Star-GURPS-Finder, Part II

There are a few stumbling blocks with the GURPS conversion for Starfinder, one being that the original classes have no starship skills. Well, very little in terms of "defined skills" for a starship outside of piloting and engineering; otherwise, anyone could conceivably hop into a starship station and help. I get it, we don't want players "feeling helpless" during a starship battle, and "everyone should have fun."

So this is a universe where everyone is assumed to have some familiarity with starship functions, and there is no dedicated skill set for starship operation. GURPS has a complete set of skills dedicated to starship operations, and it goes into extreme depth here. So, if you are not skilled, you are pretty much helpless and more of a hindrance than a help.

So, there is a clear difference between how GURPS sees starships and how they are handled in Starfinder "to enhance fun." You could always require every player to pick a windcard bang-skill for some sort of starship operation function (piloting, gunnery, sensors, engineering, etc.) and leave it at that, just so the characters mesh better with the universe and have things to do when the laser cannons fly through the vacuum of space.

Frankly, bang/wildcard skills are a great way to do a simplified GURPS Star Frontiers conversion, and that is a tool in my toolbox. Just use the existing 13 Star Frontiers skills (plus five Knight Hawks starship skills) and make them all wildcards, and forget the GURPS skill list entirely. It is quick and dirty, works well, and is simple; GURPS gives us the option to do it this way. Just get playing!

For Starfinder, wildcard skills may be the way to go. There is always this question when doing a conversion: "How deep do you want to go into the skills?" For a full-phat conversion, move every character class and subclass choice into 100% GURPS-compliant templates, only use GURPS skills, and let the system sing. Starfinder has 20 skills, plus you could crib in a sensors and gunnery skill, and completely replace the GURPS list with a stripped-down core of these wildcard-like skills, plus a few others the system needs.

Starting with the classes and builds (like a subclass) as templates would make the most sense. Many of them are sort of generic in scope, like Mystic/Shaman, or Operative/Outlaw. These are easy enough builds in GURPS, and I bet you could find comparable examples of them quick enough. Still, in 3.5E fashion, the classes themselves are huge scaffolds of powers, spells, and other abilities given over levels.

General roles and occupations feel like the better way to go, not specific class rebuilds.

3.5E has a strange tendency to make all "outlaws" the same (defined down), whereas in GURPS, outlaws come in many styles and varieties (defined out). Beware of over-converting, which can tighten the screws too much and make the templates too restrictive and all-encompassing.

Level-based systems are inwardly focused to a fault, where you start with nothing and then try to narrowly define a character through a framework of rules, math, and capabilities. Point-buy systems are outwardly-focused, where you start with nothing, and leave it up to the player to form the character with their choices. Starfinder tried to take a universe of characters and define them all with levels, and the result is book-after-book of rules.

Still, Starfinder was ambitious, and they deserve props for taking 3.5E and turning it into a science fiction game. It reminds me of Spycraft in a way, and anytime 3.5E tries to do a modern setting, the bloat and rules needed to cover everything expand to an insane degree. 3.5E is the antithesis of rulings over rules, since 3.5E requires a rule for absolutely everything.

Even GURPS is easier than 3.5E, given the volume of rules the game eventually needs for everything. GURPS uses general rules that handle every situation, whereas in 3.5E, a specific rule needs to be written to cover everything in the game. This adds up quickly to hundreds of pages of rules for every specific subsystem, class, power, and build.

One of the areas that has always puzzled me about Starfinder is the lack of mystery in the universe. The rules keep saying "discover the mysteries of the universe," but with every power laid out, every magic source known, every god cataloged, and every class built fully vetted out - where is the mystery? This has always been a problem of 3.5E and on, and it is even present in D&D 5E. With every "mystery of magic and the forces of the universe laid out," where is what we don't know?

Mysteries, in the most part, are "story mysteries" and not "leaving the nature of power open to interpretation." Power in any D&D-style game needs to be laid out without any room for interpretation, or else there will be arguments at the table. This is still the legacy of the Magic: The Gathering design style that endures in fantasy today.

