GURPS vs. Palladium

Back in the late 1980s, everyone we knew stopped playing AD&D and played GURPS 3rd Edition. Everyone loved how GURPS did everything, and you did not have to learn a new set of rules to play another genre. GURPS killed AD&D for so many of us, and it was then that you began to see AD&D's popularity decline.

And then Rifts happened. A lot of those I knew gave up GURPS 3rd Edition for Rifts. And there was a massive crowd from D&D who found Rifts easier than GURPS, which increased the Palladium game's popularity on that side of the hobby, too. It was a little of both, the massive crowd from D&D that played Rifts drew in a lot of GURPS players, and Rifts became an early '90s juggernaut with a ton of MDC and giant hyper-cannons.

The influence of anime, the Robo-Tech and TNMT games (welcome back Turtles RPG, mine is in the mail), and the cross-genre nature of Rifts meant that many of us with a half-dozen campaign worlds could cross them all over and play Rifts without losing that much, and standardize on the Palladium system. Palladium did amazingly well during the rise and fall of AD&D 2E, and many who played a lot of AD&D 1E did not see much new in 2E, and never upgraded (which should sound familiar today).

Cross-overs of existing, legacy campaign worlds with Rifts were huge and meant you did not need to throw out your beloved characters. You can do cross-overs in GURPS 3rd, too; that is the point! I know.

But Rifts was huge in the 1990s; along with Vampire: The Masquerade, these two games killed AD&D 2nd Edition and GURPS for many of us. By the end of the decade, TSR was bankrupt, and D&D was dead. We even lost interest in gaming for a few years, keeping our games boxed up and unused. College was done, and we moved on.

The Bronze Age of the hobby began with Chainmail, and the Golden Age ended with Rifts.

Rifts was the last major old school game before the modern era began with D&D 3.0.

GURPS 4th was created in the modern, post-2000 era of D&D 3.0 and 3.5, and the games we know today. Palladium did a few post-2000s games, but Rifts, Heroes Unlimited, Ninjas & Superspies, and Palladium Fantasy were some of my favorite games in the 1990s. They are still d20-based games at heart, plus a great percentage-based skill system, and who cares if one is roll high, and the other is roll-low? It works.

Palladium Fantasy is in the same boat as Rolemaster for me: the "better D&D" made in the 1980s and 1990s that everyone in the know loved more than the mass-market D&D "for kids" game we saw it as, especially with the censorship in 2nd Edition. Everyone I knew loved Rolemaster and Palladium Fantasy far better than D&D. Rolemaster was deep, complicated, and wildly different, but the charts always delivered fun. GURPS was another game that was very different from D&D and also required a lot of relearning.

Palladium Fantasy was close enough to D&D that you knew how to play it by just learning a handful of things, and then you magically knew how to play the game. If you gave people pre-gens, they could figure most of it out from the character sheet. Palladium Fantasy is like "Advanced AD&D" with a lot more thought put into classes, magic system, the world, playable races, backgrounds, and combat systems. Where AD&D felt flat, Palladium Fantasy went into far more detail.

Palladium was the far easier game to switch to, as a result. Even Rifts was not that hard for D&D players. Learning GURPS and Rolemaster were massive undertakings, and with the hobby on the decline in the 1990s, people just wanted something easy and exciting, with great art and a fun premise. If the game was easy to learn, could do cross-over campaigns with all of your games as starting points, and had very reasonably-priced books, it was a winner.

I'm not losing my D&D world; I'm just crossing it over into Rifts. Oh, there is a Palladium Fantasy game, too? Let's use that for our fantasy characters and then toss them into a rift where they can go find power armor and laser rifles, and play alongside cameos from every comic and pop culture reality possible. AD&D doesn't allow us to do this, so Palladium Fantasy is better.

We did not overthink things too much back then, not like today.

Yes, the above conversion also describes GURPS. But in Rifts, the cross-dimensional reality is baked in, and the system is close enough to D&D that everyone can just jump in and play. I could sit D&D players at a Rifts table and have them fluent in the system in 5 minutes. GURPS? Not so easy. We need to go through point buy, and even with pre-gens, the 3d6 system is still very different than a d20 system. In Palladium? Roll a d20, beat a 5, you hit. Beat the AR value? You go past armor. It is a two-layer AC system that is not hard for D&D players to pick up.

We have only gotten "culture and background" in D&D character creation in the last few years, and all three of these other games: GURPS, Palladium, and Rolemaster had them back in the 1980s. In 2050, D&D will get a decent skill system, too. If D&D has one fatal flaw, it is that nostalgia keeps holding it back, and it will never drastically change for the better (or worse, as D&D 4E proved). D&D will never change, and as a game, it is stuck in the past to an extent that playing AD&D is still the best experience you can get. Live by the nostalgia sword, and die by it.

Palladium was free to innovate, and the addition of the SDC system gave everyone that "stamina hit point" system, serving as a "light wound pool" that heals very rapidly before hit points are reduced, and the characters take serious injuries that are far more difficult to recover from. D&D (correction, modern D&D) is stuck with "short rests" and the entire hit point pool being the temporary pool, with zero "real" hit points for serious injuries, and characters can pop up, heal instantly, and sleep off shotgun blasts to the face.

Palladium First Edition and GURPS are 100% "meaty hit points" with no stamina pool that takes damage first, leading to more deadly and realistic games. In the second edition of Palladium Fantasy, they adopted SDC for "soft hit points" to make the game more heroic, and align with all the other game's rules. I say "align" since nothing in Palladium perfectly aligns; it is all custom-fitted for crossovers, and MDC kills anything anyway.

Again, back in those days, we houseruled a lot and made a bunch of stuff up. Nothing had to be "perfect" like it is today. The book and rules got you in the ballpark, and you houseruled the rest.

GURPS is a simulation game in comparison. The combat, once you learn it, is some of the best fantasy combat in gaming, and the characters are clearly head-and-shoulders above all these games. But to understand it, everyone needed books and a lot of time. For a hobby on the decline, and Magic: The Gathering stealing players from our groups, nobody wanted our players to buy and learn something too different than what they knew.

Back then, the Palladium System was like Dungeon Crawl Classics is today. A system built for fun, easy to get into, and similar enough to what you know that you could not understand what you are doing, and sit at a convention table for the game, and have fun. The big difference is that Rifts has great cross-campaign support, giant freaking robots, lasers, and hordes of interesting bad guys.

