So, GURPS 4e has been out for a long time now; and I just remembered something I was meaning to ask the more serious GURPS fans out there for a while now.  Now that everyone has had (more than ample) time to look at all the nooks and crannies of 4e, in the final analysis, is it better than 3e?

Is there some specific things that 4e does worse?

RPGPundit

Obviously I bow to Koltar on this one, but the only real criticism I've heard of 4e is that including all the supernatural ads and disads in the same section as the natural ones makes it harder to keep them out of the game and slows down chargen.

For me that's a real issue, but it's aesthetic as much as anything.  I don't think I've heard anyone really argue that 3e is a better ruleset, though I think some have said 4e may be better but not enough to merit switching.

Quote from: RPGPundit;268153Is there some specific things that 4e does worse?

It's biggest sin is to make a one book game into a two book game.  Yes I understand that 3e had extra "core" books, but I never saw the need for them.

Oh, and the art blows.


hard.

Quote from: mhensley;268180It's biggest sin is to make a one book game into a two book game.  Yes I understand that 3e had extra "core" books, but I never saw the need for them.

My experience for 3e was that a -lot- of the books required the core and at least the Compendium; while 4e may require more in the way of initial buy in, at least its honest about it.

4e is heads and shoulders above 3e. It kept a lot of what made 3e good and then added stuff that should have always been... really they just listened to their fans and applied a lot of house rules that made a shit load of sense.

4e is much easier to grock by the way it is organized and its modular system means you just add the rules you want, so you can have rules lite to rules heavy and everything in between. And seriously you really only need the first two books and your good to go, but all the extra "core" books are so awesome and well organized that the truly enhance your gaming experience and you don't feel like you just bought another splat book, but a book that you will actually use.

3e is still very serviceable and it is still fairly easy to convert 3e to 4e which still makes many of your beloved 3e books still useful and not to be cast aside.

Sure the 4e model has evolved, with the times, and is nothing like they had first envisioned, but to me this has been a strength and not a weakness, SJgames recognizes the changing landscape of rpg's and adapts to it rather than fights the current. Doing so has made GURPS a strong brand, where had they stuck to their guns I figure they would be in a lot of trouble and depending even more so on Munchkin.

It appears as though GURPS is holding its own and being profitable enough to keep pouring their thinly stretched, resources... it truly looks like GURPS will have a strong future.

Good game, probably one of the best generic systems and a solid business plan. You'll have fun with GURPS 4e and feel secure, in the knowledge, that GURPS will be well supported for awhile to come.

And, I don't play GURPS anymore.

I think the 4e books are well-produced over all, and a marked improvement from 3e.

Not that there's not room for improvement.  Art is subpar.  Having all the skills/advantages/disadvantages lumped together in their sections without any kind of thematic splits is pretty high on my pet peeve list.

And I'm still not sure why GURPS 4 couldn't have been a single book.  There isn't a really good reason for the 2 book split and there's a lot of filler there.  But it's not a terrible issue.

If you liked GURPS 3, I'm not sure why you wouldn't want to go with GURPS 4.  It's pretty much a hands-down improvement in every way.

Quote from: mhensley;268181Oh, and the art blows.


hard.

I can't argue with that. Just glancing at the books on the store shelf left me puzzled at the choices made in that department.

Guys.....I'm stuck at work...away from my home computer.

I'll post my thoughts on this topic after 9:30pm.


You would start a thread on this topic while I was away from my home machine.

{{{:-)

Quote from: Koltar;268223Guys.....I'm stuck at work...away from my home computer.

I'll post my thoughts on this topic after 9:30pm.


You would start a thread on this topic while I was away from my home machine.

{{{:-)

It was probably planned that way, just to keep you from dominating the procedings.

shit!  I better crank something out so as to beat Koltar to it!

In short, they started out well with 4e but then it went bad.

The main problem with 3e was that it'd been out so long and each worldbook added new skills and dis/advantages, and new rules. The new rules did not always work well with those in other worldbooks, so that the whole thing became an incomprehensible spaghetti mess of rules.

4e took this mess and tidied it up, streamlining things. A few needless complications were removed - like with armour, you used to have "passive defence" which added to your parry/dodge, and also "damage resistance" which subtracted from damage taken. These were basically the same thing in game terms, so they rolled them into one.

