GURPS and Traveller

I have been doing a bit of Traveller reading these days (for my new 2d6 gaming blog), and exploring the new version of the game a little more. I like the original 2d6 game, and to be honest, a "d6 game" could be used to describe either GURPS or Traveller, the similarities are there. One is roll under, the other roll over. One uses an extra die in its rolls, one uses just the two you took from the Monopoly set. Damage in both games is a number of d6. Both are skill-based games. Both have no concept of class or level. Both have deadly combat. The two games still share a lot of DNA.

Also, the original GDW Traveller is close to Car Wars for myself, as that was my RPG system for the original 2d6 vehicle combat game. That campaign lasted 30 years, and it is a part of me.

And yes, I do run quite a few gaming blogs. There is such an amazing world of games outside of D&D 5E, that having little dedicated places for the games that interest me is a part of my hobby. My main site, SBRPG, started in 2012, so I have been blogging for the last 13 years, and I was originally inspired by the original great, the legendary Grognardia blog.

One of the huge differences between the games is Traveller's random generation versus GURPS' point-buy character creation. In Traveller, I have no idea who I am playing, I will pick a career and watch the pachinko machine go, with the terms ticking by, skills being picked up, and to the eventual mustering out at the end where we have a completely randomly generated character. A few choices may be made along with way for possible career changes, but it is mostly random.

I get the feeling Travellers, along with most people in this universe, go from star to star, picking up random jobs and careers, doing what is needed at the moment, and being pushed into roles they may not be ready for, but they were the best choice at the moment so here they are. People's lives can't be planned or perfectly designed, and you can pick up odd skills along the way from any source. Some of these may have been practical experience, classes paid by your employer, on-the-job training, not knowing a thing and picking up on it from others, college, vocational school, boot camp, or self-learning.

The random generation system for all characters creates a color and texture to the universe and those who live there. That system defines not only characters, but the entire population of the stars. Anyone you may run into may had a few random skills that could be helpful, just since in far-flung star colonies, you don't always have an expert on hand or even in the system, and you make due with the best you got.

We even did this in Car Wars, since that world shared that trait. People in the ruins of the world did not know where they would end up, what jobs they would take, and they sort of existed as "people who lived on the road" going from place to place as they battled in arenas, worked at truck stops, fought bandits, took side jobs, and generally did the transient life out on the open highways.

There is a romanticism in the concept, and it is sort of like an Old West feeling.

A lot of the newer games borrow Traveller's DNA, especially randomized character backgrounds. You see this in Dungeon Crawl Classics with the randomly created "funnel" characters that go on to be the game's heroes, and also in Shadowdark with its extensive use of tables.

 

GURPS, on the other hand, is the complete opposite. We are the writer of this story. Nothing is random. We have complete control of our character's past and present. We pick and buy every skill they have, and if we decide "one was picked up along the way" then we make that choice ourselves and buy it. If we say "Han Solo is X, Y, and Z" then that is all he is. We know his character, we wrote his backstory, and there is nothing random in it. Why should there be?

This is our story, our character, and we are the writer.

This design theory even extends down to the game's core. We don't see "random tavern name tables" in GURPS like we do in Shadowdark, since that feeling of "use being the writer" is part of the game's DNA. We can name the tavern and design it. No table needed! If taverns could be given advantages and disadvantages, and designed using point buy systems, we would. If you think hard enough, you could design anything in GURPS with point buy, even cities, with a Boston accent being a 1-point quirk that is transferable to characters.

GURPS is the game of the writer, and we get that deeper character immersion just because we can get inside a character's head and backstory all that much deeper. A game with random generation does not develop the connection that we need, but picking the skills and abilities of "someone we know" will give us that stronger connection to the character and their story in the world.

No table is making this story, we are.

The flaw in the GURPS system is twofold. One, the average person is just not that imaginative. I am not talking about current GURPS players or those on the GURPS Discord! This is like "getting my sister to play GURPS" and sitting there with her and trying to get her to think about a character backstory and map that into skills. Some are creative enough they could, but most will have no clue about the GURPS skill list and be effectively able to use that massive list of skills as a character design tool.

This is the two-headed hydra that often comes up when introducing players to GURPS, they do not easily grasp character backstory creation, and they never know the game well enough to use it as a design tool.

