The Westworld Campaign and Simulacra Fantasy

Westworld, both the original 1970s movies and the 2010s reboot on HBO, is an amazing piece of speculative science fiction. This was one of the most original conceptual ideas of its time, and it predicted so many societal phenomena, such as online worlds, virtual simulation, immersion-based communities, and artificial intelligence becoming sentient. Some say the first season was the strongest of the series, and it presents a "wide open" dreamscape to begin gaming with.

All of this against the uniquely Western genre of the Western, which is "American D&D," with its mix of myth and legend colored by the American experience. Where Europe is the myth of fantasy, dragons, princesses, castles, and knights; America is the legend of the cowboy, the gun, the outlaw, and the settler.

Simulacrum or Simulacra Fantasy is a strong alternative to the Weird West genre. This is a genre in a snow globe, a simulation of the fantasy with more modern sensibilities transplanted into the alien world of the past, contrasting today with the myths and legends of history. You are "playing in a simulation," but the world can still be as deadly as the real world when things break down.

There is a tendency to "not play seriously" and take too many risks, since the "players" are essentially "players" in a second-order simulation. There is no risk to the world, since this is essentially a high-tech theme park, and the players are playing as guests in a safe environment. Where Westworld shines is when the system begins to break down, the fantasy mixes with reality, the guns are real, and the dangers to the park guests shift from the simulated to the actual.

This "system breakdown" is the meat of the Simulacra Fantasy story. Maybe the players are playing a group of guests the simulation is actually trying to kill, either through manipulation by outside forces or a system glitch that starts to break the fantasy. Maybe they aren't allowed to escape, and they are constantly ignored by staff and other guests who can't be bothered to care. You can get into modern online attitudes in MMOs where "players are in there for themselves," and people in actual need get laughed at and ignored. The genre is rich with inspiration and the depth of commentary of online communities.

You need to keep immersion, and Westworld fails when it steps out of the simulation and dotes too much on the Cyberpunk world, making the simulation fade into the background. If the "real world" is more interesting and cool, and you are tooling around in the neon-drenched "Night City" - then why is the simulation any fun? The "real world" part of this game needs to be boring, sterile, bland, uninteresting, and almost dehumanizing in its social alignment and cohesion.

The simulation is the part of the world that is missing. The myth and legend of the Old West are why this population is flocking to the simulation; it is a part of the world missing from the bland, soulless real world. The simulation is the "lost soul" that those people are seeking, the notion of the hero and the outlaw, the grand sweeping vistas of open land, the pioneering spirit, and the folk-hero power that the real world sorely lacks.

The real world should be closer to a 1984, Paranoia, Woody Allen's Sleeper, and THX 1138 style: bland, Ikea-like, corporatized, white-walled, blocky architecture, a boring, bland place for corporate drones, social alignment, and broken wills living in a state-plus-industry corporatocracy. The clothing should be bland. The obedience to authority should be total. The entertainment should be tightly thought-policed. The ideas are censored.

The simulation is the place of dreams.

This is where the wealthy go to find the missing pieces of their lives.

This is where the drone-like tech workers toil in keeping the whole charade going for the idle rich.

This simulation can be robots, androids, clones, bio-tech creations, nano-bots, or holograms - but the genre in general is better with real automena than holodeck creations. A bio-tech game with clones mutating is a genre that hasn't been explored. The Westworld series is more about "bio-androids" and older cyborg models, and you see technological advancements that could lead to biotech clones and the creation of new life. GURPS gives you a lot of tools to choose from in the underlying tech and model of the world, and we have the best sourcebooks in all of gaming for playing speculative science fiction.

You can have a range of technologies present, from the 1970s "first generation" cyborgs with removable faces to synthetic 3D-printed androids to the newest "cloned bio tech" life-forms, which push the theoretical limits of morality and reason.

The guns are a problem without "holo tech" and a heavy sense of nano-simulation. You should handwave this off and not get too deep in the weeds here with how "guns can act real inside the simulation" and "they don't hurt the guests." There is some underlying tech here at work, even if it is direct sensory injection into the brains of guests to make them feel like bullets are impacting inches from them, whizzing by, and hitting the NPCs of the simulation. Knives, punches, beer bottles, kicks, and other melee attacks are similarly "quasi-silumated" through a combination of projected effects,  holograms, force fields, mental injection, and other chicarnery.

