As far as style goes GURPS Light is pretty average. The layout is good and easy to follow, everything is in black and white except for the Pegasus Games logo which is in colour. Everything is laid out in two columns and sidebars are integrated smoothly. The art is thankfully quite rare as the art for the GURPS Basic Set is quite horrible, but the art that was chosen is kept quite small and is some of the better art picked from the Basic Set. This is the only time in which I'm giving marks for the sparseness of the art. There isn't enough of it to get on my nerves (although YMMV) but the few pictures do spice it up a bit and add a little character to what would otherwise be a bland string of text. (There is some difference in the art chosen for the english and german versions, but my sentiments remain the same for both). GURPS Light gets a style rating of 4 out of 5.
The table of contents, glossary and copyright notice are all on the first page. The glossary covers all the necesary terms for playing RPGs. The table of contents does its job well listing major sections in bold (essentially each chapter, although GURPS Light has no chapters) and enough of the subsections. I'm getting really distressed to see how many RPG products are lacking in an index of any kind, and GURPS Light follows this trend. It isn't terrible as it's only 43 pages and it is somewhat excusable as it is a Light version of the game (the GURPS Basic Set has a complete and quite useful index).
The first four pages covers the basics, it explains what GURPS is (and what roleplaing in general is) and the basic dice mechanics. There are 3 types of rolls in GURPS, success rolls, reaction rolls and damage rolls. Success and reaction rolls both use 3d6, damage rolls use only d6s (in fact the d6 is the only type of die used in GURPS, a fact which I quite like) but in varying ammounts depending on the attack and the weapon used. GURPS Light obviously uses the term W instead of d as germans say Wurfell instead of dice.
The next 24 pages cover character creation. GURPS is a point based system, so the characters get a certain number of points to start off with (usually 100 but it may be more or less depending on the campaign, with the information that GURPS Light provides anything over 150 is probably not a good idea to start with otherwise all the characters will be looking the same) and these points are spent to buy all the characteristics of their character. Attributes, advantages (and disadvantages), quirks and skills are all bought from the same pool of points. A sample character sheet is shown (already filled out) with lines to each section indicating which page in GURPS Light describes the rules for that portion of the character sheet. This is something I haven't seen many RPGs do, and I would like to see more game makers follow suit. The example has been provided by GURPS for over 15 years so I don't know why hardly anyone has copied them yet. Advantages and disadvantages are split up into several sections. Appearance, social status, wealth and friends and enemies are seperate sections but have the advantages and disadvantages grouped together within them. Then there are seperate sections for other advantages and disadvantages. I like this set up as it organizes them according to features that all characters will have and features only some characters will have, but considering the lack of index it makes things a lot easier to find than if there was only a section for advantages and disadvantages and everything was organised alphabetically (and within these sections everything is organised alphabetically, so if you know the name of what you're looking for you won't have to do much page flipping to find it). GURPS has a feature called quirks, in which you get extra character points (up to 5) for having traits to your character that have little in game effect but flesh out the character and give some roleplaying opportunities.
GURPS is essentially a skill based system, although combat is given more pages than other types of skills, fighting ability is mechanically treated the same way as any other skills. Skills are split up into mental and physical categories, and are also costed according to how hard they are to learn. GURPS has some game imbalances within the skill system. As most actions the characters will be attempting is based on the skills they know, high skills are obviously quite important. One would think that this would lead to spending more points on skills and that someone who has spent more points on skills would be better than someone who has spent less. It doesn't work like this at all. All physical skills are based on agility and all mental skills are based on IQ, so the best characters are going to be the ones who spend lots of points to have high IQ and agility scores. They not only end up being very good at anything they do but also very good at everything they do. Then the character only has to spend anywhere from half a point to two points to be very good with any skill, and as this is fairly cheap a character with high agility and IQ scores would be very skilled at everything. A character with average ability and IQ scores would likely not be as good as a character with high scores in even their best skills. This is going to be fixed in GURPS 4th Edition by doubling the cost of increasing IQ or agility, and this would be a good houserule to introduce now (this also means a character gets twice as many points for having low IQ or agility scores as it is a serious drawback). Unlike the GURPS Basic Set, the skills in GURPS Light are only organised alphabetically and not according to type. As there aren't as many skills in GURPS Light as the Basic Set this isn't a serious problem, but it would have been nice to have them split up according to type as well.
Next is the equipment section, it only details equipment relating to combat - weapons and armor. No description is given for non-combat equipment. Fortunately most people are familiar with non-combat equipment so in a modern-day campaign this isn't an issue. Otherwise the game leader will have to make up their own equipment lists. The equipment is mostly modern day or historical equipment, with a few futuristic weapons.
