Posts
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My Alternatives to GURPS
It seems my last post on this subject caught more attention than usual! I got a significant number of comments on Google Plus and Facebook. I honestly wouldn’t have thought people would be this interested in my opinions. So let’s elaborate on this a bit more, shall we?
In that post I mentioned that the first system I tend to think of when I visualize a game in my head is GURPS about 90% of the time. In the other 10%, something else comes to mind. And in some part of the first 90%, there may come a time where I decide GURPS is not the best fit either. Why do I end up thinking that, and what systems I prefer at these times?
The Why
Much of my reasoning has been explained in the previous post on this subject: sometimes the setting assumptions just don’t mesh well with GURPS in terms of their preferred level of exactness, internal consistency, or sheer scale. The rest of the time I come to this conclusion is because I know of a system that can handle what I see as that particular setting’s “essence” better than GURPS. Usually it’s a mix of the two.
With enough work I could probably modify GURPS into something that can handle these cases. However, I feel that there’s a point where it’s simpler and easier to use another system whose design and default assumptions already match what I’m going for.
Note that this doesn’t have anything to do with the level of “crunch” in a system! It’s more about the specific feelings I want to evoke in actual play than about the complexity of the rules.
Here’s some examples from fiction and other media that I feel fit the criteria above:
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By the end of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, you have the protagonists piloting a universe-sized robot who uses galaxies as throwing weapons. How to even begin modeling that?
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The joke at the core of Andrew Hussie’s Problem Sleuth is that the exact game mechanics of the stuff you do don’t matter one bit and trying to properly understand them leads only to madness. This remains an ever-present theme in his subsequent story, Homestuck, as well. Despite the jokes some people like to make, GURPS works in precisely the opposite way.
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An Overwatch campaign that sought to capture the feel of the original’s gameplay would need a fight between a non-superhuman shirtless dude with an improvised shotgun and someone wearing the best powered armor German engineering can build to be an even match. GURPS can’t easily handle that level of ludonarrative dissonance.
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Everything in the entirely non-violent and pastoral Flying Witch happens at a scale where you could sit down and figure everyone’s DX scores and encumbrance levels, but that would feel like it’s missing the point of what the show is really about.
The What
So what do I usually go for, when I decide GURPS wouldn’t be a good fit? Let’s look at my usual alternatives in rough alphabetical order:
Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition
This is my favorite edition of Dungeons & Dragons; Quite possibly the only edition I actually like. People like to denigrate it as being too “video-gamey”, but I find its combat system and the power system that supports it to be immensely fun in a very specific way.
You see, D&D 4 combat does feel like a video-game to me, but not like the MMOs its detractors usually compare it to. No, to me it feels like a grid- and turn- based tactical RPG in the vein of Final Fantasy Tactics, Fire Emblem or Disgaea. I love that sort of game to bits, and my fond memories of playing them stretch back into my pre-teen years. Having an ruleset that allows me to run something like that on the tabletop is basically a dream come true.
Its encounter and monster design system is easy to use and produces remarkably consistent results. Monster stats in D&D 4 are mostly independent from the in-setting description for those monsters. Everything is based on level - the equipment a monster of a certain level wears and even its basic attributes are mostly there for color, and can even be safely omitted from the stat block itself. This makes reskinning monsters to fit your specific scenario a simple matter of changing your description and maybe switching out a minor power in the stat block.
I use D&D 4th Edition when I want to experience the feel of its grid-based combat, and when I want a high level of separation between a character’s game stats and their in-setting description. That last reason is why I would use this system for a “gameplay first” adaptation of Overwatch. In a “setting first” adaptation I would still go with GURPS (and Roadhog vs. Reinhardt wouldn’t be an even match).
Exalted 3rd Edition
I love Exalted’s setting! I didn’t love the second edition all that much, but the third won me back.
While I could take this game’s excellent setting and run it as a high-powered “fantasy supers” GURPS game, I find the original rules have a certain, well, charm to them. So unless I have a very strong reason not to, when I run Exalted I use the Exalted 3rd edition rules. I would probably go for a system conversion before I used the second edition, though.