While Palladium Fantasy and Rifts can easily replace any D&D or 5E game, they can't really replace GURPS. For me, GURPS hits differently and gives me some of the best character-focused systems in gaming, where every choice matters. GURPS also feels more grounded for me, where Rifts and its MDC feel like everyone is walking around with anti-vehicular weapons.

But truthfully, Rifts and its MDC (mega-damage) system are far more survivable than Car Wars, and we played Car Wars for years and never complained about it. In Car Wars, my character is a 6DP ant moving at a snail's pace around a freeway of vehicles armed with weapons that do multiple dice of damage, and would scratch the paint if they ran my character over. In Rifts, they hand out MDC armor everywhere, and it is not that hard to get a ton of MDC armor in a normal-looking suit. You never take it off, and your standard weapons are now worthless, but that is beside the point. It is science fiction, and pea-shooters should not touch space marine-style armor.

Rifts says to utilize SDC situations and environments, and it is good advice. Treat MDC weapons and armor like rare military gear, and run a mostly SDC world in the cities and settlements. Demons and dimensional beings are MDC creatures, so there is a fundamental imbalance in the power levels the game tries to navigate.

But a part of me likes the contrast. If you roll with magic and dimensional beings, it is like hanging around the Avengers, and everyone is flinging MDC powers around you and at you, so armor up. You have no choice, but these are your friends, and they need you alive when they are hurling bolts of magic that could tear through steel, and fighting the same.

Suppose you roll on the other side, as in the human-only fortresses of the Coalition's megacities. In that case, I can picture a world where only SDC weapons and armors are present, even among the police forces, since police body armor and weapons can be stolen, and the MDC-geared military can be called in for more serious threats. You could play a strict SDC campaign for years on the Chi-Town streets and never see an MDC weapon or creature. The Coalition military is the MDC force, so high-powered play options are there, too.

Rifts is like Car Wars if the cars were the characters, and they only had 1 DP of interior hit points once damage got through. It is dehumanizing and terrifying, but this is what modern tank crews deal with on every battlefield. If any damage gets through the tank's armor, good luck with that. Rifts assumes "every soldier becomes a tank," and this natural progression of warfare continues. Once any damage gets through, that is it, game over.

Still, even in light MDC armor, if a car going 100 mph hits you, your armor will be fine; the person inside will resemble a milkshake. Common sense still applies. In a mech-like MDC battlesuit? The car will wrap around your ankle, and you will shake it off like you just stepped in something.

Sure, outside of those "personal tank suits," regular guns still work, and that is one of the challenges running Rifts. But, I can't say it is unrealistic for science fiction, given the way weapons are becoming, and the march of technology makes every gun more and more lethal.

GURPS still does the "massive damage by high-tech weapons" thing, and high-tech armor is butter against weapons with high armor divisors. So, you are still just as dead if a 12d6 weapon hits you with no armor on in GURPS. Rifts just shorthand resolves the whole thing, tells you to roll 1d6 MD instead of 12d6, and one point of damage is death. In both games, science fiction tends to go "off the rails" compared to a more balanced role-playing game like Star Frontiers.

Most science fiction combat tends to be on the one-hit-kill side of things in gaming. GURPS can be like that in fantasy.

But going back to the comparison, it takes a reasonable amount of time and effort to learn GURPS this much to get to a point where this sort of science fiction combat is possible. With Rifts, I could throw D&D players into a mech battle without them knowing much more than 5+ on a d20, and they can play instantly. This is why Rifts killed a lot of interest in GURPS, at least in our groups back in the 1990s.

GURPS gave devoted players a much deeper sense of satisfaction, of course.

But Rifts was the far easier game to both play and get started with, given the core 1994 book was only $25 and was all you needed to play.

But truthfully, all of these games of the 1990s are things I love. This is when my brother and I had the most fun gaming, and the games were amazing.

GURPS: Star Frontiers, Update #6

Knight Hawks came out after the original Star Frontiers set came out, and we had already adopted starships from Traveller and Space Opera into our games. I wish this had come out at the same time, since we adopted the Star Wars-style "Millennium Falcon" trope into our games, turning starships into "space RVs" with anti-gravity, able to land on planets, and serving as flying hotels with antimatter engines.

Nothing kills science fiction faster than a magic space RV.

The ship lands next to space dungeons; there is no need for overland travel, landing at starports is a why bother, there is no need to carry shuttlecraft or orbital space planes, and the ship becomes "backup fire support" flying artillery for any ground mission. I have played decades of this, and having a destroyer hovering above the battlefield, turrets at the ready, really kills any challenge for the away team.

I wish our Star Frontiers campaign were a strict TL10^ game. Starships are these paper-thin, decks stacked like a loaf of bread, 1G acceleration, slow, weeks to get to a planet, dropship-carrying, atomic engines on sponsons, no artificial gravity, depressurize during space battles, flying cans with guns.

There are no magic "sensor beams," just radar and LADAR, and old-style radio direction finders. Telescopes and imaging equipment that detect brightness and radiated heat are used to detect objects at greater distances.

You should only have gravity when accelerating at 1G, a mid-point flip, and then deceleration at 1G provides gravity on the second half of the trip. There are no anti-gravity panels, and if you are in orbit, everyone is floating around. You need shuttles, dropships, starfighters with orbital capability, or space planes to get down to the planet. To get large cargo up, they fire it up on giant rockets that look like something from NASA or SpaceX. Starships are assembled in space and never land on a planet. Space stations handle interface duties and customs and provide 1G or gravity via giant rotating rings.

If you go on a mission, your ship needs to sit in orbit with a crew. You need a dropship and crew for that. If you land in a remote area, you need a flat space, and then you need to disembark an ATV or VTOL to get to where you want to go. If you will be there for a while, take camping supplies and survival equipment, including pressurized tents, solar panels, and life support units.

You need to take a ton of stuff with you for extended stays.

If your ship in orbit detects an unknown contact, and you know space pirates are in the area, they will go into action without you. You may be left stranded in your camp for a while, with your radio and heat-producing gear off, so nobody can detect you, staying silent to avoid detection. You may not know when your ship will return, if ever, since you both go radio silent. If you get on the radio, a pirate missile may come flying in from orbit at that signal.