At least in GURPS, I can "wall off" power systems and sources, and leave them as the mysterious forces behind the powers of magic. Of all my games, GURPS, Call of Cthluhu, Palladium Fantasy, and Dungeon Crawl Classics let magic "feel like magic" whether through game systems, design, mechanics, or the power given to the referee to shape the universe. How a game handles magic and the unknown is one of the criteria I use to decide whether to keep a game out or put it in storage. Castles & Crusades is the only exception to this rule, since everything else about that game is S-Tier.

In GURPS, I can rule that "all magic causes corruption," and then rule that the corruption-caused disadvantages are "divine influence and obligation," "demonic taint," "arcane mutation," "alien intelligence influence," or even "Elder One de-evolution." This gets me closer to DCC's rules, and that puts the fear of using magic back on the table.

Do you really want to fling that spell so casually? Your star mage could end up with strangely glowing eyes that cause others to be wary of them, and make hiding in the dark difficult. Flavor the disadvantages however you wish, just make sure they fit the theme.

Still, I like there to be some mystery to the universe, the gods to be alien and far from understood, and the nature of magic and "strange happenings" not to be laid out on page after page of exacting rules. The original Coriolis game had an amazing amount of depth and mystery to the setting, along with the nature and role of powers. Things were never fully understood, and there was room there to make magic and powers your own.

Magic and technology should oppose each other: humankind's need to conquer the universe and harness its knowledge and effort opposes the unexplained phenomena of life and the universe's energy. The minute "magic becomes a battery technology," you have lost me. Magic should never be understood, nor should it reflect the mastery we have over math and machines. It is not a power for "glowing fist energy" in artwork or media. There is a price, a cost, and an unexplained nature to magic, the same as the mystery of life and death.

Granted, once you define or figure out the big mystery, the entire universe is over.

Starfinder game revels in book after book of rules. A full conversion is unlikely, so the best I can do is be inspired by the "science fiction plus fantasy" setting and do my own thing.

With GURPS.

There is something here I like, the contrast between magic and technology, the wizardry of machines versus the faith in the power behind the universe and life. This is the classic Star Wars conflict between the original never-defined or understood Force and the machine-god power of the Death Star. Starfinder tends to mix it all up in a pop-culture pastiche Guardians of the Galaxy veneer of space adventure.

We have lost the ability to create wonder and mystery, at least in films and TV. No one will pay attention. They are all on their phones. The second screen has taken over our frontal lobes.

While enjoyable, Starfinder is not what I am looking for in space fantasy.

But it is a start.

I like the pawns I have, and they are beautifully done.

Now, to just figure out a way to use them with GURPS.

Star-GURPS-Finder

I have a good collection of Star Finder pawns, too; about a box and a half are for that game. I played the 3.5E version of the game and enjoyed it until it fell apart. The adventures held back money to the point that my characters were constantly broke, starship-owning space travelers. Since money is only used to upgrade armor and weapons, and all of those are leveled items, the game sort of makes no sense.

And I sit there with a perfectly good starship and wonder why I can't just run cargo for extra cash, like in any 2d6 space game like Cepheus or Traveller. But the next adventure awaits, and I found myself working for "space undead." I had no interest in helping them, and the adventure path fell to pieces.

I tried a second time with the sandbox setting, and that was fun, but the leveled gear and that "arms race" started to take over the game when good stories were getting started, and I lost interest again.

I also found myself abusing my knowledge of D&D 3.5E to my advantage, and melee combat with a strong character outshone anything else, to the point where my 1d4 damage laser pistol pilot felt useless. We would just lure monsters into opportunity attacks and whallop them. While D&D 3.5E is the best D&D we got from Wizards, the combat in any version is severely lacking and exploitable.

I would prefer a normal science-fiction system to a level system in space. The only exception would be the Amazing Adventures game, but that is more of a pulp-action game, and those can do most any genre well.

The "what if" is converting the game into GURPS, which would mean all that would be the races, and then using GURPS' great selection of science fiction gear to fill in the rest. There is "magic" present in the setting, and GURPS does that too; it is just a question of "what flavor do you want?" There are psionics, too, and there are already far too many power systems in this universe, which gets a bit confusing. "Too much mojo" is the name of the game here, and it almost feels like too many magic and psionic power systems are in the game.

