Is there any easier way to learn gurps than just reading this monstrosity?

[MonkeySage]

I've got the 4th Ed Basic set here, I'm looking at it, and I'm confused. It's like trying to read Cyrillic... I'm obviously not going to learn anything from this because I don't even know what I'm looking at. The GM wants me to ask questions, but I don't even know what to ask. Questions would require a basic understanding of the thing I'm asking about.

[Maglubiyet]

I know the details can sometimes be overwhelming, but the basics of GURPS aren't too difficult.

Characters have:

• Stats - strength, dex, int, and health, similar to most other RPG's
• Advantages - special abilities
• Disadvantages - things that make you worse
• Skills - what you can do

To make a character you start with a set number of points -- your GM should tell you how many. 100 points is typical. Stats, advantages, and skills cost points. Disadvantages give you points.

[DigoDragon]

Would you learn better by doing? Perhaps your GM could run you through a couple scenarios with your character to show you the basic mechanics.

[Mr Beer]

Most rolls are against a skill, you roll 3d6 and try to get equal to or lower than your skill in order to succeed. So rolling low is good. You get situational penalties or bonuses on your skill.

Example, you want to bandage a wounded comrade, you roll 12 and your First Aid skill is 14, you succeed. You try to do it in the dark on a moving wagon, the GM gives you a -4 skill penalty, your effective skill is 10 (14 - 4), you roll 11 and fail.

Other rolls are Reaction - you roll 3d6 to see how much someone likes you. You get bonuses and penalties for things like your looks, status, charisma etc. Low is bad, high is good.

There is damage, how many dice you roll depends on the weapon you use and for melee weapons, how strong you are. High is good, obviously.

Finally, there are Defense rolls, these are effectively a type of skill roll, i.e. 3d6 and get equal to or less than; the difference is the numbers you roll against are derived from other stats and skills.

These are the main dice rolls you will use for 99% of most games. It's fairly straightforward, low is good for skills, high is good for damage and Reactions.

In terms of your first character, get the GM to do a couple of fights or whatever he thinks will be common encounters. The GM should at minimum help you build your character. I run GURPS and I do all of the points assignation to build characters for every player except one.

[Townopolis]

The way I learned GURPS is by playing, and that's honestly what I'd recommend, because learning by reading is almost impossible. It also lets you stick to the rules that are relevant to the genre you're playing in.

Make a character, play, figure out what part of the rules you overlooked when making your character, re-roll, play, wash, rinse, % repeat.

Of course, this method requires a GM who knows the system decently well.

Edit: some questions you could ask:

• How many CP (character points) do I have to spend?
• What advantages do I need to be [concept]?
• What skills do I need to be [concept]?
• Can I take attributes and advantages after creation at base cost, or do I have to pay 2x cost for any attributes and advantages I buy after creation?
• Are we using the horribly obnoxious critical hit and miss tables? Don't look at me like that, Lordsmoothe called them that on the internet.
• What are the "everyman" skills for this campaign?
• What's my "default" for [skill]?
• How many points will it cost to raise [skill] to [number]?

[Mr Beer]

Also, GURPS, even the basic set, is more of a toolkit to build your game than an actual game. The GM needs to have a strong idea of what they are aiming to achieve and what rules they will (and especially won't) be using in their game.

GURPS is strongly simulationist, can run pretty much any setting you like, has an extremely flexible character generation system* and has numerous high quality supplements. But it requires a strong hand at the helm, so to speak, otherwise you will end up with a total dog's breakfast of a game.

* GURPS makes it trivially easy to design characters as diverse as an axe-wielding half-dragon; a talking hat; an 18th century French musketeer and Batman.

[Nexahs]

I would advise you start with GURPS Lite, it's a free resource that condenses the basic rules into an easier-to-digest pdf (it's ~30 pages instead of ~300), and then see if your GM will run a brief sample encounter to help you get the hang of the fundamental mechanics without worrying about your actual character. Also, I heartily recommend paying a visit to the friendly folks over at forums.sjgames.com, they're a fantastic (and knowledgeable) group. I've personally been given advice multiple times by the assistant line editor and author of many supplements.

[Algeh]

If possible, ask the GM to sit down with you and help you build your first character. GURPS was my preferred system back when I played regularly, and I often brought new players into the game. We'd generally do character-creation at the table, then I'd give more experience than usual for a few sessions so they could add things they realized they forgot. I don't know about your GM, but I always told them about the setting and what kind of characters would fit in it, then encouraged them to come with a character concept that would fit in the setting and helped them build that. If they were stumped, they would often pick a disadvantage to "theme" their character around, since one of the main things that makes a typical GURPS character different from a typical character in a lot of class-based systems is that you've chosen specific weaknesses for them rather than choosing what they'll be good at and their weaknesses being more "didn't choose to be good at other thing". If you're going into a pre-existing campaign, ask the other players for advice on what kind of character to build - they will probably have some ideas on what the party is missing and will help you build a useful character.

