Conversion Notes

The more I play GURPS and master the system, the more I am done with other games. Yes, I know, it is always good to play new things and experience different games, but I have been down this road with game publishers for decades. Some games promise up the world but only deliver a fraction of the B/X town-to-dungeon experience. Some games are written and are 90% similar to B/X, and the encumbrance rules have been changed because the designer never liked the original system.

It reminds me of all the bands that sprung up in the 1990s that sounded like Soundgarden or Pearl Jam. There were some good ones, but everything sounded the same.

B/X compatibility is excellent, and it lets me easily convert to GURPS. B/X Damage and hit points are similar to GURPS and can often be used straight. A 3-hp goblin is more like a minion, and I don't mind those low values for some monsters since they speed up combat (or they could be sickly or wounded from a tough life). Even if you look at GURPS Dragons, hits never exceed 100, so the B/X scale of an ancient red dragon having about 88 hp works, and once you factor in modern firearm damage, a 6d6 fireball fits into GURPS nicely and is quite lethal. Armor? AC minus nine, and it works. Skill, parry, and dodge you can estimate, based on HD.

Be careful with AD&D 2E and higher hit points and HD; they increase quickly with each edition, tripling at 4E and doubling in 5E—which is still too much.

Any B/X adventure can be converted to GURPS on the fly. It is beyond simple. I added a page for my B/X conversions today.

Magic items? Most are used as-is, and magic weapons and armor can apply their bonus to damage, hit, or DR as needed. If a magic sword does an extra 1d6 fire damage, use it like that. If it is broken, fix it.

Saves? A resistance roll in GURPS.

Spells? I stick to the ones in Dungeon Fantasy and use these casting and effect rules. If one comes up in a module, I use the closest one. Magic is an easy system to swap out in any OSR game.

Basic Fantasy 4th Edition is such a great GURPS resource that I keep it alongside my GURPS books. It is the best conversion base and reference work for OSR gaming. It is worth playing as-is! But if you wanted to use it as a sourcebook for Dungeon Fantasy, that works too.

However, many of the OSR and OSR-like games are based on gimmicks (especially with all the random tables in games these days) or the designer's house rules. We are in the age of personal preference; if you like dried strawberries in your cereal, you eat this; if you don't, you eat that. Designers ask us to get passionate about minor differences. Am I really supposed to get behind your version of B/X because it has different encumbrance rules and a few other minor changes?

I am at the point now with B/X and OSR games. They need to bring something new to the table. I have enough of them, and many are just a few house rules away from each other.

YouTube, DriveThru, and Kickstarter keep many of these games afloat. Very few are worth buying into, and I can say that, having bought many of them. A few are based on a passion for how the games used to be played, and these are always the ones that rise to the top since the designer understands the relation of the source material to the inspirations. Cepheus Deluxe is like that for me in regards to 2d6 sci-fi.

Get the best in the OSR game genres and use GURPS for the rules. Cepheus Deluxe is an excellent example of classic 2D6 sci-fi, and Basic Fantasy is my best OSR source game. I have a few new B/X games, but Basic Fantasy's free status and community project will make it accessible and have a future long after every other OSR game goes away. And it was recently rewritten to eliminate all OGL material, so it is safe.

If a game has a unique wargame-like system, like a ship combat system in Star Frontiers (or even car combat in Car Wars), use that instead of the one in GURPS Space. Use GURPS for the skill rolls and apply a -1 or -2 per hex to hit the penalty (I need to test this). The same goes for Cepheus's ship combat. Ship design, combat, and internal damage all work like Cepheus—but make all skill rolls with GURPS and throw modifiers on there as needed.

GURPS is used for the skill rolls.

The unique system is used for everything else.

Only use GURPS for characters. This way, the classic Knight Hawks ship combat will look and feel like the game, but your GURPS characters will make the skill rolls. I wish I figured this out before my game blew up, but I can always restart at the point it blew up.

But I like a one-source system for everything since my mind is beginning to think and work in GURPS. When I play other games, I see how GURPS does the same things better and with less effort. Some of these "invented systems"—especially the ones that come from story-gaming—are so abstract and gamified that they make no sense.

Beware the games that need to invent abstract concepts to patch rules in other games. I like Level Up Advanced 5E's "supply" system to eliminate tracking food and water, but really? How hard is it to track food and water by day and weight per day and leave it at that? It won't matter in many games, or it can all be left on a horse. When it comes to survival scenarios, you can make it an issue. Or in genres where survival is paramount, like post-apocalypse (or worlds like Dark Sun), tracking these supplies and finding new sources will be life and death.

Require a skill roll to replenish them if you are in an area of abundance, or just say they top them off.

Otherwise, ignore food and water. If I were playing GURPS: Miami Vice, would I require players to track them? If I were playing a similar-themed fantasy game of constables in a large fantasy city, playing Magic Vice Cops, would I need them to track these supplies?

This is where a lot of GURPS's unfair criticism comes from: people taking one specific rule and applying it in every case. You would never do it in D&D, so why is GURPS any different? Sorry, your two vice cops are lying on the corner, starving! You should have kept food and water in your sports car! The rules are the rules!

When you realize that most all rules in GURPS are optional, and if you cut them all out, the game is like B/X in complexity, and 5E is a horrible mess of layered rules and interrupts, you will begin to understand the GURPS mindset.

I can play GURPS using GURPS Ultra Lite and still be playing GURPS, and these characters will be compatible with the whole game. I can use the above one-page rules for all my NPCs and monsters and use them in a game where the characters play by the complete rules.

I can run a nearly complete GURPS game off the 32-page GURPS Lite free PDF, and the rules you need to understand are only half the size of this book—the other half is character creation. Give me a break; GURPS is a rules-light game.

It has a few hundred pages of optional rules and a few thousand pages of optional setting rules, none of which are needed to play. It is lighter in rules than even a game I love, Savage Worlds, which requires you to understand many abstract concepts to get fluent in the system. Savage Worlds' speed comes at the price of programming your brain to work with the game. I still love it, but getting back into the game requires loading that information into my memory.

I can't say any of this about 5E.

5E is over 1,000 pages in the first three books; you only get the basics. Most of them are monsters, spells, and magic items—but you begin to need thousands of dollars of add-ons and third-party 5E books to give the game a good level of customization.

In the core book, GURPS does it all.

And I get so much more depth and customization in GURPS than I could ever buy, no matter how much money I spend on 5E (or even the OSR). I like 5E and love the OSR, but there is no contest here for the better game.

At least not for me.