I love OSR games, and I have been playing GURPS since 88. My preferred game now is the best of both, a blend of GURPS Dungeon Fantasy and the newer Dungeon Fantasy RPG. Does anyone else play GURPS?
Dungeon Fantasy anyone?
1 Like
It carries the feel of say AD&D 2e, using a roll under mechanic, and point build chargen. It is a skill based system, as is magic. There are some similarities withhow magic works for GURPS, and how it works in DCC; you roll to cast, get docked fatigue, and mostly your opponent gets a resistance roll. Critical results are rarer with 3d6 than with d20, but fairly spectacular.
The default play level is a point build of 250, which roughly translates into 5th-8th level. I prefer lower levels of play; 75points which is like 0-2, and 125 points, more like 3-4th level.
I have used the GURPS engine to run CoC, VtMand Cyberpunk in the past, but I really enjoy DMing DF.
GURPS 3rd Edition was my default go-to game system of choice through most of the 1990s. I did run a brief fantasy game using GURPS, but we quickly became dissatisfied with the magic system, and ended up abandoning that campaign after only four or five sessions. I always found GURPS to be a better system for modern-day action-adventure/espionage/horror and science-fiction games. I ran a year-long “GURPS: X-Files” game in 1996, and we had a very fun GURPS: Space Opera that lasted nearly two years. I was a player in a very weird GURPS game that was advertised as another “GURPS: X-Files” game, but that one pulled in ESP, magic from Mage: The Ascension, the Cthulhu Mythos, aliens from a planet in the Arcturus system, vampires, the Bavarian Illuminati, and the American Boxing Association.
That campaign ended in 1999, and I haven’t really played GURPS much since.
1 Like
For years I ran CoC using GURPS Horror. I ran Cyberpunk, VtM, Old West. I found it to be the best system I have ever played.
I always found that advancing a character in terms of what abilities they have been using, rather than a whole block of abilities based on level advancement; individual point buy advancement always seemed a much more organic process. That said, I also like seeing completely random character advancement in some oSR games.
For a lot of people, GURPS sourcebooks were used for other systems. I often did the reverse, using Arkham Uncovered and Kingsport to inform my Horror campaign. Which sourcebooks did people like to use?
1 Like
I’ve actually been playing in a GURPS campaign, in the AD&D setting Planescape. We’re only using the core rules, no splat books, no optional rules, so that actually keeps things pretty fast and lite. I’d been playing Savage Worlds with this group for a couple years when this GM switched to GURPS, and I was pleasantly surprised at how much more smoothly GURPS runs than the “Fast, Furious, Fun” system. That has a lot to do with the GM having a lot of the system in his head, and him not pulling in rules that would bog things down.
That said, if I had my druthers we’d be playing PbtA games, it’s just how I’d prefer to play.
2 Likes
A lot of how well a system plays, in my experience, comes down to how well the GM can focus it for the table at hand. As unwieldy as GURPS could be, in my younger days I could make a game sing with it for my players, mainly because I knew what stuff I could drop or gloss over in the rule set to get the table where everyone wanted to be. When I run games that I’m less familiar with, even games that are much lighter and less “crunchy” as written, I might be slower because I’m doing a lot more work behind the GM screen, so to speak, and that introduces a lot of lag at the table.
1 Like
I have found that the game runs smoother if I have enough prep, and have limited character builds to the specific genre during session 0. With the convention games I have run, there were pre-gens, and in my online game I have a hand in most of the builds that go to play, so I have advance knowledge of PC mechanical limitations, which in turn limits lookups. I also do a lot of advance building of generic opponents that can be customized on the fly. The template system is a big help.
1 Like