GURPS: Boot Hill

This will be a brief article.

Done.

Joking aside, the GURPS Old West book is a far more comprehensive resource for Old West gaming than can ever be imagined. Even if all you are doing is a casual, generic, Wild West gunfight simulation, GURPS has you covered. There is far more information, history, factions, technology, and functional adventure information in the GURPS book than Boot Hill could ever hope to deliver.

I like the GURPS Old West book a lot, and this is very well written. It is helpful for more pulp, TV shows, and serial cowboy action films as it is for a more gritty and realistic treatment of the genre. It is excellent reading and one of my favorite GURPS guides. You gain an appreciation for the hardships of life, the plight of the Native Americans, and the sweeping scope of change that moved across the country.

The period was part of the nation's formation, encompassing both its positive and negative aspects, as well as the transition from one way of life to the one we know in the modern centuries that followed. The story of every settlement, town, city, and place out West was one forged in fire and blood, a mass movement of people and settlers seeking a better life, some finding it, and many not.

The time was both the end of the strife of the Civil War, during which a nation forged the meaning of the word "freedom," and the beginning of a very hungry Industrial Age, where those freedoms were eventually realized after long struggles and hardships. The entry of the world into the Industrial Age led to displacement, a hyper-aggressive rush for resources, food, and land. The pressures of a shrinking world doomed those in its ravenous path.

Progress was the enemy.

If I were to play this, I would maintain that perspective. I would not gloss over the bad parts. Ignoring the struggle is a disservice to the entire fight, erasing the hardships that have brought us to our current state. We can't forget this and pretend it never happened. If the struggle is there, I want to acknowledge it and remember those who made sacrifices.

This may be why the safe opiates of fantasy are more popular.

https://www.amazon.com/Famous-Gunfights-American-West-Southworth/dp/1890778176

Boot Hill does have scenarios, but you could always find real-world accounts in history books to pull from. I would go by the history books for the classic gunfights, and don't worry about getting every weapon perfect. Stick to the most common types of guns, such as six-guns, shotguns, rifles, thrown knives, and lever-action guns, and things will work out fine.

I do feel the Western has held up as a genre stronger than Gangster movies, as we see the influence of the Western even today in modern films and TV shows, where that "gunslinger influence" and "Code of the Old West" can be seen in TV shows like the early Mandalorian seasons, and even TV shows like Fallout. If the traditional fantasy genre is "European D&D," then the Old West is "American D&D," at least in mythology, the role of the hero, and lore.

Plus, gunfights are tense, epic, and cool. In GURPS, they mean something, and you are not using a short rest to heal off a shotgun blast to the face. I swear, modern 5E has a reality disconnect that drives me up a wall, and while they may present realistic art (and even games that pretend this is gritty and real), none of it is true. D&D 5E lies to you in that you can get seriously hurt, die, and it doesn't matter.

You respawn in 5E like a video game.

In GURPS, injury and death are real and matter. The stakes are raised. The battles are tense.

Gunfight mechanics and weapons matter. Track shots and reloads! Part of the calculus of Western gunfights is not "spamming bullets" like in an FPS game, but being careful about shots and making each bullet count. Knowing the combat system and how to get and stack bonuses helps, even if that means taking a few seconds to brace and aim.

These are not high-capacity firearms, and even bullet belts should be limited in how much ammunition they can hold (typically 50). Reloading a revolver with the fastest gun to operate takes a full nine seconds! Make each shot count.

There is a gritty realism to gunfights where you must perform "mental math" to determine if a shot is worth it or not, and take actions to aim and slow your rate of fire. You do not have many rounds before you have to duck under cover and reload. Making shots matter, while avoiding getting hit and not being too careful, is the gunfight calculus you need to master.

You will use every point of those firearm skills.

You will remember those ranged combat rules.

Even the fighters can be mostly done with bang skills, or quickly designed characters from GURPS Ultra Lite, which I am a massive fan of. These will work with the full GURPS game just fine, and this gives you a bit of customization to personalize your gunfighter. The most armor anyone will ever have is a DR 1 leather jacket or overcoat, and most fights can be done without any armor at all.

It is what it is.

Now, this assumes that you think "Westerns are all about gunfights." This is like thinking "fantasy is about combat," which is the legacy we live with, given D&D is turning more into a wargame these days than a roleplaying game. While classic Old West gunfights are amazing and fun, they are not something an entire campaign can live on.

