GURPS: Star Frontiers, Update #9

Back then, we used Traveller for our Star Frontiers ship design and combat system. This was the release year of Star Frontiers, back in 1980, and we really had two options: Traveller or Space Opera. Traveler was the easier game for our young minds, so it won. Knight Hawks hadn't been released yet, and by the time it was, we had standardized all our designs on Traveller variants, and the game hummed along nicely without us caring enough to convert everything over.

So, the thought of a GURPS: Star Frontiers game running on the Cepheus Engine starship rules with GURPS for the starship engine really isn't that radical for me, since that is exactly what we did back in the day. Converting GURPS skills to 2d6 equivalents for the ship combat system is very easy, and both games run on a d6, so you don't even need to switch dice.

One thing I love about this combo is I get ship designs and combat back, which was a big part of our games, being OG-Star Wars influenced, with my brother playing a small starship captain with his crew. He was always off to somewhere new and dangerous, tangling it up with pirates, Sathar, space criminals, Streel mercenaries, and other bad guy groups. The ships weren't invincible; his ship often took heavy damage, and he was always down somewhere for repairs while he got into all sorts of trouble planetside.

Earning credits to pay for all this was a high priority, so he did his share of looting, taking cargoes others would never touch, and getting rewards from Star Law by bringing in wanted space criminals. The crew had stories and troubles of their own, and he would often step in to keep them happy or things on an even keel.

He also had colony investments that would pay out returns (based on a random events roll), and he would need to jet over there to make sure his investments were not getting raided by pirates, claim jumpers, too-aggressive space corporations, Sathars, and other threats. Other times, the colonists in colonies he bought shares in would call him up, telling him they found something strange, and they trusted him to check it out.

Sometimes, very stupid pirates would announce a shipping blockade of a system, and that would stir up a lot of trouble as ambassadors would arrive and try to calm things down, and the more go-in-blasters-flying crowd would want to clear them out. He was often a part of the latter; no negotiating with pirates, and he would join any merchant ships trying to break the blockade to take it out on the pirate ships, grab ships to sell for salvage, and help pay for things with merchant rewards for helping out.

The UPF was always busy with the Sathar fleets, so militia ships and merchants had to roll up their sleeves and take matters into their own hands. If you want something done, you gotta do it yourself. This also led to NPC ships and crew making repeat appearances, along with a few militia fleet officers who got to know him as a reliable gun for hire, and squarely on the side of the good guys.

Star Frontiers has this wonderful UFP/militia/mercenary split in space forces, and it gave ship encounters and the entire universe a better assortment of factions and interests with different goals and tolerances for danger. Sometimes militia ships were hampered by planetary defense budgets and UPF commitments, so relying on them for support was not always a sure thing. If you knew buddies you could call up in a pinch, and they were in-system, that is what making friends is for and why you ran a strong social game in our campaign.

And there were even times when local criminal syndicates provided information and resources; of course, they were never to be trusted, but pirates blockading a space route they had illicit cargo running through didn't work in their favor, either. There is always a shady deal to be made, but that is like making a deal with people you really don't want to be associating with.

The closest thing the setting has to an "Imperium" is the UPF, but they are more like a NATO defense alliance than a galaxy-wide government. So you still deal with megacorporations and planetary governments a lot here; no nobles come along ordering planets around, and no Imperial fleet comes in to dictate defense matters or engage in space politics. The setting is very much a loose collection of planets, local governments, and (pre-Cyberpunk) megacorps. The UPF is there, but it has to focus on the Sathar threat and any new wars that may flare up. The UPF won't waste ships on internal matters and will let PGC, Streel, the militias, and merchants work things out inside the Frontier as long as no Sathar involvement is detected.

This is why starship combat matters to me in science fiction, especially the aftermath of starship damage and repairs, which often dictated the action and focus of the next few sessions. One of the main engines is down, so we are stuck in the middle of nowhere for a while while we get it repaired, at least enough to get us back to a hub world and a new one put in. All that costs money and time. Time means we will be here for a while, and we need to find money to keep this thing flying.

That means a trip to the starport bar and hitting up a few contacts, or making a few new ones. So, what's going on around here?

A remote research station is still out of contact? The people sent to check on it have not reported back?

Really...?

GURPS: Fantasy Comparisons

For the type of fantasy I run, GURPS is still king.