The "Deception Engine" is the "magic" of the setting. Leave it vague and mysterious. This is not important in the "how and why" that it works. You are not "hacking the holograms" since that destroys the mystery and removes the magic of the setting. Never reveal the secrets, and this is the stage magic that always needs to leave people wondering.

Of course, when the simulation starts to break down, the Deception Engine becomes lethal. This is like MCP from Tron, the AI behind the scenes, slowly going insane and trying to kill what it sees as threats to its goals or even existence.

And you don't need Weird West tropes, and the "strange" is not in the supernatural; it is in the simulation breaking down, and the subtle stories behind the blend of the outside world and the "almost real" simulation. What should "feel real" and matter should be the Old West, and the real world should feel nebulous and out of focus.

In fact, it is best to keep the simulation "low fantasy" and as realistic as possible, to get that grit and immersion. Let the guests experience the "pulp elements" through their fantasies.

There will be "stories in the simulation": rescue the mayor's daughter from the bandits. This is your "questing and progression" in the simulation of the story. Complete these quests and tasks, and you will be rewarded with "higher level" content, such as bank robberies on trains, gunfights, and raids on bandit camps. Think of the "simulation stories" as "MMO quests and progression."

Then, these will be colored by "intrusions" from the outside world. A competitor is spying on the simulation, trying to steal secrets and gain access to restricted areas. Two corporate rivals are in the simulation, trying to kill each other for real. A husband and wife are trying to work through "real-world marital difficulties" through the simulation, and the "other man or woman" enters the world to vie for affection (and try to eliminate the rival). These "outside stories" color the "inside stories" with subtext and bigger stakes.

External factions and interests should play games here in secret, with mysterious, nebulous goals. They are akin to the "secret societies" of the setting, never wanting to break immersion, but they have clear goals and are willing to use violence and brutal means to obtain them. Competitors, governments, spies, wealthy individuals, those selling access, groups of gamblers, those seeking to destroy the system, and many others can be found in here, but they will never say who they really are.

But they will always be pursuing an agenda behind the scenes.

Finally, the "breakdown" will raise the stakes for everyone involved. The simulation will begin to have problems. The guns will become real. The actors will get violent or unpredictable, slowly gaining sentience. Workers from the firm will infiltrate the simulation to figure out what is going on. The mystery of what is happening in the "master AI" will become increasingly important. Perhaps Cthulhu is taking over the AI, and an alien sentience is taking over. Maybe this will go like the Terminator movies. Maybe the AI wants bio-andoid independence and wishes to form its own nation, and it is a new form of life. Wherever you go with this is the "big secret" of the setting, so it should be slowly revealed and color all the glitches in the Matrix as the Deception engine slowly breaks down and mixes the real world with the fantasy.

Another great part of Simulacra Fantasy is being able to pull in any Western movie or TV show into the world and have it be "paid for and real." Like a millionaire paying for a ride on Blue Origin, if a guest wanted to "replay" High Noon or a Clint Eastwood Western, that is an experience that could be pulled in and created, and it would make complete sense in the game and not feel out of place. Go to town here; these recreations are fun diversions for guests.

Rules-wise, with GURPS, there are a couple of considerations. When you create characters, build them for the "outside world" first, and then apply a template from the cowboy world that the simulation grants them. The character won't have these skills in the outside world, but skills from the outside world may overlap with those inside the world. A real-world soldier or police officer will have pre-existing weapons skills that overlap with those in the simulation (note that there will be a TL difference in these skills). This may or may not be important to you, and it depends on how important the "outside world" will be to your game.

You could also ignore all of this and say, "The character's mind is programmed with these skills for free," and leave it at that (but there will still be a TL difference to the programmed skills). Please note this as if your assumed outside world is TL 9 or 10, and the cowboy world is TL 5; if a character is "trained" with guns only in one world or the other, trying to fire guns in the other world will incur a penalty (B168, Tech-Level Modifiers). The same goes for IQ-based technological skills, but the penalties are steeper (see the same section). It may be feasible for a character to have two separate gun skills, one for the modern world and another for the simulation, just to avoid the penalty.

The other consideration is the "game's difficulty setting," which is how forgiving the simulation will be to the guest. One guest may never want to be injured or hit by gunfire, so they will just play through the simulation or movie on "easy mode," being virtually invincible and superheroic. For inspiration, see the Cinematic Combat Rules on B417.