And you won't be able to detect, see, or know what is up there in orbit, unless you get fortunate with your electro-binoculars and see it from the ground. You may have radio direction finders of your own that can help you detect objects in orbit.

The pirates may have dropped a satellite up there for some reason: to detect orbital ships, ground emissions, or radio traffic, or to relay communications. If you found that early, you could have blown it up or sent someone over to hack it and tap in, being wary of it being trapped with anti-tamper devices or explosives.

Big ships, like battleships, are a big deal and require a fleet. Most of the "grunt work" in the galaxy is done with smaller ships tooling about and solving problems. Fleets are expensive and for homeworlds, while colony worlds will have a handful of smaller ships for defense, if any. Space combat is closer to The Hunt for Red October than Star Wars.

Hard TL10^ is the way.

You get too high-tech, and it is the magic space RV landing on the planet. Even Traveller has this problem with its adventure ships. Go further, and you are teleporting to the surface. Very little from the GURPS skill list is needed, and there is no preparation or procedure. My TL10^ away-team has a small group of experts, including a doctor, a communications person, an engineer, security personnel, scientists, contact people, command, and others.

Past TL11, it is "the PCs get out of the ship," and one of them could be a bartender and another an entertainer. While that is great for light-hearted science fiction, more like Guardians of the Galaxy, it is not what Star Frontiers tried to do, or what I wish we had done.

For Star Frontiers, that genuine feeling is the TL10^ game, with lasers as the ultimate weapon and the entire universe closer to that 1980s ideal and vision of the future. This isn't smooth, ultra-sexy, future-tech, but that gritty, NASA-style, Interstellar, The Martian, Cold War naval battles, survival-in-space sort of game that GURPS does so well.

GURPS: Shadowdark

What? What in the what what?

Sometimes, my brother and I would do these silly game conversions just to see where they ended up, and we would spend a weekend playing them. Many times, we would learn something new about both games, and while extremely strange and off-the-wall, these conversions were a load of fun.

So, let's play GURPS: Shadowdark.

First up, what even is this? We need some ground rules for the conversion. Let's say we want this played with GURPS characters, according to the GURPS rules, and we want to fold in the parts of Shadowdark that make sense. We will lose all GURPS races, skills, and magic, and prefer to use Shadowdark when possible. Damage will be GURPS, with character HP being done by GURPS rules, and monster HP being rolled by the hit dice. Otherwise, all combat and damage will be done with GURPS. Advancement will be entirely Shadowdark.

The goal is to use as much of the Shadowdark book as we can, use the classes, ancerties, and advancement of Shadowdark, but play as much as we can using GURPS rules. There are still a lot of fun tables in here, and plenty of ideas for GURPS games. Even if we later "play it 100% as GURPS," we will have had fun for a while and done something completely off-the-wall and silly.

Advantages and Disadvantages

We will need to hack GURPS to support the 5E advantage-and-disadvantage system. For advantage, roll 4d6 and drop the highest. For disadvantage, roll 4d6 and drop the lowest.

I see this being an official rule someday. Huh, we already found something interesting.

Character Creation

Create your GURPS characters as usual, but do not buy a racial template or skills. Just focus on abilities, advantages, and disadvantages. Set a lower point limit, such as half normal points, since we are not buying character skills or magic. You may end up with some pretty high abilities, but this is a game meant for fast character creation and frequent deaths, so get used to it.

All you do is buy and set ability scores, and pick a few advantages and disadvantages. Character creation will go quick. This is good! These characters are supposed to be disposable.

Ancestery

Use a Shadowdark ancestry pick, and just write down what they tell you. If a pick gives you +2 HP, just add two to HP and do not pay any extra. From here on in, everything is free. Talents are those abilities rolled on the charts. And +1 to attack or spellcasting rolls is treated as a +1 skill level.

So far, this game is coming together. I feel it will mostly be "rolling equal to or under ability scores" with modifiers, and ignore most skills (and even unskilled penalties). This is like the OSR; we do not have much use for skills.

Skills

But we still have a few! We only have a handful of skills in the game, and you gain these "bang skills" when the rules say you do:

• Ranged Weapons!
• Ranged and Melee Weapons!
• Spellcasting (Arcane)!
• Spellcasting (Divine)!

Note that some abilities give you both attack roll and damage bonuses! The half-orc gives you a +1 to attack and damage rolls with melee weapons, so this is treated as a +1 skill and a +1 damage modifier in GURPS.

All damage modifiers granted in Shadowdark translate over to GURPS into melee damage. There will be times your attack bonus differs from your damage bonus, and other times an ability will increase both.

Okay, this conversion is a mess. I'd like to know why I am doing this Frankenstein conversion. But let's keep hacking and going! There is always this mid-point regret where you just want to give up and say, 'This is a stupid idea.' This is it.

Ignore the feeling, and keep going.

Hit Points

Hit points start at GURPS standards, and extra hit dice are rolled per level. A d8 is a d6+2 in GURPS, and a d4 is a d6-2 (minimum 1). You will be slightly tougher than Shadowdark characters, but both GURPS and Shadowdark are so deadly that it won't matter. You pay nothing for them in CP when you level up.

When you get a level, roll for more hit points, as usual for Shadowdark. This does break GURPS slightly, but you are going to need the hit points, trust me. This is one where we would run a campaign through and test. If characters with 50+ HP in GURPS turn into a slog, we would halve the HP gain per level. Nothing will be perfect the first time through, but that is okay.

When we do conversions like this, we always put sticky notes on things to test them at the base level and adjust later if they are broken. This is a game-design skill worth learning: set a baseline, test it, and stick to it. Something that feels broken early may not be broken later. If it breaks later, correct it, then run another complete test.

How do I know this? We played a D&D 4E campaign from levels 1-20 with dozens of characters. That game was never tested past level 10; there is no way. How could they never see what they did to turn denial powers, hit point totals, and stun locking? We had a high-level combat run for 43 rounds, and we were so happy when it ended that we quit the game.

Even the boss monster was begging for it to be over.

This is what happens if you skip testing or create echo chambers.

