GURPS Adventures: Smaller Scale and Focus

You can do grand, sweeping action with GURPS. It is easy to abstract things and handle larger-scale battles and scenes with tactics rolls, other grand-scale skills, and narrative sweeps of flourish.

What I find interesting is the size of the dungeon crawls in GURPS; they can be smaller than those in D&D or OSR games. I am happy with six detailed rooms in a dungeon for a GURPS adventure, while in a traditional dungeon game, I feel better with sixty less-detailed ones.

OSR and D&D characters cover much more ground than GURPS characters, but that is both good and bad. I don't care about any of them if I try to work through sixty rooms. I just don't care. With six, if the side chambers are full of skeletons and the far chambers have a puzzle room and a mummy? That is a good, tight, tactical design with many possibilities, especially if you put puzzles, runes to decipher, little clues to find, hidden things, secret rooms, loot to appraise, and plenty of other skill-based challenges and opportunities.

Give me six fully detailed rooms over sixty bland ones, any day. I will get more play out of them, my skills will matter, and they will be much more memorable than another empty 20x20 room out of the 15 more around here.

D&D and the OSR tend to combat well, but not much else, so they engage in a video game-like "clear as many rooms as possible" gameplay mode.

With GURPS, your focus needs to change. Those skills you bought matter - all of them. If there are twelve possible items of value in the room, but only two are worth hauling back to town, how do you identify them? Would etchings and sketches of the runes and inscriptions on the walls and statues be worth money to a historian or buyer? They may be. The place was too dangerous for most to venture into, and you are there, so why not spend some time documenting what you find? Instead of fighting that drow patrol, try negotiation and trade with them, or get information on the caves you are in. Map the caves and sell that!

A GURPS party are not D&D characters who kill for treasure; they are skilled experts in many areas.

Each one of those skills is a potential hustle and moneymaking opportunity.

Adventure areas should reflect that. Too often, in Pathfinder and many other dungeon-focused games, we get room after room of description, monsters, and treasure listings that feel like trying to eat a whole loaf of flavorless white bread as a meal. I convert these adventures and end up saying, why bother?

They are huge, bland, and made for nothing but killing and looting.