GURPS: Zero-Level Funnels

A few games have the concept of "zero-level funnels" in the system, most notably Dungeon Crawl Classics and Shadowdark. The game has a mode of play where zero-level characters (without a class) are rolled up randomly, and each player gets a few of them to control, such as four, and they get a random profession (farmer, baker, butcher, gong-farmer) that determines their starting "skill" and equipment. A character may get a chicken and a pitchfork as starting gear, while another may get a bag of flour and a rolling pin.

The result is a hilarious "last person standing" style of play where characters are sent into danger and sacrificed to solve the adventure's challenges, traps, hazards, and puzzles. The characters with terrible ability score rolls are typically disposable mooks, while the highly desirable characters are held in reserve in the hopes they survive.

The characters that survive become the choices for player-characters, who are graduated to first level when the campaign begins.

You can do a zero-level funnel in GURPS pretty easily. I would stick to very low-level character point totals, 25 or 75 maximum. If you have GURPS Character Assistant (GCA) from the Warehouse 23 store, create a library with GURPS Basic Set, GURPS Fantasy, and GURPS Magic, and you can apply randomized 75-point templates from GURPS Fantasy as your starting characters. They have archers, bards, knights, holy men, and a good selection of fantasy archetypes.

If you ever get duplicate skills or selections from a randomized template, don't worry about it; just play with what you got. When your zero-level funnel is done, then allow players to "rebuild" the character with a few extra character points (maybe allow a total of 100), and give them a chance to clean up the skill list, add a few they want, and clean things up to make a platable and well-rounded hero. Stick to most of what was there, and you could make tweaks like replacing a few disadvantages that don't make sense and cleaning things up so the character fits how they were played in the funnel, while getting rid of things that make the character unplayable.

If your character survives, this is the part where players can "create a level one character" and make those tweaks. Do not care about balancing points, either; if some come out 60-point, and others 120-point, just roll with it. When it is time to create "level one" character, pick a ceiling above the highest surviving point total, and set the design point limit there. So if you have characters from 80 to 120 points as your "level one pool," then set the ceiling at 150 points, and let them design for that.

My random "spellcaster" ended up with two spells, detect magic and lend energy, along with bad temper, bloodlust, overconfidence, and gluttony. This guy will be a hoot to play as he steals food from the monsters, and if he is ever denied a chance to chow down, flies into a fit of rage and starts trying to kill everyone in the room. I dare say this is a more hilarious character than anything I would get in DCC or Shadowdark, just due to GURPS' excellent disadvantage system creating memorable personalities to throw into the meat grinder.

His spells? Well, he can lend others energy and detect magic, so if he is ever in a funnel with a magic trap, he will be useful. He does not have a direct attack spell, but, hey, it is a funnel; make do. If a referee is feeling generous, throw a spell scroll with an attack spell in the funnel somewhere and allow a CP spend on the spot to buy it.

My barbarian came out pretty useful, an impulsive pirate from an uneducated, mundane background. He can also throw sticks! The radioactive wasteland could be interpreted as a magic-blasted wasteland from some mage war in the long-lost past, but as a mundane background, he doesn't know why the land was blasted raw; it just is what it is. Hey! We are getting worldbuilding happening here, too! I would consider this barbarian a keeper. At only 58 points, I have a lot of room to tweak and build with when he "graduates" to a "level one" hero.

This archer does not even have a ranged weapon skill. Since he has overconfidence, maybe he lied and thought he could make it as an archer without knowing how to fire a bow, and just got by winging it, and is now stuck in a terrible situation. He has leadership, too, so maybe he figured out he could get an officer's role without doing too much archery. Even a "junk" character like this can become a memorable and hilarious personality with a little imagination.

The lying archer seemed like a randomized, mistake, garbage character, but now I imagine him with a compulsive lying disadvantage and never buying him archery, yet carrying around that bow and pretending to know what he is doing. He has a smallsword, so have him fight that way if needed, and he can pump that skill up to be a highly effective close-in fighter who is still useful to the party. Buy bluff and intimidate skills and let him use the bow to threaten others and get his way, if push comes to shove. He never knows how to shoot the thing, but he uses it as a tool to get things done.

