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GURPS is not better than a role playing game specifically tailored for the setting.
It shouldn't be, anyway.
It's the embodiment of the original phrase, "a jack of all trades is master of none, but often times better than a master of one."
GURPS turned out to be better at Twilight: 2000 than the 1st or 2nd editions of those rules.
GURPS and Traveller work great! Enough that they even made two official versions of it.
GURPS is proving to be OK at fantasy settings, but it's not D&D.
I still want to do AD&D with GURPS just to prove it can be done, but it's significantly more effort than just playing the original game. Magic gives you wizards, but doesn't really give clerics, druids or illusionists. I'm on the path to making that work.
GURPS: Old West is vastly superior to TSR's old Boot Hill.
GURPS: Espionage works a lot better than TSR's Top Secret.
GURPS works well to replace just about any genre specific set of rules where those rules are poorly designed, like a lot of the games from the early 1980's.
What GURPS sucks at is attracting new players thanks to people who are terrified of math and the complexity inherent in a system that's trying to account for everything.
And it's much simpler than Hero Games attempt at the same thing. Or Chaosium.
I keep trying, and failing, to convince people.
I've noticed that once they're playing, it's the GM and the world that make or break the game, not the rules.
So... does Ethshar GURPS?
ReplyDeleteIt can. I've worked on having multiple kinds of magic like that world before, so it's possible to do with GURPS. Lots of work, though.
DeleteMost anything can be made with the advantages with the proper enhancements and limitations.
Ethshar warlocks, for example, are psi-based powers. Mostly telekinesis.
I seem to recall another bit from the days when it was still Great Un-named Role Playing System (during development that's what they called it in The Space Gamer) one of the parts they were aiming at was to make it so you could take a character from a fantasy genre, and move them to a sci-fi genre, or post apocalyptic genre, or whatever.
ReplyDeleteBesides being just one rules set so you didn't have to memorize another rules set to play in a different genre.
I bought probably a dozen different "worldbooks" and never found anyone to play GURPS with until years after I gave away all my GURPS stuff.
But nobody balked at learning Mechwarrior, and Shadowrun, and Champions, and Star Wars, and etc. to play in a different genre.
People who would happily min-max a mech design for hours balked at the hard math in GURPS too.
DeleteI was like, "You're proving you can do it, what's the mental block here?"