It's been so long since the last GURPS edition, that the present day is now in the "future" tech level

[Staffan]

Ultimately all fortune mechanics are just rough percentile generators. How likely is something to happen? And 3D6 modified by some number or the other isn't an intuitive number, much less a realistic one. When it's going wrong it's not easy to see why it is going wrong or what modifiers to the roll are doing in a particular case. It obfuscates the probabilities and treats that obtuseness as realism. It's not actually simulating anything. And if it isn't simulating anything particularly well, then why should it be excused for game play that comes down to "first side that rolls a critical hit wins"?

I mostly agree with your criticism of GURPS, but I think there's a point to the bell curve. The idea is that increasing your skill level leads to diminishing returns when it comes to regularly difficult things – going from 12 to 14 is an increase in from about 75% chance to about 90%, but going from 14 to 16 then only builds it up to about 98%, and beyond that it doesn't help at all. But the character with 16 can take a -4 penalty and still have about a 75% chance, while the guy with 14 is now down to 50% and the one with 12 is at 25%. Whether that's a good thing or not is a different matter.

There are two issues related to this, though. One is that you get double-whammied on the diminishing returns front. With an average-difficulty skill, 1 point gets you stat-1, 2 points get you stat+0, 4 points gets you stat+1, and every additional 4 points gets you an additional +1. So just as you start getting diminishing returns on each skill level, the costs start going up. That's why the powergamer move in GURPS is to max your DX and IQ and spend as little as possible on skills. If you're spending 100 points on IQ and IQ-based skills, you can either pump IQ to 14 for 80 points and then spend 20 points on getting 20 different Average skills up to 13 for 1 point each, or you can keep IQ at 10 , get 8 skills to 13, and 1 to 11. And given how many frelling skills GURPS has, 20 skills aren't that many.

The other issue is that GURPS is very "generous" with penalties to skills, but far less generous with bonuses. Being unfamiliar with the specific equipment you're using is a -2, for example. This can stack for being different in multiple ways – the game specifically calls out someone used to 12.7mm sniper rifles having a -6 when using a 5.56mm assault rifle (-2 each for unfamiliar caliber, unfamiliar action (bolt action vs self-loader), and grip (bipod vs hand-held)).

 

[Wolfpack48]

Honestly? Me too. I'm pretty sure I've played GURPS with maybe 15-16 other people over the last 30 years. I used to be able to see more GURPS books than that at my local gaming store in 1991.

Never used the rules but their background and settings and adventure books were full of great ideas.

 

[Celebrim]

I mostly agree with your criticism of GURPS, but I think there's a point to the bell curve. The idea is that increasing your skill level leads to diminishing returns when it comes to regularly difficult things – going from 12 to 14 is an increase in from about 75% chance to about 90%, but going from 14 to 16 then only builds it up to about 98%, and beyond that it doesn't help at all. But the character with 16 can take a -4 penalty and still have about a 75% chance, while the guy with 14 is now down to 50% and the one with 12 is at 25%. Whether that's a good thing or not is a different matter.

You hit on two things there but mostly just illustrated how counter intuitive probabilities are and why linear math is so much better at the table. First, it's not diminishing returns - it's actually huge returns. To understand why, let's look at some simple linear math from 1e AD&D. Let's say you are fighting orcs in something like B2 Keep on the Borderlands. How much better is a -2 AC than a -1 AC? The answer is not 5% better, but twice as good. With -1 AC you get hit 1 time in 10, but with -2 AC you get hit only 1 time in 20. Your expected damage versus each attack is halved. You have effectively twice as many hit points as the guy with -1, and three times as many hit points as the guy with 0 AC, and four times as many hit points as the guy with but 1 AC.

Failing only one time in 50 is five times better than failing only one time in 10. The number of situations where the failure matters is proportionately decreased. This is the reason system mastery players horde those modifiers, because they now that if they are already close to good every little increase is huge. The increase from someone needing a 12 to hit you to someone needing a 13 is small. But the increase from needing an 18 to a 19 is huge. And for GURPS this meant that any positive modifier wasn't an incremental improvement but an exponential one, but one which would be variable and unpredictable depending on how many ranks the character already had. Which is why GURPS could never be generous with bonuses.

It's also why pumping points into your defenses broke the game. Worse, damage resistances were static, so they either did very little or did so much that you became invulnerable except to critical hits. But critical hits themselves were absolute rather than quantified, so everything was ultimately just luck, and because you couldn't really horde positive bonuses you couldn't even be particularly tactical about it.

Traveller 2D6, BRP, WEG D6 - they all handle this better than GURPS does just across the board.

That's why the powergamer move in GURPS is to max your DX and IQ and spend as little as possible on skills.