This is GURPS. You can get away with this here, and the design system supports it. The tactic of bluffing with a bow you don't know how to use is supported in the rules, and you can pump these skills and abilities up to a high level and support them with force-multiplying advantages.

You can't do this in D&D 5.5E, DCC, or Shadowdark.

My randomized "mistake" characters are coming out better than my boring optimized designs.

GURPS is hands-down cool.

We don't have great random starting equipment tables in GURPS, so borrow one from another game. You don't want to be buying and equipping four randomized characters, so either do a cold start, such as all the characters being stuck in a cell without gear and organizing an escape from the goblin fortress, or some other cold start where the characters wander into trouble and must find, steal, or figure out gear. As an option, give everyone their highest-trained weapon as a starting item. You can also create your own tables.

Once you can get beyond character generation and use the randomized template characters, you get over a huge hurdle to running a funnel. From there, it is just printing the characters out, handing them to players, and letting them use their imaginations.

And with these types of quirky, randomized, sometimes hilariously limited characters, your funnel experience could be better than it is in games that directly support the funnel-style adventure. Letting players figure out randomized disadvantages and skill lists, and come up with stories? This is insanely fun! Running the angry glutton mage or the lying archer through a funnel is going to be a fun game to play and outshine experiences in other games.

And you can do zero-level funnels better in GURPS.

GURPS Powers: Superheroic Fantasy, GCS vs. GCA

I am researching how to start a GURPS Supers game, and I bounced off both the GURPS Supers and GURPS Powers books pretty hard and nearly gave up. I want an easy way to get started. Many superhero games on the market have systems where you pick powers, and it is very simple to select a power, or a set of related powers, for your character and get playing.

With GURPS Supers, they have some nice archetype templates to get started with, but these are expensive, hundreds of points or even 1000-point characters, and I don't want that much superhero to start with. Give me a 250-point starting hero, please, with a few street-level abilities to do a few amazing things, and let me buy new powers from there.

And then I stumbled across GURPS Character Assistant's Sample Powers section, created from a three-book library of GURPS Characters, GURPS Powers, and GURPS Supers. I can pick one of the sample power frameworks, such as ice in this case, choose an origin, buy a talent to help with skill rolls, and then buy a few powers in the "ice area" to build my starting hero from.

Do I want flight, ice armor, an attack, creating ice, alternate form, slippery, or other related powers? A list comes up, and I can choose. I am in, choose my powers, and out, and the rest of my character is up to me, using the standard GURPS creation tools - a journalist, scientist, whiz-kid, soldier, or what other archetype I want my ice hero to be.

This is an area in which GCA seems to outshine GCS, and I love GC. Still, for superhero games, this makes it easy and deciphers the power books to a level where I could put this in front of a new player and have them design an ice hero without staring at endless lists in the GURPS books, not knowing what something is, and pulling their hair out.

While the templates in GCS are immaculate, perfect recreations of four-color comic heroes and excellent starting points for creating comic characters, for a beginning, street-level campaign with lower point totals, GCA's system feels easier to get started with as a "power picker" system that guides my choices and gives me a great list of related powers in a focused area.

This "sample power creation" system is also hugely useful for a GURPS Fantasy game that does not rely on magic spell lists of arcane and divine spells, but more on a superheroic power framework where "my cleric has life power," and you buy subpowers like a superpower system. If you look, this one has healing, undead-damaging powers, regeneration, and a bunch of other related powers.

Combine this with a light power (divine source), and you can have a holy laser and blinding powers. Huh, all of a sudden, 5E's power lists that looked cool to start, look weak and limited compared to a full power system that lets you build a fantasy hero like a true superhero and combine powers in interesting ways, while all sharing the same source of power. I could play this "holy laser cleric" in GURPS and have a ton of fun with them, and not even need to worry about Dungeon Fantasy, the traditional OSR style "spell lists of divine and arcane origins," and just play my superpowered fantasy hero who heals the injured and shoots holy lasers from their fingertips. Powers use fatigue and energy reserves, so it is all balanced and fun.

