GURPS as a BrOSR Toolbox: What Works, What Doesn’t, and Why I Haven’t Quit

 GURPS as a BrOSR Toolbox: What Works, What Doesn’t, and Why I Haven’t Quit

I've been running my BrOSR-style game for almost a month now, and the experience has prompted some introspection. Was GURPS the right choice? Why am I playing GURPS in the first place? What's missing? Why is GURPS like this? Eloquence isn't my forte, but I'll try to explain my thoughts.

So far, things are going great. In just a couple of weeks I recruited eight players to run different factions in this (currently small) region of the world. Factions interact with each other and occasionally with the PCs, rumors are circulating, and there have already been skirmishes. 1:1 time is working wonderfully, and I'm struggling to understand why the concept is so difficult for many people online to grasp. GURPS, for the most part, plays well with 1:1 time.

However, the system starts to shake when players ask seemingly simple questions like "I want to gather herbs during downtime. How do I do it?" or "We found a deposit of iron ore. How do we mine and sell it?"

A hypothetical strawman would yell, "There's a Mining and Excavation chapter in GURPS Low-Tech Companion 3, don't you know it?" Yes, I do. It's two pages long, with the actual rules taking up a single paragraph. Those rules aren't even consistent with the digging rules in the Basic Set. The rest is just historical flavor. How do you extract metal from ore? The Smelting section offers no rules at all. Sure, it's an interesting read, but where's the GURPS in all this?

All right, let's skip smelting and just sell the ore. We have prices for iron, but not iron ore. I scoured every book I own and found nothing. "But Eggplant, why do you care?" I care because these PCs wanted to exploit their discovery to cover their living costs. I didn't want to invent an arbitrary number as other players might want to do the same, and I need to stay consistent. In the end, I had to borrow things from mining systems from AD&D 2e, ACKS, and even third-party D&D 3.0 material.

These PCs found the deposit via a random encounter (a procedure I ported from ACKS II). But what if they want to search for ore? What if the player running the dwarven faction wants to prospect for a new vein? We have the Prospecting skill, but the books are silent on how long an attempt takes or what area it covers. So you either invent arbitrary numbers or import procedures from other systems. Those numbers matter a lot when you're not running a conventional monoparty game.

GURPS Low-Tech lists many medicinal herbs but gives neither prices nor durations for their effects. GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 16 suggests using the foraging rules for food, replacing each meal with "$X worth of herbs", but it doesn't tell you what X is or which herbs you find. Low-Tech also describes cool items like fire-lances but provides no rules for reloading them.

These are just a few examples from three weeks of play, but they illustrate a broader issue: many GURPS books (or sections of them) were written to be read, not used. It reminds me of how excited I was by GURPS Realm Management only to discover it offers almost nothing for practical application.

I know GURPS is a toolbox, not a complete game. You're given rules but very few procedures, at least in the Basic Set. Most procedures are scattered across other books (when they exist at all), and many are incompatible, not just because they target different genres and levels of realism, but because they were written by different authors with little coordination. I remember a thread on the SJGames forums where someone asked why a rule in one supplement contradicted GURPS Low-Tech. The author’s reply was simply, “I haven’t read GURPS Low-Tech.” The most usable procedures tend to live in the Action, Dungeon Fantasy, and Monster Hunters lines, which is why those books remain valuable even outside their intended genres.

In essence, the books give you tools and expect you to build your own procedures. To create good ones, you need both a strong understanding of how GURPS works and solid game design sense. The latter is harder than it looks. First you have to know what you actually want, and even that trips up roughly 90% of players.This is why I've been adapting procedures from ACKS II and AD&D. They provide a clear framework for how the game should work at the domain and faction level. I've borrowed so many that I sometimes ask a player for a d20 or d100 roll and catch myself thinking, “Am I even still playing GURPS?” When does GURPS stop being GURPS? We’ve entered Ship of Theseus territory.

That brings me to the real question: Why am I playing GURPS? After thinking about it for several days, here are the elements I consider “essential” to what makes GURPS feel like GURPS, and which ones actually matter to me:

    1. 3d6 Roll Under Resolution

    I prefer this method, even if it sometimes lacks granularity. It also creates natural soft caps on skills and attributes. That said, I can’t strongly rationalize my attachment to it, which probably means I’d be fine with a d20 or anything else.

    2. Traits, and Modifiers

    I love the framework of traits and modifiers, where you can build any kind of ability with them. Ability- and monster-building is my entire thing, after all. This is something I genuinely enjoy, but I do understand that the point-buy system is flawed and, at the end of the day, arbitrary. Even now, when I'm writing up spells not just for the sake of it, but for actual use, I realize that when you know what you want, this system is merely a series of extra hoops to jump through. If you know what you want, you can just come up with an ability and say "It costs 20 points." This even avoids the issues where very weak abilities end up costing a lot, and vice versa. Thus, even though this is the part of the system that I like and enjoy working with, I do not consider it essential.

