Great video. Great game. Thanks!

Awesome. Happy that you are presenting this. I am a longtime GURPS GM and player (since 1995) and a frequent playtester (as a scientist- I am a geneticist) of GURPS Books, like Low-Tech, Space, Bio-Tech, etc.. Great job with the video!!

This is an idea I've floated around, but currently only have 4 players, so haven't really needed to do this. But to scale up more players, and keep the action flowing. Use the combat cards. There are cards you can order from Warehouse23, they have all of the combat maneuvers on them. You have the players pick their maneuvers / targets. Give them X amount of time for them all to decide. Then you have them place whichever card they're going to use down, then go clockwise for their turns. They should have declared their targets before calculating everything out. This would give the fast paced 1 second per turn feeling they were going for, and not really allow changes until the next turn. This means that if PC 1 was able to shoot and take down an opponent on their phase, and PC3 was shooting at that same one, then either the shot flies over their lifeless body, or they could shoot them while they're on the ground (which of course gives them bonuses or penalties if they're behind cover now). I feel this would definitely hype up tension in battles too. Everyone sitting around the table and trying to decide what they want to do on their turn slows down any kind of game. Pathfinder 2e is a perfect example of this, since each character has three different actions they can do, it isn't always so simple / quick to go through them.

GRRM has touted GURPS as an influence of his books. While I don't know if he has officially written out the sheets you can almost see them behind each of his ASOIAF characters. Which makes me wonder if George's writing method doesn't involve him playing a solo TTRPG with all of them to see how they would react to each scene based on their individual skills, advantages, and disadvantages.

Oddly enough one of GURPS' biggest downfalls is its over encompassing genre, or specifically it's lack of one. While yes you can play any genre, world, or system with it, most players won't. Why work to make a Firefly 'verse in GURPS when you could just play the Firefly RPG? Many people buy into the name and will play whatever official game the IP produces over that which has the ability to best encapsulate the story and the mechanics of the world. Which brings up the other problem, the name. By itself GURPS doesn't ring bells to know what it means. At best it sounds like a disease or some type of phlegm or mucus. You hear Traveler, D&D, Rolemaster, Pathfinder, Star Fleet Battles, Macho Babes with Guns, TMNT, etc and you can get a good guess on what the game will be like. Hearing "GURPS" you get next to nothing. Far too late, nearly 40 years later, but it would be nice to have a name change to something that rolls better off the tongue and doesn't need an immediate breakdown of what each letter in the anagram means. Best Roleplaying Encyclopedia of Accurate Simulation in Tactical Scenarios. Calling it BREASTS would draw a lot more interest in the game. "I picked up a new BREASTS book and am so excited to start playing." (Definition needs work but you get the point.)

I haven’t even watch the whole video, but 💯. If you need to figure out how to solve a problem, GURPS likely has an answer for how you can handle it.

I’ve had the old one for a few years. I just picked up the starter and the blue/green at GenCon this year.

Ordered! Thanks for the tip. I plan to use these to better organize the dice collection. And I suspect we'll find other uses for them.

0:17 "OSR, also known as Old School Essentials." OSR stands for Old School Revival/Old School Renaissance. It's a catch-all term for any game that is made to mimic old TTRPG games from the 70s through the 90s. There's a whole bunch of different games that fall under the OSR banner, such as Basic Fantasy, Dungeon Crawl Classics, White Box Fantasy Medieval Adventure Game, and Old School Essentials.

Loved the mullet photo

Virgin Persuade and Chad Diplomacize. 😂 Fun review.

This all years ant still no gameplay wideo ?

When I run DnD, I’m constantly telling the PCs “oh I got that idea from GURPS”. It’s a hard game to teach, but so much inspiration!

When you need balance, and you have many strategies or moves, balance these moves so they cost the same. There is nothing worse than having a game where one strategy wins the game.

Battletech has imperfect forces. There is a trade-off between armor, speed and firepower. It does not have the Super robots like animes where you face hordes of alien enemies..

I was a player in a GURPS 3e game with 4 other players. We got in a brawl with 4 dire wolves at the beginning of one of our sessions. It took almost 3 hours. It was the last time we played GURPS. I never considered scale. Im going to give it another look

GURPS is the first game i saw that has default skills. A character who has not trained in a skill may be able to do it, a little less well than a similar skill, or at a value based on an attribute. For example, learning survival in one type of environment allows a character a lower chance to survive in other environments.

TEMU is owned by the Chinese Commies. It's hard to understand why you are promoting Communists.

I did pick up The Fantasy Trip (you're a bad influence!) and there is an absolutely insane amount of stuff in there.

Great video ... thanks!

Awesome! I didn't know people were still playing Starlet Battles. I played back in the late 80's but hadn't heard of it since then.

I once ran a game for 8 characters. That was so tedious. Some people weren't even playing when other were active. And yes they do Warhammer Epic, but now it called Legiones Imperialis and it's set in times of Horus Heresy.

