Why play D&D in GURPS?

Why play D&D in GURPS?

I think a better title would be "Why do I play D&D in GURPS?" If you follow my blog, you should know that I'm mostly preoccupied with porting all kinds of D&D content to GURPS. Why do I do that instead of just playing D&D? And why do that when GURPS already has the Dungeon Fantasy line and even DFRPG? I'll try to divulge my thoughts on the matter. Things will get rambly.

When people think of D&D (keep in mind that I started with 3.0), they usually think of hack-and-slash dungeon crawling games. I don't think I've ever played a D&D game that was strictly dungeon crawling-focused. There was always plot, social encounters, various NPCs to interact with, it wasn't always only about combat. However, all that noncombat stuff was poorly supported mechanically, but you could still roleplay it all. What I liked about D&D the most was a vast amount of lore and character options. When you read a D&D book, your mind always concocts various situations, encounters, plotlines, or ways to weave something into the world. Then you realize that it's all very gamified - as soon as you reach a certain level, hordes of orcs stop being a threat, taking on a dragon stops being an undertaking that requires careful planning and a lot of resources, various minor abilities become useless, and the world suddenly feels much less magical, evocative, and believable.

I remember the first time I read the D&D 5e Player's Handbook. My reaction was "Why did they do that? Why would I play this dross?" The absolute lack of options and customization took out half the fun for me. I still gave it a shot once just to see that maybe it plays better that it seems. And it kind of was even worse than I expected.

During my D&D "career", I've been browsing all kinds of roleplaying forums. Apparently, most of thee games belonged to two types - core only (Why would one limit the options like that?) and anything goes. The latter meant that anything published by WotC was fair play, but, of course, the DM had to veto absurd stuff. Nevertheless, there were many people who would create absolutely broken characters as thought experiments, but some would even try to play them and hope that the DM does not notice that and let them "win" the game. (And such people exist in the GURPS community too.) This entire mindset of "you have to know the system well to be able to notice exploits that the players can come up with a mile away" created something of a mistrust of all things unofficial. Homebrew and third-party material was frowned upon, even though official material sometimes had much more broken stuff. People just did not know how new things would interact with the old things and couldn't be bothered to learn, so the immediate reaction to homebrew material usually was negative.

So, I eggsplained my experience and my love of options and lore. When am I going to start talking about GURPS?

When I was starting out with GURPS, I was positively surprised by the number of options. I would, for example, read GURPS Psionic Powers and understand how psionics works in GURPS. I would read GURPS Magic and understand how magic works in GURPS. Only when I read through GURPS Powers and GURPS Thaumatology I understood the most important things about the system, and the system itself just clicked in my mind - everything works the way you want it to work. This is why the frequent questions I see online, such as "How does magic work in GURPS? How does psionics work in GURPS? How do spirits work in GURPS? How do dragons work in GURPS?" just make no sense to me - everything works the way you want it to work. Isn't that great?

Remember how you might've wanted to change something about D&D, but couldn't? Now you can create your perfect system, the one that meets all your expectations, the one that allows for a world to make sense to you. Basically, no GURPS game is the same, because every GM does things differently, you're not supposed to strictly follow a certain template. Dungeon Fantasy is not my thing not only because of the templates, basic Magic, but also because of its strict dungeoneering focus. If that's your thing - go ahead and enjoy some DF! If you grew up reading Forgotten Realms novels, but the actual system prevented you from imitating these stories due to its mechanics, now you can! Weren't content with the subpar support for non-combat activities? Now you can have anything you want.

So, basically, GURPS is the perfect D&D for me. I created a setting where I managed to incorporate all the various lore that I've read in the D&D books. But not only D&D 3.5, but I can take content from AD&D, D&D 4e, 5e, Pathfinder, and literally anything else and port it over to GURPS, and it will make sense and seem natural. I've had gigabytes of third-party supplements for D&D that I've never had a chance to use because some of the very cool ideas were implemented abysmally - but now I can! Sure, it turned my setting into a "kitchen sink," but that was the intention. I know that nowadays kitchen sinks are stigmatized, because the modern trend is a "no, you must have no more than four races in your game! and no elves, they are too overused", but I find the diversity of option to be very believable - just look at the real world!

However, all the aforementioned means that it's more difficult for a GURPS GM to find players, because not everyone will share his vision. Personally, I probably have only two or three players who will reliably join my games, and only one of them actually seems to be as passionate about this D&D imitation as I am. The fact that my GMing skills seems to have deteriorated might be an additional cause of that - almost everything I hosted for the last few years ranged from "eh, decent" to utter dumpster fires. That's why I never try to give anyone GMing advice.