I could do another cleric who combines life and cold for a Norse Cleric of Freya, or another who combines life and telepathy for a Greek Cleric of Aphrodite.

Wait, you mean I don't need to buy multiple 5E Kickstarters at $70 each to get these subclass options? Uh, yeah, GURPS has been doing this for decades, wake up. None of this is "new game designer invented technology," and 5E is actually exploitative in how they sell character build options we have had in GURPS for longer than most 5E players have been alive.

Yes, you can play GURPS Fantasy campaigns without "spells as magic skills," as GURPS Dungeon Fantasy would have you believe. And G: DF is an amazing game! You can play straight with the powers book, and just say "these powers have a divine/arcane/natural/etc." source. GURPS does it both ways, and probably a hundred other ways nobody has thought of yet.

If all your fantasy heroes are "uniquely designed superheroes" in your campaign world, then that is how it is. They get CP for adventures and buy new powers in their spheres, enhance the ones they got, or add a new realm of power to their repertoire. GURPS will never tell you that you are playing the game wrong for handling something the way you choose to.

Magic as skills or magic as powers, it is your choice.

GCA and this "sample power picker" are extremely powerful and worth the price of admission. It enables these sorts of superheroic fantasy and street-level superhero games easily. While I love my GCS program, GCA still has a place, and it has a few of these "killer features" that make the app a worthy character-creation tool in my GURPS toolbox.

My 1000 Point Character

So, to compare against my "wouldn't it be cool" test build of a 14th-level 5E character that ended up with a character sheet 16 pages long, I decided to make my "ultimate GURPS fantasy hero" to see how complex that character would be.

GCA has a wonderful randomization function, so I took four 250-point templates and applied them randomly to my character (knight, wizard, bard, scout). I then spent my remaining points on whatever I felt like. This is NOT how you design a 1000-point character! Taking four templates and mashing them together is possible, but who does that?

But hey, this isn't just a multiclassed character; he is quadclassed.

I had a few repeat skills, strange choices, conflicting advantages and disadvantages, and a general unoptimized mess of everything. He has 160 points of disadvantages. But this does highlight what the worst-designed 1000-point character may look like, and I was shooting for a huge skill and spell list just so the PDF would grow to an insane length. I can always fix the repeats, choose other skills, or combine them. Some polish is needed. And hey, this guy is a 26-minus poet and public speaker with similarly high axe and pickpocket skills. I can't design that in 5E at all.

What is the more complicated character sheet?

A 14th-level multiclass 5E character, or a 1000-point unoptimized mess of a GURPS character?

My 1000-point GURPS character came out to a 7-page PDF, with 3 pages devoted to spells. So, really, a four-page sheet had all I needed to play. My 5E sheet didn't have spell summaries like this one! So my GURPS sheet is easier to use, and I don't really need to be flipping through the Player's Guide to look up spells.

And my GURPS character did not have "rules short circuits" like "characters within 40 feet reroll failed inspiration checks," or similar stuff, which 5E is notorious for. Every character sheet in 5E is a potential "nuh-uh" to any rule in the game, and that blows up complexity compared to a skill-based system like GURPS, where mostly all you are worrying about is, "What is the negative modifier for that?"

If I went to 2000 points, I would probably hit a 10-page PDF, most of which would be my spell list. Most of page four was empty, with plenty of room for more skills.

The silly part of this whole episode is that running a 4-person party is likely easier in GURPS than in 5E. In 5E, the beginning is very deceptive, with "simple characters" that "feel OSR." Like a frog in a boiling pot, this quickly grows out of control, and character sheet complexity for each hero grows to more than a dozen pages for each, all with special rules changing how the game is played.

I was probably wrong to assume GURPS doesn't support solo play for four-person parties because of its complexity. With 5E, it is arguably worse to solo there than GURPS (outside of a VTT). In any OSR game, it is likely easier than GURPS. With Castles & Crusades, that is by far the easiest. GURPS is sort of middle-of-the-road when it comes to solo/party complexity, but it is not the worst, by far.

