GURPS Is the Best Low Fantasy Game

While I love Rolemaster, Runequest, Hackmaster, and a few of these other "real fantasy" games, GURPS has killed the entire genre for me. The low fantasy versions of 5E, the Conan game, any of the new "dark and gritty" low magic versions of OSR games, and low-magic variants of D&D? Yeah, those are all gone too.

GURPS killed the genre for me.

GURPS does it all better.

While these books are excellent sources of inspiration, GURPS will always be the system played at my table for them. it works the same way every time, is easy to pick up and run, and has the best combat system - and it works without combat even better than most "combat only" games.

Even a game like Shadowdark, brilliant in its own right, pales in comparison to GURPS. What thief character do I want to play? Shadowdark's d4 hit die, backstabbing, and advantage on a few skill check areas, or my fully realized GURPS thief character?

It is no comparison. My GURPS thief wins every time. This is a character who has much deeper development, a greater sense of who they are in the rules, and a more configurable and customizable skill set than a simple 3d6-down-the-line OSR thief. My GURPS thief also beats my 5E rogue by a mile, since my GURPS thief actually feels like a thief and not an MMO DPS class.

My GURPS thief feels like a real person, someone with a backstory with supporting rules to back that up, and will engage me on a deeper level than any OSR or 5E game. In a solo game, my thief wins by a huge margin, even over games designed to have solo modes of play, like Dragonbane.

When my thief navigates through a world, that character in GURPS will have a much more engaging and deeper experience than my OSR or 5E thief. The "GURPS effect" of feeling like a VR headset was put on you will hit immediately, and I will feel immersed in the world, with everything around me suddenly vividly real, mattering, and my every action has consequences - good, indifferent, or bad.

Sure, my 5E rogue gets "cool powers" - but, so what? Those are only good for combat, and they don't help me tell a story. Most of them are promises I will never play long enough to enjoy, having but never really needing. Or the fact that I only get combat powers means the game forces me down a "choice path" of violence first, thinking later.

GURPS? I can run a campaign out to 500+ points of character abilities and not get into one fight. Combat isn't the focus of this game; perhaps it is stealth and social intrigue in a Venice merchant house? Maybe my character has competent fencing skills and some excellent training, but solves most of his problems through intimidation and Machiavellian scheming.

"He's pulled his sword a dozen times, but never used it."

That is a great GURPS character.

Why all these "roleplaying-focused" streaming shows aren't using GURPS is beyond me. GURPS curb-stomps D&D 5E in terms of roleplaying support and actual in-the-book rules that support character backgrounds. It is not a guess, player choice, or sitting there and making it all up - all the character options for flaws and advantages are in the book, rules written, and ready to be used.

And for realistic, gritty combat? GURPS has dials that turn that up to 11, or down to 1. It beats many of these other "real fantasy" games without even breaking a sweat. You have as many or as few "realism rules" as you want here.

And GURPS is far, far easier than many of these games to create characters for and run.

Skills & Wits

One of the trends in post-2000s gaming is the expectation that everyone will be given special powers. Our games became less about "skills and wits" and more about "powers and progression." Granted, there were always superhero games before the year 2000, but with D&D 3.0, game design became more about power trees and progression paths, often mimicking ARPGs like Diablo in pen-and-paper form.

You see this sort of design culminating in D&D 5.5E, where every class feels like a video game series of unlocks and granted powers, where player skill (and the character's skills) matter less, and it is all about what power I can get next, and where I am going on this class tree.

I am speaking broadly, as if D&D 5E is 90% of the market, and games like it tend to follow the leader, and you will see class designs with special powers granted at each level. This "prebuilt powers on a class list" design is incredibly common in gaming today.

Also, skills have been relegated to a secondary role, often "solving a toggle problem." Passive perception covers, "Do I see something?" A referee calling for an active skill roll, like History, is just presenting a pass-fail problem with very little player input or interest. After a while, it doesn't matter what the skill is or what the roll covers; it is just a binary test in the adventure: you get to read something, or you do not. You can move somewhere, or you can't. You take damage, or you don't.

If you can see a 5E adventure as a decision tree, this is the structure. Skill rolls just force you down decision tree paths. And I get this feeling that in 5E, the primary way you solve a problem is with a power, rather than creativity and skill use.

GURPS hits differently for me. Skills feel more open and more like player tools than pachinko machine pegs. For most things, you don't have the skill. You may know someone who does, though. Many D&D adventures are designed around skills. Since they are so limited, there will be a number of skill encounters that act as toggles or filters, making the roll go this way, fail it, and go that way.