GURPS would do a good job, but in all honesty, it probably would not really feel like Starfinder. It would be a GURPS Space with magic and psionics, and Starfinder races, with a lot of strange pawns that I would need to create game stats for. I wonder if Amazing Adventures would do this easier, since I could crib monster stats from the fantasy game, mix in spells and spionics from these rules, and just have an easier time converting and playing with the pawns.

Still, GURPS would give me a "throttled own" Starfinder experience, far more concerned with the lower-level skill and gritty combat game than the 3.5E system ever was. Starfinder was always a game that felt like it "skipped over the surface" far too much, ignoring skill rolls in lieu of easy combats with another group of space goblins. In the adventures I played, even social interactions felt played down, and another set of combat stats was given, should "3.5 players were gonna 3.5 their way through this again." D&D never did social and skill-based play all that well, and Starfinder 1e inherited that legacy, becoming a combat game with a science-fiction veneer.

Those weak 1d4 ranged weapons were a pain, though, and the higher-level ones made you roll multiple d4 dice, like 12d4, and I am sitting here wondering why anyone would want to physically roll 12d4 for any weapon. For the love of my fingers, make this 6d8.

It would probably help Starfinder and make it seem like a more grounded universe to slow things down and celebrate the characters, rather than rushing through the next space dungeon and rolling initiative. GURPS science fiction does that; it can put the brakes on a "rush through it" sort of adventure and force you to think about your character and what they bring to the table. And GURPS makes characters versatile in many more ways than a list of special attacks, spells, and a to-hit bonus and number of attacks.

Another part of me wants to dig deeper into the magic systems of this world and define them more clearly in GURPS than in Starfinder. There are a number of tightly-defined and thematic subclasses that make the castes special here, and doing a conversion without them would feel incomplete. When you look at Starfinder, it is the precursor of Pathfinder 2, and the stronger and more thematic subclasses make the character here.

There is a difference between a "dress up" style of GURPS conversion, where you are just playing GURPS Space with a few of the races along the veneer of the universe. There is a deeper level of "total conversion" where you put in the work, build the subclasses as true templates, and rebuild the Starfinder power lists in GURPS from scratch. I get the feeling Starfinder would benefit more from the latter, where in fantasy, GURPS has 90% of what you need for simulating fantasy tropes without too much rebuilding, though Dungeon Fantasy is a good example of putting in that work.

I would probably template the base classes and then offer subclass choice templates under them. Spells would need to be converted. If a conversion needs this much work to make it feel right, you start to wonder if the project isn't too big to take on. It would be cool and be a fresh take on the classes and subclass abilities, but it would be a lot of work.

You begin to wonder if a "Starfinder lite" experience with tech-plus-space-magic is the way to go. This is how Stars Without Number does it, where you can play the base space game, and then port in "space magic" through BX additions. Is the "Starfinder vibe" that important? If so, put in the work and make the conversions. If it isn't, do a generic "space magic" setting.

By playing Starfinder with GURPS, the same thing I have seen reported with Traveller may happen: it feels like putting on a "VR headset" and becoming immersed in the world in a way the original game could not provide. GURPS can help give games an "identity" that otherwise feels lacking, and show people what it is like to live in the universe and experience it at a lower level than a more rules-light system can offer.

It is an interesting project, but a huge one if you want the Starfinder flavor. If you are a super-fan, probably play Starfinder with either the 1e or 2E rules. If I want to use the pawns, maybe a generic "space fantasy" GURPS setting will be enough, flavored but not a faithful conversion.

GURPS-Finder

I have about eight boxes of Pathfinder pawns, mostly for Pathfinder 1e, the D&D 3.5E version of the game that I loved (you can tell by the stylized cross on the "P"). This was the original world, Golarion, still raw, where demons roamed, slavers preyed on the weak, kingdoms made pacts with devils for power, flesh weavers butchered the innocent in magical experimentation, forgotten empires scattered the world with fallen ruins, and savage monsters terrorized the land.

The new Golarion and Pathfinder 2E, I am not as much of a fan of, since a lot was retconned and removed from the world. The new world is more fantasy-modern cosplay pastiche and less Conan fighting dragons and freeing the world from demonic slavers. They went their own way for a more family-friendly setting, filled with steampunk, cute races, and faux-modern anarchisms, and good for them. They do what they feel they need to do to compete with the D&D audience, and the market has changed.