At the same time, they added a lot of detail. It can be very overwhelming. The failure to split mundane and supernatural dis/advantages is one example. How many campaigns will need the traits "Extra Head" or "Stress Atavism"? GURPS' main barrier to wider acceptance has, like many point-buy games, been its long lists of stuff for players to choose from for their characters - it means character generation takes ages.

Now the corebooks have been expanded by Powers, Martial Arts and so on. They're at great pains to ensure that their new skills, dis/advantages and rules don't contradict, they only add detail. For example, with Characters you can just hit your foe, with Campaigns you can hit him on face, eye, neck, skull, chest, vitals, abdomen/groin, arms, legs, hands and feet. Martial Arts adds joints and arteries to this.

Of course no-one can possibly memorise that many rules and that much detail. This increases character generation time, and time in play spent looking up rules.

So what I say is that 4e began the right way, but is now well on its way to becoming another 3e, with absurd amounts of detail in play. Naturally people say, "well, you don't have to use all that detail, it's just there as an option."

But we're talking about human nature here. One thing noted about the modern battlefield is that the fact that higher ranks can get words and images from the lowest level slows everything down considerably, because information invites decisions - like the Lt in Aliens with his viewscreens showing what each grunt saw.

Likewise in a game session, details invite use in play. The GM may try to speed things up by saying, "no, you cannot target arteries, just kick him in the nads or something" but of course not everyone will agree. Every enthusiastic GM or player will have just one more thing they want to include.

So it's now well on its way to being just like 3e. Well, not quite the same, no rules contradictions, but enough detail that it'll take a long time in play to sort it all out. Which comes to the same thing, really.

I love it. Big improvement over 4e. I've never looked back. Great system.

Well, they cleaned up lots of stuff a decent contact or claws that do the same damage as a short sword no longer cost as much as being rich.  There's been an overall rationalization and streamlining of points costs.  Attribute scores no longer map to D&D scores which was always true really but now they come out and say it.  Some people carry it too far.  For myself I see no problem with giving a 15 to a normal human.

Like others, I feel there could be better organization in the Advantages, Disadvantages, and Skills.

Some things like Innate Attack and Affliction get applied a little too broadly for my tastes but I guess having things under broad headings is good.  Sadly it isn't carried forward quite enough.  I would like to see Social Hangups, and Neurological Conditions, and Mental Health issues all get a similar broad heading if they were going this route.

The game still isn't your best choice for supers.  I understand why they did what they did with super strength but I still don't like it.  You shouldn't have to buy an advantage with a power modifier and look it up on a table to get a value you use to reference another table just to do super strength.  Especially when the basic Strength attribute could have handled it just fine with a little tweaking.

Combat is cleaned up as well and firmly positions itself as the best combat system ever.

Quote from: RPGPundit;268153So, GURPS 4e has been out for a long time now; and I just remembered something I was meaning to ask the more serious GURPS fans out there for a while now.  Now that everyone has had (more than ample) time to look at all the nooks and crannies of 4e, in the final analysis, is it better than 3e?

Is there some specific things that 4e does worse?

The game works better than 3e. The expansion of advantages to allow just about anything to be built doesn't get as bogged down in the math as the Hero system. It strikes the right balance.

The Sourcebooks are even more packed than 3rd edition and better organized than before.

The problem are most mostly external to the  system. Munchkin is doing far better for the amount of labor SJ Games has to give and the release of GURPS products has suffered accordingly. It isn't that GURPS isn't profitable it isn't as profitable as Munchkin by a wide margin.

GURPS 4th edition suffers from a lack of ready to play adventures and settings. Their adventures continue to read like mini-sourcebooks. This is a problem when the biggest source of new gamers is from the world's most popular PRG.

Without ready-to-play products GURPS has the weakness of most point based system as it takes way too long to prep for.

The Dungeon Fantasy series of PDF (now in stores also) helps somewhat. But where most RPGs has one to three book that are clearly the core rules for a genre. GURPS 4th has it spread out among multiple books.

The situation is not unreasonable from a business standpoint however it still sucks for many GURPS Fans. If they had a better commercial third party setup I am sure that many, including myself would take a crack at plugging some of the holes especially adventures.

Again GURPS 4th is a great RPG rules system but it current level and type of support is throttling the influx of new fans and makes it difficult to use GURPS to support an ongoing campaign.