With the 1000-point non-casters having 4-page character sheets, and casters having 4-8 sheets due to spell lists, that is very manageable in GURPS for a four or even a six-person party. At 1000-points. Which very few play at that power level. Also, my character is massively unoptimized, as most GURPS characters grow organically in a few key areas and become much tighter, well-thought-out designs. My character is the worst-case by design, just to bloat that character sheet with junk.

At most, for 250-point characters? A two-page, double-sided sheet, and another double-sided sheet for spells. One sheet of paper at most for a 250-point character. One extra sheet per character for casters.

If I start throwing on extra attacks in GURPS, my turns get slightly more complicated, but not to the degree of 5E, where some report taking 30 minutes to decide what to do during a turn. I would, too, if I had to flip through a 16-page character sheet on my turn. It would take me a few minutes to leaf through all that paper to find what I was looking for. Each turn. Per player. Over and over.

A one-second, one-action GURPS combat turn solves a lot of problems. I can look at a player, count, "zero...one" and then ask them, "What does your character do in that amount of time?"

The character sheets in 5E are way out of control. I get that most people play on VTTs, and all this complexity is hidden behind UI buttons and scripting that hide the rules and interactions.

"It is easy, look!" they say. "The turns go by quickly!"

But that comes at a cost in software support and an online-only model that locks you into a paywall. You need to buy "digital goods" to make it work, often doubling the price you paid for the game. You will lose those goods when the website goes away, and they will all go away someday. Wizards have always designed their games with that "software as a service" model, so the characters and rules end up hideously complicated. 3E, 4E, and 5E are all the same "dozen-page-long" character sheet, endless, special rules mixed in, and forcing you to use software to figure it all out.

And GURPS?

It will still be out here, more playable at higher power levels, with the easier character sheets, and supported by an enthusiastic community. While yes, designing a GURPS character with software makes it easy, what comes out of that software is far more straightforward than any modern D&D version. And I can still create GURPS characters by hand.

And GURPS is easier than D&D at higher power levels since there is far less to worry about, and most of your power is reflected in higher skill levels to perform the same basic tasks.

GCA: Random Characters

While I love the GURPS Character Sheet (GCS) program, the paid-for alternative on Warehouse 23, GURPS Character Assistant (GCA), is also a good option.

One of the best functions of the GCA alternative is the "Create Random Character From Template" option in the top menu. This option takes a template, preferably one of the more expensive ones, and randomizes the choices so you can create a random character to begin playing with.

Of course, if there are potential synergies, such as weapon master (or fast draw) in a weapon the character is not skilled with, I am allowed to go in and fix those, and do a few clean-up items. If something is game-breaking, I will change it. But I keep things as they are, and if my knight is a shield, spear, and flail user with a sling as a ranged weapon who gambles and has a criminal background - that is who I got.

Spells and gear I will need to add myself. I will let the character's skills guide me, especially for spells. If a wizard has elemental or demon lore, that will change the spells I choose. I will need to build a gear loadout for each character.

Random characters are fun! They force me to play with weapons, skills, advantages, disadvantages, and builds that aren't my typical choices, and challenge me to optimize that build with future character points. If you are an experienced GURPS player and want to challenge yourself outside your comfort zone, play a random character and build them into a viable one.

Also, I am not as attached to these characters as I am to my "pet characters", which I tend to stick with game after game. Random characters will be much more fun since there is little chance that I will want to protect them, and another amazing random creation is a button-click away. After a while, I will be invested in them and want to protect them, maybe, but still, I won't care as much if their story ends, and I need to start another.

I am starting to play through some excellent Basic Fantasy adventures with the GURPS rules, such as the Morgansfort campaign. Now, these adventures and Basic Fantasy are great games, and I can enjoy these adventures with many old-school games, even classics like Old School Essentials or Castles & Crusades. Since I source all my old-school monsters and treasures from Basic Fantasy and convert them to GURPS (see my B/X Conversions page), this works easily for me.

Doing this playtest will likely force me to update my conversion page. Still, there are many good suggestions for quickly adapting B/X monsters to GURPS without needing expansive bestiaries written for the game. Are they perfect? Not by a long shot. Do they work? They should, and with powers that are more like bang skills, like a spider's "entangle 13-" or "venom 11-" powers, they should work well enough, and not every monster is the same (or should be), and even powers can vary. Some spiders won't have entangling or venomous powers.