But this is not the world of stark contrasts and good-versus-evil I fell in love with.

I am still a fan of the original Golarion world. The art, vibe, feeling, and "this is not D&D" mantra of the world, aimed at "the cool gamers," were awesome in the late 2000s and still hold up today. This is where the cool gamers played. D&D lost its savage swords & sorcery mojo with D&D 4E, and it never came back. Pathfinder 1e and its original Golarion setting are one of the last times that a major Conan-style setting in a D&D-like game was published.

So, what do I do with eight boxes of Pathfinder pawns?

Well, I do have a lot of mega-hex tiles from The Fantasy Trip, and these go wonderfully with my pawns. The Fantasy Trip and its mega-hex tiles are like the peanut butter to the chocolate of GURPS, and being able to put together twisting hex-labyrinths is an amazing thing to do on my gaming card table. This is really good gaming, and my Pathfinder pawns and these tiles are incredibly good GURPS gaming, almost like a fantasy wargame (like TFT, but GURPS), and they sing so well together.

So I either play a GURPS-Finder game and rebuild the entire world as a GURPS-style savage sorcery world, or I use the pawns for my own world. Even though the Pathfinder world is a strong one and filled with amazing places and adventures, I am not tied to the Golarion world as strongly these days due to the retconning, and the changes GURPS would bring are dramatic enough that they would alter the role of everything in the world.

I would like a lower-fantasy world where magic is rare and special. There is a realism and grittiness that GURPS does extremely well, where the default high-fantasy D&D 3.5E to 5E puts magic in everything, and magic has this "free" feeling that reduces the importance of normal people in the setting. With GURPS, a 22-minus in blacksmithing makes you an extremely valuable and skilled craftsperson, and that one skill means a lot more than untrustworthy and other-worldly magic.

Magic as an other-worldly and alien force is the key here, and it is almost a Lovecraftian view of spells and casting. All magic has a price, in the physical, corruption (out of GURPS Horror), causing strangeness in the local area, alliance with demonic forces, or having other disadvantages that make the average person very distrustful of the practices of the arcane and those who flaunt their magical prowess.

Similarly, the cost of divine magic should weigh heavily on the faithful. A cleric of one god may not be welcome in communities that worship others, and that suspicion and distrust would run deep in a world where faith equals direct power. Imagine if organized religion in this world had access to magic powers and the ability to cure diseases and restore life? They would be the government, or control most of it through their influence. What would the wealthy give to practically live forever? What would the faiths ask of them?

Also, the war between arcane casters and the divine would be one over true and societal power. Some faiths may declare arcane casters heretics just out of "who controls magic" and send out inquisitors and launch crusades on lands where arcane casters are welcome.

Think seriously about consequences, and you will find a lot of cool things to put in your games. The original Golarion conveniently forgets about most of this cause-and-effect due to needing to implement the 3.5E modern fantasy model. Part of the reason I call out the modern fantasy genre is its default assumptions, and stripping back those assumptions gives us much more to build compelling stories with.

Don't assume everything in the OSR, 5E, Pathfinder, or BX is some absolute truth about the fantasy genre. Most of it is derivative of older, far superior works: the Iliad, the Bible, mid 20th-century epic fantasy, and pulp fantasy fiction.

What is true in fantasy comes from inside you. What interests you? Where can you tell your best stories? What does the genre mean to you? Too many games, movies, and media tell you how you should think or what something means.

Meaning comes from you.

It should reflect something within you that you would love to explore and connect more deeply with.

If you feel magic is extra-worldly and should cause corruption or divine consequences, like out of GURPS Horror, then this is what magic should be in your setting. For divine magic, I could start picking disadvantages like vows and duties, being hunted by demons, getting an angelic halo that has drawbacks, auras that cause others to react differently to my character, or other similar changes. Growing wings like an angel could be a combination of an advantage and a disadvantage, but there is always a cost.

This is what magic means to me.

Not spell slots, spell rolls, or a simple fatigue cost.

But the magic in my world helps tell a story that means something to me.

Once you shed the "D&D mindset," you can worldbuild more creatively and craft compelling drama and conflict, which the D&D model tends to diminish. D&D requires "any party to be able to co-exist," so the company can sell you more "dungeon adventures." With GURPS, I can clear out the corporate assumptions and layer in all sorts of conflict and drama that a D&D world isn't designed to handle.

