The Painfully Specific Genre

The other drivers. The bar fights. The side plots. The outlaw 1970s culture and scene. Drivers smuggling narcotics. Someone's brother is a bank robber. Girlfriends and sisters. Divorces and weddings. Other drivers' stories: one in the hospital with bills to pay, another taking up trucking. The gas crisis. The sport's slow decline into the 1980s, when corporations and TV networks move in, shut down the small tracks, and the local version of the sport starts to fade away.

Let's say I wanted a painfully specific role-playing game genre, like American stock car racing in the 1970s. I don't think any game has ever been written like this, and likely fewer than five people in the world would ever play it.

Not a problem for GURPS.

I can start this right away.

Oh, but the soundtrack I could put together for this would be amazing; just pick any 1972–76 Southern rock playlist. The sideburns, the garage-hacked-together freak-jalopies, the smell of beer on the carpet, orange Formica furniture, post-Vietnam War malaise, Tang, kids running around watching Saturday morning cartoons, and spending the whole week in the garage getting ready for another hick-town small track event where the payout for finishing in the top three barely gets you through the week.

The stories of outlaw racers in a world that is quietly coming to an end.

Be thankful it's not AI. -Hak

GURPS can do this easily. I could start this right now; the game already supports it. The only money I would need to spend is on reference material, a few movies from the era, and other non-game entertainment. I have no plans to actually run it, but if someone else wanted to, the grease-covered tools are in the toolbox. But who knows? This sounds fun, and unlike many other games, GURPS lets me start a game like this instantly.

5E would take more work. It has weaker built-in support for the non-combat stuff, and you'd probably end up needing a custom book or a pile of house rules. Position gains might turn into some kind of "gas points" attack against the AC of the car in front of you, or a skill check that still needs extra scaffolding. No classes or subclasses support this game. You could hack something together, but you wouldn't have the disadvantages, the skill defaults, the vehicle and mechanic rules, or the margin-of-success math already sitting there waiting.

Even racing in GURPS (and I know the rules exist somewhere), I could break a race into a series of skill rolls every 10 laps and let the margin of success decide how much position you gain or lose. A 40-lap race is four rolls. High-margin results move you up through the pack. The mechanic also makes skill rolls every 10 laps to keep the car together. You might be in the lead, but the mechanic's sloppy gasket job means you blow the engine, load the car back on the trailer, and go home short a week's wages. All of that with the soundtrack playing and the sounds of the race in the background.

Top fuel, extra spicy! -Hak

For NPC teams? Pick the top three NPC competitors, give them unique names, looks, and personalities, names like Bud, Reggie, and Cletus, and skills for driving and their mechanic. Maybe roll a flaw: always bad tires, redlining the engine, dirty windows, melting the brakes, drives on a few beers, eats in his car, or the car falling apart. Pick something fun and silly. When Cletus passes you eating a bowl of chili, it will be worth a laugh.

You could do this in BRP or Savage Worlds, and those would work fine. But GURPS gives me the grit and detail, the messy characters who feel real, and the level of immersion in the era the system just hands you. In my experience, GURPS also handles non-combat adventuring and social interplay extremely well, where other games can feel like they are waiting for combat to begin. GURPS can be one of the most patient games out there, and some sessions can be engaging and fun without one turn of combat, and they often are.

Many games fail the "is non-combat fun?" test. GURPS can run many types of games well, especially cerebral, social, and mechanical ones.

I do not need any time to get this started; just my source material, and I could generate a character, pick a car, and drop into the middle of a small-town weekend race. The best way to start is in the heat of the action. My driver has problems, bills to pay, people who depend on him, and a nasty addiction to overcome. All of these are already in the GURPS rules, and I know each disadvantage by heart.

Just as a writer fluent in language can create infinite worlds, being fluent in GURPS opens up infinite worlds.

Start your engines...

This Is Your Life

Imagine a 10-year-old you, and a time traveler walks up and tells you exactly how your life will go. The schools you will attend, the loves you'll lose and find, your spouse, all your travel, your career, your accomplishments and failures, your children, your grandchildren, and when you leave the world.

You would probably spend your life either waiting for it to happen or fighting predetermination with every step you take. You would be bored or unhappy, maybe both, and then begrudgingly accept your fate. But life's surprise would be gone.

Why am I playing games that do the same thing? A level track from one to twenty, with the character's ending state decided before the first session starts. In a classless system, the sheet records what you have done instead of predicting what you will do. No set progression path lies ahead.

The future is open.

D&D and most other level-based games put you on the rails and push you toward a predetermined end. The remaining variables get smaller as you climb: the chance of death drops, the rewards become more predictable, and the main questions left are whether the character dies or retires. Multiclassing is the common workaround people invent because the system otherwise doesn't let the character change. It is a patch, not a feature of the design.

Sometimes I look at a level one to twenty track in D&D 5E, and I never begin the game. Part of me says the surprise is ruined, nothing can change this path, and while my story and adventures may differ, this progression is set in stone before I ever begin.

I play a lot of solo games; surprise and the unknown keep me going.

Play any classless, skill-based game and the difference is immediate. GURPS is my favorite, but the same principle runs through BRP, Hero System, Dragonbane, and others. No track waits for you. A bard can train as a knight and, after enough points spent on the things that matter, become a full knight who still knows a few songs. A rogue can learn wizardry. A cleric can pick up acrobatics. A ranger can take up druidic powers. An illusionist can learn bardic magic. None of that requires a special class, a prestige path, or a crowdfunded supplement that adds a new subsystem.

You may start as one thing, but you could end up as anything.

The same freedom applies to larger changes. A character can become corrupted and turn half-demon, or undergo a transformation and gain angelic wings and powers. Both come with advantages and drawbacks. Vampirism and lycanthropy work the same way. You design what you want and keep going. You do not take levels in the new state.

Many third-party 5E books introduce transformation states or pseudo-leveled systems for corruption or form changes. With GURPS, I don't need them. My lycanthropy can have a transformation curse, an uncontrollable rage, and it can have superpowers I can put points in, if I want. I can buy off the rage and have it as a "heroic" second form, with the same weaknesses to silver and other werewolf banes. A lot of these third-party 5E options don't give you that freedom. GURPS does.

My characters can change. And I can control what that is.

Realistically, only GURPS, Hero System, and possibly BRP could pull that off. GURPS is the cleanest and focuses on the character, which is why it is my best game for these stories.

A warrior can settle down and run a kingdom. Suddenly nobility, law, and administration matter more than another attack. In one campaign, a fighter spent two sessions settling a border dispute that had been simmering for months. He walked away with points in Diplomacy and Law instead of a free combat ability. That is what the game had become for him, so that is what the sheet reflected. He was not getting better at fighting while he ran the day-to-day work of a dominion. He was getting better at the things he was actually using.

What happens in the game is written on the character sheet and shapes it. The sheet doesn't dictate what the character should do next. The player and the table decide that.

Your future is not set. You make it. No level track awaits you, and no milestone reward waits. You do not know what is coming.

GURPS is Doing Well

I run a few blogs, and one thing that always stands out about my GURPS blog is that articles here get three to five times the reads- even the legacy ones- compared to my main all-game blog. That blog may get ten times the traffic, but the numbers here are different. This is the advantage of a single-game blog: it is much stickier than a general one. People come here to read, and they come back to check in on things they may have missed.

Among the other single-game blogs I run, GURPS is easily five times larger than anything else. Because of that, it is catching up to my main blog and is on track to reach the one-million-lifetime-views mark much faster than the main blog did. GURPS feels like it is doing well- attracting players and retaining them.

At least from my little corner of the hobby.

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.