I have set most of my D&D 5E material aside. The damage curves across 5E, 5.5E, Tales of the Valiant, and Level Up: Advanced 5th Edition no longer line up. By mid levels, the numbers have shifted enough that I stopped trusting the baseline I thought I knew. That is a preference, not a complaint about the designers - but it's why most of those books went to the garage. A few Goodman Games volumes stay out, and Nimble 5e does too. Nimble was built around one curve; it is small, and it is as easy to support as OSE, so I do not have to worry about the numbers drifting out from under me.

As good as Nimble is, GURPS is what actually gets played. GURPS has a fixed damage curve too, and it does not move because a new fantasy PDF appears on Warehouse 23. A sword’s damage is the wielder’s ST-based thrust or swing damage plus a fixed weapon modifier (sw, sw+1, thr+2, and so on). A new supplement doesn't reprint the Basic Set damage table and declares that longswords now do 2d+2 once characters reach a certain point total. The only ways to raise the damage ceiling are campaign decisions: open higher Tech Levels, allow magical weapons, or give someone superpowers. Those are choices I make when I set up the game. The default hardcore curve stays put once you choose the options.

I spent some time with the Hero System fantasy books. The system can do fantasy superheroes cleanly, and I still like it. What I ran into was DIY fatigue: once I wanted more than the published material, the expectation was that I would point-buy and balance every new effect myself. GURPS has the same point-buy option when I want it.

GURPS also has published advice, horror and magic frameworks, and the permission to wing a pool or a corruption track without first proving it balances against every other option in the book. Hero remains a solid choice if I want fantasy superheroes. I do not play fantasy for superheroes; I play it for stories.

I like wild magic, corruption by evil, and the classic good-versus-evil arcs. Dungeon Crawl Classics has a shelf, and I love its vibe, but the tools already exist here. GURPS Horror has corruption rules. A critical failure on a spell can be treated as a Horror-style corruption check, or as a one-time wild-magic surge designed for the campaign. Either way, the character sheet already has the hooks - critical tables, disadvantages, and the option to track a pool. Every 10 points of a DIY-ed nature-corruption track can mean a new mutation or animal trait. The game teaches that “your stuff is just as good as ours,” so whatever system I adopt as the campaign standard is good enough.

Unlike most other systems, GURPS leaves room to be a designer. I can bolt other resolution systems onto it - Battletech, Knight Hawks, Car Wars, Cepheus - and keep GURPS as the character engine. I can invent new corruption or wild-magic tracks snapped onto the critical hit and miss tables, or new resource pools for effects like slow transformation. Other games do not give me that mix. Some VTTs hard-code their character designers. Hero System expects every new feature to be point-bought and balanced. DCC hands you a random chart result with no design hook. OSRIC and BX get closer to “just make it up,” but GURPS still gives the best combination of DIY freedom, suggested methods, and a design system that lets me prove the work when I want to.

The same freedom shows up in character concepts. Template Toolkit 2: Races and GURPS Furries are full of concrete ideas that go beyond flat bonuses. Hooves that add a special attack and extra Strength, horns, enhanced senses, armored skin, a breath weapon that costs fatigue - all of these are straightforward to build and costed in points. If I want a distinctive nonhuman race that actually changes how the character fights or moves, I can make it here without waiting for an official option that matches what I have in mind. D&D 5.5E goes in the other direction with special species abilities, and here I can use them as part of my character concept and stat out powers for them.

GURPS also hits the low-fantasy tone I want. Modding 5E downward usually means rewriting spell lists, class features, and monster hit points until the chassis no longer feels like 5E. In GURPS, the low-fantasy baseline is already there; I do not have to rebuild it.

For the kind of fantasy I actually run - stories, corruption, the occasional wild surge, and a damage model that stays put - GURPS still does more of the work I want without requiring me to rebuild the baseline every time a new book appears. That is why it stays on the table, and on my living-room shelves where every visitor can see a complete library.

Rules Light and Immersion

I get myself into a trap with rules-light games. The pitch is easy to love: a compact rulebook, generous tables, a bestiary or two, and the promise that everything you need fits in a small package. Some of them are genuinely well made. But when I sit down to play solo, what do I actually have? Six stats, a level, and hit points. It’s a thin hamburger on a flimsy bun. I can eat it. The question is why I keep choosing to.