Classes

Pick a class and follow the Shadowdark rules and suggestions. When a class says "add half your level to attack and damage rolls (round down)," just do that. So a level 2 fighter will add one to all attack and damage rolls, so a +1 skill level modification and a +1 damage adjustment (to melee and ranged) is applied. If a talent lets you modify stats, do so as instructed, but do not adjust your character points.

Thief skill rolls are done with advantage and made against the character's attributes. A thief figuring out how a trap works would be an IQ roll, while disarming would be a DX roll, while forcing open a stuck window would be a ST roll, and so on.

Spells

Use Shadowdark's spell slots, spells,  and casting rules, but roll spellcasting checks in GURPS with IQ and your appropriate Spellcasting skill. Priests cast off Will, while mages cast off IQ. Mishaps are rolled as usual (keep a d12 handy, or use the d2/d6 method for generating 1-12 results).

Shadowdark damage is GURPS damage. Ability rolls (such as the confusion spell's WIS check) are best translated into GURPS (like a WILL check on 3d6 or less).

Damage and AC

Damage between GURPS and Shadowdark is one-to-one. Use GURPS weapon and STR damage for characters, modified by any modifiers given by the game. Thief backstabs add weapon dice as noted. Calculate GURPS DR based on armor types in GURPS, as usual.

GURPS DR for monsters is (Shadowdark AC - 10) / 2 (rounded down). If you want a faster-playing game, halve the monster's HP; otherwise, leave it as usual and treat higher HP (30+) monsters as boss monsters.

Backgrounds

When you roll up a background, treat that as a "bang skill" and make rolls as usual against it, and the referee could rule that these have an advantage in certain situations.

All Other Rules

Darkness, exploration, danger levels, luck tokens, gear slots, and all the other rules go by Shadowdark standards. We are just using GURPS for combat, skill rolls, ability rolls, and damage. You are not getting character points for GURPS experience; you get Shadowdark XP and advance the level charts in that game. You get talents and extra HP when the game tells you to.

If a roll should be difficult or easy, apply a suitable modifier to the 3d6 roll. Ignore the Shadowdark DC system and substitute with GURPS die roll modifiers.

Some rules, such as survival, falling, exposure, bleeding, food, and water, will be better handled in GURPS. Make a judgment call when the situation comes up, and "handle it in GURPS."

Go Play GURPS Shadowdark!

The conversions we did were not complicated, nor did they try to make everything fit perfectly into the GURPS rules and framework. For this, abandoning traditional GURPS character advancement and putting yourself at the mercy of the Shadowdark rules for XP and talent rolls would lead to some hilarious situations. If we felt something was horribly broken, we would issue a ruling and fix it, adding it to our conversion rules.

What I love about this conversion is letting thieves make an ability roll for their skills, without even using a skill level. Theives just work "as they do" and this is a helpful way to handle NPC skill and ability rolls without needing a skill. Got a town sage and want to make a skill roll for them? Give them an IQ and roll 3d6 against it.

So, I did learn something and got a new tool for my GURPS toolbox!

Also note, this is not a perfect conversion, and you will need to make adjustments and rulings on the fly. This is another excellent skill to learn, since it comes up in pure GURPS games as well. Game design is experimentation, but it also requires patience and testing to ensure something is broken, not just a knee-jerk reaction. High hit points at higher levels may not be a problem. We don't know until we test.

And these mutant-chimera game conversions are fun ways to spend an afternoon and learn something about both games. Often, you will find yourself going back to GURPS for everything and tossing the conversions. But you may end up with characters and an adventure framework you like! You may enjoy the "digest-sized" dungeons of the Shadodark adventure as "GURPS mini dungeon runs." You may keep that format and introduce a new type of fantasy game for GURPS.

For the most part, GURPS and the superb combat rules should carry the game, and you will start to "feel holes" when it comes to the skills you are used to having for searching, hearing noise, and knowledge. For these, just make ability rolls, as needed, and chalk it up to Shadowdark not having all the tools that GURPS gives you. Make the best of it and enjoy the simplified game while still keeping the best parts of GURPS running the show.

GURPS: Space Opera, Part II

There is a problem with generic science fiction. Why bother?

Space Opera goes a long way towards solving this problem, especially if you grab the Star Sector Atlases and use the structure in the core rulebook to establish factions and organizations. All of a sudden, we have a complete universe out here to explore, on the size of a complete setting like Traveller and its Imperium, and due to this game being so rare and niche, practically nobody knows what this universe is about.

Galactic Starship Dune Star Federation Troopers Battlestar Trek Wars: Gordon Rogers is my best explanation of this universe. Every pre-1980 primary science-fiction setting put into a blender, just like D&D did with fantasy.

Drop players in here, and let them figure it all out.

Trust me, after their initial revulsion and complaining that this is not Star Wars or Star Trek, they will begin to like it here. Because this is really Star Wars and Star Trek, with the licensed IP removed, and the whole thing feels like a classic science fiction novel from the 1960s and '70s.

This is solid, playable, generic science fiction!

If you want one of the factions to walk around and act like the Galactic Empire, do it! Just don't play the music, and have their troopers be just as brutal and be better shots. If you want Starforce to be like the United Planetary Federation, just do it! The ships are a little different, more heavy metal, but that does not mean you can't riff on classic Trek.

Oh, and spoiler alert, when you are in battle, everyone will be in a spacesuit and strapped in tight, so take that, stupid TV shows and movies. Decompression is real, and having an armored spacesuit protects you against internal explosions and fragmentation. If you start the game in the middle of a starship battle, start all the players in spacesuits in a depressurized ship. Set the tone from the start.

Seriously, that is such a cool thing to imagine the bridge filled with a crew in armored spacesuits, armed in case they need to abandon ship, and the entire bridge depressurized to a vacuum to avoid explosive decompression. Escape pods will be close to all crew stations. Seats may also be armored to give an extra level of protection. There is a hard-science fiction element to this universe, but it remains at the highest levels of theoretical technology.

Space Opera is a mix of World War II naval battles, hardcore engineering, speculative science, and instant death at any moment. This is not hard science fiction, science fantasy, or any other genre we know. This is the OG version of science fiction found in Starship Troopers and Federation. Yes, you may be dealing with a hyper-intelligent species of alien pod-creatures on some undiscovered world. Still, you are backed up with a battlecruiser armed with one-meter megabolt battleship guns in a triple turret, sitting in orbit. If these aliens give your away team heat, an option always exists to pull out and start orbital bombardment.

