What's With All the Hate, Man? (GURPS)

If a game system can simulate Justice League, Dragon Ball Z, Pokemon, Transformers and Power Rangers all at once, I think I can spend the rest of my life reliving the TV I watched in the first 15 years of it.

If a game system can simulate Justice League, Dragon Ball Z, Pokemon, Transformers and Power Rangers all at once, I think I can spend the rest of my life reliving the TV I watched in the first 15 years of it.

The great thing is that this doesn't even seem like it would be hard with GURPS. At least not in the way that making comparably powerful characters at a given point value in, say, Ultra-Tech (say TL11) and Fantasy is hard.

edited 2nd Sep '10 2:05:55 AM by LullTheConqueror

Or what if you have a group where someone wants to play Sailor Moon, someone wants to play a a viking riding a dragon, someone wants to play a Gundam, and someone wants to play a sentient psychic cactus...

Sounds like the perfect Freshthing class for Illuminati University.

IOU welcomes beings from all walks, crawls, slithers, and flies of life!

Just...don't ask what the O stands for, you're not cleared for that.

EDIT: ...and my thread killing abilities strike again!

edited 3rd Sep '10 12:56:27 PM by Nemi

I've seen GURPS, and while I haven't played it, it looks pretty good.

It's just that, well...it's really easy to make fun of.

Don't fall into that trap! Far too many of our own kind are also far too easy to make fun of!

I also hear it's considered the system for really stupid campaign ideas. You play D&D for fantasy, Shadowrun for cyberpunk, and GURPS for crap like Chip and Dale Rescue Rangers vs. the Cthulhu Mythos in the old west. I've abandoned the system myself. It was my first RPG and I think in over a decade I've played three brief games of it. Nobody wants to play it, nobody wants to spend a decade making characters. Given that there is such a strong internet Hatedom for the game, I assume I'm wrong in liking it and it is a bad RPG after all. I have terrible taste in everything.

Dood.

Chip 'n Dale Rescue Rangers vs. the Cthulhu Mythos in the Old West is an awesome idea for a campaign setting.

And the one time I've ever done any serious roleplaying so far, my entire group hated Yu-Gi-Oh! and Homestar Runner. I love Yu-Gi-Oh! and Homestar Runner. So don't feel bad that you like something just because a few people you associate with for the purposes of playing a game hate it.

edited 9th Oct '10 11:56:18 PM by Ryusui

I play and run GURPS game weekly. I find it funny how people think GURPS has loads and loads of rules. But guess what? All you need is the characters book. Most of the rules are realistic but when you take the right advantages, suddenly realism is gone and you have whatever genre of your choice. Most people who make fun of it have either flipped through it without actually trying it or make fun of it because they heard it sucks. Oh well their lost not mine. Now excuse me as I enjoy my GURPS: Infinite Worlds cross genre jumping game.

There are a lot of advantages and disadvantages, a lot of skills, and a few Scrappy Mechanics (most of the GURPS players I know don't like the dodge rules). I can see how that might intimidate a newbie.

i had to mention this is another topic and it brought this one back to mind:

opinion is not a magical catch all that prevents things from being objectively bad

there is something horribly wrong with the gurps system. it is widely hated for a reason. if it wasn't bad then perhaps other people would be interested in it and want to play.

I've played dozens of d&d games over the years some have gone on for months in the past and some barely lasted more then a session or two but I have played dozens of d&d games.

Ive played two gurps games in the course of the same decade and gurps was the one that got me into rpgs in the first place. the first game lasted all of a week and the second I ran for two seesions like four years ago. it was an introductory campaign desgined to introduce my friends to the system and they hated it, it took something like two weeks to get everybody ready with a character and the characters were supposed to be everyday contract laborer types, I did something I mistook for clever and had them find out they were the mooks in a james bond supervillain base. nobody liked it and nobody ever wants to try the system again

meanwhile on a whim we can roll up d&d characters in 15 minutes and we get more roleplaying out of I decided to play my chaacter this way then paying for stupid disadvantages and being mechanically forced into it

I have attempted dozens of gurps games in the meantime. mecha campaigns, steampunk, autoduel, survival horror, diselpunk, fantasy world war, post-apocalypse, space opera, zombie horror, anime campaigns, Silent Hill, practically everything that an rpg campaign can feasibly take place in and not ONE of them ever made it to as much as cahracter creation because NOBODY has any interest in wasting time on gurps.

we play things outside of d&D. longest campaign ever run was based on a half ass online Final Fantasy system. We've played Dark Heresy and wod and shadowrun and other systems. I am the only one stupid enough to think anybody could ever enjoy playing gurps.