What I miss is texture. I want a system where the character I spent time building is the same character whose decisions and limitations show up in play. In many modern designs, especially those built around frequent resting, damage and resource loss are temporary by default. A shotgun blast to the face is gone tomorrow. Full hit points, no lasting injury, completely rested.

The game waits for you to pick it back up, like an MMO. After a while, that stops feeling like adventure and starts feeling like the system has already decided that nothing that happens to the character will stick for long. The constant replenishment keeps the session moving, but it also flattens the cost of bad decisions. For solo play, where there’s no table of other people to create friction, that flatness shows up faster.

A simulation system like GURPS changes the math on time spent. Character creation is slower. That time is not free; it raises the cost of losing the character before the first session even starts. Once I’m in the game, the mechanics keep demanding attention. The rules feel like they matter here.

Ranged combat is a clear example.

In most rules-light games, the difference between ten feet and a hundred and fifty feet is small or nonexistent. It’s AC 12 either way. Even in B/X the long-range penalty is often only –1. You can stay at range, move, and still have a reasonable chance to hit. GURPS does not work that way. On the Size and Speed/Range Table, a few yards is a modest penalty (–2 to –4 depending on exact distance), while 50 yards, 150 feet, is –8.

Closing the distance improves your odds but raises the chance of melee. Staying back requires either a high skill or accepting that the shot is unlikely. Cover, movement, and aiming become relevant choices instead of flavor. An archer who has raised Bow high enough to make the 50-yard shot reliably is also operating in a range where, up close, they can pick hit locations. In D&D terms, a 24-minus skill in GURPS is like having a level 20 character, and you start to dictate where your shot lands on a target, especially up close. Skill level does all the work here, and no feats or subclass abilities are needed.

None of this requires a veteran referee to supply the depth. The skill list, attribute baseline, advantages and disadvantages, and range penalties give me a reason to return to the game. Five minutes of thinking through a situation in GURPS produces more concrete options and constraints than the same five minutes in a lighter system. For solo play, where I am both player and referee, that density is what keeps the session from feeling like I’m just rolling to see what happens next. The system protects the investment because it keeps giving me something to invest in.

The result is immersion in my character, and then immersion in the world. When I play GURPS, it feels like putting on VR goggles and being put into the world.

Rules-light games are still useful when I want a short session or a quick procedural loop. They stop satisfying me once I notice how little of what I do matters beyond the next rest. GURPS makes the opposite bargain: it takes longer to start, requires more tracking, and has a higher chance that the choices and consequences will still matter tomorrow.

Authorly Characters, Hero System, and GURPS

I’ve been playing around with my Hero System 6th Edition / Champions books lately and comparing them with GURPS. The two systems pursue different goals. Hero System focuses tightly on powers, keeps the skill list short, and puts a lot of its complexity into a unified, math-heavy power design system. GURPS keeps the math lighter at the table, gives you a broad skill list, and lets most subsystems remain optional so you can use or ignore them as needed.

It reminds me of the difference between a highly standardized platform and a more open, modular one. One is built around a single, consistent framework that everything routes through; the other lets you add, swap, or leave out different parts depending on the game you want to run. Neither approach is inherently better; they just optimize for different things.

I still play Champions. I used 4th Edition heavily in the 1990s, and a lot of that game is still hard-wired into how I think about supers. If you want a supers game that stays focused and mechanically consistent, Champions remains excellent. GURPS Supers is also fully capable, but it is a different kind of tool.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s we ran a Mystara campaign using the blue-book Champions rules. It was one of the things that helped us step away from AD&D. Being a mage who could design spells as powers was a genuine pleasure, even with the conversion work and the extra complexity. After a decade of being forced to accept D&D spells as written, designing our own was a blast and made the campaign feel fresh. The campaign lasted until about 2000, and the magic powers became their own story.

With GURPS, you have GURPS Fantasy and GURPS Magic, and spells and abilities are written and used as they are. With Champions (and Fantasy Hero), almost everything still goes through the power design system; the rest is mostly flavor and setting material. That is a real philosophical difference. GURPS gives you a high degree of freedom to add or ignore optional systems. Hero System standardizes the engine so that powers, skills, and combat all share the same underlying math.