Chuubo’s Marvelous Wish Granting Engine
Chuubo’s is a system as rigorously designed as GURPS, but with a diametrically opposite focus. While GURPS is all about the mechanical actions and physical results of character actions, Chuubo’s is all about the intention and the emotions behind these actions.
This makes it well-suited for pastoral, non-violent games inspired by material such as Flying Witch. Games where how an action makes you feel is more important than whether it is successful, and where the climax of the story consists of witnessing something wonderful rather than overcoming a conflict.
The system also has support for other genres as well, and a large selection of miraculous powers that truly feel miraculous. It generally excels at running games where the metaphysics of the setting matter far more than its physics (such as one based on Homestuck). Its narrative-based XP mechanics are also quite interesting!
Another system that has very good support for non-violent pastoral games is Golden Sky Stories. Unlike Chuubo’s, it works at a more prosaic level and doesn’t try to support other genres, but it’s pretty good at what it does.
Wushu
FATE seems to be all the rage these days when it comes to relatively-rules-light, narrative-driven games, but Wushu is the game that captured my heart in that area. Its first iterations were dedicated to emulating kung-fu movies, but it eventually became a generic, action-oriented system that reaches that status by not caring about the physical details of character actions. Its very light rules mostly concern themselves with ensuring the group maintains a coherent narrative, and use that narrative as a means to gather the dice players roll for actual tests.
This makes it perfect for games where the exact “physics” of the world take a backseat to the spectacle of the story. Gurren Lagann is the perfect example of such a setting, and it would also work wonderfully for Problem Sleuth’s “nonsensical adventure game” paradigm since players would be able to make up stupid mechanics on the spot as part of their narration.
What About You?
This is pretty much the list of all of my go-to systems. What are yours? What specific things draw you to these games?
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Dragon's Dogma Bestiary: Golems
Copyright 2012 Capcom. This is an entry in the Dragon’s Dogma bestiary. The remaining entries along with the full adaptation can be found here.
As in other fantasy settings, golems are animated statues created by magicians to fulfill a certain mission, usually to guard some important place. In Gransys, the secret of their creation has been lost to the ages, but there are still a fair number of dormant golems still extant. Sages speculate their creators belonged to the same culture that worshipped the elemental deities whose shrines still survive underground. This speculation comes mostly from observing the designs of both the ruins and the golems and concluding their builders liked to think big.
However, none of the golems found so far were even near the elemental shrine ruins. They slumber out in the wild, looking like boulders until an unwary intruder crosses some unseen boundary. Perhaps the truth is that the golems are even older than the shrines, and the places they have been set to guard have long since crumbled to dust.
Advanced Stone Golem
GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 2: Dungeons contains stats for a stone golem on p. 26. As that book says, those stats represent a basic model. At SM+1, this type of golem can comfortably fit in most dungeons and might indeed be guarding some deep chamber in an elemental shrine.
The “advanced” stone golems found on the wild are quite a bit larger and more dangerous, and have the ability to shoot coruscating energy beams from their foreheads at foes they can’t reach with their powerful fists.
ST 50; DX 11; IQ 8; HT 14;
SM +3; Dodge 8; DR 15;
HP 90; Will 8; Per 8; FP 11
Basic Speed 5.50; Move 6;
- Punch (16): 5d+1 cr. Reach C-2.
- Grab (16): Grapples at ST 51.
- Brilliant Lance (14): 3d burning; Acc 3; Range 10/100; RoF 1.
Traits: Automaton; Cannot Learn; Doesn’t Breathe; Doesn’t Eat or Drink; Doesn’t Sleep; Fragile (Unnatural); High Pain Threshold; Immunity to Metabolic Hazards; Indomitable; Injury Tolerance (Homogenous, No Blood); Pressure Support 3; Reprogrammable; Unfazeable; Unhealing (Total); Vacuum Support.
