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.