What I love about GURPS is that the characters feel authorly, like people created by a novelist, with built-in stories, conflicts, skill packages, and open-ended potential. Champions characters feel more like carefully engineered capability sets. For complex superheroes, that approach often helps. Once you have six characters on a map, each with a different suite of powers, a shorter skill list and a single consistent system become practical advantages. I appreciate Hero System's standardization, its focus on abilities, and how the rules reduce to a math-based framework that works the same way for everyone.

GURPS characters, though, are built as people first, then given abilities. That is why I feel more connected to my GURPS games. I run a low-fantasy GURPS campaign, and I am immediately immersed. The numbers exist, but they read more like ordinary competence, disadvantages, and skill levels than a power framework aggregated into derived values. There is less of a mechanical layer between me and the character as a person.

For superhero wargaming and tactical simulation, Champions is the better fit for me. It boils characters down to a unified system and forces everything through one consistent engine. My brain works that way, and it feels natural. I can put Spider-Man against Batman and get a clear, satisfying tabletop wargame result without juggling a large skill list or a stack of optional modules. One book covers the mechanical engine.

For superhero roleplay, or for any game where I want the characters themselves to carry the story, GURPS appeals more. The authorly construction and the way abilities sit inside a fuller character description give me deeper stories and a stronger sense of connection. GURPS Supers handles powers well enough that I don't feel like I'm giving up anything essential.

Both games do what they prioritize well. Champions gives me a precise, focused supers engine that stays manageable under complexity. GURPS gives me characters that feel like they belong in a novel and a toolkit that can expand or contract depending on the genre. I reach for each one for different reasons, and both still earn their place on the shelf.

100,000 Lifetime Page Views

Thank you to the GURPS community and fans for helping us hit this milestone. We rolled over 100,000 lifetime page views on this blog last night, and we are on our way to a million. My main SBRPG blog has 1.5 million lifetime views (we hit 1 million this summer, and we have accelerated since), and according to Google's AI, only the top 5 or 6 tabletop hobby blogs ever reach 1 million+ lifetime hits. It helps that we have been around for 15+ years on SBRPG and have kept things consistent.

GURPS is my second top-performing blog, and it still moves the needle in views and attention. That is good news for GURPS in a hobby dominated by 5E and D&D; we do good traffic here, and GURPS feels mainstream. Daily blog posts and GURPS discussion show the world that people play here and share ideas and adventures.

And I know blogs are nothing compared to YouTube's reach and power, but blogs are still a core part of the hobby, especially for the old-school crowd and those who like to read. I like to write, keep writing, and practice and share every day, so blogs are part of my hobby. I can't watch YouTube videos at work, but I can read a blog. Not all engagement is video content.

One million lifetime views for a GURPS blog will be a huge achievement, a major feather in the GURPS community's hat, and we get closer every day.

Vehicle Combat and the Lure of Simulation

As kids, we played day-long sessions of Car Wars at card tables, sixty cars, four maps taped together, and nobody sneezed or the hurricane destroyed the map. The hobby has a strong desire to simulate something as complex as multi-car vehicle combat, or even starship combat.

We want to be Luke Skywalker, flying into the Death Star trench and fighting off TIE fighters heroically in our X-Wing. That myth is as strong in our souls as the World War II fighter ace was for another generation. In the modern era, most of it is still a myth and has been eclipsed by drone warfare and cruise missiles fighting the wars, but the imagery and desire to be the pilot going in guns blazing still proves the myth is stronger than reality.

But, given a roleplaying context, what is "ship combat?" In a narrative sense, it is a skill roll, like a character in a movie: roll extremely high, and you do something amazing. Want to make your submarine quieter than the one hunting you? It is a captaining roll, followed by a helm roll, and maybe an engineering roll to silence the boat's engines and pumps. That "making the sub silent" has nothing to do with a wargame subsystem, but narratively it is three skill rolls, modified by how quietly the sub naturally runs.

I didn't need submarine statistics or a fully designed GURPS Vehicles design to figure that out.

World War II destroyer versus frigate? Well, the destroyer will outgun the smaller ship, but lucky shots happen, so I am going to put the outcome of this fight on 1d6: on a 1-4 the destroyer wins, and on a 5-6 the frigate wins. Roll a reaction roll at the end of the battle to see how catastrophic the damage is to the loser, and another to see if the victor got away unscathed.