This is my issue with most kitchen sink fantasy bestiaries, and after a while, players know what to expect. A monster "outside the norm," like a mana spider that shoots magic missiles, will be seen as cheating by the referee, or a goofy one-off. For me? Mana missile 14-, 1d6 damage, 6 shots, and uses spider stats. I'd give them a one-use 12-minus magic web spell. Monsters are not supposed to be familiar. That next fire beetle may explode after it dies. You just don't know.

Much of today's fantasy games contain bad habits or false assumptions that D&D forced on us, and we follow them without questioning. Part of the fun of fantasy gaming is not knowing what to expect. D&D has enshrined all its goofiness and has become predictable and boring. This recycled fantasy culture gets boring. Yes, it is iconic. But this place isn't where fantasy gaming started, and it is not the place in the unknown that makes us fear the next monster in the dark.

For me, GURPS works well and gives me that "immersion feeling" that I crave when I convert a setting to GURPS. This was reported from players of GURPS Traveller as well, even though people played the same setting with the original 2d6 rules, once they switched to GURPS, it almost felt like people were "in VR" and actually experiencing the world in person.

GURPS is highly immersive, with a level of detail and reality that makes you feel like you are in the world, looking around, watching people walk by and doing their things, hearing the sounds and smelling the smells, and living there. I can't explain why this happens, only that it has been reported many times, and I also get that feeling.

This is the GURPS Reality Immersion Field.

It exists.

I will likely expand the setting a little; the encounters and adventures mention traders on the roads, but I have no other towns near the fort to trade with, so I may add a few places of my own. The setting is perfect for expansion, so I shall create a few more towns and link this to the city to the north.

A solid, expanded, old-school adventure with random characters and GURPS?

This sounds like fun.

GURPS Character Sheet

I started with GURPS Character Assistant (GCA, the software you can buy on W23), but I am slowly migrating to GURPS Character Sheet (GCS, free, but please support the creator on Patreon).

GCA is only a Windows app. I like the "creating libraries of books" and focusing on the experience, though how they do this at times means they remove options from the main books I may want: wings in the Dungeon Fantasy setup, for one. If I want a character race with wings, I must add that as a custom advantage. But when this works, it does very well, like the scripts that remove all the high-tech gear from the equipment lists, so you only have what you want when picking equipment.

GCA is a bit slow on my machine, and the entire "creating and loading book libraries" feels more complicated than it should be and can throw errors if you add incompatible books. Each character can use a different library, so loading can sometimes be a little slow and confusing. The guided templates used in character design are excellent here, though, and the program avoids the duplicates you can sometimes get in GCS that you have to combine or clean up.

I feel GCA is a better "beginner's app" than GCS. Hacking GCA and creating books requires scripting experience to create a book or script and then apply it to a library.

GCS feels like a power-user app. Hacking this and creating custom options is extremely simple; you create files in folders. GCS lacks the "macro scripts" of GCA's library functions because they aren't needed, but you have to be selective about gear or create a custom list for yourself.

GCS sometimes creates duplicate entries in a character sheet, like one option adding a point of STR and another doing the same. The STR score is updated, but I like to combine those into one modification of the sheet to clean it up. I have had a few times where a duplicate advantage or skill was added, so it is good to review each section and look for duplicates, combine them if needed, and delete the second entry. I haven't had GCA do this, so again, it's better for new users and players.

GCS supports Windows, Linux, and Mac and has excellent Foundry VTT export support. The upside and downside of this app are you get everything; there is no creating "lists of books." You have all of GURPS to pick from when building a character. That said, you have to "know your GURPS" to get the best use out of this software. There is a Dungeon Fantasy RPG area I mostly stay in, but if I want a few Basic Set traits, I can open that folder up and grab what I want. It is nice when I am trying to design a monster and can just hop over to something "shop there."

I love taking GCS user files and replicating my custom templates and character lists on another machine and OS with a file copy. I have a characters folder in my user library, and I store my characters in there, with a folder for each game. I click on them, and they open. All my custom templates live in there, too, so I can create a custom "magic corruption" template, give it levels and effects, and save it so I can apply it to a character with a click.