Space Opera is Battleship Gray Science Fiction (BGSF).

This genre stands on its own, smelling like a fresh coat of paint and the metallic tinge of air recyclers. The genre is pure STEM, with a heavy metal injection of military power. Science is essential when the captain wonders what they are dealing with, and engineering builds the solution. Navigation and math-plot courses are getting the ship to its destination before a vessel faster than the one the players are in, just because the navigator knows how to use gravity wells to fling the cruiser quicker and on a better course, without wasting time or acceleration.

Right now, they are wondering how we got here before them, despite their faster ship. Communications officer, open a hailing frequency. Navigator, you may raise your middle digit on my command.

This genre is strong enough to carry the entire game, just as good as Star Wars, Star Trek, or Licensed IP. Seriously, I ran BGSF for decades in the Star Frontiers Universe using the Space Opera game, and it was a great time. We ran generals and admirals who planned planetary invasions and got involved in conflicts and adventures. The genre stands on its own without corporate IP. Just look at Helldivers. Star Wars and Star Trek like to pretend they are in the same genre, but they are not, and they have gone too soft, into science fantasy.

Parts of this universe are wonderfully backwards and silly. Other parts of this universe will remind you that you are dealing with anti-matter-powered systems, and things can go horribly wrong. You will laugh, but never cry, since by that time your atoms will be scattered all across deep space.

The ship design and combat system work as-is if you convert GURPS skills to Space Opera (GURPS Skill Level - 10, max 10; so an 18-minus in GURPS is a skill level of 8 in SPO). So there is zero work needed to design starships and have combats with GURPS characters inside them, using converted skill levels. You do not need to mess with GURPS ship combat and design; the system in Space Opera is a bit of WW2 wargamy goodness, but it is functional and works well.

And we have starships! Seriously, there are some amazing ship designs in here, and it is worth learning the starship combat system to see these heavy-metal behemoths slug it out with massive nova-gun battery fire and the follies of dozens of nuclear torpedoes. If the players sit in their starship and whine that they don't care about the universe, have the Space Soviets of the Galactic People's Republic show up in a fleet cruiser and obliterate them all. You will learn to care, comrade!

Those Soviets never really do go away, do they? All of a sudden, we are stuck with the Cold War forever. Yes, this is silly, but hey, we are talking 1970s science fiction here, with spandex jumpsuits and early 80s hair. There are hives of billions of bug aliens here, too, and there are times the only way to stop them is to blow up the planet. Sorry, we need to blow up a world to save the rest of them. Next time, please check the cargo pods with customs before they infest the world.

The players will be back next time to this insane place, a little wiser and wanting to explore more. Play it serious, torture them with the crazy things, turn the factions up to eleven, and make the universe come alive.

I would keep this universe hard, brutal, and deadly. Don't let people laugh it off or take it unseriously. Have the GPR or Blarads show up, beat the entire party up, leave them for dead on a planet with no gear, and laugh as they fly away in their shuttlecraft. The evil factions here are not to be messed with, and they will enjoy taking out their punishment on anyone who crosses their path.

Otherwise, what? I am bored and playing Traveller. Not to slight that game and its universe, but we have had many times where the universe felt too cosmopolitan, safe, and advanced, and it all fell flat for us. While there were small fights here and there, wars did not reach across subsectors. Where Traveller can feel too much like 2025, Space Opera is firmly set in a universe that resembles the Cold War, with a couple of Vietnam Wars going on around the galaxy. Starfleets can and do get into scraps here, especially in border space.

These space armies still use flame weapons, disruptors, gauss weapons, and tactical nukes. Go figure. Star Wars is soft romance fantasy compared to this. Ewok, meet flamethrower. If that fails, we gas the whole forest with chemical weapons and send the warbots in, firing cannister rounds out of gauss cannons.

I wish all of you were back in the 1980s playing Space Opera with us. Very few know the unhinged side of this universe and how slap-in-the-face brutal it can be. It makes Warhammer 40K look like My Little Pony.

Oh, and one of the ship damage results is the solid waste sewage system backing up into hydroponics again. Or a box of bandages in the med-bay malfunctioning and losing their stickiness when the ship is hit by enemy fire. Or all the interior sliding doors need to be cranked open manually. Or the ship's humidifiers breaking and turning the vessel into a sauna, increasing the breakdown rate of every piece of electronics on board. Fire detection systems can go out, and you will never know that the lower decks are currently engulfed in a hellish inferno until smoke starts blowing from the vents and killing people in those compartments. If the anti-matter converter fails with a high enough shutdown level, there is a flat 25% chance the ship turns into a small sun. 

Some of these ship breakdown effects are hilarious in a way only the classic Paranoia game can inflict on players, and your players will be begging the engineer for relief. Or survival. Or it may be too late by then. And no other classic science fiction game makes ship breakdowns this deadly, so you will take maintenance and repair seriously.

Here is a secret. All the ships resemble World War 2 vessels; they explode in gigantic atomic explosions, mount weapons far too powerful for anyone's own good, and hate everyone inside them. Even the smallest starfighters pack a punch that can do severe damage to a city skyline.

Seriously, though, these ships feel like real starships, not just fake CGI or oversimplified parts of the game the designers don't want to think too hard about. Every one of these ship breakdowns needs attention, and continuing to fly with them is a considerable risk that ups the ante and heightens the tension. They can also ground the ship until they are repaired.

And the computers are wonderfully a 1970s vision of computing, with a TL 7 mini-computer (hand computer) having 1 DPU of CPU and 2 DPU of storage, with a DPU being about a megabyte of storage. When you scale up from computers to mainframes, the TL 6-7 multi-computer weighs 500kg and has 100 MB of memory and 500 MB of storage. These are so primitive that they are endearing in a way.

This is not really a society that has the Internet, and computers are more utilitarian and functional. Computers do not control society here; you walk up with a clear plastic "holo card" and put it into a wall slot, and a holographic movie plays.

You can actually talk to the higher-level computers with sentience! Otherwise, the conversation goes like this: "Computer, how many moons orbit Alpha Ceti Five?" And the mainframe answers you like someone talking out of a can, repeating the question with the answer, "The answer is, seven moons orbit Alpha Ceti Five." Think of any computer out of Star Trek: The Original Series or 1970s science-fiction movies, and you have what it is like in Space Opera. As a referee, drive your players up the wall with canned, vague, and too literal answers from these computers.

