(Casting spells is physically taxing, brother.) Being GURPS, there
are rules for creating and modifying your magic system (such as
making it a religious art rather than a wizardly one), and rules for
making magic items or totems (staves, wands, etc.) There are also
pre-made spell lists with enchantments broken up into classes, such
as healing spells, necromantic spells, mind control spells, and fire
and water spells.
All the basics from high fantasy are here, of
course, and the list includes Create Air, Sense Foes, Lightning,
Explosive Fireball, Identify, Continual Light, Deflect Missile, Icy
Weapon, Fog, and the fraternity party favorite, Summon Demon, just
to name a few. You choose spells as you choose skills, spending
C-Points, and most spells are Hard or Very Hard skills. Failed
spellcasting usually just means a fizzled attempt, but there's the
possibility of a critical failure leading to energy backlash on the
mage. Owch.
PSIONICS
The follow up section to Magic is Psionics, a
much smaller chapter, consisting of only a few pages. The two arts
are similar in function, but different in setting. Psi powers, as
the book explains, are basically faster and easier to use, but of
more limited functionality than magic spells. They fit more into a
sci-fi genre campaign than magic would, even though some of their
effects mimic magic spells. (If you're feeling giddy as a GM, use
both in your campaign. A PC mastering magic and psionics will be a
serious badass!)
Psi talents are actually entire areas of
knowledge, and include things like ESP, Telepathy, Psychokinesis,
Psychic Healing, and Teleportation. Each psi talent has a level, and
you buy levels with a set amount of C-Points. Within each talent are
several abilities that you can learn, however, and they come from
the Advantages list. For example, The Psychokinesis psi power allows
you learn to use Binding, Damage Resistance, Flight, Telekinesis,
Walk on Air, and others. These are all from the Advantages section
of the book. So psionics is rather like an Advantages package deal,
with advantages being learned as you train your mind in that psi
talent. So get your Jedi mojo going, my young padawans!
EQUIPMENT
Finally, we're done with C-Points! Our PCs are
created! But they're buck naked! Well, not really.
There are Technology Levels in GURPS,
and some skills and equipment won't be available in certain Tech
Levels in your campaigns. A pirate PC in the late 1600's Age of Sail
era (TL 4) is gonna have a hard time plundering with an electrolaser
carbine from the year 2034 (TL 9.) So how do you know what's what?
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The Characters book has detailed
chapters on weapons, armor, and thingeemabobs from every tech level.
There are lists of random equipment popular with characters (wooden
plow, cutting torch, satellite phone, wheelbarrow, tent, lockpicks)
divided into categories such as Camping Gear, Spy Gear, Medical
Gear, Tools, etc. You buy this stuff with your starting wealth,
which is based on your campaign's tech level, your social status,
and any wealth advantages you bought during char-gen. Rather than
make PCs account for every sock and shaving kit they own, PCs have a
monthly cost of living that covers basics like rent, food, and
clothes. They need to pay this cost or lose social status, which
could result in such in-game repercussions as poor NPC reactions,
servants quitting, reputations being sullied, business deals falling
through, or imprisonment for debt.
Characters wraps up by describing how to
improve your PCs, using C-Points awarded by the GM after each
adventure. You can improve abilities or skills, or buy new
advantages or skills, using the charts given to determine the cost
of it all.
Seriously, using this system, you can come up
with any sort of character for any sort of game you
want to run.
At this point, your players are ready to do
some GURPSing! Let's move on to Campaigns… |
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CAMPAIGNS
The second book of the GURPS Basic set,
Campaigns is really a GM guide, which delves into details that
the ref needs to know for running the game, or designing or
modifying rules for their own deviant pleasures. I'm not going to
spend as much time on this volume, because each section is mainly a
collection of rules clarifications, examples, and optional variants
for the game. There's no need to try to cover them all here, or I
may as well just rewrite the book. So, let's just hit the main
points of interest.
