The Broken Promise of Second Edition GURPS Basic Set

I want you to just look at this:

That Second Edition GURPS Basic set came with these beautiful Denis Loubet drawn Cardboard Heroes figures. Every set came with something different. The questionnaire that came with mine asked, “should we include Cardboard Heroes miniatures in GURPS products (like we did with GURPS Autoduel?)” It could have been an integral part of every GURPS supplement going forward, but just like the way that that tedious, uninspired railroad adventure would disappear from the third edition of the game, these captivating game pieces would evaporate along with the gaming dreams of my youth.

It could have been great, though. Honestly, the figures were the most exciting thing in the box. The first thing any fourteen-year-old would do would be to cut the counter sheets and then imagine a game where the players’ figures made daring breaks across the hex map in an attempt to pick up a magic weapon before the monsters could descend upon them. Piles of treasure would be placed on the map as well, and the players would be in competition to see who would be the one to get the choicest items. Alliances would form. Backs would be stabbed. Glory would be obtained.

Of course, those drab little rule booklets with the light blue covers have nothing in them that could help someone deliver such an experience. Quite the contrary, they held passages that would snub you for even wanting to play something like that. Further, they lacked anything that would equip a teenager to successfully set up such a game. And worse, the cursory instructions on setting up a dungeon environment were so spartan, they could only be successfully applied by someone that had already dedicated hundreds of hours to playing other products that actually made an effort to teach people how to do this.

Oh, but that’s okay, people tell me. GURPS is a super flexible system. It can do anything, they say. There is a supplement or a variant that fixes all of this which would come out decades down the road. Maybe that’s really the case, I dunno. Unfortunately, what we’re talking about here is what it was like for the average kid that washed up on the shores of this pitiful excuse for a game.

Why do I say that? Well, consider what you need to be in order to make this thing work? Steve Jackson says you need to be “like a mystery writer… a storyteller… an umpire… a cosmic bookkeeper… the ‘house’ at a gambling casino… and (to the characters) a minor deity.” What fourteen-year-old can be even half of those things? And why should he have to aspire to some bizarre form of megalomania just to get a game off the ground? Seriously, where does all this crazy talk come from?

I think it has something to do with the fact that there isn’t a real game inside the box at all. Consider:

The GM is the final authority. Rules are guidelines… the designer’s opinion about how things ought to go. But (as long as he is fair and consistent) the GM can change any number, any cost, any rule. His word is law!

Think about it.

Instead of simply being able to pick this up and play the Second Edition GURPS Basic Set, some fourteen-year-old is supposed to spontaneously be able to look at this mess of ideas and then be able to synthesize an actual game from them. He is supposed to be able to know when and how to change or throw out anything and everything about the game in order to hold down half-a-dozen contradictory roles. Again, the only real answer that could put a fourteen-year-old in a position to gain the sort of wisdom required to do all this would be to go play several other more complete games that could train him to the point where he could think at the level required to pull this off. That’s a project that would take years. It requires anyone that would attempt to use these rules to develop to the point where they are de facto game designers themselves.

Seriously, that is too much to lay on some kid that just wanted to have a game he could use to support the yearnings he had for the little cardboard figures that came in the box set he’d purchased. Really, the main thing wrong with this set is that it didn’t come with a note from Steve saying that he was sorry he had just sold him a nongame that couldn’t possibly work unless the purchaser didn’t actually need any of it already.

It’s not too late for that.