Give my sister a random table, like the careers in Traveller? She can navigate that well, just like playing Monopoly or Yahtzee. Give her the four or five basic steps, and she could sit there and create dozens of characters and not even know the game. She could probably roll up for or five by the time we get playing, and she could pick the one she likes best, or use them all for her crew.

Her attachment to them will not be on the "I am the writer" level.

It will be on the "I made them by myself" level.

This is another level of attachment, one not as deep as we are used to, but for a new player in a new game, it is a great feeling of mastery and accomplishment. Traveller and most 2d6 games are picked up very easily through that random character creation system, and you do not need to know the game, or even memorize the skill list, to "play" it. I know, for us GURPS players, we want full control or everything, but taking a step back, for someone like my sister? She would love her random characters and have that quick feeling of ownership immediately, which would create the "I want to play this" feeling very rapidly.

Who cares about the rules. Who cares about the design theory. A quick initial feeling of success and mastery is the best way to make a new player a lifetime one.

And this would not happen with a pregenerated character! Those are almost like "walls of text" to some players who want to feel early system mastery, that they had a "quick victory" over learning the game very early. I know if I give a GURPS pre-gen character to my sister, her first reaction will be confusion, followed by that sinking feeling of "I am never going to learn this." I will get her through, but it is a lot harder than it should be.

Her "quick victory" will be something very minor, like a skill roll, ability check, or rolling a to-hit in combat. that is not the same as the feeling you mastered an entire area of the game, like character creation. this size of that early win is huge for 2d6 games. D&D 5E now character the GURPS problem with all of its complexity, sub-classes, choices, point-buy attribute system, and the hundreds of pages you need to read to get started. the older versions of D&D, like B/X, were much easier to feel system mastery over in character creation.

GURPS still beats the pants off D&D 5E, though, as the pay-off for mastery is exponentially higher. GURPS is a programming language you can create anything from. D&D 5E is a software as service subscription service where you take what you are given, and keep paying for it all, no matter the quality level, month after month.

D&D 5E is the best concept of the negative aspects of "streamification" in our hobby. Just like the metric tons of garbage that come out on Netflix and Amazon Prime month after month, the 5E market is a subscription service to ton after ton of garbage books and crowdfunded content with very little shelf life, zero balance, and very low quality overall.

And we pay monthly fees to make it all work together and design characters for the mess. As long as we keep paying streaming services, the garbage will keep coming. There are always gems in the piles, but 95% of what we are fed is pure garbage.

GURPS? A very curated selection of the best of the best. Every book, even if I have little interest in the topic, is a winner. Traveller? The same. A good game with solid books, written well and curated by those who love the game. A narrower, niche focus compared to the more ambitious GURPS, but still excellent quality overall.

GURPS and Traveller are strong sister games. It is no wonder they work so well together, since they do not have class and level, and are strong skill-based systems. They are not d20 games. They both have that strong human-level baseline character type.

For every game I can play in GURPS, I can play with a 2d6 system, and it works the other way around. GURPS works as-is for everything, where 2d6 games need career character charts and gear lists to have support. A 2d6 game is more initial setup and design work than GURPS, since those parts are needed for genre support. GURPS loads complexity on character creation, without needing those frameworks.

Where they differ is in design philosophy and character creation. Past that, most of the rules are similar, the damages are in dice, and the special rules that GURPS has go into more depth. Traveller is the easier game, and where it spends its "depth" is in the extra genre systems, such as ship design and combat, planetary and sector generation, alien generation, and other support systems. Stripped free of those, the core 2d6 system is the same one as the original Car Wars game, another sister game from the same era, with an X+ to-hit roll.

I enjoy GURPS more, and it gives me a greater sense of satisfaction in character creation. There are also times where a 2d6 career chart creates a character I want to die during character creation, and the charts make a character I can't do anything with. There are pitfalls to random creation you do not have in GURPS.

Still, I enjoy the random charts of 2d6 games, and they can surprise me with characters I would have never thought of. There is a grit, dirtiness, and realism about unoptimized characters with strange and odd skills. Those can also be inspirations to taking that character and later creating them in GURPS, with all the quirks and odd skills they picked up along the way.