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GURPS Fourth Edition: Characters
After more than 15 years, the venerable GURPS has undergone a major facelift, releasing a new edition. It's a big event for one of the most well-known and widely used systems out there. So I asked my friendly (non-local) game store owner to send me a copy.
A bit about me and my biases
I've been playing RPGs since I was in high school - which, at this point, is more than half of my life. GURPS was my first generic system, so I've got some fondness for it.
On the other hand, in the intervening 15 years since I first found GURPS, I've learned a lot of other systems, and my tastes have changed dramatically. (When I first learned GURPS, my gaming experience was limited to first edition AD"D, Traveller, and Champions. In comparison, GURPS seemed to be flexible, consistent, balanced, and simple.)
I've become a fan of seriously rules-light systems. My favorite systems these days are FUDGE, Risus, and BESM. I haven't played GURPS in years, because after learning those other systems, I decided that GURPS was overcomplicated, and far too easy to min-max - and that it had some annoying mathematical quirks. (It's impossible in GURPS for a character to perform at their average skill, ever - because in the 3d6 system used by GURPS, average performance is 10.5.)
OK. So, in summary: I'm a former GURPS fan, with a weak spot for GURPS, but who hasn't actually used or followed GURPS in at least a decade. And now, on with the review.
The Fourth Edition
GURPS Fourth Edition (hereafter referred to as G4) is divided into two hardcover books. The first is dedicated to character creation and basic rules; the second is more advanced rules and GM-specific information. This review is focused on the first book, GURPS: Characters.
Visually, it's a dramatic change. Instead of the old black-and-white paperback with its strange formatting and horrible art, G4 is a 336 page, full color hardcover. All pages have a colored top-and-bottom border, with each chapter having a different color (thus making it very easy to find the chapter divisions without even opening the book.) The typesetting is very nice: not too dense, easy to read, easy to distinguish headers from body text, sidebars clearly distinct from main text, and all around very clean. The artwork is vastly better than G3; it's not particularly my cup of tea as artwork goes, but I think it's actually pretty comparable to the art in the D20 books.
Structurally, it's also solid. It's well organized, with a complete index, and with explanatory sidebars and tables at the right places; and with a good main index in the back, and a great character traits index at the end of the character creation rules. All around, this is a clean, solid, useful book, which reads well for a first-timer trying to learn the rules, and also reads well as a reference for an experienced player. It's a very, very solid effort, and SJG deserves to be very proud of it.
Enough Style: What's inside?
What's inside will be mostly familiar to old GURPS hands. It's roughly speaking very much the same old GURPS. The same basic structure: basic traits, derived traits, advantages, disadvantages, and skills. They also add, as an optional rule, something called techniques which are, basically, D20 feats under another name.
The main changes to the rules are an overall cleanup. It's still pretty close to what came before, but many of the ambiguities and quirks have been fixed up, or at least cleaned up and made explicit.
For the rest of the review, I'm going to do a chapter-by-chapter breakdown, summarizing my impressions.
Chapter 1: Creating a Character
I have to say that this was a real letdown. It's by far the worst part of the whole book. It's not very coherent; it's sort of a generic catch all for random character creation stuff that didn't seem to fit elsewhere.
It starts off with attributes, both basic and derived. That's fine. But then it goes into a lot of the details of things you want to know about your character, and includes random miscellaneous notes about things that are really advantages and disadvantages. There are rules and costs here for social standing, languages, literacy, wealth, etc. These are all things that are also covered by advantages, disadvantages, and skills. Putting them here is just confusing.
Chapter 2: Advantages, and Chapter 3: Disadvantages
These chapters are rather boring, but then, shopping lists always are. But these are really good shopping lists. They've done a nice job of being as complete and as balanced as reasonably possible in a finite space. It's easy to read, easy to find what you want, nicely organized, and nicely complete.
Chapter 4: Skills
There are some rules changes here, which basically make the old obvious min-max trick of tweaking out your attributes official, and which make the skills system overall cleaner and more streamlined. And there's another nice shopping list.
Chapter 5: Magic
I was never a fan of the old magic system in G3. To be honest, I don't remember it very well - except that it left a bad taste in my mouth when I tried to use it.
This is a huge improvement. I like what's here. It's a nice system, with a reasonable way of handling spells in a point-buy system like GURPS.
Roughly speaking, there are several "colleges" of magic, which are essentially categories of spell-types: healing, earth, knowlege, etc. A mage has a skill in each category where they've been trained, and they use that skill level for casting spells in that college. A mage can cast any spell they've learned in a given college. Clean, simple, functional. Nice.
And again, a shopping list, of the colleges and spell, with complete descriptions of power requirements, effects, etc.
Chapter 6: Psionics
I hate psionics. To me, they're just magic under a stupid name. So I didn't read this chapter. So sue me.
Chapter 7: Templates
In order to speed character creation, G4 provides a set of attribute/advantage/skill packages that you can purchase as a bundle instead of building up on your own. They're balanced with the point-buy system, so you're not getting a dramatically more or less powerful character by taking a template, but it makes it easier for players used to a class-based system to quickly and easily create a particular type of character. It's a nice addition to the system, and one which I think a lot of players will actually be happy to use. There aren't a lot of templates, but I expect that they'll be many, many more setting specific ones in the coming supplements.