The point buy was broken all to heck in GURPs. You could take situational penalties to an attribute to get enough points to increase the attribute, effectively being better than you would have been without the handicap. Take weak willed, then spend the points to up attributes so that you are now effectively not weak willed. And on and on. All the numbers were just pulled out of the air with no real balancing.

 

[Jd Smith1]

Don't worry, it's only ten years away!

It must be, they keep saying that!

 

[Committed Hero]

Instead of good game design or instead of organic design, GURPS is guided by that idea so common until the early 90s that all problems at the table stem from a lack of realism, and so just making things realistic will fix all problems.

"Realism" in a system is a perfectly acceptable goal, and GURPS has indeed striven to achieve it. But it clashes with principles of PC generation for me. I understand why Nuclear Physics should cost more than Unarmed Combat in reality; chances are, however, a higher rating in the latter will come in handier in far more games.

Industry-wise, SJG has the mixed blessing of Munchkin. It's hard to justify diverting time and resources from the product line that earns you the most money (and board games vs rpgs in general).

 

[Staffan]

"Realism" in a system is a perfectly acceptable goal, and GURPS has indeed striven to achieve it.

Striven perhaps, but I am not sure it has succeeded. It is certainly detailed, with its 1-second turns and hundreds of skills, but that's not the same thing even if many gamers get those confused. Is it really "realistic" with 9 different Guns skills, multiplied by TL? Do you really need Electronics Operation (Media) as a separate skill from Photography? Does Falconry need to be a skill? Do you need to make the distinction between Filch (taking things that are out in the open without being noticed), Pickpocket (taking things on someone's person without being noticed), and Sleight of Hand? Do you really need to specialize Philosophy by the particular type of philosophy (so Philosophy (Confucianism) is different from Philosophy (Stoicism))?

 

[darjr]

Ope!

I’m feeling like I’m bashing GURPS so I think I’ll stop. Reader if it’s your jam then that’s awesome.

 

[MGibster]

Striven perhaps, but I am not sure it has succeeded. It is certainly detailed, with its 1-second turns and hundreds of skills, but that's not the same thing even if many gamers get those confused. Is it really "realistic" with 9 different Guns skills, multiplied by TL? Do you really need Electronics Operation (Media) as a separate skill from Photography? Does Falconry need to be a skill? Do you need to make the distinction between Filch (taking things that are out in the open without being noticed), Pickpocket (taking things on someone's person without being noticed), and Sleight of Hand? Do you really need to specialize Philosophy by the particular type of philosophy (so Philosophy (Confucianism) is different from Philosophy (Stoicism))?

This is what broke my players' minds. One of them was looking at a master skill list and, with a great deal of incredulity, "There's a #%#*&# dropping skill? There's a skill for dropping things!" Dropping is of course the skill of dropping heavy objects at a target while you're flying.

 

[stonehead]

"Realism" in a system is a perfectly acceptable goal, and GURPS has indeed striven to achieve it. But it clashes with principles of PC generation for me. I understand why Nuclear Physics should cost more than Unarmed Combat in reality; chances are, however, a higher rating in the latter will come in handier in far more games.

Skills and advantages seem to be pointed using totally different philosophies. Advantages are (very roughly) pointed according to how useful they are to the average adventure. Obviously it's not perfect, because no campaign takes place in the platonic ideal of the average adventure, and there are a near-infinite number of possible combinations, so balancing all of them would be impossible.

Skills seem to be pointed roughly according to how hard they would be to learn in real life. How useful something is, unfortunately, has absolutely nothing to do with how hard it is to learn.

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Personally, I'm a huge fan of gurps, but it relies so heavily on everyone at the table trying their best to make it work that I can't really recommend it. It really was designed on the assumption that if someone makes an over-powered character (which is stupidly easy) the GM will just tell them to change it, and the player will cooperate. On top of that, it barely even counts as a system straight out-of-the box. If you want to have a fun game, the GM needs to put in a lot of work beforehand laying out what skills, advantages, disadvantages, tone, optional rules, etc, are appropriate for the game.

I would compare it to a poorly balanced TCG. If you have a group of friends who are all on the same page then playing the game is really fun. And as long as no one is only trying to 'win' building a deck/character is a really creative endeavor. But as soon as someone breaks that unwritten social contract, the entire thing falls apart and becomes miserable.

 

[Celebrim]

Skills seem to be pointed roughly according to how hard they would be to learn in real life.

As a professional software developer, I am certain of few things more than I am certain of the fact that people are terrible at estimating how hard things are. We have no intuitive sense of what is hard or easy. We measure that based on how rare some skill is, or whether something is hard or easy for us, or how hard or easy we think it would be to do it ourselves, or on any number of other biases that have nothing to do with "real life" and have no relationship to objective fact. So it is for the GURPS skills.