Other guests will play on "hardcore mode," where they experience simulated injuries and pain; if they die in the simulation, the game ends, and they go home in the real world, then come back to try again. The money is spent, the gamble is lost, and they will come back next time to try it all again. In this case, play with the full wounding rules, and just "wake up" when the character "dies" in the simulation.

The simulation could default to a single setting, or there could be multiple worlds with different difficulty settings. There could be a "high-stakes" world for the most expensive players, with hardcore rules in effect. There could be a more "tourist world" where everyone plays on easy mode, and the thrill of the higher-stakes worlds is dangled in front of them. Perhaps the rewards of the high-stakes world are going home with a bio-entity from the game, letting it cross over into the real world, and this is what the high-stakes players dream of winning.

But the high-stakes world has an elite casino feel, with players needing to be among the ultra-wealthy or the highest-skilled players in the lower-world simulations. That "high-end poker game" TV show feeling of players competing to "be the best in the sim" also comes into play here as a meta-concept. Players improving their skills to move from lower-stakes simulations to higher-stakes ones is a meta-game played over multiple visits to the sim and can provide "out-of-game" drama and stakes.

Perhaps the CEO of a company is trying to win the right to take "his true love" into the sim home with him, and if he fails, dies, or loses the game, his company is sold to the game's conglomerate. These "out of game" stakes are powerful meta-motivations for characters, and can interplay with any level of the stories, and even factor into the system breakdown metaplot.

You can play Old West games in the context of Simulacra Fantasy without needing Weird West tropes to drive interest, and in fact, drive a deeper meaning through exploring the concepts of artificial life, online simulation, high-stakes gambling, bio-engineering, influencer culture, corporate control, and virtual experiences. There is a lot of commentary you can have on these topical subjects through the lens of a game like this.

What makes this genre so different than fantasy is that the myth and legend of the cowboy stands in stark contrast to the fake world. Those ideals and truths of the hero and villain eclipse the entire simulation and genre, and hold the truths we can find inside ourselves. Through the lens of the past, we can find values to guide us in the future. The robber baron running the trains in the game is a direct mirror of the simulation company's CEO, pushing the limits of morality and technology.

And that gun-toting paragon of 'what is right' will not only save us in the simulation, but those ideals can save us in the real world, too. That transference of the myth into the real world is the hope this genre offers us.

That is where we came from, and it can provide the truths and morals we need to navigate this new world with.

And GURPS does this better than any game on the market, it always has, and it always will.

GURPS: Old West, Adventure Ideas

Yee-haw! Today, we are rustlin' up adventures and adventure ideas from a few different Western-themed RPGs and converting them all over to GURPS. There is a severe shortage of stock, no high-falutin' magic, none of that supernatural mumbo-jumbo, rough and tumble Western adventures, but there is gold in them thar hills if you know where to look.

So we are looking for Wild West adventures with no magic, and they don't have to be for GURPS. They just need a plot, characters, situations, and an adventure progression. A great campaign starting location is also a massive plus for our adventure cattle drive. We will do all the converting to GURPS ourselves; getting our hands dirty down here on the wagon train isn't anything new to us 3d6 cowboys.

The fact that I started this roundup with the classic Boot Hill meant something. Well, there are five solid adventures for that system, y'all can throw a lasso around and round up for your Old West adventure collections. These also have the advantage of being free from all that hocus-pocus magic and weird west tomfoolery, and they are a straight-shootin, rootin-tootin good time.

Now, Mad Mesa here is a solo adventure! This means you can create yourself a GURPS 4th Edition cowpoke, saddle hand, saloon gal, vagrant, cattle rustler, bank robber, or some other man with no name and run him or her through this adventure all by your lonesome! You can read the entries, make your choices, and perform minimal conversions to make all this work according to GURPS rules.

Heck, rustle up a free copy of GURPS Ultra Lite (GUL) if you wanna create bad guys for your six-gun to blast at! This is right fine for creating NPCs as well, and even vamints like wolves and rattlesnakes can be quickly thrown together using this little book of guidelines. This works seamlessly with the full GURPS rules, and will get you quick stats for any character in this here solo adventure, or any of these other adventures you rustle up.