D&D and the modern fantasy mindset do not want intra-societal conflicts across any race, class, or background. This creates intra-party conflict, trouble at the table, and reduces the company's ability to sell "generic adventure" books. In 3.5E, we still had some of the classic nods, the half-orcs, the half-elves, the alignment system, and hold-overs from the OSR style of play.

The inner conflicts in the rules were swept away as the fantasy genre modernized. It is a sad thing to see, since I love the classics, and I don't like the edge being dulled off fantasy.

We are losing fantasy, and it is becoming a modern allegory.

And what I was talking about is just the conflict between the divine and arcane. Introduce the devil-blooded Tieflings and blood-of-dragons Dragonborn into a world, and you will have even more conflicts. Would a kingdom of humans see the Dragonborn as "secret allies" of the dragons and their humanoid barbarian hordes? That suspicion is a powerful thing, something to fight against constantly, and a great story conflict. The same could be said between demons, devils, and Tieflings. The deep-rooted distrust that they are "agents of Hell" would run strong, making for a great conflict in storytelling.

I am tempted to rebuild Golarion, but it may be too big a project for me, and I would be happier with my own small world, using the Pathfinder pawns and looks.

Still, a GURPS-ified Golarion sounds cool if I start small. This version of the world will have hex-dungeons, though, because hexes are cool.

The best thing about GURPS is that I can take any setting and make it mine.

Book of Maps: Tor Akul Campaign Setting

This is an interesting book. 

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08J21KNJJ

I love these system-neutral campaign setting books, and this one features a huge area of the world, and an amazingly detailed large city map with districts and names of every establishment in the city. If you wanted to run a fantasy-themed urban campaign with GURPS, this is a spectacular resource and place to start, with plenty of gritty and dark fantasy inspirations, especially with such a huge red-light district featured here. A thief's campaign is right up this setting's dark and crime-filled alleys.

The rest of the world is mostly left for you to fill in, with lighter details as you start exploring the world, with many places left to your imagination. The central city and another town are the stars here, and the world is a great tapestry to create upon.

I can't find a PDF, and I don't really want one. There is a certain magic to a book without a PDF, as if it were an ancient find before the digital age, and I am left to leaf through the pages and make of it what I wish. Would a PDF make this more useful? Clearly, yes. Do I need one to play? No.

We get a few dungeon maps with numbers, but they are left for you to fill. We also get maps of the main city, a town, and a keep. We have brief descriptions of various places in the world. Most of it is left up to you. Most of it has an old-school flavor, but it's left generic enough that converting it to GURPS is trivial. We get "levels" of some characters, but no stats, and that can be used as a relative character point value for these NPCs.

This one is Amazon-only, and a strange find by a hobbyist who printed a world for you to make come to life. It has a generic feel, presented in a plain format, in full color, and even the title font is a bit basic. The maps are beautiful, and the descriptions are just enough to get my mind working.

It is also not that expensive, and it is a good starting point for you to fill in the rest. This is also a labor of love, and that enthusiasm shows through the setting. While this is not done by a professional publisher, you can feel the love and attention to detail here in the descriptions. That creator enthusiasm is contagious.

In contrast to the genre-best HarnWorld, where you get every character, map, and door down to the lowest level of detail, this book is more freeform and loose, giving you more room for your imagination and creativity. HarnWorld is clearly the superior setting, far more detailed, with so many more NPCs, a richer history, and more detail in every location.

HarnWorld has a very medieval feel, and it feels more traditional, with humans, dwarves, and elves represented. As for other races, like the more modern ones, you will need to fit them in yourself. Tierflings and Aasimar don't fit in as well here and would stand out starkly against the more realistic world, not to mention Dragonborn, Dark Elves, and other exotic kin. While the big three races have lore and history here, the others you will need to make up yourself, or just leave them out entirely.

Tor Akul is the more freeform setting, with less detail, scarce NPCs, and generic descriptions rather than exacting detail. If you want a generic setting with maps and a few loose descriptions, and you don't want much detail, then Tor Akul is a fine backdrop for your ideas. The capital city map is the star of the show here, where HarnWorld lets you go anywhere, explore, and have maps and NPCs ready to use. I could easily fit exotic kin into this setting and give them a homeland on the map.

