GURPS as a Forever Game

There's a new question on YouTube: "What is your forever game?" This is a sort of question asking, "If you could only have one game, what would it be?"

Many are pointing to AD&D 2nd Edition, which is a good choice for a dungeon-style game. Others recommend Savage Worlds, which is also a good choice and arguably better than AD&D, as it can be applied to any genre. But in my mind, there is only one forever game. It is a no-contest, hands-down winner.

The best forever game is GURPS. It's not even close; even if I had to create character sheets by hand, it would still be GURPS.

The versatility of this game is fantastic. I can adapt any book, movie, IP, TV show, comic book, or graphic novel into a game. I can take any setting from any other pen-and-paper game, fantasy to sci-fi, and turn it into a game. I can take any video game and turn it into a role-playing game. Put GURPS in front of anything, and it becomes a game.

And there are whole shelves of games I do not need if I have GURPS.

During the Pandemic, the first game I started collecting was GURPS, because if the world ended, I knew that game would give me the most fun in isolation. I would not need "content streams" for it, Kickstarter projects, or anything else but the two core books. Software is nice, but GURPS is not that hard to hand-create characters for. The other books were still great to have, but not really core to the "forever" game.

That still holds true; games have come and gone since GURPS, and very few of them have managed to keep my attention. With 5E, it is always "the latest thing." With OSR games, it tends to be "the gold standard." Then there are a few publishers who put out interesting stuff. Some use very unique art styles, such as those found in Dragonbane or Dungeon Crawl Classics. While GURPS is not the most popular, nor the most complete, nor the most compelling art, it wins where it matters: in the rules.

The rules of the game are where it matters. If I am going to play a game "forever," all that will matter are the rules. Everything else is secondary. While 5E has a lot of rules, the entire game is a house of cards that, at its core, is no different from an OSR game; the difference lies in the intricate, carefully designed, finely tuned, and fun-optimized class designs and those "trees" of options. This is no different from an MMO with a "talent tree," and one thing about those designs is that they have a short lifespan before the tree needs to be cleaned out and updated.

Character classes designed like talent trees put an artificially short lifespan on your game.

I would rather have a game that offers a comprehensive, DIY character creation system.

For a "forever game," I will get sick of 5E's character classes after two or three campaigns and be looking for something new. The choices will be the same. Exploits will be found. Some options and combinations will be garbage. The only way to keep this system fresh is to multiclass, which extends the game's lifespan somewhat, but it ultimately reveals critical exploits that break the game. Another option to keep the game fresh is to continue purchasing expansion books to acquire the limited number of class options they offer.

D&D 2014 and 2024 were always "live service games" that dropped a few new things in each book, forcing you to buy them to alleviate the stale set of options and refresh those character builds.

With GURPS, I am the designer. If I want to break the game, I can, but out of respect for the game and my campaigns, I won't. The options never get stale. There are no "talent trees." I don't have to pick a character archetype, which is a limit on choices. With GURPS, I have an infinite number of options.

There is a power curve in D&D games, much like in video games. If I lost that and switched to a flatter-balance system, like GURPS, I wouldn't mind at all. Not all worlds should "scale" like a videogame, and flat-balance fantasy worlds where skill matters and hit points are lower are entertaining. Every blow means more, and the game is more deadly. Magic is more powerful. Every point of skill is critical.

You do not need a lot of enemies to have challenging encounters, and on a flat power level, enemy skill matters more, and the game is easier to balance. I can have a small, one-on-one combat in GURPS and have it mean more than a one-on-one combat in 5E or an OSR game. My fighter is facing off with a goblin in a dungeon room? That could go a lot of ways, good, bad, or somewhere in between, with 5E or the OSR. I may lose a few hit points. I will heal, and in 5E, it is gone after the next short rest.

With GURPS, that goblin's life meant a whole lot more. People often prefer not to think about this, and D&D provides them with an easy set of "rose-tinted glasses" to look through when considering combat. In GURPS, I have the skills to defeat that goblin through many more means, without killing, and like a proper old-school game of the 1980s, combat is deadly and serious business. No matter how good you are, one lucky hit can be your end. "To kill" is a vast choice narratively. In D&D, they reduce killing to making enemy sprites flash and disappear, much like in a video game.

GURPS will give more narrative weight to combat and violence, resulting in a more satisfying experience for storytelling. For a forever game, GIRPS will win in the narrative storytelling area every time.

What makes the perfect forever game?

It isn't the number of books, the art, or whether it excels in one niche; if it has pool mechanics, uses tokens or cards, or is even a generic game.

It will always be the rules that elevate a game to the status of a "forever game."

For me, GURPS is it.