Then, just be prepared to ask for help figuring out what to roll when you're playing. In most of my groups, I'd have players who described their actions and then the GM would figure out what rolls they needed to make to make that work, so it was ok if some of the players didn't really have much idea how the mechanics worked at first. Take the Common Sense advantage so the GM will clue you in when you're doing something that likely won't work.

If you've got some spare time before you see your GM again, try to build several different low-level (50-100 point) "rough draft" characters to get the hang of the system. Have your GM read over them and let you know what you're missing or confused about. Don't try to deal with magic or psionics unless those will be in your "real" campaign - many games don't use these and they're a lot of extra planning during character creation (GURPS has a magic system only the dean of an engineering department could love - so many convoluted prerequisite chains).

I never had many problems with newbies not being able to cope with the during-play rules, since it was mostly just a bunch of rolling against skills (of course, I ran combat-light games). Character creation was just really intimidating for people who usually played certain other systems because it was so wide open and thus easy to miss "important" things. (As a regular GURPS player, the first time I played D&D (2nd edition) I was surprised to lean that my Bard would automatically be good with weapons, because that wasn' t in my character concept that time so I'd been ignoring the weapons rules. I was told that in D&D EVERYONE had Weapons Proficiencies, and I got -however many- of them, and I should go pick back and pick something. It was...a rough transition for a few sessions until I got used to the different set of assumptions.)

[Knaight]

I'd recommend reading GURPS Lite as well. It gets the rules across, then you can just use the significantly more encyclopedic lists in the full game for character creation. The math of GURPS and core system properties honestly are pretty straightforward, it's just that every list of stuff is excessively long (particularly skills, there's a point past which skills are way too narrowly defined, and GURPS blew past it at full speed and then just kept going further).

[goto124]

In any system, I'm afraid to choose weaknesses because I don't know if I can live and play with it. What if my unwillingness to let go of grudges prevents the entire party from going where they want to go, for example? I could say 'my character chooses to let go this particular one', but that doesn't quite sound like sticking to a particular trait anymore...

[Mr Beer]

In any system, I'm afraid to choose weaknesses because I don't know if I can live and play with it. What if my unwillingness to let go of grudges prevents the entire party from going where they want to go, for example? I could say 'my character chooses to let go this particular one', but that doesn't quite sound like sticking to a particular trait anymore...

It's traditional in GURPS to have Disadvantages, not least because you get extra points to spend.

Another reason is that certain backgrounds require Disadvantages, if you want to play a Bram Stoker-esque vampire, a Vulcan, a Universal Soldier...you are guaranteed to include Disadvantages in the build, because they are inherent to the concept.

It's not required though, you can play a character without Disadvantages and that's fine. Realistic baseline humans often don't have any GURPS Disadvantages, although Quirks (minor, 1 point Disadvantages) are very common.

[Algeh]

In any system, I'm afraid to choose weaknesses because I don't know if I can live and play with it. What if my unwillingness to let go of grudges prevents the entire party from going where they want to go, for example? I could say 'my character chooses to let go this particular one', but that doesn't quite sound like sticking to a particular trait anymore...

What I tend to do is to start to roleplay (or state out of character, depending on the situation) as I think my character would due to their disadvantage or backstory issue, and then see how the reactions go. If it's clear it's going to be pain for the other players (not characters - they can suffer and that's fine, it's good for 'em) and/or the GM, then I tone it down or find a reason to make it go differently. Otherwise, we roll with it even if it's not optimal for the characters, since the story of everything always working out well for the main characters is kind of boring anyway. Quick example (from a Feng Shui game over a decade ago, actually):

GM: "You each open the envelope, and inside is a picture of a beloved family member."
Algeh: "Actually, my character doesn't have any close ties, it's an important part of his backstory that his ex recently left him alone in the world and..." (sees annoyed look on GM's face)
GM: "It's a picture of your cat"
Algeh: (dropping the point that my character doesn't have a cat anymore, his ex up and left and took the pets and the truck and everything that ever mattered to him and etc, etc, backstory): "Not FLUFFY!"

and the plot went on, because it wasn't going to add anything to the game to deal with my character's personal angst right then, particularly in a short-term game where we were only going to use the characters for a few sessions and mostly in an infiltration/action plot. (I don't remember if any of this ex-done-left-me stuff had any mechanical aspect at all - it was a pretty rules-light system and I am just incapable of NOT giving my character an elaborate backstory to explain why they're wherever the game is starting and ready to do whatever it is I think the game is supposed to be about. I'd probably do that playing Tunnels and Trolls. Possibly even in Battleship, if I'd been drinking.) In a different, more serious and long-term game, it probably would have been worth pulling the GM aside for a few minutes to come up with a better thing for my character to be threatened with or incentivized with right then that would actually fit in with my character concept, and if I'd been running a serious game with a plot point along those lines I would have either spent some time combing through character sheets in advance or asked the players to come up with that part so it'd fit. For a silly short-term game, I just ignored it because it wouldn't add anything.

A good GM in a system where most/all PCs have disadvantages will keep them in mind when planning the game, mostly so they all come up sooner or later and aren't just free points. It's ok that it makes things more difficult for the party, but it shouldn't make things impossible. Both the GM and the players should figure out ways to work around the disadvantages and make them interesting rather than make them roadblocks.