Class: Construct.
Notes: See below for additional weaknesses.
Fighting the Golem
As a six meter tall, six-ton stone statue the advanced golem has the sort of HP and DR that puts it well outside the range of most personal weapons. Despite its relatively low IQ and Will, it’s not very succeptible to mind-affecting magic either. Fighting it directly would require siege engines or apocalyptic magic. Fortunately, there’s a better way!
Since it requires much more magical energy than the basic golem described in DF 2, this advanced model is powered by 1d+1 Powerstones encrusted in its surface (roll a random hit location for each one). Each can be targeted at a penalty equal to that of the hit location it’s in plus an additional -1, and despite being as Homogenous as the golem has a “mere” HP 10 and DR 0. Reducing the stone to 0 HP cracks it and makes it worthless as a power source. Destroying all of them deactivates the golem.
Of course, parties who stumble upon a golem can also just run away and leave the zone it’s guarding. They will never pursue anyone or fire their beams past that boundary. Even if the golem is on the way to something you need, you can retreat and come back prepared to face it later on.
Golems are always alone - they kill anything else that enters their protected area.
Golem Variants
Iron Golem: Some places were apparently deemed too important to be guarded by mere stone golems. They have faded away to nothing just the same, leaving their immortal guardians watching over empty stretches of bog or meadow.
Not only do iron golems have double the HP and DR, their 2d+2 power sources are located outside their bodies, placed along the boundary of their guarded area. These special talismans are as resistant to time as the golem itself, but have a mere DR 0 and HP 5 each. The problem is finding them while the golem attacks - destroying an iron golem is the ultimate exercise in Extreme Archaeology.
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To GURPS or Not To GURPS
I’m sure many people have posted their takes on this over the years. In a continuing attempt to procrastrinate on finishing the Dragon’s Dogma bestiary, I decided to post mine.
My History with GURPS
GURPS has always been one of my favorite systems ever since I first heard of it somewhere during the early Nineties. Back then, GURPS 3rd Edition was one of the Big Three systems in Brazil, mostly because it was one of the three systems that had been translated by this one publisher who had a strategy of buying All The Licenses from US companies. The other two were AD&D 2nd Edition and Vampire: The Masquerade, at the time also in its second edition.
Of those three, I went with GURPS, mostly by a process of elimination. Buying only one core book was way cheaper than buying three, and I wasn’t a fan of vampires as player characters. I read and enjoyed the book, but didn’t actually use it in play very much. I mostly played Tagmar, which is a fantasy system that should be pretty much unknown to anyone outside of Brazil, and later on a bit of Shadowrun 2nd edition (and my relationship with that one deserves an article of its own).
After ‘96 or so, when my English skills had improved considerably and I had moved to a bigger city with a proper FLGS, I began to discover the joy of GURPS supplements. Some of them had been translated to Portuguese, but the ones I found myself drawn to only had English versions. I still have and cherish my physical copies of Russia, Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon, the first Discworld, and consider my relative recent finding of a used GURPS Goblins to be a major stroke of luck. Even though I still didn’t play much GURPS, the books were a joy to read.
I bought the GURPS 4th Edition corebooks when they came out in 2005, in English. By then the Brazilian edition of the game had been languishing for a while, publishing-wise: aside from those first few translated sourcebooks, all we had were some locally-produced historical games based on GURPS Lite, and even those were fading out of print by the time Fourth Edition rolled around.
I liked the new core rules quite a lot, and kept buying print books as they came out until I switched to PDF for good. These days, GURPS is pretty much my absolute favorite system, though ironically that doesn’t seem to be an opinion shared with any of my fellow face-to-face players. But they’ve all moved into board games anyway, so they don’t count here.
Now, every time I watch or read some particularly interesting piece of media I try to think what it would look like adapted to some RPG system. And pretty much the first system I always try to fit in there is GURPS. 90% of the times the result looks pretty good, at least for a 15-minute purely mental effort, but sometimes I find it’s not the best system for the job.