In GURPS and many older games, you don't really have adventures designed so tightly around skills. Skills are there as player tools that could open new paths, but they primarily exist to give players the tools and options to create new narrative paths. Skills feel optional and more player-initiated than adventure-required.

Powers are another thing. Powers force the player to read the character sheet each turn and choose a path for that turn of combat. Choice paralysis also defines modern gaming. You will have high-level D&D games in which players forget their characters have powers they could use.

D&D 5E says to me, "Powers solve problems, not plans."

GURPS was designed in the pre-modern era, and you can even see this design philosophy reflected in other games, such as Palladium and Basic Roleplaying. Characters in these games are more about character skills and player choices, and powers are an extra, special bonus.

If you wanted special powers, you turned to games like Champions or ... GURPS. GURPS sort of stands in both worlds, with a power design and a full-featured system for superpowers. D&D never had the focus on special powers it does today, merging with video games and with powers taking over the mental decision tree for a player when their turn comes around. GURPS, by default, can ignore the power-design system and still run like an old-school "stats and skills" game.

Then again, I started with GURPS 1.0, so special powers were always something found "in other books" rather than something in the core rules. GURPS 4 changes all that and is an excellent all-in-one game. And in GURPS, you design whatever power you want, whenever you want, and work with the referee to get or have it. If you have the free character points, you can play.

Still, for me, GURPS feels like a "skills & wits" game.

GURPS: Twilight: 2000

This would be a tough conversion.

Twilight: 2000 is famous for being a nearly complete catalog of military hardware. You have all sorts of ammunition, guns, tanks, APCs, guns, suppport weapons, and military gear, all laid out for you with complete game stats for everything. By version 2.2, all the kinks were worked out, and this is close to being a modern version of Squad Leader, but on a man-to-man scale and in a what-if World War III.

I could see a GURPS conversion working if you used GURPS for the characters, and Twilight: 2000 for vehicle combat rules, with a skill conversion matrix, sort of like how my Car Wars Classic conversion works. Still, Twilight: 2000 has a lot more going on, in that it is a complete package game. One book and done. Toys to play with for everything. Character creation that takes you through a survivor's life. And then you are on your own.

Twilight: 2000 is the D&D of World War III.

And there are no drones to speak of.

Yes, there is a new version out from Free League, but this is the OG game, down to the millimeter details of the ammunition your AFV fires and the make and model number of the salvaged RPG stored in the back. You are playing escape and evasion with enemy forces, dealing with the next village scared out of their wits at you, and random marauder attacks everywhere as civilization breaks down.

Like any good post-apoc game, trust is the currency you can bank on. Rescue a village's kidnapped people, and you are heroes for a while, with a safe place to stay, your vehicles safe places to park, and your stuff is (mostly) free from being stolen.

Tomorrow is another day, at least until the marauders start dropping mortar rounds in town as revenge, and you are hustling to go find them to finish the rest of the decrepit band off with maximum prejudice. The Navy SEAL and German hostage rescue specialist in your unit will have a ball picking off the mortar team with sniper rifles as your M113 with the 50-cal turns their vehicles into Swiss cheese, and the rest of your team goes in close.

Then, you begin to become a local legend.

Watch out how famous you become, you are bound to attract attention. A detachment of the Soviets may come up to town, saying they mean no harm and are looking for medical supplies for an outbreak of influenza. Do you trust them? Do you make a deal? Do you shoot them, fearing they are infected, too? Every choice has consequences here.

Maybe you will regret opening fire when you should have sent a few and your doctor to meet with their commander to broker a deal. Your team has a chance of getting sick, but delivering what you can spare will foster a more positive disposition between the sides and an agreement to share resources, as long as both sides respect boundaries. Maybe helping them lets peace have a chance for a little while.

Or they could hold your team and the doctor, and you need to go in, rescue them, and realize they can never be trusted. What both sides do matters. The trust you give may be honored, or spit in your face.

GURPS could do this type of game; it would be gritty, hardcore, and real. It has most of the weapons and tech, up to a point, where the pedantic detail of TW2K starts to outpace what GURPS has stats for. There is enough post-apoc info in GURPS to hold its own against TW2K on the rules side.

On the gear side, GURPS tends to be very broadly based and covers a lot. You can get detailed stats on a few of the vehicles and weapons TW2K has, but not really all of them. The best way to do this is to convert TW2K vehicles into GURPS and best-imate the stats. TW2K tends to have more of a "playing with a big box of broken toys" feel, while GURPS is more up close and personal.