OK, you don't enjoy it. That means it's bad for you and your group. Does that mean no-one else can enjoy it, ever, because it's objectively bad?

Uh, I think the mistake you're making is using other people's hate of GURPS as evidence as GURPS is bad.

Because as far as I can tell this is your reasoning:

• D&D is a good game because it's easy to get started with it.
• Thus a bad game would be difficult to start.
• I have never managed to start a game of GURPS because all my friends hate GURPS.
• Therefore GURPS is a bad game.

But the problem here is that you've never actually managed to get a game of GURPS going because everyone you know hates it. You don't know why they hate it; they could be like you and hate it because everyone else reassures them it's bad.

If I recall, my main beef is that it's too simulationistic. One of those games where "Hey, you can do anything!" so they start making rules to let you do anything, which makes game balance totally ridiculous.

But I don't remember much about it, since I only briefly looked it over and got a bad taste in my mouth.

I don't like the roll-under model for dice.

Crotchety old gamer warning. I've been playing D&D since Blackmoor, and GURPS is my favorite system. It's not for everybody. There are rules, true, but you're encouraged to *ignore* them in the interest of telling a good story. That means you have to be able to improvise, to keep a story moving, to handle a rules lawyer, and to maintain game balance. If you have/are a GM with those skills, you'll have a good game. If you have other skills, you'll be happier with another game. I suspect the haters have played games, or heard about games, where the GM struggled, either from not yet understanding the system or from not yet having the confidence to cut loose. Don't be a player hater.

I like GURPS chiefly because for me it's an ideal character generation system. I can make ANYTHING I want, even if I possibly have to scale down a thing or two to meet the overall strength level of the campaign.

It works for everything from everyday people to Exalted-level demigodhood.

Stupid Simulationistic gameplay. I hate it so much. So damned much!

The amount of simulationism depends on the DM.

Game systems are at most guidelines, you know.

Besides, I prefer the flexibility to having to play by rules/standards I find absurd. 5 paragraphs of backstory, anyone?

I can see why people'd dislike that, but in my case? 5 paragraphs is a shortish one, and I enjoy writing it...

I dislike having to do that AND generate large, intricate charts of stats and logistics. Adds up, y'see.

Again, fair enough- but I kinda enjoy some of that, too...

YMMV!

I like GURPS chiefly because for me it's an ideal character generation system. I can make ANYTHING I want, even if I possibly have to scale down a thing or two to meet the overall strength level of the campaign.

It does bug me that GURPS doesn't get that much love. Character creation doesn't take that long once you get the hang of it, I can make a character in about 20-30 minutes.

edited 26th Nov '10 11:27:59 AM by LolipodDistortion

I like GURPS for exactly the same reason I like TV Tropes; it gives options and information on a wide selection of topics and is generally well-researched (where applicable, and fairly reasonable where not).

Right now I'm using GURPS to write a story; having the characters statted out helps ward off Power Creep, Power Seep and keep Magic A as Magic A.

Based on my own experience with GURPS:

• The GM and the players have to put in a lot of work to decide which rules will be taken into account and which rules are not. This is what prevents me from ever trying to run the game.
• Everything is controlled by points. Everything. Min-maxing is practically required for any game that will be "typical" adventuring or combat. If you don't like using computer programs to help you get the most out of your points, GURPS is not the game for you.
• Although it is theoretically possible to combine some of the skills and traits into simpler things (e.g. Finance, Accounting, and other such skills are all different skills in this game), it takes work that most people are not likely to want to do.
• It was the first of its kind, and it shows. Nowadays, we live in a world in which many people tried out GURPS, then stole its key concepts and refined them, making GURPS look like a pretty "meh" system in comparison. Not to mention that these days there are a lot of rules-light generic systems out there, as well as the whole "narrativist" movement thing.