System
mechanics
The basic GURPS resolution is a "3d6 Roll
Under" mechanic. That means that for ability or skill checks, you
sum up the toss of three knucklebones, and hope you roll under your
stat or skill score. This is why previously I mentioned that higher
stats are always beneficial, whether it's attribute scores or skill
levels. That's pretty much it. Of course, there may be modifiers,
but that's the gist of it, always. A roll of 3 or 4 is always
considered a success, while 17 or 18 is always a failure. So no
matter how slick your PC is, she can always have a bad day if you
roll too high.
Combat is basically a skill check. You roll to
use karate or a gun or a grenade or a spell, and success means
you've earned a chance of hitting your target. I say a chance
because most often your wary foe will get to make a defensive roll
of some sort to avoid your attack. Only if their defense roll fails
does your attack actually strike true. (If you roll a critical hit,
though, they don't get to roll their defense. Ha ha, suckas!) Armor
absorbs damage rather than making you harder to hit, so there's
nothing along the lines of "armor class" or static defense numbers
to overcome. (Armor actually divides weapon damage, so a bullet
striking a heavy futuristic battle vest would only do, say, "quarter
damage.")
Melee weapons do damage based on the user's
Strength, plus perhaps a modifier for the weapon. There's a
difference in 'swinging' damage and 'thrusting' damage in GURPS,
although each are based on your PCs strength, and are usually 1d6
with a modifier in the -2 to +2 range. Also, each weapon has a
connotation indicating what type of damage it does; impaling,
crushing, burning, cutting, corrosive, fatiguing, etc. There are
rules for how each of these damage types affect armor, modify
injuries, etc, but they're not relevant enough to go into here, and
can be ignored if you'd like. They're just more fun options to play
with for those who like crunchier rules to their bloodshed.
So, a
baton does damage based on the PC's "swinging" Strength damage with
no modifier, while a spear does "thrusting" Strength damage +2.
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Ranged weapons have a set damage, though,
according to the weapon's own deadliness. The .36 caliber revolver
does 2d6-1, and the 7.62mm assault rifle does 5d6+1. A laser pistol
does 3d6, and a heavy blaster does 8d6. (The contemporary bullets do
piercing damage, and the future tech does burning damage.) Remember
that your hit points equal your strength, which averages around 10,
so high powered weapons are nothing to screw around with!
The first chapter of the Campaign guide
is the GM's bible, really; it lists all the common modifiers the GM
may impose on the basic rolls players make, discusses critical
successes and failures, degrees of success, goes into detail
regarding ramifications for rolls involving physical, mental and
magical feats, and offers optional rules for all sorts of
situations. Any modifications to the basic resolution system will be
found in this chapter.
The next chapter deals with combat and the
myriad options therein. All the rules for using those optional
damage types like piercing, cutting, burning, etc. are examined,
with their effects. The main concern with taking damage in GURPS is
that once you've taken 2/3 of your original HP in damage, you start
getting penalties to every task check you make. Fall to zero HP, and
you pass out (sooner or later.) You don't really die until you drop
all the way down to negative your total HP (so someone with
13 HP originally will die if they reach -13.) There are stamina
rolls to ward off death for a while, but the rules above are
guidelines to how long you'll last in a fight.
There are two more follow-up sections on
combat; one provides rules for using tabletop miniatures to visually
represent the carnage, and another section on special combat topics
like homing missiles, massive explosions, automatic gunfire, aerial
and submerged combat, and hit location charts. Another accompanying
section explores the exciting world of wounds and injuries, and
healing. Poisons, falls, diseases, collisions, all those
occupational hazards of the adventuring life are examined.
Some sections on character templates and a
monster catalog make the GM's life easier, followed by a gadget and
gizmo chapter. Throw in a nice section on GM advice, a chapter on
world crafting plus another with samples of pre-made worlds, and
a chapter dedicated to collecting all the tables and charts the game
master could want in one handy spot, and you've got yerself a sweet
little rules book.
THE GOOD
So back in the introduction, I asked, "What
if this GURPS thing …could really work for me, allow me to
create juuuuust the game I wanted, from scratch?"