And you have to pay double and allocate 5 MB of memory (instead of 3) for a galley program to get served chicken cordon bleu. Seriously, the computers in this game are as bad as the starships, and they secretly all hate you, too.

Modern game designers assume that every piece of computer technology has to be "just like today," and they put themselves in a box. I still miss the original Shadowrun universe, where nothing was wireless, and you had to physically "jack in" to access points in dangerous locations. Wi-fi and VPNs ruined the entire setting.

If you port in the classic weapons, you can use GURPS Ultra Tech for the base stats. Still, there are some good parts to take into consideration with the classic Space Opera weapons, like the fact that almost all the energy weapons are capable of fully automatic fire. Even the blaster pistol. So Han Solo will be sitting across from Greedo, and instead of just shooting him one, he will be drilling a burst of ten blaster shots into the poor green latex sap. Tell Jabba to suck on my blaster Mauser with a switch. It is insane, unhinged, but incredible. Make sure to carry around a personal force screen.

Otherwise, stick with GURPS personal weapons and gear if you want to keep your life simple.

Plots? Steal them from other science fiction. If you have a Starforce ship, make a remote outpost lose contact, and send them to investigate. Since we have no transporters, we need to take a shuttle down with a contingent of marines, and then we get to do science in the abandoned outpost. Make the sentient computer get paranoid, and you need your social scientist to talk the computer out of it to find out the truth. Have the Space Marines go on foot to investigate a series of strange signals around the outpost. Let the engineer discover a secret sublevel beneath the outpost, full of labs conducting strange experiments. Let one of the PCs have a possible psionic awakening and hear voices telling them to run.

Come on.

Science fiction is not hard. It is full of secrets and mysteries, and nothing is as it seems.

Also, we are rocking the new Wacom MovinkPad 11 today for my doodle art. If you are into drawing and sketching, this pad is excellent. I did not go all out and get the most expensive one; I just got the smaller one, since all I wanted was a quick tablet to practice on with a Wacom-quality matte screen and a paper-like feel. Just something to practice a little each day, and knock out silly, fun doodle art is all I wanted. If you are looking to get into art, this is the ideal pick-up-and-draw Android practice device that lets you get some pen time in, save your work, and tear off a new sheet of digital paper for another silly idea.

Highly recommended and a great Christmas gift for a budding artist. Don't use AI! Have the satisfaction of drawing it yourself! Practice each day! Learn fundamental skills and grow as a person. Years down the line, you will thank me, and no one else will be able to draw a straight line without using ChatGPT.

But GURPS: Space Opera is a fun universe with a complete set of star sector maps, starships, fun gear, and compatible space combat systems that work efficiently with GURPS. Most of the books are "stuff to play with" either in organizations, equipment, weapons, starships, star maps, or other information. Outside of Traveller, this is one of the most complete science fiction universes in gaming we have, and one that has been forgotten.

Where Other Games Fall Short...

GURPS just does everything well.

I run a few other gaming blogs because I have been in the hobby so long, and my leading SBRPG site is still going strong 15 years in. My sites have probably been scanned by so many AI agents that my wisdom is now part of the global consciousness from role-playing games, from now to eternity.

I was trying to discover the best version of D&D on one of my other sites, and settled on the idea that AD&D Second Edition (and the retroclone For Gold & Glory) are the best D&D you can get. Yes, this is a heavily censored edition of the game, with half-orcs, demons, devils, and assassins removed, but the rules make a few significant fixes. Also, all the cut content was restored later in the Outer Planes Appendix and the Complete guides, so it is there if you look. Also, other free games like OSRIC have all of those, and First and Second Edition are the same game, so everything ports in without needing any changes.

And For Gold & Glory is easily one of the most generous games in the OSR, and one I will happily support. The art is all public-domain works by the great masters, so this game features some of the best art in gaming today, and every piece is stunning and authentic to the period. Compared to the AD&D Second Edition POD reprints, this book beats them all. It makes me want to play a historical fantasy game based on the book's pictures. Also, while AD&D 2E is a dead game that can't be expanded or have adventures written for, FG&G is a community game that allows for all of that. The FG&G PDF is free and can be freely redistributed without profit. Only OSRIC comes as close to this game, and is another favorite of mine (even as a GURPS resource).

In the Second Edition, we get Story XP, which is more like GURPS's XP system for achievements and difficulty, which shows D&D was chasing GURPS (3rd Edition) in the 1990s, and they were. Everyone I knew quit AD&D First Edition for GURPS, so they needed to compete with the market leader. Level limits for non-human characters were raised to around 12th level, and while level limits are silly, this made them all but ignorable since few games even got to that level, and if you ever did, you ignored them anyway.

We also got the original core bard class and not the freakish hybrid of First Edition. This was a cool bard, very difficult to play since it was a half-arcane caster, and the bard's abilities were particular and of limited use. Even the combat song required 3 rounds of singing, without attacking, to get going. You had to be a great player to make a bard work; otherwise, you were just a mediocre archer with a few arcane spells. I would rather have a new player play a thief or a mage. You had no bardic inspiration nor healing spells! This was a challenging class, but great if you knew how to make it work.

We played AD&D 2E back in the 1990s, and this game got us back into AD&D, mainly because of the GURPS-like XP system and the increased XP values of monsters, easily ten times the old BX D&D game. Also, there was zero XP for gold, so the greed motivation in the game was gone, and this was more of a heroic storytelling game where Story XP doubled your monster XP if they were defeated on a quest. We read the original Forgotten Realms novels and loved those stories, and the game did a good job of being "the game of the novels."

GURPS was still the better overall game.

In GURPS, if you held a crossbow to someone's head, that was a tense moment. In AD&D 1E or 2E, if you were high enough level, you laughed it off unless DM Fiat kicked in and they called for a save or die roll, which was rare, and if you were high enough level, you made it anyways. The same was still deadly (by the rules) and required resurrection saves, but GURPS did that tense moment far better than games with bags of hit points. Resurrection in GURPS is exceedingly difficult or impossible, with the spell costing 300 FP and one try (GURPS Magic, p. 94), and it can be ruled impossible in some settings.