I hear you saying, Prove it! Alrighty, here's my GUL rattlesnake for ya, using three levels as my base:

• ST: Weak (8 HP, d6/2 damage)
• DX: Agile (12)
• IQ: Dull (8)
• HT: Hardy (14)
• Rattlesnake Skill: 2 levels (+8)
• Rattler Poison: 1 level (+4)

Wut? Reading GUL, that rattler will attack at a -6 for a skill that needs training, so that blasted snake in the grass's base attack will be DX + skill - 6, or doing the math we get: 12 + 8 - 6, or a 14- to-hit. Pretty dangerous! It doesn't do much damage (d6/2 + 2), but the poison is where it gets you.

I used a skill level to give that varmint a special ability for rattler poison, which I am sure you could find in one of the GURPS bestiaries, but I treated it like a skill here for a quick-and-dirty pick. If a creature has a special attack or ability, treat it like a skill and throw a level or two at it. Note: Use a contested roll with the skill level for poison creature HT + skill - 6 versus character HT, which is 14 + 4 - 6 = 12- on a contested roll.

Yes, skills can utilize any ability, and even multiple ones, such as a giant spider with a web attack that has a to-hit based on DX and an entanglement level based on ST. And skill levels can be used to buy creature special abilities, attacks, and defenses. Damage? Use the STR table for the ability, plus levels of skill.

Of course, that snake is dumb as a box of rocks, so you could distract it by tossing a river stone past it and watching it snap at it, and that may give you a chance to bean that scaley viper with a camp shovel. Just remember to skin the thing for meat and its hide; the town trading post may give you a few buffalo nickels for that.

That rattler works with the full GURPS rules, too! And your players will be none the wiser, you are building these with the quick ruleset and not flipping through books to find this critter. This will mean faster play, a still true-to-GURPS experience, and using a supported and official system to guesstimate NPC and creature statistics. Guesstimate is one of those words that those folks from Philly use, and it means to spit in the wind and get a hankerin'.

If yer' not using GURPS Ultra Lite fer' your games, you are doin' a whole lotta work you don't need to be doin. Most NPCs and critters don't need to be designed using a fancy character sheet program, and these rules we got in this one-page game work just fine for 95% of anything you need.

Want more proof? Here's my GUL grizzly bear, and I will use five levels since these are supposed to be very dangerous predators of the wilds:

• ST: Very Strong (18 HP, 3d6 damage)
• DX: Agile (12)
• IQ: Dull (8)
• HT: Hardy (14)
• Grizzly Skill: 2 levels (+8)

Woo doggy! That grizzly attacks on a 12 + 8 - 6 = 14- but does a whalloping 3d6+2 damage per hit.  This is a massive, legendary bear; for normal ones, I could do one less level of ST for 2d6+2 damage and 14 HP, and up the DX by a level.

Wait one second! You designed a rattler and a grizzly using the same GUL design system, and did it in less than a minute? And these work well enough with the main rules; no one knows the difference? That's faster than flipping through a 5E Monster Manual and taking 30 minutes to read a whole stat block! People who say GURPS is too complicated are full of hogwash. Making NPCs and monsters in GURPS is easier than 5E, B/X, or any other game on the market.

In fact, GUL is the key to quickly playing and converting these adventures on the fly, with a minimum of fuss and reference. Yes, if you have the GURPS Bestiary and want to run a full rattlesnake, be my guest, but this works just fine for our needs.

Pardner, I ain't doin' any more work than I have to so I can run these here Old West adventures, nor does having perfect stats matter all that much. Just look over yonder at D&D-land; they keep changing their monster stats every five years for the last fifty.

We got Mad Mesa, The Lost Conquistador Mine, Ballots and Bullets, Burned Bush Wells, and Range War for a complete campaign of adventures to play with GURPS Old West and the 4th Edition rules. You will get a decade of campaign gaming out of these five adventures alone, and they are worth checking out.

Some of these are right excellent campaign starters and home bases in their own right, with Ballots and Bullets featuring a small city as its home base of operations. While you can play through the main adventure, creating linked adventures for an epic campaign set in any one of these adventures would fill out a whole pickle barrel of adventure time for your cowpokes.

BH4 and BH5 are from the third edition Boot Hill, but they are still fine additions to your Wild West adventure library.