I have to say, I believe it can. The more I
came back and gave the game a chance, the more I enjoyed the smooth
and common sense system. I liked the options that could make play as
simple or complex as I wanted. I really liked the way the Fourth
Edition Basic Set is laid out, and I think the authors and
designers have done a fantastic job of capturing a full game with
two easy- to- use books. (The books are great looking, by the way;
well organized, color coded sections, easy to read, appropriate
color illustrations.)
And if you want some help with designing your
universe, there are many, many GURPS sourcebooks available. There are
books for settings, books for technology, books for culture, even
books for emulating other brand-name role playing game lines. You
don't even need to get updated 4th Ed sourcebooks; I'm
lead to believe that many older books are perfectly and easily
adaptable to the new edition with practically no fuss. |
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So GURPS is exactly what it sets out to be: a
sweet, truly universal and good generic system that allows
GMs to craft any campaign they want. It does so by setting up a
simple and absolutely functional and malleable framework, giving you
ideas, then turning you loose. THAT'S what role playing is all
about.
THE
NEUTRAL
If you're buying something that's generic and
universal, you need to accept the fact that you'll need to create
your entire campaign yourself. Sure, it'll help if you want
to buy another sourcebook to give you ideas and get you started (GURPS
China, GURPS Aztecs, GURPS Egypt, GURPS Upper East Sheboygan, etc.),
but no matter what, be prepared to do a lot of thinking about which
rules, skills, powers, tech levels, and everything else you
want to use in your game before you let your players run amok. This
might be a bit daunting for new GMs.
Also, once you get experienced characters with
lots of C-Points to throw around, you'll have PC sheets filled to
poppin' with lists of advantages, disadvantages, skills, and quirks.
A 400 or 500 point PC can have a grocery list of each of these,
making the page very crowded indeed. (And forget about a 700 or 800
point monstrosity!) This is a neutral feature for me because while
it certainly makes for a colorful PC, I also cringe at seeing that
much stuff written down. This kobold likes his skills and
stats lists a little more manageable, that's all.
THE EVIL
Just a note to the new: Do not try to
run a GURPS game using all the rules at once. Even the game
authors say this is not the way to go. The books are chock full of
choices, and you need to pick the ones you want. Start off nice and
easy, then as you get the hang of the basic rules, add some options
in. After you've played a few games where your PCs have generically
wrestled bad guys and had fisticuffs with henchmen, then go ahead
and introduce more detailed rules for grappling, and specific hand
to hand combat techniques or martial arts.
You may even want to start with the
free GURPS Lite rules, available for downloading,
and run a few sessions using those before putting money into the
hardbound books.
Closing Thoughts
Even after I decided I really liked GURPS, I
didn't hang onto it originally. I have several other games in the running/
planning stages, and I felt I still just didn't need a generic system. So, I
traded my Basic Set away to get my hands on something new and
shiny.
Alas, as soon as I did so,
and for a while afterwards, I rather wished I'd not made that decision,
because somewhere down the line, I may indeed want a generic system to
slap together something new and exciting for my group, and GURPS had
everything I needed to do that. I kept thinking about the GURPS
books, and eventually I knew I had to acquire the set again. So that should tell long-time readers of this kobold's
work something about the coolness that this game contains. I rarely
miss a game once I get rid of it, so for me to actively want
something back that I've given away, it must have some serious
potential. So, I did re-acquire the Basic Set, along with
several additional sourcebooks. (Kobold's
note: A year after I wrote this review originally, I now have
nine GURPS books on my shelves, and due to the beauty of a
generic system, I don't even have to use them for a GURPS game; they
make awesome reference books for any other rpg I happen to be
running.)
So, thanks for bearing with me through the
entire review. Believe me, I just barely scratched the surface of
all the goodies loaded into GURPS 4th Edition Basic
Set. If you're hunting for something to satisfy your gnawing
role playing craving but you're not sure what you want, get yourself
some GURPS. It might just be what you're lookin' for.
Plus, it's just fun to say.
Gurps!
Gurrrrrps!
Guuuuurps!
Gurpsgurpsgurps!
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