This "roleplaying is combat" feeling with 5E turns the hobby into a tabletop video game. I am more drawn to characters, story, skills, and a deeper plot, as well as a sense of character development. In GURPS, my cleric can become an Arctic survival expert specializing in exploring ruins and ancient history. In 5E, they are a cleric. Need to survive? Find a ranger. Need exploration? Find a rogue.

In a Wild West game, my sheep herder or preacher can become an outlaw, lawman, gunfighter, treasure hunter, or go in any direction the story takes me. Yes, I started here, but in GURPS, I can go anywhere. This is why I love GURPS: you are not going down a set class progression path, and anything is possible.

While progression is essential, you need more. I will say this about fantasy, cyberpunk, post-apocalyptic, science fiction, gangster settings, modern games, or any other historical or speculative roleplaying. You need characters doing something compelling, a story that they will tell together, a goal, and a reason why you are playing.

You need more than a "let's create cowboys" theme for your game. While that "random adventurers" thing may work in D&D, for most GURPS games, you need a little more.

You need to know the focus of your game, and your characters need to fit that theme. The character concepts have to work together. You need a story and a current situation. The story can't be set in stone and unchanging; there needs to be enough freedom for the players to solve it with creativity, wits, and grit. There may be other answers they come up with. They may also want to do different things, and your game becomes a sandbox.

Take a favorite western movie, set up the characters, and let the players resolve the entire film the way they want to. If you get stuck, simply send them to the next scene to stumble through and have a laugh. Play the whole movie like that, having them solve each scene, wrap it up early, or go completely off the rails. Make adjustments to reflect how the characters impact the plot. Go with it. Make "High Noon" into "Your Noon."

A love of the genre and its conventions always helps a great deal. If you are not into Westerns, then this genre won't appeal to you. But most of science fiction these days is a play on the classic Western tropes, so if you like science fiction, you may find a lot in Westerns to be very familiar, except with laser swords and blasters, and lots of fantastical aliens. You could watch a Western and replace the guns and characters in your mind with lasers and aliens, and make the evil army "space troopers," and you will begin to recognize things quite quickly.

There is also a nice town map in the Boot Hill game, which can be helpful for campaign setting purposes. Other than that, the Boot Hill game itself is rather slim, more of a tactical miniatures game than a full-fledged RPG. There is a fun list of characters from Western fiction in the Boot Hill games, which is also an interesting note.

The 3rd Edition of the game is more meaty and a more complete game, but then again, why do I want to learn a dead game that isn't supported, with limited options, when I have GURPS?  I am not learning and supporting a new game that won't go anywhere, and I have all the best and most familiar rules right here in GURPS.

Also, watch some movies and TV shows for inspiration! You can do classic "Lone Ranger" games and singing cowboys, where the bad guys "fall down" when they are hit, or you can do a more realistic and gritty game. You can make your game as "Hollywood" as you want, do pulp adventure games, or as "tall tale" as you can imagine. This is not always about realism, and you can do comedy and lighthearted gaming if you want.

And, we have an entire line of GURPS Deadlands books! If you're looking for Weird West games, we have them here. So, not only do we have the best RPG with the best character options, but we also have an entire setting with supernatural elements. We want magic or Steampunk? Airships and steam-powered robots? We got it. We want to cross over to Mars and venture forth with an alien princess? We got that too. We wish to run this gritty and realistic? That is possible too. Cowboys and Cthulhu? It works here. Unlike other games that force a single way of play, GURPS lets you customize your game in any way you can imagine.

We truly have the best of all worlds with GURPS, allowing us to mix and match options and books to our heart's content. Do we want furries or fantastical races? Elves and dwarves? We have them here. All the sourcebooks from GURPS can be used, from Horror to Zombies, and many others can be mixed and matched. Even the martial arts book is handy for a Kung Fu Cowboys-style game out of the 1970s drive-in movie genre.

Generally speaking, historical gaming is easier with GURPS than with games written for the same period in other systems. With other Old West games, I feel a sense of being lost, and the energy drains from the game as the motivation wanes. The original Boot Hill was only 44 pages of tactical combat rules and very light campaign support, which served only to string together gunfights. Some of the OSR and 2d6 games in the Old West genre are nice, but they still lack the motivation and driving force of "why play this" beyond the gunfights.

I can easily create unforgettable characters and have a classic campaign using GURPS.

As long as I have a theme and a story to go on.