If I were looking for adventures and campaign starters, you couldn't get any more classic and good old-fashioned clean fun than these classic Boot Hill adventures. The old game's rules are so simple that they don't take up too much of the book, and you can just drop GURPS right in and make your own stories with one of the best generic universal role-playing games this side of the Rio Grande.

https://www.amazon.com/Definitive-TV-Western-Collection-Television/dp/B003ANP8CO/

Another downright mother lode of adventure ideas is any of these huge DVD collections featuring westerns, cowboy TV shows, and all sorts of rough-ridin' adventures. Sure, you've got to mess with those old-fashioned "movie disc" thingies, and maybe round up one of those movie disc players. If y'all can operate a remote and hook up one of those HDMI cables, you are gonna have a good time.

The quality won't be like a new-fangled 4K masterpiece, since some of these shows are as old as the hills, but all the work is gonna be done for you when you pop in a disc and turn an episode of some random TV show into a GURPS adventure idea.

Those writers from the golden age of Hollywood, creating these "moving pictures," will probably be tickled pink that you are reusing their plots and stories for your "silly dice games." And these TV shows are so old; none of your players are going to know better. Use the GURPS Ultra Lite system and create characters, no good outlaws, and critters from the stock footage included in these films, and you will have some right good gaming.

And if you can't get your hands on this, there are loads of 10 and 25 Western movie collections to get your grubby hands on, and you can score them used or dirt cheap at places like Oldies.com.

https://www.oldies.com/Western-Movies/collection.cfm

What is this? A place you can pick up Western TV shows on DVD for as cheap as $2 per disc? And the Blu-rays are $4 each? I will stop trying to sell you things now, and I won't be getting any money for it. However, deals are available, and there are some amazing collections and affordable discs to own. If you are a fan of the genre, you will love having these to enjoy. 

Additionally, physical media remains a viable option in an age of streaming services, where content can be easily taken away. People have lost entire libraries of films they thought they owned forever.

Popping in a TV show or movie you never saw in your favorite genre is a far better experience than YouTube or random scrolling to find entertainment. Plus, all these do qualify as adventure ideas, NPCs, locations, and scenarios for you to use in your games.

Other western games are hit and miss for adventures, such as the 2d6-based Rider and the Hero System Western Hero (WH). The WH game does have a 44-page section in the back with campaign information, a few scenarios, and adventure seeds, so this is still a worthwhile idea book for creating period adventures using Western tropes. This is not as useful a book as the Boot Hill adventures, which I recommend getting first, but it still has a few good bits in the campaign section, as well as maps of trains, buildings, houses, and other period locations.

Rider has a dozen pages of basic information on adventure creation, along with the familiar act structure. Most of the book is 2d6 rules and careers, so it is not as useful as adventures written for the genre. This is not as helpful for GURPS referees and is more akin to a 2d6 version of the Cepheus Engine, designed for playing Wild West games.

The book is enormous; most of it consists of 2d6 rules, but there are some nice d66 charts for encounters, patrons, and rumors. I wish there were more charts for creating solo adventures, plots, factions, and other Wild West scenario pieces. This one is not as useful, but it is still an interesting game. Western Hero is the better buy.

https://www.amazon.com/National-Geographic-West-Stephen-Hyslop/dp/142621555X

I know I am done selling things, but this is another book in my collection. There are times when beautiful coffee table books, like the one above, inspire me. Just looking at the illustrations, pictures, and reading the stories is worth more than a written adventure, film, TV show, or a game designed to cover the subject, but you need that extra thing to make it feel real to you.

The Old West is more than "playing generic fantasy" and spinning up cowboys to shoot things. It is a love of the genre, the tropes, being a part of a massive sweeping change, and those frontier stories of seeing the last open expanse on Earth being settled. This wasn't just "them 'mericans" doing the settling, either; this was the entire world flooding in as immigrants, the European powers, banks, and the crushing power of the world moving in on a massive land rush for what would become a nation.

But in this grand, sweeping, oil painting of moving West, one you would see on a saloon wall, there are moments for personal stories, struggles to survive, tales of souls fallen to evil, lawmen and those who bring justice, pioneers, settlers, trappers and hunters, wagon trains, cattle drives, saloon gals, railroad workers, share croppers, townsfolk so poor they lived in dirt hovels and sewed clothing out of burlap sacks, farmers, ranchers, investors, schoommarms, cowboys, marshals, bandits, and so many others living a dream in a grand experiment and moment in time that did not last forever, but left its mark on us all.

Playing an Old West game is more than simulating a cowboy movie or screaming yee-haw!

It is about a more profound love of the genre, of this being a uniquely "American fantasy" with legends, myths, stories, giants, gunfights, and a mythology all its own.

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.