When To GURPS
GURPS excells at representing settings and stories where the specific details of the actions you take are important and have mechanical weight. This usually means relatively grounded and internally consistent settings, though not necessarily realistic ones. Most action movies fit here, as does a whole lot of science fiction and quite a few martial arts stories.
Fantasy does, too, as long it has the traits above. IMHO, GURPS does low-to-mid-level D&D a lot better than most actual editions of D&D. If you want “I wait until the armored ogre lifts his arm to attack and stab his armpit with my spear” to actually mean something mechanically, GURPS is your system!
I would use GURPS for a game inspired in say, the Killjoys science fiction series, the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon movie, the My Hero Academia comic, or the Valkyria Chronicles video-game. I have used GURPS for games inspired on X-COM and plain old Dungeon Fantasy, and wrote a fairly complete Dragon’s Dogma adaptation.
In a more general note, GURPS also thrives when your group has a little time to prepare for the game - choose which subset of the rules to use, create characters, that sort of thing. The more of that the GM does themselves the less experience with the system their players will need to have.
When Not to GURPS
Now, the other 10% of times, I find GURPS wouldn’t be the best fit for the show/book/video-game in question. These works usually have the opposite traits from the ones I listed above: action details are much less important than their effects, and their settings tend to lack one of “grounded” or “consistent”. Often they lack both! This doesn’t imply they’re bad works, just that they have a different focus.
GURPS bases all of its numbers in real-world measurements. Powers have ranges in yards or meters, an attack’s damage is based on the force behind it, and so on. Therefore, it has trouble modeling tories where characters have fuzzily-defined skills and powers. If your character’s specific capabilities are defined more by the needs of the story rather than by anything measurable in-world, it would be best to use a system that supports this.
The sort of science fiction that has characters switch bodies a lot is also hard to model in GURPS, whose rules assume its characters will usually not undergo this sort of drastic change so often.
And if you don’t have much time to prepare for a game, the best system for it will inevitably be whatever your players are more familiar with! At least where I live, that’s unlikely to be GURPS.
What about you?
What have you used GURPS successfully for? If that game fit into my “When Not to GURPS” description, what did you do to make it work well? Please leave a comment!
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Let's Read Hell's Rebels: Meet the NPCs of Part 1
Welcome to another installment of “Let’s Read Hell’s Rebels!” You can find links to the whole series in its project page. This time we’ll take a more detailed look into the friendly NPCs the group has met by the end of Part 1. Let’s look at them in order of appearance and discuss how we should convert them to GURPS.
Rexus Victocora
Rexus. Copyright 2016 Paizo. The heir and sole survivor of what was possibly Kintargo’s nicest noble family. His parents belonged to the Sacred Order of Archivists ever since before he was born, and after a youth spent looking for a cause Rexus had finally decided to join them upon returning home from his studies abroad. Instead he found his home in flames with everyone who was inside dead, and regretfully fled into the night. He’s having some trouble adjusting to life as a destitute outcast, not just because he misses the luxury of a noble lifestyle but because his he has what sounds like a chronic respiratory disease that demands regular treatment with expensive alchemical drugs.
With the death of his parents, Rexus is more determined than ever to see Kintargo free, both from Thrune’s government and from Chelish rule in general. However, he will not compromise his principles to do it, and will leave a rebellion that turns too bloody or exclusionary.
An interesting bit: Rexus is transgender! This will probably never come up in play or be noticeable to the PCs (this is a world with well-developed polymorph magic), but it’s nice to see it on the page nevertheless.
Conversion Notes
Rexus’ original stats have him as a Neutral Good Human Aristocrat 2/Sorcerer 1. Despite being higher-level than the PCs to start, he’s more of a support character whose main function is to translate some important documents the party finds in Part 1 of the adventure. His low Constitution score and mostly noncombat spell selection make him unsuitable for adventuring.