HarnWorld is my ultimate GURPS fantasy setting.

Tor Akul is a more generic, malleable, interesting, and "fill in the blanks" setting with a single book and beautiful maps, where you can do whatever you want. If you wanted, the main city map could be dropped into any campaign world and used as-is, and the rest of the world could be ignored.

I like this book; it is inspirational and a fun starter for DIY projects.

My 1000 Point Character

So, to compare against my "wouldn't it be cool" test build of a 14th-level 5E character that ended up with a character sheet 16 pages long, I decided to make my "ultimate GURPS fantasy hero" to see how complex that character would be.

GCA has a wonderful randomization function, so I took four 250-point templates and applied them randomly to my character (knight, wizard, bard, scout). I then spent my remaining points on whatever I felt like. This is NOT how you design a 1000-point character! Taking four templates and mashing them together is possible, but who does that?

But hey, this isn't just a multiclassed character; he is quadclassed.

I had a few repeat skills, strange choices, conflicting advantages and disadvantages, and a general unoptimized mess of everything. He has 160 points of disadvantages. But this does highlight what the worst-designed 1000-point character may look like, and I was shooting for a huge skill and spell list just so the PDF would grow to an insane length. I can always fix the repeats, choose other skills, or combine them. Some polish is needed. And hey, this guy is a 26-minus poet and public speaker with similarly high axe and pickpocket skills. I can't design that in 5E at all.

What is the more complicated character sheet?

A 14th-level multiclass 5E character, or a 1000-point unoptimized mess of a GURPS character?

My 1000-point GURPS character came out to a 7-page PDF, with 3 pages devoted to spells. So, really, a four-page sheet had all I needed to play. My 5E sheet didn't have spell summaries like this one! So my GURPS sheet is easier to use, and I don't really need to be flipping through the Player's Guide to look up spells.

And my GURPS character did not have "rules short circuits" like "characters within 40 feet reroll failed inspiration checks," or similar stuff, which 5E is notorious for. Every character sheet in 5E is a potential "nuh-uh" to any rule in the game, and that blows up complexity compared to a skill-based system like GURPS, where mostly all you are worrying about is, "What is the negative modifier for that?"

If I went to 2000 points, I would probably hit a 10-page PDF, most of which would be my spell list. Most of page four was empty, with plenty of room for more skills.

The silly part of this whole episode is that running a 4-person party is likely easier in GURPS than in 5E. In 5E, the beginning is very deceptive, with "simple characters" that "feel OSR." Like a frog in a boiling pot, this quickly grows out of control, and character sheet complexity for each hero grows to more than a dozen pages for each, all with special rules changing how the game is played.

I was probably wrong to assume GURPS doesn't support solo play for four-person parties because of its complexity. With 5E, it is arguably worse to solo there than GURPS (outside of a VTT). In any OSR game, it is likely easier than GURPS. With Castles & Crusades, that is by far the easiest. GURPS is sort of middle-of-the-road when it comes to solo/party complexity, but it is not the worst, by far.

With the 1000-point non-casters having 4-page character sheets, and casters having 4-8 sheets due to spell lists, that is very manageable in GURPS for a four or even a six-person party. At 1000-points. Which very few play at that power level. Also, my character is massively unoptimized, as most GURPS characters grow organically in a few key areas and become much tighter, well-thought-out designs. My character is the worst-case by design, just to bloat that character sheet with junk.

At most, for 250-point characters? A two-page, double-sided sheet, and another double-sided sheet for spells. One sheet of paper at most for a 250-point character. One extra sheet per character for casters.

If I start throwing on extra attacks in GURPS, my turns get slightly more complicated, but not to the degree of 5E, where some report taking 30 minutes to decide what to do during a turn. I would, too, if I had to flip through a 16-page character sheet on my turn. It would take me a few minutes to leaf through all that paper to find what I was looking for. Each turn. Per player. Over and over.

A one-second, one-action GURPS combat turn solves a lot of problems. I can look at a player, count, "zero...one" and then ask them, "What does your character do in that amount of time?"