Character advancement is handled by the game leader, after an adventure or a session (s)he hands out character points to each character depending on how well they did. Races, animals and monsters are given brief lip service. Races are handled like any other character except any differences from humans would be described according to templates. No racial templates are actually given. Monster templates aren't given either, they have to be created the same way as any other character. Only riding and pack animals are described and only with a line describing their attributes as well as weight and cost.
Something that becomes very obvious after reading through the character creation section, is that while as a system goes GURPS does support a variety of genres, GURPS Light only has adequate information for modern day or historical campaigns, with some magic thrown in (the small magic section is covered later on in GURPS Light) and possibly some near future settings. The advantages, disadvantages and skills that are provided make sense for modern day or historical campaigns, but nothing significant is provided for high fantasy, cyberpunk, space opera (or any space for that matter) and no special rules are given for horror (the Basic Set has 1 page for horror). The system is generic, but it really isn't that universal. The GURPS Basic Set has exactly the same problem, it's only useful for modern day, near future and historical campaigns with magic and/or psionics added in (GURPS Light doesn't have psionics rules), but at least GURPS Light has an excuse - it's only 43 (or 32) pages instead of 256 and it is also an intro system. It would be hard to fit something for every type of campaign into 43 pages without suffering from a Jack of All Trades, Master of None syndrome.
The next 8 pages cover game mechanics. It provides rules for most things the characters will want to do. Both mental and physical actions are covered, and there are sections for combat and injury. Anything in this section would be covered with the aforementioned success rolls. GURPS uses a roll-under system, and the target number to roll under is determined by Relevant Attribute + Advantages + Disadvantages + Skill + Any other modifiers. The player must roll equal to or under this number to succeed, really low rolls equal a critical success, whereas really high rolls equal a critical failure. Combat is handled by the attacker rolling an attack skill, and if successful the defender must roll a defense skill to counter. If the defender fails then damage is dealt, minus any damage subtracted because of protective equipment or advantages. Various tactics and aspects of combat are covered in this section, definitely enough to cover basic combat actions.
For some reason the magic section is covered after the combat section instead of being included in the rest of the character creation system which would make a lot more sense. Only 15 spells are given and it takes up 2 pages. The spell system is skill based, and spells work the same way skills do, except that they cause fatigue to the spellcaster. Magic heavy games won't be possible unless the game leader wishes to create new spells for the campaign. It looks like magic is almost an afterthought, although it's more likely that the layout just follows the same pattern as the Basic Set. I also have a feeling that the reason for the placement of magic is when Steve Jackson was making GURPS he was using D&D as an example and followed the same layout while introducing his own rules in place. The GURPS Basic Set has a very similar layout to the AD&D Player's Handbook, and GURPS Light is a condensed version of this, having close resemblance to the D&D Adventure Game.
The last 2 pages (before the character sheet at the end) is the game world/game leaders section. Some brief advice is given on running a game, designing a game world and handling various aspects of the game. The advice is good, but I highly doubt any one with no prior role playing experience would be able to run a game with the information presented in GURPS Light. The Basic Set is definitely a must for game leaders with no prior experience, but even it is weak in that department compared to some other role playing games like D&D. GURPS Light is perfect to give to new players so they don't have to buy their own Basic Set, and the information in GURPS Light is definitely adequate for that. It's worth noting that GURPS 4th Edition will be split up into 2 volumes, 1 for players and 1 for game leaders, which will hopefully fix this issue with GURPS.
GURPS Light has all the same limitations that the GURPS Basic Set has, but these are actually acceptable considering the size. It is surprisingly just as capable as the Basic Set as well, despite its size. The substance rating really depends on the indended use of GURPS Light. For a game leader with no prior experience the substance is 1, might as well be 0 but at least it has some content, even though almost none of it helps for running a game. For an experienced game leader it deserves a substance rating of 2 or 3, depending on how good the game is. For players GURPS Light is quite useful, and in general the substance would be around 3 or 4. For players who don't want to spend the money for the GURPS Basic Set, GURPS Light is really good and deserves a 4. For players new to roleplaying in general and would normally be overwhelmed by a bunch of rules, it would be worth a 5 for modern day or historical games, or a 4 or even a 3 for some other types of campaigns which would need information that GURPS Light (and even the Basic Set) just don't provide. If GURPS was intended to be limited to only modern day or historical campaigns GURPS Light would get a substance rating of 4. Considering GURPS is intended to be a universal role playing system I give GURPS Light a substance rating of 3 instead.
GURPS Light is available for download from Pegasus Games' website here or from SJ Games' website here where the italian and english versions can also be downloaded as well as the versions for Transhuman Space and WW2.
