Is GURPS old-school? - GURPS and OSR

Is GURPS old-school? - GURPS and OSR

If you are following the tabletop RPG hobby, then you probably have heard about the OSR movement. In case you have not – OSR stands for Old School Renaissance – a movement that strives to bring back the old school playstyle of the early D&D incarnation. This trend is popular nowadays, and you can find many retroclone systems, publications, and blogs out there. In this post, I am going to explain how and why OSR can be useful for GURPS games, and why I like OSR.

First things first – I’m young. I’m only 31 years old, and my introduction to the tabletop RPG hobby happened back in 2003 with D&D 3.0. This has somewhat tainted my perception of how RPGs should be played, and it took me a while to shift gears. For many years, I’ve been playing D&D 3.5 and Pathfinder, but the more I did so, the more I grew disillusioned with the systems. They just did not support the style of game I wanted to play. There were many rules, but it felt that they constrain you instead of enabling you to do more. Eventually, I switched to GURPS and found it to be a perfect system for me.
 
How is it related to OSR? OSR is not a play style, not a ruleset, but it’s both. You cannot play an old-school game using a system that does not support that kind of playstyle, and GURPS very much does. Let’s take a look at what probably should be the first document you have to read to get what old-school playstyle is – A Quick Primer for Old SchoolGaming by Matthew Finch.
 
The most important part, in my opinion, is the Four Zen Moments. The first Zen moment is “Rulings, not rules.” Modern games constrain you with rules – the example given in the document in a simple pit trap. In D&D 3.5, you would have to make a Disable Device roll to avoid it, and that’s it. And probably only a rogue can do it, because he has the Trapfinding class feature. In an old-school game, the GM would ask the players how they’d like to circumvent the trap, and if the proposed solution makes sense, then, for example, he could demand or make a roll to see if the character pulled it off properly – or just let the characters circumvent the trap without any rolls. Everything is based on common sense, and dice are rolled only if a certain element of randomness can affect the outcome. Quoting the document: “Rules are a resource for the referee, not for the players. Players use observation and description as their tools and resources: rules are for the referee only.”
                And GURPS definitely supports that kind of gameplay, since it is grounded in reality. You can run a game for complete newbies to the system and let them simply use descriptive language for their actions. You, as a GM, will translate it into the language of rules and make all necessary rolls. GURPS has an extensive ruleset that can cover almost any action imaginable, so translating normal language to rules shouldn’t be difficult.
But here you might say – but this is not a ruling, this is a rule! And here, I’d like to quote Peter Dell’Orto – “Rulings are just rules you didn't know until they came up in play.” GURPS rules to me feel more like a collection of rulings than a definitive ruleset. If you don’t like what the book says, you can do it differently – just use the common sense. That’s why, as a player, I try not to be a rules lawyer – when I see the GM resolve something “not by the book,” I accept it. At least most of the times, because old habits die hard. The skill system of GURPS lets anyone attempt almost anything. GURPS enables you to do things, not restricts you.
 
The second Zen moment is “Player Skill, not Character Abilities.” This is where GURPS is not very old-school. You do have to rely on the abilities of your character, and advantages and disadvantages that you take dictate how you should roleplay your character. Yes, you can remove all that from GURPS and make it more old-school, but I think that that would make it less… GURPS.
 
The third Zen moment is “Heroic, not Superhero.” This is definitely something GURPS excels at, as by default it assumes a heroic realistic playstyle. Things that are a threat to a real-world human are still a threat to a human in GURPS, the characters are not invincible. But if you want to, you can play superhero games in GURPS too.
 
The fourth Zen moment is “Forget game balance.” This is one of the reasons I dropped D&D and Pathfinder – the game required you to tailor encounters and situations to the power level of the player characters. Once characters become powerful enough, it would make no sense to set them against the so-called weak enemies, but it would also make no sense to have them fight a monster they cannot possibly beat. I felt that this is exactly what caused it to feel more like a video game than a tabletop RPG – the game had to be adjusted to the power level of the player characters, or else it wouldn’t work. As a side effect, it also made the game world much less believable and for me personally, it made it hard to invest into the world and the characters. As a player, if I saw the GM set us against, for example, a warband of orcs, I would assume that we can defeat them. Things such as evaluating the threat level, thinking about how to engage the encounter or whether we even have to engage it, just didn’t occur to me. It felt like a fight in a game world, not an adventure in a believable fantasy world.
                And GURPS works like that by default. It does not have anything like the Challenge Rating, and it relies on the players interacting with the world, not with statblocks. When I hear people tell me “GURPS isn’t balanced,” I reply “Yes, I know, and I don’t care.” Game balance is overrated – it isn’t necessary for an engaging story.
 
                With all that said, I have to mention that it is easy to use OSR content with GURPS. So, if you are a GURPS player, be sure to check out some OSR blogs and books – I’m sure you will be able to find something useful. What I like about OSR content is that it is easy to convert to GURPS, because very often you don’t even have to! For example, I have taken a one-page dungeon from one of the OSR blogs and simply ran it in GURPS as is. This is also why using AD&D monsters in GURPS is easier than using D&D 3.5 monsters – AD&D uses a more descriptive language that is easy to adapt, whereas D&D 3.5 has a proper statblock that is balanced against a certain power level.
 
                So, is GURPS old-school? Judging by these four Zen moments, GURPS is around 75% old-school, and that is old-school enough for me.