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.

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 Sheet (GCS)

I am glad I learned about GURPS Character Sheet (GCS), the community-supported and free alternative to GURPS Character Assistant (GCA). Before I go any further, consider becoming a backer of GCS if you love and use it! Even a dollar a month helps, and it helps the developer gauge interest and develop new features.

Where GCA forces you to create subsets of books to play with (and you sometimes end up with conflicts), GCS is designed from the perspective that every book is valid simultaneously. You start with a character sheet and apply templates and other selections to that sheet, and it copies them over.

GCA's books and scripts will delete unneeded and unused options; you can put a custom library rule that limits gear to a particular tech level or below.

GCA with templates guides you through selections one at a time. With GCS, it applies everything to your sheet, and you delete the ones you don't want (and combine duplicates). So, where GCA is a bit more user-friendly and guided, GCS makes up for it by allowing you to pull in anything from any GURPS book in your library.

GCA is more new-user-friendly and oriented to picking a subset of books. GCA also gives you an excellent loadout manager and factors shields in a little easier than GCS. If you are the type who manages your weight carefully and drops that backpack to be unencumbered during a fight, GCA does that well.

GCS is for power users and allows you to use your entire library to design characters. This feature is worth a lot if your campaigns extend across multiple books and you pull in random things from any book in your GURPS library.

Both are great programs and currently, GCA feels like it has slightly better support of Traveller: Interstellar Wars than GCS - but you can't go wrong with either. GCA is also stricter on character validation and auditing, ensuring the templates' rules are followed for every selection and point value. GCS feels much looser; you are fine if your points add up.

It took me a while to get used to GCS and how you delete unwanted template options and combine duplicate choices. They don't happen that often, but knowing how to sort through and filter your character to a legal design is a good skill. Also, deleting things on your sheet (not the libraries!) feels strange at first, like how you can go into 'edit mode' and delete the bite from your natural attacks if you never use biting in melee.

With GCS, you enter this "search, apply, delete, combine, and add" mode, which becomes your character editing workflow. GCA uses a lot of dialogs to guide choices, and you pick A, then B, then C, then D, until you finish - sometimes more than a dozen dialogs deep. It ensures all choices are made, but you can't go back into a dialog if you make a mistake.

Both are great, get constant updates, and whichever you choose is your personal preference.