My feeling is that with GURPS, much more will be broken down and lost to the ravages of time and war, and it feels like a better game, with a focus less on the gear-head stuff and more on characters. Where TW2K does the 2000 game better, GURPS will do the 2020-and-beyond game, where the world is slowly sliding into a new Dark Ages II, much better.

Given enough time, the world will start to develop feudal trappings again. The borders and nationalities will disappear, and the focus of organized civilization will become farming and storing enough food (on radiation-free land) to let a large population survive the longer winters caused by the debris still in the atmosphere after nuclear war. In 20 years, the winters will be like the Ice Age, and any large population will find it rough going just to sustain more than a few thousand in one small area.

Working guns and vehicles will be the tools of "knights" and the elite. They will be taken care of, maintained like family heirlooms, and passed down to the next generation. Owning a working pickup truck with gas will be like owning a fully barded warhorse, with a team of squires and mechanics who work for the family in its garage-like stables. Gas will be made in small batches and power the few remaining vehicles of the knights and royalty.

This is the game in which GURPS will shine and outdo TW2K.

Part of why TW2K works is that it is still close enough to the war that all this stuff still works. There is still gas. There is still ammo lying around. The limited industry still works because there are people around to run the broken factories. The game has lots of bang-bang left around to play with, like some last gasp of an action movie. Pretty soon, the notion of NATO versus the Soviet Union will be forgotten. It will just be the living and the dead, with the latter side winning the battle.

The entire setting is sliding into another mass die-off of the Earth's population once they figure out that "it really wasn't worth it."

It still isn't.

HAPPY 40th GURPS!

I went back and checked a few sources, and to the best of my knowledge, this is GURPS' 40th anniversary. This is backed up by SJG, with Origins 1986, July 3-6, being the first release of GURPS:

https://www.sjgames.com/ill/archive/2026-07-03

40 years of great gaming, and only 4 editions, with the 4th lasting more than half of that time?

GURPS is more than just a legendary game; it is an icon and milestone in gaming. They rolled a crit when they developed GURPS.

40 years of amazing gaming, and here is to many, many, many more!

Happy GURPS Day to you!

Skill Confusion

There is a conversation happening over in the 5E and Critical Role communities about, "When you should roll a skill roll?" A Critical Role GM said a bit of roleplaying was so good, he said, "No skill roll needed!" Some OSR types got angry. How could he "not roll?" That is an OSR rule, not 5E!

I sit over here in GURPS-land and wonder, "Really?"

How is this hard?

What are they even talking about?

I will shorten all of this and point out the obvious: anger engagement is engagement, and this is probably something about nothing. People are riding coattails again and finding silly things to be angry about. Also, mind you, if any of them played a true skill-based system, which some of us have been doing since 1980, they would have figured this out decades ago.

GURPS has had this figured out for the last 40 years.

This all stems from the bad habit of 5E players, and the game encourages it with passive skills: when characters enter a room, every player says, "I roll perception!" Instead of convincing an NPC through roleplaying, the player shouts, "I roll persuasion!" 

We have it nice and clear. From GURPS, Campaigns, B343, the first page of that book:

To avoid bogging down the game in endless die rolls, the GM should only require a success roll if there is a chance of meaningful failure or gainful success.

It is simple. From the D&D 5.1 SRD, page 77:

The GM calls for an ability check when a character or monster attempts an action (other than an attack) that has a chance of failure. When the outcome is uncertain, the dice determine the results.

Oh, that is simple too. So, if I search the statue and tell the referee I am pressing the third button on the statue's jacket, just like the clue we found earlier said to open the secret passage, no roll is required?

Yes, if you hit a bullseye with your roleplaying, searching, interaction with the environment, or the referee says "don't roll" because "the outcome is certain," you do not need to roll. Both D&D 5E and GURPS are crystal-clear on this.

In fact, if, in GURPS, a player says their character "searches the room" but doesn't say any of the W's (who, what, where, when, why, and how) - or gives me any clue where they are looking or what they are looking for is probably staring at a -4 to -8 modifier in GURPS as my ruling. I'd say "looking for anything" in that large an area is a very hard skill roll.

Yes, searching a large area is more difficult than searching a small area, especially when time is a factor. But, again, only roll if there is a chance of meaningful failure or gainful success. You may just say they find it after an hour of searching, mark a torch off, roll for some wandering monsters, and move on. On the flip side, searching a very small area will be easier. GURPS covers this with the universal difficulty modifiers. The referee makes the call.

Tell me, are you searching the desk or the bookshelf? For that, I may give you a 0 to -2 modifier, depending on how well it is hidden. Well, you are searching for the key that was taped under the top desk drawer? No roll needed. Bingo. You hit the jackpot.