The best way to stat Rexus up in GURPS Dungeon Fantasy would be to make him a Scholar (from DF 4) with the necessary linguistic and research skills to fulfill his dramatic role, and perhaps a few Knowledge spells to round him out. His poor health might be represented by lower than average HT and/or disadvantages such as Very Unfit and Chronic Pain, perhaps with a Mitigator to represent those alchemical treatments. He would still provide valuable skills, but wouldn’t be someone you would want to take with you to the front lines.
After Rexus has fulfilled his function in Adventure 1, the GM is entirely free to run him as they see fit. His permanence in the rebellion depends entirely on how well the PCs treat him and how well their own morals match his. Our hypotethical party shouldn’t have a problem in this area, which means he would continue to lend them his vital scholarly skills. I mean, who else would you task with translating those encrypted Celestial writings? Merisiel?
PCs who get along specially well with Rexus could purchase him as an Ally, in which case the GM might want to stat him up so he’s a bit more survivable in the field. Buying him as a Contact would be sort of redundant, however, since as a member of the resistance he’s already always around and has a defined skillset.
Laria Longroad
Laria. Copyright 2016 Paizo. Laria is a halfling, and was born a slave in Cheliax. Her owners were unusually cruel even by Chelish slave-holder standards, and when one of them killed her parents and brother she beat the guy to death with her bare hands and escaped to join the Bellflower Network. A few years later she ended up as a coordinator for them in Kintargo while running a very well-regarded coffee-house as a front. She worked not just with Bellflower agents but with smugglers, criminals, and rebels of all sorts - anyone working to undermine Chelish rule in Kintargo.
Needless to say, Barzilai’s rise to power has left her without an much of a network to coordinate. She’s been keeping her head down but by the time the PCs meet her has grown conviced something must be done to improve the situation. Where Rexus is idealistic, Laria is cynical: she wants a free Kintargo as much as he does, but is less picky about which methods are acceptable to reach that outcome.
Laria provides the PCs with a temporary hideout in Adventure 1, and if they treat her well can continue to give them logistical support and access to a network of smugglers.
Conversion Notes
Laria’s original stats have her as a Chaotic Good Halfling Brawler 2/Rogue 1. Brawlers are kinda like monks, only they replace the philosophy and chi powers with the fighter’s large amount of bonus feats and with the ability to switch them around mid-fight.
Despite this, Laria’s main contribution to the cause are her social skills and her useful position in both polite society and the underworld. Therefore, it makes sense to stat her up in GURPS Dungeon Fantasy using the Agent template from DF 15, with plenty of Savoir-Faire, Current Affairs (Kintargo), Streetwise and Contacts. The lower-point template would prevent her from overshadowing Lem from our hypothetical party, and those points would go into areas where an active DF PC might be reluctant to invest in. For actual parties who lack a bard or other specialist “social” character the GM can bump her up to a full 250 points of halfling crime boss.
As with Rexus, Laria could make an interesting Ally for a PC who gets along with her especially well, particularly if that PC’s party lacks strong social skills. As she is not a formal member of the Silver Ravens and has her own operation going on, it could also make sense to acquire her as a Contact. Laria can also be the “face” of a larger Contact Group representing her own network of smugglers.
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GURPS X-COM: The Arsenal of Ruin, Part 2
Illustration by AntiMingebag on DeviantArt In their second field-op, our brave X-COM squad saw new enemies with new equipment, so it’s time to update the Arsenal of Ruin! This post will focus on the gear carried by the Elite Puppets, also known as White Masks.
White Mask Gear
White Masks are elite Puppets of Ruin in service to the Ebon Masters. Like their “lesser” brethren, they are borne as fruit from the Trees of Ruin, but they only appear in the heart of the woods where the Trees of Woe are older. At the stage where our campaign stopped, there were still no trees old enough to drop elite puppets, so the ones the party met are all “imported” from off-world.
In the original Dreams of Ruin material, elite puppets carried TL 8 military equipment equivalent to that of a first-world military soldier: automatic assault rifles and more modern rocket launchers. For this campaign, they had to step up their game, as that sort of gear is starting equipment for my PCs.