I still like GCA and keep it installed and updated. If I want a campaign focused on a limited set of tech levels, the macro scripts do an excellent job cleaning up the game's massive lists of stuff. The macros sometimes go too far and clean out options power users want. For players new to GURPS, giving them an app with a preset library that limits selections and lets them focus on design is handy. You don't have to worry about a player in Dungeon Fantasy picking a .357 magnum, though this is GURPS, and that sounds like a fun game.

With Mac (Intel and Apple Silicon) and Linux support, GCS is a power user's dream. I tested Mac support, and it works amazingly. I wanted a laptop character creation tool for GURPS, which changed my laptop buying plan to a Mac with some screen room. It works excellent on an M1 MacBook Air 13", but a 15" Air would be very nice to work on and give me more screen room. I was looking at a Windows Surface device (since GCA would run on that, too), but paying 3 grand for less than a day's battery life.

Chrome is the big offender, and that program will drain your battery faster than a Tesla trying to tow a loaded U-Haul trailer. There is very little reason for Chrome these days other than as a password manager, and if you want battery life, switch to either Edge or Safari while on a laptop. The browsers made by the OS companies are good enough, plus they can optimize for battery life far better than energy-wasting Chrome could ever dream of.

The Macs are amazing regarding price, performance, and battery life. My 13" M1 Air will be good for another 4-6 years, and it is really all I need for GCS and my PDFs. However, as I get older, my eyes want a bigger screen. As it is, opening a PDF in GCS to read an option, I need to zoom and pan around, which is not great but workable.

GURPS Character Assistant: Dungeon Fantasy Setup

Some people like GURPS Character Sheet (GCS) for character generation, but my tool of choice is the excellent GURPS Character Assistant (GCA, link in sidebar). The unique thing about GCA is you must set up your library before creating a character (in GCS, you do not). Why do this? It allows you to better focus the application selections on what you want to see.

Want a base Dungeon Fantasy + Companion 3 setup? Just add these books to a library and save them:

You will have no 0.45 automatics and laster pistols cluttering your weapon lists, and every choice will be Dungeon Fantasy classes, powers, magic, equipment, advantages, and other items in the game.

But Steve Jackson Games also supports playing "Dungeon Fantasy within GURPS" - that is, instead of needing Dungeon Fantasy, you use the GURPS Basic Set Characters book and a bunch of supplements (PDFs on the Warehouse 23 site) as the "base game" for playing.

Why do this? Let's say you wanted to add a few GURPS expansion books to your Dungeon Fantasy game, like Low Tech or Horror. With this setup, you could have a lot of interesting books in your library and still have all of the focused Dungeon Fantasy feeling and frameworks. There are a few tricks to doing this:

The first book must be the GURPS Basic Set 4th Edition Characters book. Follow this with all the expansion books you want. Then the Dungeon Fantasy books. I will probably add "GURPS Powers" to my load and open up superpower-type abilities to my characters. There are two things you need to add at the end:

The first are three variants to remove TL 4+ gear, super science TL 4+ gear, and non-TL super science gear. These are highlighted, and one of them is poorly labeled.

If you want to use GURPS Basic Set armor (more like Dungeon Fantasy), do not use GURPS Low-Tech 4e; use the file "GURPS Low-Tech 4e - Everything NOT Armor & Protection" instead.

The final (not shown) is the world book GURPS Dungeon Fantasy Remove Unnecessary Traits. This last file aligns the traits of this library to the Dungeon Fantasy list. Why didn't I include it? I want things like "enemies" and "wings" in my game, and I do not wish the script to remove those traits. Consequently, I will have some "tech traits" on the list, but I can ignore those quickly enough.

Do I like the full GURPS setup or the Dungeon Fantasy setup?

Honestly, I love the clean Dungeon Fantasy setup, but I miss the freedom to pick and choose my books. GCS could do this better, and I can see how managing libraries feels like an unnecessary hassle. I need to check that program out and see. I can always edit in the few things I want as user edits in any case.

Both are excellent programs and highly recommended.