GURPS Character Assistant

It is not as easy to use or pretty as Hero Lab, but it does pack a punch.

This is the GURPS Character Assistant, and while it looks like a legacy Win32 app, there is a lot of power under the hood here to wrangle the complicated pile of GURPS rules and options when building a character.

https://www.sjgames.com/gurps/characterassistant/

When I first opened this program, I boxed up all my GURPS books and vowed never to return again. It is that easy to get absolutely overwhelmed by the options here. Seriously, a skill list with three melee weapon skills, one for the weapon, one for the art, and one for the sport - needs some serious paring down.

Yes, we need a skill for fighting with cloaks, but is there really a cloak fighting sport? Like, two people with capes trying to hit each other with them?

In GURPS, I guess there is.

At least you can create custom filters and get rid of the art/sport and wildcard! skills from the skill list, and you can even get rid of categories like magic if your game is not using that. Again, this program is not as easy to use, but there are options here hidden away that control complexity, and I recommend you use them.

The Strange World of GURPS

We have a skill for fire-eating. It is important. You need someone in the dungeon with this skill in case you have to quickly put out a torch. This is the strange world of GURPS where the esoteric becomes critically important at the strangest moment.

If a goblin walks up to you and challenges you to a finger wrestling match, who are you gonna call? There are ancient monasteries that teach that stuff. There is a housekeeping skill for cleaning messy pit traps. There is a game designer skill, in case the boss of the dungeon wants to play a game other than GURPS.

You think I am poking fun at the game, but no, I love this stuff. This is the strange world of GURPS, and I love how you can play this completely seriously, or slowly introduce characters with very specific, esoteric skills that are absolute masters at one strange thing or another, like an 18- housekeeping roll for one starship crewperson, and once every blue moon that skill plays a critical roll in a life or death situation.

In Pathfinder 1e, the odd and strange things feats and abilities give you are designed by other people and you pick from the ones given to you. In GURPS, you design it as a power, take it as a dis- or advantage, or make a skill for horseshoe throwing and make yourself the world-class expert. And then your character carries around a bunch of horseshoes and uses them as thrown weapons. And that horseshoe throwing expert would be right at home in a dungeon party as they would a starship crew member.

Or you can play this game completely seriously. Me? I like a serious base game, and then going campy when it would be more fun to be a little crazy and different. My brother and I developed this sort of silly superhero world around Car Wars and GURPS that was always a little crazy, completely campy and nerdy, silly at times, and yes, you could have a cloak-fighting MMA league and have people be big fans of it.

It was almost like a world from a 1970's Steve Martin or early-era SNL or SCTV comedy where people were completely serious about silly things. And it was cool.

The Program

This really is the way to play GURPS. You can design characters using templates, give them gear, and print character sheets from within the app. It is not as intuitive as Hero Lab, but it does the job. In some areas, it outshines Hero Lab, in that I can create a custom skill, advantage, piece of gear, parent type, perk, or even templates for quick character creation later. There really is a lot of power here under the hood once you dig in, and what you give up in ease of use you get back in a wealth of customizability.

And to play any genre, the price is a lot better than Hero Lab, but you are limited to GURPS.

NOTE: Also, this year, check your account - version 5 is out and has a lot more options. My screenshot above is version 4. If you bought it, you will have a legacy V4 installer and a V5 installer in there, and you do not need to buy it again, and they can be installed side-by-side.

The highest recommendation if you are into GURPS, otherwise I like Hero Lab for my other character management tasks. Worth checking out though, even if all you have are the basic books.