    3. Point Buy / Classless

    The point buy system of character creation does have an appeal, but, yet again, I don't think it is essential here. GURPS newbies believe that point buy makes characters "balanced," but it soon becomes apparent that this is not the case. You definitely can play GURPS "pointless", building characters via a template ("""classless"""), or just from modules a la Delvers to Grow. Point buy is not essential, and I'd go as far as to say that GURPS plays better without point buy!

    4. Skill System

    The skill system is what often filters people interested in trying out GURPS. I love it, but I do realize that it has flaws. The most major flaw stems from there not being procedures tied to those skills. Remember Prospecting? This is tied to people not abstracting certain actions and sticking to the detailed one-second-scale resolution, which makes it so you need like 20 rolls to succeed, and the more you roll, the more the laws of probability cause you to fail. For example, how do you smuggle goods? You'd think that you have to roll against the Smuggling skill, but by RAW it actually only governs hiding objects within other objects or vehicles. This is why I'm using the ACKS smuggling procedure.

    So, while the skill system is flawed, the flaw is more with the scale of resolution and the lack of procedures. Others would point out that there are too many skills, but the defaults system makes it much more bearable. Furthermore, if you abolish point-buy character creation, this problem practically becomes a non-issue.

    At this point, the skill system is the first component that I consider essential. I genuinely like it, and this is something that keeps me playing GURPS.

    5. Combat System

    GURPS is notorious for its complex and detailed combat system. I love it to bits, but I also do realize that there are flaws. The huge number of options and variables confuse new players and make them take too long to take a turn. This is mostly a skill issue. However, active defenses and some other rolls that you make if you tune up the level of detail, prolong the fight even for skilled players. The more combatants there are, the slower the fight is. The slower the fight is, the less you do during the session. Players, as a rule, prefer to do more, not less. Essentially, GURPS combat system limits the fights to merely a handful of combatants, or otherwise it takes too long to resolve. This is extremely damaging to the ability to run a game on all tiers of play, where there is combat between individual characters, squads of combatants, or entire armies.

    While there is GURPS Mass Combat for army battles, there is nothing between individual combat and mass combat. This is why I wrote my abstract combat resolution system - to plug this gap. So far, it's been working well, with skirmishes being resolved rather quickly.

    I do consider GURPS combat system an essential component. I understand its detrimental effects on all-scale campaigns, and I do understand that this level of detail isn't even necessary. Even Gary Gygax cautions the reader against overcomplicating the combat system in AD&D 1e DMG.

    6. Customization

    As was mentioned before, GURPS is a toolbox and not a game. You can customize it however you want, and the books provide plenty of guidelines for that. I like it, but it's possible to customize any other system as well. Yes, it's possible to customize D&D 5e to be used for sci-fi space opera (but that doesn't mean that the result will be any good). Yes, it's possible to customize D&D 5e to be used for a strategic Braunstein with all tiers of play (see Drakonheim by Serious DM; in this case, the result is good). One might invoke the ship of Theseus again and say that you're not playing D&D in that case, and I'd tend to agree, but for GURPS, this assumption is baked in - every GURPS game is different, and "playing GURPS" doesn't really tell you much by itself.

    The customization aspect, I think, isn't essential to GURPS.

    When I boil it down, what I love most about GURPS are the skill and combat systems. Without them, it wouldn’t feel like GURPS to me, and even those have limitations when viewed through a Braunstein/BrOSR lens.

    Let's consider a hypothetical case - I grow tired of GURPS and switch to, for example, ACKS II. What would I do? I have a terminal case of D&D brain, so I'd probably start doing what I did with GURPS - converting D&D content to ACKS II just because I like it. Would ACKS players like that? Probably not, as ACKS is grounded in the assumptions of its own setting. Would I like that? I definitely would.

    To summarize with a food analogy: GURPS is a huge pantry full of high-quality ingredients. Some combine into poison, some are beautiful on the outside and rotten within, and there’s no recipe book. You have to become a decent chef yourself.

    Writing this helped me clarify what I value in the system and what isn’t essential. My current campaign is a stress test of GURPS for BrOSR-style play. So far, it works, but only because I’ve adapted and created many procedures. I’m documenting everything on the blog so others can learn from my mistakes and successes.I’m genuinely thankful to Jeffro Johnson, Mr. Wargaming, Dunder Moose, BDubs, RuleOfThule, Serious DM, and many others for showing how to run this kind of campaign. This is what I’ve wanted since I first opened the D&D 3.0 Player’s Handbook.