RPG Spotlight: GURPS, Let’s Get Generic With Our RolePlay Systems
GURPS let us play in any world we wanted, granted we were willing to do a ton of math to get our charactes there.
GURPS was first published in 1986 by Steve Jackson and Steve Jackson Games. Short for Generic Universal Role Playing System, GURPS was designed to be the answer to D&D that could fit into any setting. High fantasy? GURPS. Pirates? GURPS. Super Heroes? GURPS. Cyberpunk? Try out GURPS. Lovecraftian horror? Why not GURPS?
A generic one-stop-shopping approach to tabletop RPGs is great in theory, and in practice it won the Origins Award for Best Roleplaying Rules in 1988. In fact, GURPS is still very well known today and even though a new edition hasn’t been released since 2004, most people who play TTRPGs are at least familiar with the system if not experienced with it.
I never once used a real character sheet. I always had all of my GURPS character info written out on regular lined notebook paper. There isn’t a good reason for this, sometimes I just make bad decisions.
Unfortunately a system that can be used for anything is going to be crunchy, and crunchy GURPS is. Character creation is an exercise in spending a number of points assigned by your GM as precisely as possible. Powers and attributes cost you points while negative attributes and “quirks” cost you negative points. You can effectively buy back more points for additional abilities by making your character a disaster. And in my RPG groups, we did just that very thing.
In addition to that recipe for weirdos, character creation was complicated and math heavy in a way that the Wikipedia article explains perfectly:
“For example, to create a “dragon’s breath” attack, a player would select the Innate Attack ability (the ability that allows a player to perform an attack most humans could not), and select burning attack 4D (normally 20 points). Then, the player would modify it as follows: cone, 5 yards (+100%); limited use, 3/day (-20%); reduced range, x1/5 (-20%). The final percentage modifier would be +60%, making the final cost 32 points.”
For my group, character creation was always a full group session as the people at the table who managed to excel at translating this into English helped the players who looked at their very crowded character sheets blankly and panicked.
Gameplay required just three six-sided dice. In GURPS your aim is to roll below your character’s level in that skill so if you have a skill of 10 in hacking, your goal is roll a ten or less to succeed. In addition, the GM can assign difficulty ratings to the roll, adding or subtracting a modifier to your skill depending on how complicated the task at hand is. This isn’t dissimilar to many other RPG systems.
For me the best part about GURPS is also the worst. The openness of the world allows for any kind of game you can imagine while using the same general set of rules. As an RPG system it opens you up to literally any sandbox you’d like to play in with tons of official expansions and a system in which you can basically make any kind of character or NPC you want. But that’s also one of its biggest problems. I played a Lovecraftian game in GURPS once. It was fun (I trolled the GM a little bit by making an alchemist named Maura Rustang), but we could have played the same game in the Call of Cthulhu system and it honestly would have had a better mechanic for the manic fear our characters should have been feeling. If I want to play a fantasy game, D&D exists. If I want to play a space game, there are multiple Star Wars systems and Starfinder. If I want to play a superhero game, there are tons of options. And most of these other systems aren’t quite as pedantic as GURPS. Sure, in ’88 the options for non-fantasy games were more limited than they are now. But it is now, and tabletop gaming has grown into a hugely diverse hobby. Which, if I’m being honest, is why I haven’t opened a GURPS book in probably close to ten years.
I found out that this existed for the first time while writing this article. I’m a huge Terry Pratchett fan and this is truly a testament to how while I played the heck out of this game, I looked in the actual books a little as possible.
But now I’m feeling a little nostalgic for it. I described GURPS earlier this week as “big and stupid,” and it is. But it’s one of those big stupid things that I love. It’s that wacky friend who’s not great at any one thing, but always down for anything. And that has its own charm.
What do you think? Did you play GURPS? What’s the wildest disadvantage you took for those sweet sweet character points? Which world was your favorite to generically roleplay in? Let us know in the comments.
Happy Adventuring!