To bring someone back to life in GURPS, you all but need ceremonial magic and a circle of casters (GURPS Magic, p. 12). To get that 300 FP, you need a lot of casters with the skill over 15-, ten times the casting time (20 hours), there are baked-in failure rates, and you get one try. This is not a spell you can "pay the temple 500 gold to cast" and be on your way, like this was a video game and an extra life.

In 2E, resurrection requires a system shock roll, ages the caster 3 years, and has a maximum number of times equal to a character's CON score. Still, this is beginning to feel like a video game, assuming you will die multiple times, and NPC healers are there to suffer aging effects. In 5E? The cost is laughable: 1,000 gold, and you need a long rest before you can cast spells again. The subject also requires a long rest and gets a -4 on all rolls (um, we do have a disadvantage and fatigue system here in 5E) until they do.

GURPS does a better job of creating a profound, realistic, and dramatic game. Death still means something here. Part of me feels like the fantasy genre has been ruined by the D&D-isms and assumptions baked into it, and that going back to GURPS is the only way to clean my palette of the video-game-inspired mechanics in today's fantasy games.

If we don't push back against these D&D tropes, the entire hobby will become a mobile game where we will be expected to buy currency, boosts, characters, items, and stamina for real money.

All that great art in For Gold & Glory that I have been posting in this article? That is more GURPS than AD&D. I love the game and its art, but to me, this feels like GURPS art because of the weight and realism of these pieces. They come from an era before the concept of "role-playing" gaming existed, and they are all-time historical greats. For Gold & Glory is worth checking out (for free), just for the art and inspiration it brings to fantasy.

It comes down to a question of why you play the fantasy genre.

For me, I like the grim reality that GURPS brings to the table, and everything becomes a serious, weighty decision. Healing isn't free, and death is all but final. GURPS is like a hardcore game where you get one life, and you live with your decisions, good or bad. If your character gets a bad rep, that sticks with them, and they will feel the repercussions of that for the entire campaign.

In D&D, especially 1E and 2E, I can still ignore much of the danger and its consequences. In 5E, it ignores all the threats, and there are no consequences. The new "rule zero" in D&D 2024 is "everybody wins," and I immediately check out, that is not why I play role-playing games.

Would I rather play a thief in AD&D or GURPS? This one is easy, and GURPS is a clear win. While thieves in AD&D are simply a weak martial class with a collection of skills plus backstab, thieves in GURPS are real people. In GURPS, I am dealing with disadvantages and reputation, and the campaign world matters all of a sudden. In AD&D, thieves "just are" some sort of "class choice" on the "choose your class" screen in a video game, and they sort of exist in the nether. If my GURPS thief blows a kleptomaniac roll and goes for that shiny necklace, fails, and the town guards show up - that is a real problem.

Death is real, so I need to have the skills to escape, since fighting and killing guards will lead to worse consequences, or I can surrender and deal with some time in a cell, maybe some manual labor for a few months, or being sent out on a dangrous mission that is all but certain death (but finding a way to succeed and pay my debt to society in the process with a smile and smirk on my face). Hey, GURPS referees can have fun with the whole "prison time" thing as well, and give thieves some creative ways to pay off that debt by taking on dangerous missions for the constables.

A highly skilled thief is also an asset when a town has monster troubles, and this is a resource that innovative mayors can make secret use of. Even if the mayor is embroiled in inter-faction politics, those missions could get very interesting as the thief is sent after political enemies to gather (or plant) dirt, steal from, or otherwise weaken the mayor's political foes. All of this is done under the table, of course, and the thief can walk free for a few favors.

Or, I could have the skills to talk my way out of the whole mess. None of the above ever happens.

But back in AD&D, I will just hide in the shadows or climb a wall to escape the guards. I never needed to make a self-control roll or suffer a bad reputation, so there is no societal cost for choosing to be a thief. Death is no big deal, especially in 5E. Thieves just sort of "are there" in D&D, with few interesting things driving them or painting how others see them.

If I take the same above logic and apply it to a bard, mage, fighter, cleric, druid, or any other fantasy role, then you can begin to see why GURPS just does fantasy better. My characters are part of the world, required by the rules to interact with it, and for the world to interact with me. With great, creative refereeing, even these "failure states" that would kill characters or imprison them in D&D-style games are easily turned into new plots and adventures in GURPS. Yes, blowing my self-control roll put me here, but it does not mean instant death or rolling up a new character unless my choices are horrible.

Where other games fall short, GURPS delivers.

Linux is Really Good Right Now

I am shocked at how great Linux is. I have been on and off with the OS for years. This year, I dedicated a whole machine to it and have been maintaining it, learning about security, installing software, using the command line for updates, and just getting my feet wet with a distro.

Go with Linux Mint, or if you just want a starter OS that everybody uses, Ubuntu. I know how bad Ubuntu is and all the terrible choices they made with Amazon, packaging, and other things. If they use Ubuntu at your place of work, trust me, install it on an old machine and learn it. I like Mint a lot, but there are things about Ubuntu where I see them pushing the OS forward, especially with their (controversial) Rust rewrites of the core libraries. Debian recently announced Rust rewrites, too, so the writing is on the wall.

I know people dislike Ubuntu!

But hey, Ubuntu is one thousand times better than Windows, and if it starts you off as a "first distro" before you move to Mint or Arch, then you took that first step on a long road of learning and discovery.

You will learn, and it is good to learn in a distro that holds your hand. Plus, if they use Ubuntu at work, do it to increase your job skills and justify it that way.

But install something and start learning!

Rewriting the entire OS in Rust is one of the most forward-looking ways Linux can cement its position in the enterprise market and finally replace Windows. Decades of C and C++ code in Windows versus an OS entirely written in a secure development language that allows zero exploits and buffer overflow attacks? This is your future cloud OS, and Steam is 100% onboard.

If you have old hardware that can't run Windows 11, why not try this?

Oh, and Steam runs on Linux too, along with thousands of games. If I want to be distracted, there are excellent ways to do so here, too, but that's my choice.

The fact that the GURPS Character sheet comes with a Linux version is just tremendous joy for me, and it frees up my creativity from the constant annoyance of Windows. Windows is becoming highly trashy; it annoys me with notifications every five minutes and constantly puts news, entertainment, and information from sites I do not care about in my face.