The character sheets in 5E are way out of control. I get that most people play on VTTs, and all this complexity is hidden behind UI buttons and scripting that hide the rules and interactions.

"It is easy, look!" they say. "The turns go by quickly!"

But that comes at a cost in software support and an online-only model that locks you into a paywall. You need to buy "digital goods" to make it work, often doubling the price you paid for the game. You will lose those goods when the website goes away, and they will all go away someday. Wizards have always designed their games with that "software as a service" model, so the characters and rules end up hideously complicated. 3E, 4E, and 5E are all the same "dozen-page-long" character sheet, endless, special rules mixed in, and forcing you to use software to figure it all out.

And GURPS?

It will still be out here, more playable at higher power levels, with the easier character sheets, and supported by an enthusiastic community. While yes, designing a GURPS character with software makes it easy, what comes out of that software is far more straightforward than any modern D&D version. And I can still create GURPS characters by hand.

And GURPS is easier than D&D at higher power levels since there is far less to worry about, and most of your power is reflected in higher skill levels to perform the same basic tasks.

Is GURPS Really More Complicated?

I was playing with my 5E character designer, and I created a multiclass bard-warlock of 14th level, and the character sheet was pages long, full of special abilities, spells, descriptions of powers, a dozen powers all with differing "uses per day," and tons of special rules for one character. Some of the selections are cool and "not what I would have come up with," but that is part of the fun, being surprised by designer choices and figuring out which one is the best pick for you at this level.

But all this complexity starts to add up.

While my 500-point GURPS character can have a half-page of skills, the character by itself is not really all that complicated. Even with tacking on superpowers, those are pretty straightforward without the paragraphs of special rules that 5E loads on every ability, like text was free, and there is no need to unify and streamline the design system.

Everything is a special case in 5E.

Every 5E ability comes with a few paragraphs of text.

If you multiclass, it starts piling up fast.

By 6th level, a 5E character feels on par with a 250-point GURPS character. Past that point? The 5E characters start to grow exponentially heavier as paragraphs of descriptions of powers and abilities pile up. I would rather play a 500-point GURPS character than a 14th-level 5E character, just in terms of character sheet complexity.

In GURPS, I will have a few skills at 20-minus or above, and those do not introduce character sheet complexity, but unlock depth in the combat actions you can take at a high level of difficulty.

My 5E character has abilities that have fixed uses per long rest, proficiency bonus uses per long (or short) rest, sometimes are modifiers, are piled full of subclass features, and others are flat bonuses.

My 14th-level 5E character is a 16-page PDF. That could easily reach 24 or 32 pages by the 20th level, and that is not counting spell descriptions. I need all those pages to play, and I am flipping through them all during a turn. In reality, it is a horrible play experience. If I don't "scan my abilities," I will miss one. It is easier to "learn as you level" and repeat them as you gain them, learning how the design works and slowly training yourself on your build.

Now, let me run a 4-person party in 5E and multiply that 16-page character sheet by four. All of a sudden, the amount of character sheets I am managing is getting to the size of the player's guide, and it would only take a dozen characters to reach a book-sized pile of character sheets. This has not changed since D&D 3E, and every game based on the Wizards' design theory runs you dozens of pages for one character sheet at higher levels. Even Pathfinder shares this legacy.

Go digital or go home, and if you are playing in a character party? Four PDFs open, each with a dozen or more pages. I dare say playing GURPS feels like a rules-light game at this point, just in comparison to the pages of character sheets you are dealing with in 5E.

GURPS? Filling four pages of character sheets for a single character is very rare, and that is pushing it; most of the important information is on the first sheet, with maybe some skills running onto the second page. If I have powers, most likely they use an energy reserve (from myself or an item) or fatigue to power abilities.

For a 250-point character, I am averaging a two-sided sheet, and most of the time, a page and a half. Some 250-point characters I can fit on one side of a sheet of paper.

Even if I have superpowers in GURPS (as fantasy powers), those will be a lot more straightforward and easy to understand than your average 5E subclass ability, where 5E has no standard of design and can do almost anything, or modify any part of the rules.

Also, in GURPS, I am making myself more complicated by buying piles of small power-point powers, or I can invest in a few expensive powers or high-level skills. In 5E, I have no choice but to take what they give me. I can control complexity far more easily in GURPS by not going overboard and keeping my character straightforward and streamlined.

