I Tried Walking Away, but I Can't

Dungeon Fantasy is just too good of a game.

I get 5E; character progression is a theme park ride on rails. Sometimes, it is an enjoyable ride. The second time through, it is meh, mostly the same unless you are following someone's multiclassing guide and breaking the game. Pathfinder 2e is balanced with good options all the way up, but the class complexity and dozens of unique tags and conditions killed the game for me.

Yes, GURPS characters are complex. The 250-point starting characters are equivalent to 8th-level characters in D&D and are highly capable. They are also a lot to handle for new players, with tons of skills, powers, spells, and special abilities to manage. Combat and damage use a more realistic system, with parries, blocks, and dodges being important.

Despite all its detractors, GURPS has done something right to last nearly 40 years. This is still the same game as the first version, and despite a few subsystems and options, it has mostly stayed the same. The 4th Edition has lasted nearly 20 years, outlasting D&D 3, 3.5, 4, 4 Essentials, and 5E.

And when I play GURPS and the fantasy-themed version Dungeon Fantasy, I am taken back to the 1980s when AD&D sucked, and a point-buy system like GURPS was much more fun to play and craft characters in. Those of you who weren't there just don't know, and those rose-colored glasses of nostalgia blind you to so much.

If the kids in Stranger Things were cool, they would play GURPS. And Car Wars. Then again, shows you what the writers know about the 1980s. Everyone played Car Wars in the pre-Battletech days, post-Atari and pre-NES. Back when you had to go outside to have fun, nobody had phones in their pockets, and kids could just be kids.

Everyone did have a hand calculator, though. I still have one, and it still works after 40 years.

Back to using GURPS to play fantasy. Every skill matters; the skills you choose matter. You can play a social-focused campaign with no combat. You can play a skill-focused game more on stealth and subterfuge. You aren't forced to pick combat skills and become a killer the game designer forces you into. You don't have to solve all your problems with blood and violence.

Combat is deadly, which heightens the risk and danger - and forces you to think of other ways to resolve problems. Firstly, with your skills. Combat is something serious and not to be engaged in lightly. D&D abstracts death to the point where we become desensitized to it. Combat is 'for fun' and is 'exciting content!' We hurl fireballs into rooms of goblins and laugh. Tactical options are exciting and cool! Healing? Don't worry about healing; a "short rest" will cure a shotgun blast to the face! Death is hard and healing is easy!

Roleplaying games selling combat as gameplay sounds like fascist dictators trying to get people to join the army for glory, wealth, purpose, and excitement. They downplay the soldiers who die and those maimed for life and sell this fantasy escapist dream of military adventurism.

AI Art by @nightcafestudio

This is me talking from the 1980s. This was true back then and is more true today than ever.

This hasn't changed, and D&D was always too focused on death - and still is. A considerable part of the realism movement in roleplaying games in the 1980s - and GURPS was one of them - was to get us to question our bloodlust. Today's average roleplaying game is a party of killers like multiple versions of Jason Vorhees.

GURPS gives you tools to escape the D&D reality and makes you question it. Some people dislike GURPS just because it does this; it puts a price on death used for escapism. The complexity is part of the price. They want to be inside the cave, and while that is okay, people need to understand what motivates them psychologically.

We gave up D&D in the early 1980s for games like GURPS, Aftermath, and Champions, and D&D was a limited, killing and loot-focused, level-based game. that didn't do much of anything else but "kill for treasure." These days, the treasure is gone, but it is still "kill for power" and story is secondary. GURPS did fantasy far better than D&D, and coming back to it - it still does.

The type of fantasy we liked.

One less focused on death, more on character and story, and one where every skill matters. This wasn't a 'power collection contest' or a curated 'leveling experience' - you got a pile of character points as a reward, and you were set free in a toy store of options you could pick from. Your fighter wants to dip into magic? Go right ahead! Some lame game designer won't tell you what to do or force you to cheat the game by multiclassing. You won't become an 'invalid character' with your choice.

The points are yours to spend in any way you want.

If your fighter knows a few spells now, and they help him light up a dark dungeon hall or heal himself, those abilities are a part of his story - cool. If it makes sense story-wise, go for it! You take a level of wizard as a fighter in D&D, and it can feel like a dongle that weakens your character in high-level play. It makes no sense. It breaks your build.

Sadly, many of the fantastic OSR games fall into the D&D trap. I love Dungeon Crawl Classics, but I can do more satisfying corruption stories in GURPS that are much more nuanced and meaningful. Just balance points of 'dark magic' with disadvantages, and pretty soon, your mages are growing horns, being hunted by witch hunters, gaining all sorts of compulsive behaviors, and serving dark lords of alien evil. DCC opened my mind to the possibilities, but GURPS made those more meaningful and expressed them with game mechanics.

The power could be yours right now! All you have to do is accept these few disadvantages and say yes...

What could go wrong?

Questioning power? Like the notion that 'power at any cost' is not worth it? We are back in the 1980s again and in that counter-culture movement where roleplaying games dared to do this. D&D even back then, D&D gave you this mentality that if you obeyed the rules and stuck within the classes they gave you, you were given power. That is precisely what governments and corporations want you to do.

You may see a pattern here.

I still play a little 5E and OSR games, but it is mostly junk food. It never lasts, and when I am eating it, I know it is a short-term thing, and there are better, more satisfying options. GURPS is my home cooking. It takes a little longer to get into, but the enjoyment is something I savor and look forward to. DCC, again, is a great game, and I love it - but it is still class and level-based.

With GURPS or Dungeon Fantasy, I can also question the narrative, shape it, craft my game into something that reflects me, and break free from the hobby's corporatist, death-glamorizing, blind obedience, and more problematic roots.