Windows is making the world's "second screen attention disorder" worse.

With Linux, I have a choice. The default state of the operating system is quiet. There are very few notifications outside of system updates, and even then, those are very infrequent. I love the peace and quiet. I can focus on something creative, rather than being pinged, bugged, alerted, flashed ads in front of, spied on, and constantly reminded that I am not using my computer the way Microsoft wants me to.

The computer sits quietly and runs.

What I do with it is my choice. I typed 3,000 words of a novel in one day with that peace and quiet. I got into my zone. I felt the creative flow return to me again.

With Windows, forget it—it is like trying to study in a noisy dormitory with music blasting through the wall, people running in the halls, the door won't lock, and people barging in at random. I am always expecting a notification or an ad to pop up in Windows, so I can never get into a peaceful, productive, pure, higher-level of thinking, creative flow.

With Linux, I can.

I know nothing is going to bug me, pop up, or annoy me. My guard isn't constantly up. My mind is at ease. I have nothing to distract me or take me out of that higher level of cognitive thought.

Linux is the "quiet mode" that Windows is missing.

And this helps me think and play GURPS. Since GURPS takes a little more effort and brain power to enjoy, if I can eliminate the constant ping-ping-ping of Windows and its annoying nature, I can get into "deep GURPS thought mode" and really enjoy the game. Nothing will pull me out of my "GURPS zone," and I can really dig deep on characters, adventures, combats, and reading the PDFs.

Linux makes my GURPS experience better.

Conversions especially. A game conversion, like GURPS: Star Frontiers, requires a deeper level of thought and concentration, where I can pick little things apart, identify the most essential elements to port over, and really drill down into translating one setting into GURPS. In Windows, forget it —I am constantly on guard, distracted, and doing something else while a screen full of icons fills my desktop.

Windows is the desk full of dust, crumbs, junk, papers, and clutter where you can get nothing done.

You can build the same thing in Linux, but it isn't the same. You have to actively wreck Linux to get it to annoy you. With Windows, this is the default way it comes out of the box, and it can never really be removed easily.

sudo apt update

sudo apt upgrade

You do those things on a terminal, and your software is up to date. It is wonderful. You will have minor hang-ups here and there, but buy a book, go online and search, and even use AI search to look for answers. It is easier than ever to learn Linux.

And with my GURPS PDFs on there, the entire computer becomes a "GURPS station" for creating on. I can theme one workspace for GURPS, and zone out in one of my favorite games of all time.

With no distractions.

The Hobby is Hurting All Over

We are in a bust phase of role-playing tabletop games, with D&D seriously faltering on that side of the hobby, and many people just turning indifferent to new releases from Wizards and third-party D&D creators. One notable creator who made most of their money from 5E now says their own game is making more, and sales across the board for 2024 D&D have cratered.

People are sticking with what they have and not "upgrading" or "seeking 2024 material" unless they are forced to, and it isn't that many.

Blog hits are way down, too, and I am moving back into programming and software development and taking courses. The hobby is dead, with the air let out of D&D 2024, and people are mostly giving up or filtering into niche games. If D&D 5E survives, it will be through Shadowdark.

People say Shadowdark is far less of a headache to set up and run than a session zero of D&D, with everyone running to D&D Beyond and designing freakish niche classes and characters. We get this in GURPS, too, without some tight control on character design.

I hope the GURPS revision doesn't divide the community, and a part of me wishes the game would be left as-is. I know YouTube will go clickbait on any changes to the core GURPS books; click hunters gotta make rage-bait content to keep their channels afloat. Even if they never covered the game or don't cover it at all, you know it will be a barrage of "GURPS gone woke" one video after another, even with sensible and reasonable changes to update the book for a wider audience range.

I love GURPS, but I know how people are, and the desperation of many of these channels and who they will dump on for clicks. It is a sad state of affairs that we can't have positive, constructive, and game-focused content. YouTube and its "engagement" are a blight on tabletop gaming. It gets so bad that I unsubscribe and tune them out. Even the 5E hype channels are becoming sad, "please watch me," channels that beg for views and comments.

There are times I need to escape it all.

But I am learning Rust and enjoying the language. We finally have a language that puts some thought into data, buffer overflows, variables, and tight memory control. There is a learning curve, but it is not as hard as GURPS once you grasp a few core concepts. Everything is migrating to this language—from AWS to Linux—and it is the future of systems and application development.

While gaming is in a slump, I am working on other skills.

Even games will move over to Rust once the tooling and knowledge expand, since testing is built in, refactoring is easier, and the applications will not compile if they have memory leaks or serious pointer flaws. The cost to maintain a game and the development costs will go down once the engine spreads from system development into the application space.

C and C++ are dying. It is a shocking thing to see. But the demise was foretold long ago by the language's failure to change and its being far too permissive with security and trust. We simply do not live in an age where we can't trust the software that controls the planes we fly in, the banks we put our savings into, the medical devices we rely on, and the cars we drive.

Coding, like gaming, has gotten far too permissive and out of control. Character power, combinations that break the game, and builds that do nothing but exploit one fringe rule are commonplace. Rust shows you can put tight controls on a system and still achieve expressiveness while maintaining control over the development experience. GURPS suffers from this outdated game design paradigm, too, and it feels like C++ in an era where application development requires a tighter rein on memory access and variable scope and lifetimes.

D&D 2024 is 100% loosey-goosey characters who can over-spec into passive perception and be like automatic trap radars in a dungeon, or over-spec into social and walk around saying they own everything in the kingdom, and make themselves the rulers. The era of this sort of massively careless and sloppy design paradigm is on its way out, and the far-too-permissive games of the 2020s will be seen as relics of overdesigned characters, designers who did not care, zero-challenge adventures that are more themed time-wasters, and executives who just needed to sell more books with OP subclass options.

One side of Wizards is shipping cozy game starter sets, while the other is kneeling at the altar of Dragonlance and proclaiming that the old-school is back, and I see a confused hydra with heads that don't know what the other ones are doing. Meanwhile, players are walking away in droves or simply stopping to care.

We are heading into an era of tighter, more secure, tested, less permissive, and proven designs.

Working well, proving the math, and being supportable will soon be seen as highly desirable features in gaming, as this "do anything" culture fades along with many of the systems that cling to the old ways.