What am I making anyone roll for that?

Even in GURPS, that is silly.

Same thing with roleplaying. "I roll intimidation" is going to get you a pretty hefty negative modifier since you aren't telling me anything. What, are you leering at them? Come up with a great one-liner? Make my day, +4, easy task. Or maybe even automatic success. Give me something specific to work with here, and I will take that into consideration.

This is GURPS; there are ways to make a skill check easier by narrowing your focus and telling the referee exactly what you are attempting. The risk is that if you focus on the desk, and the passage is behind the bookshelf across the room, no roll is going to help you find it. Maybe someone "searches the room in general" while a few of you each take an area of the room?

Then again, give me a reason to roll. You come up with a search plan like that, and I may rule after 5 minutes of looking; the person searching the bookshelf finds the passage. Mark off some time and move on. Why are we rolling?

Also, whether a player has a skill or not may be a factor in GURPS, "if you roll," and "can you even attempt this?" If a character is a pilot, they will generally know the procedures for landing a plane and how to talk to the tower. No roll needed. What? You are going to fail the roll, and the tower says, "No, you can't land here, land somewhere else, jerk!" Characters without the skill won't know, and they will need help from someone with the skill (likely the person in the tower) to know what to do next.

There are a few factors playing into the confusion. One, BX and these old-school D&D-style systems never had skill systems to roll against, hence the rise of skill-based systems to give players games with task resolution based on skill use. There was a lot of houseruling in those days, too, where you could say "rolling under and ability score" was the "default skill check system of BX." I had BX groups in the 1980s who rolled under ability scores for everything as much as some 5E players do today.

This is not a new "problem" if it is even a problem. Nor is it new.

In old-school games, it is a problem. The rules are not all that consistent across the games, and almost every group had a different way of handling the exact same thing. Houseruling was so common that two groups could handle things in completely different ways.

In the modern OSR, things tend to be clearer with suggested ways of handling "skill and ability checks."

There is another source of confusion for 5E players: those who play D&D video games expect the skill roll to pop the magic d20 up on the screen, animate it, make a Price Is Right-style sound, and give them a pass-or-fail result. Real pen-and-paper games don't work that way, and there was always the role of the referee in deciding if a skill check is needed, or if one can even be attempted.

There was no "I persuade the king to make me king" with a skill roll back in the day; you were laughed out of the castle. That sort of silliness doesn't even work in GURPS either, not without mind control, and even then, everyone else is going to look at you like you just mind-controlled the king's mind.

Video games do not have a referee. All those skill rolls need to be scripted and pre-created. Live games at the table are not like that. Too many D&D players are trained to shout out a skill name when they are presented with anything by the GM, reducing it to this type of interaction:

1. The referee reads a long paragraph of description.
2. The players look at their character sheets.
3. Everyone picks a skill and says, "I roll this skill!"
4. Ugh.

This was made worse by many live-play shows, where the players shortcutted a lot of that back-and-forth for a quick, deterministic, pass-or-fail skill roll. Live play shows did a lot of damage to how D&D 5E is played, due to shortcutting the non-combat parts for time and speed of play. Those of us who rarely watch live-play shows have no clue why this is a problem.

You get this feedback loop where those who expect 5E to be a tabletop videogame will expect pass-fail "shout the skill" rolls, and those who watch live play want to shortcut interaction for time. 5E combats are long enough, where are we mucking around searching a room by describing where we look? This is 30 minutes off the 3 hours we'll need for the boss fight! I can't stay here late!

Sometimes, shortcutting those skill interactions in 5E is justified. This has nothing to do with game choice, new versus OSR, or any other pretend argument. It has everything to do with game design.

Combats in 5E run long.

Groups speed up the skill checks and roleplaying to save time.

In GURPS, combats are often quick and deadly.

We have more time to spend interacting and roleplaying with the environment.

And our skill system gives us near-infinite ways to interact with it.

If we need to roll.

Serious Combat is Fewer Combats

Deadly, quick combat makes everyone think twice before starting one. We lost that from old D&D and AD&D, and the whole "combat is fun" thing came in with Wizards and D&D 3.0. In BX and old-school games, you avoided combat. In modern games, "combat is fun," and they encourage fighting and conflict. The consequences of death and injury are purposefully diminished. You can sleep off a shotgun blast to the face in 5E and be fine the next day.

Every game Wizards have made overemphasizes combat. They treat D&D combat like a Magic: The Gathering battle. They preach balance, and that encounters are some sort of engineered, predetermined script. Adventures and combat are not events that happen in a sandbox; they are balanced, curated, pre-chewed, and carefully engineered "experience."