Chapter 8: Equipment
Pretty much another shopping list, with rules interspersed. I found it rough reading, but it's also the kind of thing that you don't need to read all the way through. With the advantages, you really need to read the whole thing to get a sense of how things will fit together to let you create the character you want; for equipment, you don't need to read the section on, say, bladed weapons if you're playing a modern-day policeman. It is well organized as a reference chapter.
Chapter 9: Character Development
This chapter is rules for using experience (and in-game cash) to modify your character - both through the application of experience to improve skills, and through things like body modification to change more fundamental bits of the character. Nicely done, reasonably thorough.
Chapter 10: Trait Lists
Now here's a chapter that a lot of game authors/publishers could learn a thing or two from. This is a complete summarized list/index of all of the traits - advantages, disadvantages, and skills - along with their costs, and with page references to their descriptions/rules. This is an incredibly useful thing for a game like GURPS. I can't praise them enough for doing this, and for doing it so well.
Chapter 11: Iconic Characters
This chapter is a set of example characters, of varying power levels and from different example worlds/settings. It's my favorite chapter in the book: the sample characters are really genuinely interesting, and their backgrounds are very well written. The character designs do a great job of showing how to design a variety of different types of characters in G4. Fun reading, interesting characters, and useful - what more could you ask from a chapter?
Come on, you've got to love it when an iconic sample character is a battle robot who adopted Zen philosophy, became a monk, and who then got recruited into a cross-universe police force?
Chapter 12: Basic Combat
This chapter is a basic overview of the combat system. The full system is presented in G4:Campaigns.
The basic combat system is more complete than I recall GURPS3 basic combat to be; but it is nowhere near as complex as G3 with the advanced options. It's actually a pretty reasonable compromise for realism versus complexity. The resolutian sequence is more complex than D20, but the overall combat rule system is a lot simpler - there are many fewer special cases and exceptions, and there's a lot less to resemble.
The basic system is, roughly speaking, as follows:
- Determine order. This is based on the characters speeds - there is no random factor in combat order.
- Each player chooses and states an action. There are a reasonable number of choices: aim, observe, all-out-attack, all-out-defend, etc.
- When a player's turn comes, if their action included an attack, they roll their attack skill. If it succeeds, then the target gets to try to defend, provided their declared action includes the possibility of defense. If the defense fails, then roll damage.
- If a player is attacked, and their action included the ability to defend, they get a defense roll using an appropriate skill. If their defense roll succeeds, then the attack failed.
Characters can die in combat when their hit points reach a negative multiple of their HP - eg, -HP, -2 times HP, -3 times HP, etc. At each of these multiples, they get a health save; if they fail, they die. If they reach -5 times HP, then they die without a save.
And basically, that's it. In a bit of fumbling around with some example characters, I found that it's very fast; it's easy to remember the available options (or to write out a quick chart that lists them for you); there's a solid strategic element to it; and there's not an overabundance of bookkeeping. Overall, quite good - if a bit less deadly than I might prefer.
Overall Impressions
Overall, if you're a fan of the GURPS style of rules, you'll love G4.
Stylistically, the improvement from G3 to G4 is incredible. G4 is a very attractive book, layed out in a manner that isn't just pleasing for the eyes, but is easy to read, easy to navigate, and never gets in the way of content. The writing style is reasonably clean - somewhat dry, but not painfully so, and generally very well structured. For style, I really have to give this a 5 out of 5. I really can't imagine how you could make a GURPS rulebook more stylish. It's really a beauty - I have to say that stylistically, it's the most beautiful mainstream RPG that I own. I never thought I'd say that about something from SJG, but there it is.
Content wise, the book is complete and thorough. It covers everything it needs to cover. There's a bit of confusion towards the beginning of the character creation rules, which is frustrating. And it frequently makes reference to the new canonical GURPS setting, which is never really described or explained in this book - it's in G4: Campaigns. So on substance, I'll give it a 4 out of 5.
Finally, as far as my overall impression goes, I like this a lot more than anything in this general family of games that I've seen in a long time. It remains the same basic kind of game that it's always been - a combat focused, fairly rules-heavy, point based system. But it's been cleaned up, polished, and given a handy tune-up.
I'm not going to drop FUDGE for G4. I'm still not a fan of anything this rules-heavy, or anything with so much opportunity (or perhaps even requirement) to min-max. But instead of sitting in my "will not GM, will not play" stack, which is where G3 has been sitting for the last decade, G4 moves into my "not my favorite, but willing to play or GM for appropriate settings". For many settings, I would in fact prefer it to BESM, which is what I've been using.
And now, really finally, my recommendation: if you like the basic GURPS/Hero/BESM family of games, buy it. You'll be happy. If you're a D&D3 fan looking to get past the class system, but it. With the templates, it's very easy to set up G4 to be comfortable, and yet customizable. If you're a light-system fan, don't waste your money - it's still GURPS.