Your grudge means you don't want to, I don't know, go ask the dwarves for help? Maybe you still tag along because the rest of the party insists, but grumble about it under your breath the entire time. Maybe you make a bunch of extra rolls of various kinds to check that they're not cheating you THIS time, most of which are for actions that are pretty obvious to the dwarves, and you manage to offend a few dwarves along the way and generally make things more difficult while still not bringing the whole plot to a screeching halt.

[goto124]

If it's clear it's going to be pain for the other players (not characters - they can suffer and that's fine, it's good for 'em)

Do you ask the players if it's okay to inconvenience them? It can be hard to tell if 'pain to the PC' wil cause 'pain to the player', especially when you don't know the players well. I'm unwilling to cause even the slightest bit of problem with the group it seems...

[Maglubiyet]

I'm unwilling to cause even the slightest bit of problem with the group it seems...

That's almost a Disadvantage in itself -- the person who walks on eggshells trying to please everyone else around them without asserting his/her own needs. Everyone has something about them that inconveniences other people.

If you're honestly trying to role-play and not just be a combat accessory for a wargame, you're going to have interpersonal conflicts. Try to think of a single story (novel, movie, tv show, comic book) where the clash between the characters wasn't as significant of a plot point as the central conflict.

[hifidelity2]

That's almost a Disadvantage in itself -- the person who walks on eggshells trying to please everyone else around them without asserting his/her own needs. Everyone has something about them that inconveniences other people.

If you're honestly trying to role-play and not just be a combat accessory for a wargame, you're going to have interpersonal conflicts. Try to think of a single story (novel, movie, tv show, comic book) where the clash between the characters wasn't as significant of a plot point as the central conflict.

As a player and DM of GURPS in many different types of game (from Fantasy to modern to Sci-Fi) using the disadvantages is part of the plot.

I (if DM) reserve the right to ban any disadvantages at the start but once I have accepted them then its open season

e.g’s

A fear of Spiders – guess what is guarding the treasure or even just a small house spider on their bed

Dependants – (some players think it’s a free one) – oh no – someone took it and in one town they suddenly found a child that they had fathered who then tagged along with the party and of course would run off at the most inopportune time


I do let players
- Buy off disadvantages if they can come up with a good reason / story
- Take the 5 points of quirks at start but not need to decide what they are until they have played for a bit and the character beds in

[DigoDragon]

Physical disadvantages are some of my favorites, as they're a bit more straightforward to role-play with. I've done stuff like near-sighted, color blindness, missing a leg, asthma, and one of my favorites-- the time I played as a talking pony (the lack of hands made life reaaaally interesting).

One doesn't have to pick disadvantages, but when I do I usually first put together the concept of my hero and what kind of flaws they'd have, then pick a couple disadvantages that fit the fluff.

[hifidelity2]

One doesn't have to pick disadvantages, but when I do I usually first put together the concept of my hero and what kind of flaws they'd have, then pick a couple disadvantages that fit the fluff.

Once I have decided what Character "class" I want I mostly pick Disads 1st as to me that gives the limitation on the Character. The Advantages come later

[Maglubiyet]

Can we hear from the OP about his foray into the world of GURPS? Did you give up, MonkeySage? Did someone help you build your character and get you started?

[Algeh]

Do you ask the players if it's okay to inconvenience them? It can be hard to tell if 'pain to the PC' wil cause 'pain to the player', especially when you don't know the players well. I'm unwilling to cause even the slightest bit of problem with the group it seems...

I don't generally ask outright, just kind of assess how much "dealing with stuff that's only interesting to me" will take over from "things that everyone will be interested in" that session and react accordingly. If I think I got it wrong and it's going to be an ongoing issue, we might talk about it after the session and figure out how to fix it for next time. In a game where everyone has disadvantages (which is typical in a GURPS game) no one is going to be OOC-upset with you that your character, who has an overwhelming fear of spiders, failed a Will roll when they found a spider crawling up their arm and is now shrieking about how they really hate spiders and stomping around rather than continuing to be stealthy, any more than they'd be OOC-upset with you in a D&D game for failing a Move Silently check and thus no longer being stealthy. Now, if every single contribution you ever make to the game is your character going on long-winded rants about how they hate spiders, and demanding that instead of getting the Artifact of Plot-Relevantness they join you on your quest to step on every spider ever, that would be annoying.

On the other hand, we did once have a GURPS game in which so many of us made characters so incredibly off-topic for the plot that the players and the GM together agreed to kill off about half of them partway through fighting our way out of the enemy base so we could introduce some characters who were less totally out of place in the story. (We were supposed to be space mercenaries in a reasonably serious campaign, and for some reason (probably because our previous campaign had been really silly and we hadn't quite gotten it out of our system) a bunch of us built Elaborately Unhelpful Backstory characters with no useful combat or infiltration skills, like the guy playing an adult film actor whose main combat skill was Whip. My character was at least ex-military, but was also a religious zealot that I basically built to cause intra-party conflict with the other PC in question. In our defense, we were teenagers at the time.)