Media Notes / GURPS

(aka: GURPS)

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In 1986, Steve Jackson Games released the first edition of the GURPS Basic Set. Although the system has roots in Jackson's Melee, Wizard, and The Fantasy Trip, GURPS was developed in direct response to Hero Games' Champions: The Super Roleplaying Game (the original Point Buy game). The name comes from both Steve Jackson's description of what he wanted and the in-house code for the project, "The Great Unnamed Role Playing System". However, when the time came to release the product, they had not been able to come up with a better name for it.

As a generic system, GURPS has no inherent story or background, although a number of settings have been developed and published specifically for the system, and others have been adapted; see GURPS Settings.

For those curious about where GURPS fits in the taxonomies of game mechanics, GURPS is point-based and skill-based rather than level- and class-based. All tasks are resolved by rolling three six-sided dice, creating a bell-curve of probability instead of a flat line of equal chance.^note This serves to partially counteract Min-Maxing by adding a sort of "diminishing returns" logic to one's probability of success, since past a certain point each increase in skill level gives a smaller boost to the success rate than the one before. Success is awarded if the total of the die roll is equal to or less than a target number, usually a character's skill level. The difficulty of a task is represented by a modifier to the character's skill level, and not by the target number itself. All modifiers can only apply to that target number, and never to the number rolled on the dice.

In combat, each round represents one second, which is a point of contention among people who argue the merits of roleplaying systems. If you want to do anything in combat that's more complex than moving and attacking, GURPS will require you to describe your tactics in terms of several successive one-second-long maneuvers, and then go through several rounds of combat before you discover what the results are. It can kind of interrupt the flow if you want to play an Exalted-style game full of elaborate stunts. The Fourth Edition supplement GURPS Action was created to remedy this.

GURPS has been described as a "simulationist" system, because it includes lots of rules that tell you what's happening in the game-world without much affecting the outcome of the relevant event. For example, when an attacker succeeds at his roll to hit, the defender always gets to choose how to defend and makes the appropriate defense roll (unless it was a critical hit or a surprise). The defense could be handled as penalties applied to the attack roll, and the odds of dealing damage would be the same—but in that case, should your opponent avoid taking damage, you wouldn't know if it was because you missed entirely, or nearly hit but the defender dodged, or hit too soft to do any damage, or hit hard enough to do damage but your opponent is too much of a badass to notice. This is helpful to game masters narrating the combat because it tells them exactly what to narrate, but it does take longer.

Perhaps the best feature of GURPS is the huge number of Sourcebooks that have been written for it. Pick any genre or topic, and you will probably find at least one GURPS book covering it (often available in PDF rather than print form these days). Broad categories are covered in genre books; specific settings may receive their own books. In addition to suggestions and notes regarding the topic of the Sourcebook, each volume invariably includes additions to and errata for the basic rules set.^note With the release of 4th ed., sourcebooks shifted to showing applications and examples of existing Basic Set rule rather than inventing new rules whole cloth. However, rules like Styles, Social Engineering mechanics, and Power Modifiers push the envelope, and several popular books like Spaceships, Ritual Path Magic, and Technical Grappling still do introduce new/optional rules. This has led people to ask why they should buy a so-called "universal system" that requires the purchase of a new rulebook every time the players wish to use that system to play in a new genre. Because of this, GURPS is often compared unfavorably with the Hero System, a universal gaming system whose sourcebooks and supplements have never had to add new rules to the Core Set — though the 4th edition evolution has made such additions less extensive.

On the other hand, new rules aside, many of the supplements are useful enough as setting sourcebooks that people using other Game Systems will occasionally buy them as references; this was, in fact, part of the original mission statement for the game and the reason the "U" stands for "Universal". The opposite is also true; with a little work, most game worlds can be converted to GURPS, usually with an increase in utility and flexibility. The intention was that by building the game around "real world" units of measurement instead of "rounds" and "hexes", it would be easier for people using other systems to make use of the information in the supplements. Of course "real world" in this context means the USA; pounds, feet, yards as originally developed in the UK (international editions, however, are metricated). GURPS Traveller subjects the previously-metric Third Imperium to this Cultural Translation (though the original was also American) on the grounds of "fitting in with existing products". Some 3rd edition products would randomly throw in some metric units anyway, because trying to use two unit systems at the same time always works. As of the fourth edition, official conversions from and to metric units are printed at the beginning of the basic set.

Several GURPS supplements have their own pages; see here for a list. The game has also been supported by the publication of Pyramid magazine.

GURPS provides examples of the following tropes: