Yeah we all use GURPS: Whatever when we want to read up on something, it's practically ubiquitous with "gaming research".

This thread is for the guys who run it every week at the table, or have in the past...What type of campaign do you run, what kind of supplements do you use, what versions of GURPS do you run, do you use heavy houserules or not, etc...

...and why.

Yeah, I'm tossing around the idea of playing with GURPS despite my dislike for point-buy.

Before spending any money, may I suggest downloading GURPS Ultra-Lite, GURPS Lite (Fourth Edition), and GURPS Lite (Third Edition) to help you find the version that is least offensive.

I'm not a fan of the GURPS system either, but do love the sourcebooks. Sometimes having the core rules around helps to make more sense of the sourcebooks.

I love the GURPS books and I they are among the best sourcebooks for technology and culture.  GURPS low tech is absolutely amazing, for example, and the settings are amazing.

I have a hard time making the character build system work even with strong GM-Player interaction.  But the books are absolutely amazing.

I run the Majestic Wilderlands using GURPS

I use the two GURPS Core Rule Books
GURPS Magic
Some House rules for GURPS Magic
Including a variant of Unlimited Mana from GURPS Thaumatology for Clerical Magic.

GURPS Martial Arts
GURPS Low-Tech
GURPS Dungeon Fantasy series everything but the 250 point templates which I use for powerful NPCs. My campaigns starts between 75 to 150 points. Recently I got a lot of use out of GURPS DF Henchmen.
GURPS Mass Combat.

The trick with GURPS is to sit down with the books you own and write up a bunch of lists about what is permitted in your campaign. Do not hand the book over to your players and say "Make up what you want." They will do exactly that.

What I do for novice is the following.

"At its most basic my Majestic Wilderlands is a fantasy setting with fighters, mages, thieves, and priest having adventures, fighting monsters, and finding treasure. It takes place a medieval background with exotic cultures beyond its fringe. In regular terms tell me want you want to play and I will go over the options with you. From that you can pick what you want to be. Don't be constrained by the ideas behind other games like D&D. Try to think of how your character came to be and we will go from there."

I then find and explain various playable options that work with my setting and will fit what he is trying to make.  For my friends that been playing a while they will run by me what they are thinking of and just go and make their character.

Quote from: Votan;695286I have a hard time making the character build system work even with strong GM-Player interaction.  But the books are absolutely amazing.

You might have better luck with some of the more pre-canned options like GURPS Action, Monster Hunters, or Dungeon Fantasy. They make heavy use of templates which really help in character creation.

I don't run Gurps, and I doubt I ever will. But, I play in a weekly Gurps campaign, and have gotten grudgingly familiar with it. The current campaign just started (4 sessions in), but the past few years I've played in a number of Gurps campaigns.

Our GM has run Transhuman Space, Dungeon Fantasy, a Fallout/Xcom homebrew hybrid, and is now running Banestorm.

We play Gurps 4e and use whatever supplements jive with the GM. Magic, Martial Arts, Mass Combat, Thaumatology. Various .pdf-only releases. I've lost track, and leave it up to the GM to handle all the bolt-ons.

Our GM does a lot of houseruling in the area of firearms. He's a firearm-enthusiast, and designs his own Gurps weapons, and tweaks those that are debated on the SJGames forums. He's really a rules-machine, that has little difficulty digesting complex rules systems and incorporating them into campaigns.

I am not a rules-machine, and the closest I'd ever get to running Gurps would be running The Fantasy Trip.

I did run GURPS ages ago, but I don't remember the details now.

I am familiar with 3E and 4E now, and would run them.

Quote from: estar;695290You might have better luck with some of the more pre-canned options like GURPS Action, Monster Hunters, or Dungeon Fantasy. They make heavy use of templates which really help in character creation.

Templates can be a god-send.

In the 4 Gurps campaigns I've played in, the latest is the only one where I've actually created a character. I relied heavily on a Banestorm template, and used Character Assistant to make the job as easier for me as possible. The template rounded out ~80% of the character, and then I personalized him the rest of the way.

The prior 3 campaigns I couldn't be bothered to create a PC. I basically told the GM what I wanted, descriptively, and he did the heavy lifting for me.

Quote from: estar;695290You might have better luck with some of the more pre-canned options like GURPS Action, Monster Hunters, or Dungeon Fantasy. They make heavy use of templates which really help in character creation.

Most of my GURPS experience was 3E, and predated the use of templates.  They definitely look like they might be an improvement.  I think that I'd need the right group to try again; in actual play I found the set really requires both an engaged group and a very clear idea of what the expectations are.

I've been running GURPS since the playtest days.  What I do now is effective GURPS Lite, 4th edition, with a number of houserules and tweaks, generally from earlier editions.  I still use BSII ranged rules, for instance.  As such, I've written my own version of GURPS Lite, which comes in at a lean, mean 40 pages.

I run middling-to-low fantasy, in my own setting.  I don't encourage the use of templates, partially because I've done enough tweaking of point costs to invalidate the ones in the book.  (Among other things, I went with 15/level for DX and IQ, thinking that the full 20 had a lot more to do with the system's repositioning from a fantasy-roots game to an Infinite Worlds game.)

I use Magic, some elements from Martial Arts, and bits of pieces I fancy from other works.

I used to play GURPS, until I realized it was a computer game played manually with paper and pencil.  So I use the GURPS source books for other RPG systems that are much less crunchy.

If you are ok with players needing to read books during every turn, GURPS is for you.  GURPS is a massive rules-playing system.

GURPS has basically four levels of details when it comes to combat.

Opposed Rolls of Attack and Defense
Basic combat (without a grid)
Tactical Combat (the above with a grid)
The above plus supplements like Martial Arts.

The problem is not that any one section is complex, every rule that a specific character needs can fit on a sheet. The trick for all options GURPS game is wading through all the books.

For example I play a 150 pts shield and spear guy. On my cheet sheets I have the usual listing of GURPS Maneuvers found in the core book. I also have a list of extra effort stuff I can do as a fighter found in the basic books and  Martial Arts. I have the slam rules from the basic book printed out. And finally I have the Sweep Technique from Martial Arts.

Sweep allows me to knock at target off his feet, a major advantage in GURPS combat, the mechanic is simple my Sweep skill (14 based off of my Spear skill) vs the best of ST, DX, Acrobatics, or a Grappling skill.

The only rules that SJ Games bungled and made overly complex are the slam rules. Rather than something sensible like a contest of Strength or strength based skill. It is a comparison of damage generated by the combined velocity of the two people slamming into each other. The person doing the lesser amount of damage in a slam falls down.

Extra Effort allows me to spend a fatigue point and  do a Move and Attack, and other combat related benefits.  Mainly allowing one to do one of the All-out attack options without losing your defense.

The rest is the standard material covered in the Core books. Attack, defend, do damage, deduct armor.

Quote from: estar;695334The only rules that SJ Games bungled and made overly complex are the slam rules. Rather than something sensible like a contest of Strength or strength based skill. It is a comparison of damage generated by the combined velocity of the two people slamming into each other. The person doing the lesser amount of damage in a slam falls down.

Yeah, I just use a modified contest of STR. The larger contestant gets +2 to effective STR score for the contest for every size category larger it is than the opponent.

So a horse (3 hex creature) gets a +4 to effective STR when slamming a man (1 hex creature).

Whomever makes the roll by the most (or fails by the least if both fail) knock the other prone. Much simpler.

Quote from: CRKrueger;695252This thread is for the guys who run it every week at the table, or have in the past...What type of campaign do you run, what kind of supplements do you use, what versions of GURPS do you run, do you use heavy houserules or not, etc...and why.

I ran a twenty session GURPS 4e campaign where players were the members of the Sheriff's Department of a rural New Mexico county.  They dealt with local thugs, Mexican drug cartels, and government conspiracies (of the get-rich-quick variety, not the chemtrails or alien cover-up kind); with the intention that it was going to be a very grounded, almost mundane kind of game.  GURPS really shined for this kind of gritty, realistic game.

In hindsight, I would have been perfectly fine only using the Basic Set - and I'd encourage you to see if you can do the same.  Through preparing and running the game I used High Tech, Tactical Shooting, Social Engineering, Mysteries and the Cops supplement for 3rd Edition.  These were all well written and interesting, but ultimately no substitute for common sense and a clear idea of what kind of game you want to run.

The two houserules I brought into the game were relatively simple.  One was to convert every measurement in the game into feet instead of yards.  Since the PCs tended to get into fistfights fairly regularly, I made a boxing hit location chart (sort of stolen from Battletech) with the idea that a hit on an arm was actually a successful parry as opposed to a damaging blow and then added modifiers to hit location based on relative positioning.  If the game didn't result in punching often, I probably wouldn't have felt the need for a new hit location chart.

Well Gurps is my favourite poison and I have used it for many campaigns among which a year and half cyberpunk campaign and a planetary_romance/WW2 crossover (The Jungle of Venus) which spawned a follow up (the sands of Mars).

To tell you the truth I have never understood neither the problems that some have with the many rules (yes, there are a lot of rules, most of them optional though) nor the character creation difficulties (you just need to have a faint idea of what you would like to play. If you can't do even that just choose a template...)

As for the manuals, I own many of them, but I tend to use mostly just the basic (4th ed) with the occasional supplement depending on the campaign I'm running.
Please tote, though, that as a master I tend to make most of the calls "on the fly", rathe to stop to check the rules. The show must go on...