We never left the predetermined string of carefully balanced encounters in D&D 4E; they just hid them better. They say, "everybody wins" as a design goal. The role of the 5E DM is not the old-school neutral referee; it is that of a tour guide heading towards a prescribed outcome.

Some play 5E like a sandbox game, and it is not engineered to be played that way. It confuses the game's original intent and balance. D&D 5E is not a sim. It is a tabletop video game. If you played D&D 4E, you understand the encounter structure and adventure flow they intended in 5E.

GURPS? A sim. You don't have CR or encounter balancing here. A lucky shot can kill. Combat is dangerous. The game doesn't care about balance beyond relative skill levels and avoiding pitting 500-point enemies against beginning characters. Still, that could happen. The world is a sandbox.

GURPS is closer to roleplaying simulation science.

Old D&D was a sandbox, but with curation in the rules around "dungeon level," with deeper levels meaning more challenge. Adventure level was an extension of the concept.

D&D 3 to 5 introduces the concepts of balanced encounters, challenge ratings, and planned resource depletion. It is a completely different game, more of a curated experience and sequence of balanced encounters meant to have a range of likely outcomes.

You don't balance a GURPS world and adventure other than "saying what is there." Even in BX, you do have a certain level of balancing in that if an adventure is "for levels 1-3," you pick monsters that fit that level range. D&D has always taken balance into account, and there is even a concept of "dungeon levels" and what is found on each level, with lower levels featuring higher-level threats.

In GURPS, a dozen soldiers here, these stats, deal with them as you would in a simulator. Ten orcs in the fort, a dozen goblins, and groups of 2-3 goblins get put on patrol at random intervals. Four dire wolves in cages that get set free if an alarm is raised. Balance? I can globally adjust their average skill level to make it more or less difficult, and adjust armor and weapons. I can also adjust their reactions, making them a trained force rather than an inexperienced one.

Consequences are easier in GURPS and are cleanly supported in the system. Clear out an Orc warband fort? You are all getting a hunted disadvantage for the next few months, until they are all dead or you are. They will come after you for that. Actions have consequences. This makes my job as a referee easier. That hunted disadvantage goes on all their character sheets. I don't have to keep it in my referee's notes. If a character switches parties, they are still hunted, even though their companions may not be.

I like combat that feels like it matters, serious, deadly, and "let's think about it" decisions rather than someone players can jump into without thinking first.

GURPS Basic Set, Fourth Edition Revised

Hop onto the GURPS Ring of Fire Backerkit project if you want to get your hands on the new GURPS Basic Set, Fourth Edition Revised book. This is a nearly 600-page-long monster book that will be something to behold.

• 592-page, full-color hardcover (PDF available)
• New cover and a two-column layout 
• Contains everything from Characters and Campaigns, lightly edited for internal consistency, errata fixes, sensitivity, and to bring a few bits of information up to date.
• BONUS: Includes 25 pages of rule highlights from GURPS books and Pyramid articles published between 2004 and 2025.

The GURPS Basic Set, Fourth Edition Revised is not a new edition. It is fully compatible with all Fourth Edition material in print, and all text appears on the same pages, preserving page references.

I am slightly concerned about the usability of a 600-page behemoth at the table, as I love my travel bag with two copies of Characters and one of Campaigns for remote play. I can always hand out my table copy of Characters while keeping my GM copy on my side of the table.

I get it, "handing out books" is so 2015 when everyone has the PDF on their phones. Still, I love the freedom, and GURPS should never give up on by-hand generation and doing it the old way. After a nuclear war, this will be the only way to play, and we will have a lot of 5E players looking for a game when D&D Beyond goes down for good, when the Car Wars timeline catches up to us.

I remember the Pathfinder 1e core book being this huge. Can we get a new fantasy bestiary this size, too? With all the classic fantasy monsters pulled from the different monster books, plus Dungeon Fantasy? Better yet, make it a revised Fantasy Companion with spells and magic items, too. If you want to go after D&D, you deliver what the players need to play. Go big or go home, and this book does go big.

I am in on this and getting it, since I want to see the revisions. I am still playing with my classic 4th Edition books, though, my beat-up copies will still see decades more of use at my table. This book will be good for reference, errata, and for display, while my older books will still be my play copies.

What I am really waiting for is the compilation of errata and notes for the revised edition, comparing this version with the current one. That will be a handy document to print out and have.

If you play GURPS, jump on this and spread the word! The new GURPS book is almost here.