GURPS is unique in its approach to character development. It starts with an average zero-point character, a ten in every ability, no skills, and the default chance to do everything. This character is a nobody and an everybody, representing the baseline average person. As the game progresses, this character can pick up skills through education and evolve into something more, reflecting the theme of heroism, sacrifice, and the potential to change the world.
GURPS is a very down-to-earth, holistic, almost traditional view of life. It is a game that models the "base character" around us, something very relatable and familiar, and it can model an average life. This is one reason I love GURPS; the default character is not some marketed, overly fantastical CGI hero with artificial power. There is no "level chart" with a pre-programmed track of "amazing powers." The starting zero-point GURPS character is like you and me.
And then something magical happens.
You can be that fantastical hero, that ultimate warrior, or that circus acrobat rogue. You can unlock the secrets of magic or the power of the divine. Slowly, point-by-point, your character becomes more than average and ordinary; your character becomes fantastic. It is not the same "assumed progression" as a level-based game; your mage could veer off into becoming a stealthy rogue for a while. Your bard could don plate mail and become a front-line fighter. Your nature-loving druid could pick up sailing and pirate skills.
GURPS stands out for its organic character development. It does not rely on multiclassing or layering artificial progression tracks. Instead, it allows you to unlock the secrets of power naturally and delve as deep into each one as you desire.
You unlock the secrets of power naturally and explore each one as deeply as you want. With each point spent, you go further in your chosen direction, and it does not even have to be combat or magic. You could become a skilled alchemist, artist, performer, historian, or another role, and your "adventuring abilities" could support that field of study. A long time ago, in the 1980s, someone said this about GURPS, which is still true today:
In GURPS, you can design a scientist character and have them be as fun to play and essential to the party at the table as a fighter.
The old "d20 Star Wars" game was put out by Wizards, and one of the design goals was to make technician and pilot characters "just as fun to play" as combat characters and space wizards. Part of the complaint against many sci-fi games was that "starship crews and technicians were useless" in ground-based adventures, and they had the "Shadowrun hacker problem" of only being useful in a tiny part of the game that sidelined the rest of the party.
Shadowrun and Cyberpunk have had this issue for decades, but they created the problem with lists of programs, such as magic spells and dungeon maps of computer systems, that hackers had to explore in VR. They made a mini-game inside the game for one player.
In GURPS, you can give your scientist or mechanic a few combat skills if you want, and this is if "combat is seen as fun" at your table. If combat isn't fun, you do not need all these combat abilities that d20 games force on you. That 20-sided die has a bloodthirsty legacy, and while this is a strange way to look at the hobby, I get the feeling that a d20 is mainly rolled out of hate and violence. The die is so synonymous with murder-hobo play-styles that entire games are now being designed to "streamline and gamify combat" better than D&D.
Combat in D&D-style games is getting to be like the worst parts of gun culture, fetishizing "what bullet gives the most stopping power and killing potential." Which d20 game makes violence the most enjoyable and "fun?" MCDM RPG eliminates the to-hit roll! Nimble 5E makes combat fast and fun! Tales of the Valiant gives you "luck points" for missing stabbing someone with a knife! Here is your D&D multiclassing optimization build for maximum damage per turn! Fun-death-fun!
Every argument against video games in the 1990s becoming an orgy of death and violence applies to d20 tabletop gaming today.
And they make it worse by gamified violence with abstract mechanics. Some tabletop games will have a "killing spree" mechanic, and it will go too far.
I love my 5E books, but they go too far with the death and violent focus. They are too focused on power. They try to cover it up with happy, colorful, diverse art, but once you lift the veneer, you will find it is stuck on there with the blood of hundreds of monsters, intelligent humanoids, and animals.
But it comes back to that "average Joe or Jane" character I started with. Violence to them is out of the ordinary, shocking, and deadly. It is a last resort. Combat in GURPS is, by default, deadly, so you look for other ways around the problem. This is old-school play more than B/X does old-school play. In GURPS, you can't have a few hundred hit points and laugh off repeated stabs with a knife like in D&D. In B/X, you can have 80-100 hit points and AC of -2 and laugh off dozens of goblins and kobolds. And in 5E, it gets even worse.
Even if you gain much "combat power" in GURPS, you are still rooted in reality. You are good; you can dodge and block many attacks but are not invincible. You still need to be careful. A pile of hit points, AC so high you can't be hit, and an action economy that stacks the deck in your favor will not save you from a lucky shot. One goblin with a lucky strike can take down your 500-point superhero.
You still need to think and role-play, and you still need to approach conflict intelligently. Your non-combat skills are just as necessary as your combat ones, no matter how much combat power you accumulate. In fact, in GURPS, your non-combat skills are often more critical since adventures typically involve solving a series of problems based on real situations.
If you get a scientist or hacker character in a d20 game, that character is seen as "unfun" and "dragging the party down." The character "monopolizes game time in a single-person minigame" or is "only useful once per adventure for a single skill roll."
GURPS lets me create worlds that aren't bloodthirsty d20 slaughterhouses. Breaking away from that mindset is hard, so I picked up an old-school module like Keep on the Borderlands. This adventure feels like a pen-and-paper ARPG, a killing and grind-fest that I remember fondly, but these days, tossing a fireball into a room full of 40 goblins feels more like a war crime than an adventure. I love this module. It is an essential old-school primer written by Gygax himself, but these days, we have adventures that better fit my idea of roleplaying and what I like in a game.
Trying to play old D&D modules with GURPS feels very strange. I feel as if I am taking people from the real world and dropping them into a peculiar "crazy circus of death and looting." It is almost a "wonderland of madness and infinite power gain," sort of a maniac beyond the looking-glass world where death and killing are entirely justified by the acquisition of power and wealth.
Anything is justified to reach the next level, right?
It sounds like something a blood-soaked Mad Hatter would say.
I would roleplay with the orc and goblin tribes, convincing them to leave the area and find a better way of life—to "leave the maze" and settle the land somewhere else. My GURPS playthroughs are strange, alignment-less negotiation sessions in which my heroes aren't the "kill them all" tropes but sensible, pragmatic, what-are-you-doing realists who try to solve the problem there rather than "go through the keyed rooms and gotta kill & loot them all."
If the temple of evil is keeping you here, then help us destroy it. Then, you can be free of this evil prison and forge a (possibly good) life elsewhere.
Again, my characters aren't the B/X or 5E tropes.
They act like real people would. That 10-point every-person comes to mind.
It tells how a game's design and "content" can lock you into a power-hungry and bloodthirsty mindset and behavior. It is also a story of how these companies can lie with art, flowery words, or comfort-food nostalgia. Players have been "killing their way" through Keep on the Borderlands for 50 years!
Why shouldn't I do the same?
Stop.
Why should you?