Like the equipment carried by normal puppets, all of this gear is produced by the trees themselves along with the puppet that wears it. The only “custom” addition by the Ebon Masters here is painting the masks on their armors white to denote rank within their organization. This equipment is meant to be more advanced than anything carried by modern Earth infantry, but it’s still considered somewhat cheap and low-end by the aliens.
Puppet Assault Rifle
Compared to the standard-issue puppet rifle seen in Part 1, this bullpup design fires a lighter 7mm round at a much higher rate of fire. It has an electrothermal-chemical (ETC) action and uses the High-Cyclic Controlled Bursts rule from High-Tech, p. 83.
This weapon also has an integral underbarrel grenade launcher that fires 25mm rounds with greater force and accuracy than its TL 8 counterparts.
The Puppet Assault Rifle lacks any targetting electronics, as the puppet’s supernatural senses fill the same role. It is otherwise extremely reliable and easy to operate, being able to work for years in adverse conditions without regular maintenance. It is operated with Guns (Longarm), or with Guns (Rifle) and Guns (Grenade Launcher) under the standard rules.
TL Weapon Damage Acc Range Weight RoF Shots ST Bulk Rcl 9 Puppet Assault Rifle 7d pi 4 1100/4500 3.5/0.5 9# 50+1(3) 9 -4 1 Grenade Launcher 4d pi++ or as grenade 4 360/2200 – 1 3(3) – – 1
The weapon is usually loaded with standard ammunition (in table), but it’s perfectly capable of firing APDS (9d(2) pi-) or APEP (7d(3) pi-) rounds. Both would ruin the day of those players who think their vests-with-plates make them immune to puppet weaponry. Even without armor-piercing ammo, they’re still smart enough to aim for the arms and legs if they notice center-of-mass shots don’t result in an immediate kill.The grenade launcher is usually loaded with TL9 HE or thermobaric warheads (Ultra-Tech p. 153 and 155), though the Ebon Masters can certainly issue crueler and/or higher-TL loads to their servants if the mission calls for it.
White Mask Armor
The White Mask Armor suit covers the torso and head in rigid plates of the same composite material used to make puppet swords. The neck and limbs are covered in a mesh of ultra-tech ballistic fibers equivalent to Reflex armor (from Ultra-Tech). All of this material is colored a dull gray, except for the helmet plates, which are white.
The suit is sealed, chemically-coated and contamination-proof, but does not feature ports for air tanks or even a visor, as its intended wearers have no need for such things. In fact, it can’t even be removed from the puppet wearing it without being cut open.
The White Mask Armor provides DR 30 to the torso, groin and head. It provides DR 20 against cutting and piercing damage and DR 10 against all other damage types to the limbs and neck. While DR 30 is a little less than the DR 35 provided by a TL 8 assault vest with trauma plates, this DR is not semi-ablative like that of the plates, and is more than enough to stop rounds from an X-COM issue assault rifle. The full suit is also about a bit lighter than the starting “heavy armor” package for PCs and provides more DR to all non-torso locations.
TL Name Location DR Weight 9 White Mask Armor torso, groin, head 30 15kg arms, legs, neck 20/10 Using White Mask Gear
Each Elite Puppet wears a White Mask Armor suit, and carries a Puppet Assault Rifle with 4 reloads for the rifle and 2 for the grenade launcher. They also each carry a sword and a couple of hand grenades, and may carry a Puppet RPG or extra rounds for one carried by a squadmate. These items are described in Part 1.
These weapons also fall within the “second tier” of my tech tree. Researching these weapons would have allowed X-COM to make similar versions for themselves, which would have the advantage of not being tainted by spores. They never did get a “researchable” White Mask corpse, but if they had they could have obtained a version of their armor that’s actually fit for human use. Having access to at least this much would enable the PCs to better stand up to the sort of alien that would show up later on, as their successes mounted.
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