RogerBW's Blog: My Dream Edition of GURPS

I'm not aware of any plans Steve Jackson Games may currently have for a new edition of GURPS. But I do have some ideas for what I'd want it to look like.

I note, though, that this is for me, and products that appeal to me generally don't sell well. So on the offchance anyone in the company is reading this, you'd probably do better to do the exact opposite of my suggestions.

There are two things that to my mind present complexity cliffs to a new player trying to get into GURPS and I want to remove them both.

The first barrier is for the GM: there are lots of rules in the Basic Set, most of which will not be used in any individual campaign, so the new GM has to become at least broadly familiar with everything in order to decide what not to use. My answer to that is to frame the book as a single ready-to-go setup, and then present explicitly optional rules for other settings, most of which will be in expansions. So: no magic, no psionics, no ultra-tech, no elves, in the core book. Swords and guns from history and the present day, sure. This is a GURPS that is designed primarily for games set in the real world (with options for cinematic levels of competence).

And the other barrier is for players, the 200 pages of lists of traits (advantages, disadvantages, skills) that they have to look through in order to pick the ones they'll have on their character (i.e. before they've played the game and have a feel for them). Templates can help with this, but even choosing things from a template means that you need to know what those things do. My main solution is to simplify and compress. If a trait gives you a bonus or penalty to people's reaction rolls, roll all those traits into just one. Do we actually need six separate planetology skills for individual sorts of planet, with no way of being a general planetologist who hasn't specialised?

I don't want to go all the way to whole-career skills like "space captain" or "pirate" the way FATE would do it, because I want to be keep the ability to say "this character is good at X and Y, but bad at Z, even though those things usually go together"; but I do want it to be shorter. Also, take out all the magical and exotic stuff, and the things that feel as though they were put in just to be custom villain disadvantages that PCs will never take. Go on, tell me about your PC whose characterisation is so much better for being able to take Bowlegged, Slow Eater and Terminally Ill. (Seriously, I'm open to argument.) When John Dallman went through the disadvantages one by one on the SJGames forums a few years ago, many of them felt like this to me.

Where does all the non-real-world stuff go? In campaign books. The existing Ultra-Tech, much as I love it, effectively defines a campaign paradigm in letting the GM make choices about tech level and specific fields that might be advanced; and therefore it is generally a bad fit for any campaign that already exists, in which those choices have been made, and probably not using this framework. So start from the other end: in this setting a laser pistol works like this, in that setting it works like that, so these two laser pistols are different things and nobody's ever going to be in a position to choose which one to buy—so they don't need to appear in the same equipment catalogue.

Same with magic. No two worlds have the same magic system because we don't have a working adventure-viable magic system in the real world to use as an example, and bodging on an existing one rarely works well. (I don't actually want to destroy the old dungeon-inspired spell system, I've had fun with it, but to pretend it's in some way universally applicable seems tone-deaf at best.) Same with superpowers. And so on.

So there end up being three tiers of book in my mental catalogue:

the core rules, minimal;
the setting books, more details and exotic traits for that setting (and adventure/campaign books for individual settings);
the "design" books for people who want to create their own settings, with details of what it's actually physically plausible for a laser pistol to do, how to build a magic system, and so on.

A modern version of "powered by GURPS" would effectively roll together the core rules with one setting book. And even without that combination, what you need to play a single campaign is just those two books. (Or, if you're doing your own game in the real world, just the core.)

This does mean you lose easy character portability between settings. I don't think cross-setting campaigns are a big part of role-playing these days.

Should SJGames do this? Absolutely not. I'm sure it wouldn't be commercially viable. But it's the GURPS I'd like to have at my table.

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