The Long Lines Building in New York

A common complaint I hear about people who tried GURPS for the first time coming in from other systems is that the “flow” of combat feels odd. Mainly that those 1-second turns are too short and don’t let you do enough. Sometimes also that these short turns lead to fights that end too quickly to be dramatic1.

I think this comes from a mismatch between the player’s learned expectations and the way GURPS actually does things. In this post I’ll try to describe this difference, and give a few suggestions on how to reduce the friction.

Describing the Difference

Let’s start with an example. You’re in a typical dungeon fantasy combat against a bunch of zombies, playing an archer character. You make an attack, and describe it like this:

“I draw and nock an arrow, then I take aim at the closest zombie and shoot! As soon as the arrow flies, I’m already drawing another one from my quiver!”

How do other systems2 usually handle this, and what does GURPS do that’s so different?

Abstract Action Economies

Most tabletop RPG systems are fairly abstract when it comes to combat. To the rules, it doesn’t matter what motions your PC is actually going through when they perform an action, nor does it matter how long a turn lasts. It is enough to know what the action is, and that a turn is long enough for you to do it.

In systems that work this way, our archer’s narration is just a cool embellishment that adds some fun detail to a standard ranged attack roll. All the rules need to know is that it’s a ranged attack.

However, the choice of which actions perform in your turn matters a lot. You get a certain number of them, all of which have an immediate effect in the current turn but don’t influence future ones. Therefore the system’s incentives gently push you to be maximally efficient on a turn-by-turn basis3. Attacks are good because they bring the fight closer to an end. If you use your main action for something else, it better bring as much benefit to you as attacking would, or you have just “wasted” your turn. This set of mechanics and incentives is usually called an “action economy”.

The GURPS Way

Where other systems are abstract, GURPS is so concrete it’s practically brutalist. Turns last one second and its combat maneuvers are a lot more fine-grained than combat actions in other games.

In the Union of Generic Universal Republics our example description is not just a bit of flavor: it’s a five-turn plan. Ready (draw arrow), Ready (nock arrow), Aim, Attack, Ready (draw arrow)4.

Only the actual blow from your weapon, press of the trigger, or release of the bowstring counts as an Attack. The other stuff in the plan above are maneuvers that make your Attack possible and set it up for success. In GURPS, you want to increase the quality of your attacks, not necessarily their quantity.

For the same reason GURPS is a bit less amenable to “needless embellishment” than more abstract games. Combat goes much more smoothly when you keep your action declarations to short sentences that map to a single maneuver. The structure you build out of these simple blocks can end up looking every bit as beautiful as the freeform narrative, though. This too, is brutalism.

The Barbican Conservatory in London

Proposed Solutions

“The GURPS way” is neither better nor worse than the action economies of other systems. It’s just different. But it’s different enough that it can trip up people coming in from other games.

If the description above helped you smooth the friction between the rules and your expectations, then great! But it’s likely that it didn’t, and you still having trouble with it. In that case, here are a couple of suggestions on how to make your experience smoother.

Solution 1: It’s a (Character) Skill Issue

One of the big reasons to use “setup” maneuvers like Evaluate, Feint, and Aim is that your character’s skill level might not be high enough to give you a decent chance of success. Without those maneuvers, you’ll end up missing more often, or will have trouble getting past your enemy’s defenses. This is common at the core books’ default 150 points.

One way to make attacking every turn more feasible and fun is to raise the power level of your characters. This is the approach taken by Dungeon Fantasy and Action: not only do they use 250 point templates, they optimize them a fair bit.

All the physical combatant templates in DF start with 16 in their main combat skill at the very least. Many have a 18, and a couple either start with a 20 or can get there with a bit of point shuffling.

This might sound excessive at first glance. Your base chance of success doesn’t increase past 16, and it’s unlikely anyone had more than a 18 in all of human history. Why allow PCs to start there, and possibly go even higher with earned points? Because this is what you need to be able to reliably attack every second without taking the time to perform setup maneuvers.

With these “overpowered” skill levels you can absorb more penalties without having to Evaluate or Aim to offset them, and you can use Deceptive Attacks instead of Feints without affecting your chances of success. If you still have enough spare skill levels left, you can even thrown in a Rapid Strike to make two attacks in that second.

Solution 2: Mandatory Dramatic Pauses

Fighters in real-world combat sports and action movies don’t spend every second of their fights furiously attacking each other. They’ll circle while looking for openings, stop to catch their breaths, and only go in for an exchange of actual blows every once in a while.

The use of setup maneuvers helps stretch fights out to be more similar to these examples, but if you’re reading this it’s because you don’t think they’re a good solution. And even if you do, you might want to go further.

One way to do this is to crib from the rules for tournament fights in GURPS Martial Arts. Under those rules, fights are composed of lulls and flurries. Combatants can only use the Attack maneuver5 during a flurry. During a lull, they cannot attack but can still use maneuvers like Change Posture, Evaluate, Move, Ready, Aim, or even just Do Nothing while waiting for an opening. In fantasy settings it would be a good time to cast those healing spells.

GURPS Martial Arts has flurries last for 2d seconds and lulls for 4d seconds, rolled at the start of the corresponding period. You can tweak these durations to best suit your campaign. If the combatants’ actions look like they’re going to force an early change, you can end the current “period” early.

The main purpose of introducing lulls is to extend a fight’s in-character duration to something like that of a real-world boxing or MMA round. They can also help change the mental “efficiency” calculation of someone who’s used to action economies. If there’s a part of the fight where you can’t attack, performing setup actions for when you can becomes the most efficient thing to do.

Lulls work both in melee and ranged combat (when everyone might hunker down behind cover for a while), but they might get a bit hard to manage or look a bit silly when you have a large number of combatants in a fight.

  1. 10 minutes to beat the bad guy and disarm the bomb is not a problem at all if you beat the bad guy in 5 seconds. ↩

  2. “Other Systems” here means the last three editions of D&D, Pathfinder 2E, most editions of Shadowrun, and any others that might be similar in outlook but which I’m not too familiar with. ↩

  3. And if there are any obsessive optimizers in your group, they’ll push you much less gently. ↩

  4. I admit I tacked that extra Ready at the end to make the “five-second plan” joke work. ↩

  5. And its cousin All-Out-Attack. ↩