Character skill rolls do play into this. If the characters are crewmembers on the frigate, they will need to get creative and roll very high to shift the battle's outcome. If someone makes an amazing gunnery roll and beats the roll by 8 or more? That may win the fight with a lucky shot to the other ship's magazine. A successful helm roll may reduce the damage the frigate takes. Engineering may lessen the impact of damage once taken.

None of this needed hardcore ship statistics. Just knowledge of statistics and a rough approximation of odds in a ship-versus-ship battle. Then it layers a narrative fiction layer on top of that and says character skill rolls matter and affect the outcome in realistic ways.

Doing a torpedo run on a battleship? That is a floating island fortress filled with AA; nine out of ten times, you get shot down. High skill rolls are the only thing that changes the narrative outcome, and they fit the mythic fantasy of the fighter pilot we have in our heads.

Again, I don't need battleship stats or even the torpedo bomber. Just a rough idea of the likely outcome, and the realization that high skill rolls should change the narrative path. Reaction rolls can serve as a "reality check" on the outcome: what is expected versus what actually happened.

Similarly, in Cepheus, two similar-sized ships: one a pirate ship versus a free trader? That pirate ship is designed to pick off merchant ships all day, versus a free trader with 60% of its space filled with cargo. That pirate ship will win that fight 5 out of 6 times, especially if it doesn't have to haul off cargo; it can just call in a pirate hauler to clean up. Versus larger cargo ships, the odds drop, since the smaller pirate vessel can't do enough damage to disable the merchant freighter, only damage it and peel off before help arrives.

This doesn't need starship designs or a ship combat system, just logic and fairness.

The dice take it from there.

Back and Away

I keep coming back to GURPS for what I love, and then I step away when the ask gets too big. For games like fantasy, GURPS hits a perfect spot of simulation and low-magic fantasy that I love. Blades and training matter, while low-magic parlor tricks can be used to great effect. We don't have to cast fireball in every fight. The relationships feel real, and the disadvantages carry weight. Who the character is and how they feel matter.

As it leans toward science fiction, I feel the heavy weight of simulation drags the game down. Even a world like Car Wars is better off with the board game running the vehicle combat, and GURPS running everything else. For Cepheus, it is the same for me: give me a simple ship combat system based on Traveller, and I don't need all this detail and detailed designs. GURPS can run my free traders, but for the ships, give me something I can handle quickly, without a spreadsheet and calculator.

The skills also weigh my science fiction games down. There are too many. Yes, someone has to handle hazardous materials safely, but in Traveller, engineers, scientists, and doctors deal with them all the time, and those skills cover it. I could easily rule that at the table, but then I'd need to create custom skill lists for players, and they can't easily use off-the-shelf software tools without further instructions.

While I love the depth GURPS gives me in science fiction and the VR-level immersion, I sometimes feel like picking skills becomes a slog. For the average player, it feels like too high a barrier to entry without picking a pre-gen or template.

I can run an entire starship crew in a 2d6 Traveller game. In GURPS, I am lucky to design three full player characters before I start to feel fatigue. This is a solo game, and I am playing alone; with others, it would be a different story.

GURPS sci-fi almost feels like the personal-scale version of science fiction, better when it simulates the small and personal, but when you get into space battleships and starfleets, it feels like too much. One planet, surviving, relying on my skills, repairing my gear, and that personal struggle of survival, almost like the classic Volturnus series of adventures? Yes, that is where GURPS shines for me.

Another thing to consider: that list of a dozen Traveller characters with UPP and skill lists isn't as interesting as a single GURPS character. That one spacer with personal struggles, hang-ups, and special advantages is much more fun to play crash-landed on a lost world. The bulk crew list, with its numbers and skill levels, isn't as compelling.

In a classic trading game, a 2d6 Cepheus or Traveller game gives me everything from a subsector generator to cargo charts and encounter tools. That is a campaign in a book, and I can feasibly run a free trader game myself. This is where I don't want the details, and I just want to simulate the system.

There is a guilt there in the middle, and I need to answer it with the question, "What is the most compelling game?" For the personal struggle, one spacer crash-landed, relying on the skills I actually bought; GURPS is still the better game. The free trader can stay in one book. The guilt is just me wanting both at once.