GURPS is the more concise and straightforward game, especially for higher-powered characters.

Solo Play, Depth, Dungeons, and Design

I love the depth GURPS gives me in terms of characters. But I can’t run that many of them at one time. It leads me to more solo games since I can manage the data for one or two characters pretty well, but three or more becomes a lot of work.

Some genres suffer because of this. I like fantasy, but running a “large party” game in GURPS feels so slow and data-intensive that my games never last long or even get off the ground. I will solo play one character in a GURPS fantasy game before I run a large party all by myself.

To be fair, 5E, Pathfinder, Palladium, Rolemaster, and many other games have this problem, too. I will never run a party in these games since the data load, storage, and character sheet requirements are far too high. Even character creation time is a huge issue. And some of these games do not solo all that well, since party roles are required for playing adventures.

If I don’t have tank, healer, rogue, wizard in my party, forget playing the adventure. So the game needs four characters at a minimum, and that eliminates many games for me playing them solo, since running four heavier characters is something I don’t have time for. Mega dungeons often require 12 or more characters.

I love the depth of GURPS, and I can get more out of a single, in-depth character solo than I can four simplistic characters in a BX-style game. This is another trap you can fall into with too-simple games, why play four simple characters solo if they are all boring? When it comes down to it, one detailed character solo is more fun for me than an army of cookie-cutter drones.

That said, most fantasy adventures are not solo, and playing combat-focused adventures as a social or skill-focused character is not all that great. The character design will determine what the solo adventure comprises. Solo adventures in GURPS tend to “play to the audience” with that being the character’s skills and abilities.

A social bard? Lots of city adventures, guild drama, playing at bars, opera house intrigue, learning songs, finding compositions, and other music-based adventures.

Solo play like this can be fun and very in-depth if you adjust your expectations. Especially if you blend with light combat and pulp-action.

Finding a kitchen sink fantasy adventure like this? I would rather buy a setting book and use that as a backdrop, since the default fantasy assumption is that “four against the world” gameplay of the traditional fantasy party with the four primary classes.

When I do solo fantasy play, one in-depth character is all I need.

But I have that “being left out” feeling if I pull in traditional fantasy adventures. Those are more for balanced parties and not me and how I like to play.

You could make the same comparison with a fighter who specializes in fortress defenses and siege weapons. There is a lot of gameplay on the front lines of the borderlands in remote forts under siege by humanoid armies, and that character bringing their knowledge to bear in constructing defenses and directing defensive weapons against the hordes trying to breach the walls.

I would not really name a classic fantasy adventure for that character that cover those narrow areas, but, again, as a tailored and specific story, this is great in GURPS. That character in a mega dungeon? Probably useless.

This is the core of my issue with today’s fantasy games. And “square peg in the round hole” 5E barista and magic school adventures only highlight the problem. These games elevate the dungeon experience as the pinnacle of fantasy gaming storytelling. The skills in 5E are all dungeon-focused. All the game does is dungeons. The same can be said for many OSR games.

And shoehorning in “cheap combat” into a barista adventure only makes the problem worse. The barista part is so boring and uninteresting that we need combat in there to spice things up.

While the dungeon is also a metaphor for the heroic journey, and that fish-out-of-water moment of the hero, many games focus on that to the point where other styles of play get excluded.

It feels like a strange argument to make, both for barista adventures in system that make that style of play interesting (like GURPS), and against games that focus so narrowly on the dungeon that barista play is excluded.

I suppose people try to make 5E and games like it do too much. It takes 5E two or three shelves of books to make it do the same thing GURPS does in two core books.

Also, fantasy feels like it is stuck in a dungeon rut for me. The stories I like to tell don’t need a wall to each side and one way forward. They are more like fiction and character focused. There is a reason that fiction based on traditional D&D dungeon adventures tends to be tedious. Few want to read a book about clearing an 80-room mega dungeon. That is a lot more fun to play on than read, unless it is watching a live play and watching people act and play roles.

It is a feeling of where I am in gaming is in a different place than what many games offer, and that some genres for me feel stuck in a rut. My games tend to be more like fiction, storytelling around a single character in an interesting world.

GURPS does that well.