GURPS is Still One of the Best

GURPS is still my number one game. My second-most popular blog, Another GURPS Blog, is well-regarded in the GURPS community, which I am very proud of. I created the site to track my top GURPS resources and serve as a search tool for GURPS YouTube videos, just for my own reference and idea-bouncing-around. It has evolved into a comfortable and functional community site. I am also active on the GURPS Discord as one of the blogger contributors, which is another thing I am proud of.

GURPS is bigger than 5E for me, the OSR, or any other part of the hobby. GURPS is a hobby that allows me to endlessly design characters and powers, have tight rules for ultra-realistic tactical combats, and cover any genre I can imagine with one set of consistent rules.

D&D 5E is not a designer game; D&D is a consumer game, forcing you to endlessly buy and consume more and more. GURPS is a hobby I can lose myself in, much like miniature painting, where I spend hours perfecting a character, monster, or power. I then get to use those designs "on the tabletop" and "see how they work."

GURPS also has the advantage of being stronger for narrative roleplay than dedicated games such as Daggerheart or Cypher System. The mental and physical advantages and disadvantages can be easily modeled in a realistic character, as seen in a movie script, with precise directions and character studies for the actor. Unlike other games that rely on "hope and hate dice" for narrative action or intrusion mechanics to drive the plot, GURPS lets characters drive the narrative.

Is my thief light-fingered and can't resist pilfering that diamond necklace? Well, make a self-control roll, and let's see what happens. As a player, this can put my character in a bad situation, or a morally questionable one if my thief gets away with the snatch, but I will need to live with the consequences.

That is just how the game rolls.

Now that I have the necklace, what should I do with it? Does guilt force me to find a way to return it? Can I find a fence to get rid of it? Is it a problem if the guards search me just because I'm carrying it? How do I explain my way out of that? Do I sneak back into the wealthy manor to place it behind a makeup table and let them think they just lost it? Will selling it bring us the money we need for weapons, magic training, and armor? What should I tell other players about where I got the money? If the paladin with the honesty trait is in the party, what will they do if they find out? Would the bard who loves helping the downtrodden want us to give the money to those less fortunate? Would the paladin even go along with that? Would the halfling in our party wish to steal the necklace from my thief and use it to buy expensive food?

That one failed self-control roll is going to have a butterfly effect through the narrative, which means I don't need "narrative dice" or "intrusion mechanics" at all. Having those extra systems is too much, and since the character's motivations are pivotal to the narrative anyway, we do not need them.

That one self-control roll, whether it fails or passes, can spawn a million actions, reactions, plots, and adventures.

In GURPS, a character's "personality profile" is the spindle, the center of the vinyl record, around which everything else, including the narrative, spins and rotates.

Games that remove the narrative from being character-centric try to foist external story mechanics, some game designers' "great idea," onto what should be a character-focused narrative system. They get very abstract and "Euro-gamey" with narrative point pools, tokens, dice, special cards, announced intrusion events, scene-based meta-conditions, and all sorts of external flash, outside interference, and cruft.

Every external narrative system in today's games is "designer hubris" and intruding on your ability to tell stories together. You don't need any of it. They are trying to sell you a solution to a problem you don't have. Storytelling is built into your DNA. Use it.

GURPS is very simple. It avoids getting in the way of the story and the character's personality factors that drive the narrative. The narrative in GURPS is "what just happened," not "the abstract meta-story game mechanics control system."

Now, when I play, I am careful not to "load up" a character with too many of these self-control roll disadvantages, since having more than three is sort of a pain. Two is typically good, and I only really call for one roll per session, per disadvantage, per character. You don't want to make these too powerful and all-controlling, and the times you roll should mean something. When you roll a self-control roll, it should make a significant difference, and if it fails, the failure should have the chance to create meaningful fallout in the narrative.

A greedy character doesn't need to roll a self-control roll when finding a chest of gold, but demanding a larger share for "obviously taking on more danger during the adventure" would be a good character moment for them.

All these make solo play very easy in GURPS. I have all the tools right here to figure out how my character reacts to a situation. In Old School Essentials? Well, my thief can pick locks, climb walls, and avoid fights. What does the game provide to help me determine motivation? Nothing, but this is the OSR, and it is BYO-motivation, which is as it should be, but for solo play, GURPS gives me so much more and makes running a party of diversely motivated characters trivially easy.

Oh, and if you play GURPS using just the GURPS Lite rules, it is as easy as B/X D&D. For the most part, 95% of the rules you will ever need, along with character design concepts, are right here. Don't fret the 5% unless you are a miniatures wargamer and a realism freak. However, the game can go there and provide immersion and realism, if you want to go that deep. But you don't have to.

If I only have time to play one game, it will be GURPS.