For dungeon adventurers in GURPS I usually ran it with a party of three players each with one character, plus another GM-controlled ally NPC, with their typical opposition being 1-2 major monsters e.g a dragon or vampire or whatever, or about 5-6 lesser foes like orcs, goblins, or whatever.. This is about the same level I'd use in a TFT solo adventure (where one person has to run everything). That didn't really bog down, even using advanced combat and a hexgrid and miniatures, which is what I did. In contrast, when I was running old school OSR games (AD&D 1st or Basic D&D rules), I'd be fairly comfortable engaging a party of 5-6 PCs with a group of 20-30 orcs, kobolds or whatever. Of course, I was very familiar with both GURPS and D&D. I didn't use miniatures for those, just theatre of the mind, though sometimes placed figures on a chess board or something for marching order. TFT in non-solo adventures I was comfortable with a party of 3-5 PCs vs. about 5-8 opponents, a bit more than GURPS, played on a hex grid with counters. With TFT I rarely exceeded that not because the game couldn't handle it but because TFT rules (no defenses like in GURPS, weaker armor) make outnumbering the enemy much more powerful. But I feel TFT is about 1/2 as complex as GURPS and OSR D&D at levels 1-6 about 1/4 as complex, but this rises dramatically with 3e or later with higher level characters, map-based play, and much more complex feat and power builds, and the much more resilient monsters. Traveller scaling I felt was about the same as OSR D&D in terms of difficulty, I want dropped a group of 40 NPCs against the party with eight players, it took 3 hours to play, on a grid, took 3 hours but was fun for all.

Great point, couldn’t agree more. At 2-3 characters it’s brilliant fun and the details make the experience so rich and rewarding. At 4-5 it bogs down immediately. I’ve only been playing DFRPG, which of course is a bit more streamlined, but I still feel the same way.

Thank you. Good video. Good topic. Does GURPS have rules to handle larger scale battles?

I think to "fix" fantasy trip you need to split up the three functions of DX. Raising sword use should not improve spell casting. Runequest was the first game made by SCA players. Gurps is a conversion to 3d6 along with the inclusions of champions advantages.

2024 is the 50th Anniversary of Starforce Alpha Centauri ! One of my earliest, and still most beloved wargames.

That was QUICK! 🤣🤣🤣

And ironically, I'm currently working on a video on GURPS Ogre for my channel.

Ugh...I really wish I had kept my copy of Man-to-Man.

Well, that WAS quick. Abrupt, even.

are the cards exclusive or can it be also found in the outdoor encounter cards?

Thanks for covering this classic. It has always been one of the SPI games I have always enjoyed. It has aged well.

Very helpful! The poker bit at the start made me rethink how I'll set up my game next week eeek lol Im designing a skirmish game and this is helping me decide what dice i wanna use.

What is the prisoner

I love gurps. My group dnd. I would even play a pathfinder just to not olay dnd

I love running GURPS games. I've run GURPS games for years. My favorite genres are Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Modern Day. I'm a pro DM. What genre should I run next?

This is a great game. Thanks for spotlighting it!

Funny , I was just looking at my old Traveller books today.

The short story that was in the magazine was great, and the game was a really solid choose your own adventure paragraph game. And unusual for its time, there was a female SSR on the game map, so you could play either version.

I really enjoyed the Stainless Steel Rat series (best read in publication order). Everyone in my gaming group read it (in c. 1984) and we borrowed several ideas for my campaign with the characters joining the Special Corps. The books were pretty influential - didja know that the Stainless Steel Rat series was the first to come up with the terms "gauss pistol" and "gauss rifle"? I bought the SPI magazine and enjoyed it (also for the Universe space article, as I used to run a hybrid Universe-Traveller game).

It is a great cover and name!

Love me some gurps:)

I played ice age yesterday! Was just a one shot but i did.

I’m so glad you posted this video. There is so few GURPS content, us, the “younger” gurpsers are starving

Another thought on the Health thing versus TFT is that you could simply state that the character's HP are 2x ST. Basically this would "solve" the old conundrum in TFT where you enter a dungeon, tangle with a couple of orc guards, lose half your strength or more and then run across some piddly little thing that instantly kills you in the next room, or, you realize that's probably what's going to happen, so after your first encounter you flee the dungeon, return to town, heal for several weeks, and then go back and try to clear that first room again... Clearly Steve recognized this issue when he was first designing GURPS (after he lost TFT to Howard Thompson for 35 years), since he purposely included a Health stat in GURPS to help overcome this very issue. Of course, another way to solve this would be more ways to heal efficiently -- healing potions, healing magic, First Aid rules, etc, and indeed, SJ addressed this in the new edition of TFT to some extent. but I still like the idea of increasing native HP in some way. I get the argument that doubling HP doesn't really reflect the reality of how wounds and healing work, but on the other hand, it's called The FANTASY Trip, not The REALITY Trip, and doubling HP this way would certainly smooth the flow of play instead of the old 1-2-3, kick method of dungeon adventuring. Also, why insist on absolute "reality" in this one aspect of the game, when you're talking about some guy that routinely violates all known physical laws with his mind?

Good stuff Jim. Question: Do electrolytes have travability?

Wait what...we could have CHARGED YOU???

I do think GURPS movement distances is far superior to TFT for the simple reason that moving half as many hexes (4-6 for humans and 10-14 for horses) fits much better on a game map than 6-12 hexes for humans and 16-24 hexes for horses. The latter tends to run off the map. Making hex maps for TFT adventures is a pain because characters move off the map so easily! So I prefer the halved speeds in GURPS. How to do that in TFT? The simplest solution is to just massage the turn length or hex scale slightly. Go to 2m or 6 feet hexes (which actually fits better with the scale of TFT counters -- a person fills the entire hex when lying prone, not two hexes, and it makes dragons etc. look more impressive, while still working for horses!) and maybe 3 second turns (20 to a minute instead of 12). None of that hurts anything else in the game, and I think it works better with the look of buildings and dungeons.

3rd edition is fantastic! It's an easy read, easy to find things, great layout. 4th edition is a slog, it's dry, dull, it's a huge turn off.