GURPS Apologists Are Full of Dookie

GURPS fans are in complete denial about what roleplaying games even are and what referees actually need in order to run a successful campaign. There has to be some kind of weird brain damage going on with these people; I seriously don’t get it.

Consider this guy The_RyujinLP commenting on my positively stellar half-orc posse writeup:

Wait… why make full stats for NPC’s? Unless your publishing an official book, all you need are their HP, DR, and relevant skills (Using a variation of BAD is great here) and maybe an advantage or two if they really need. In fact I’m pretty sure that’s brought up in the Basic Set.

If it’s not something a player is gonna to be able to play as, don’t waste the effort.

This guy is insane.

I didn’t make that list of NPC’s for no reason. I sat down and cranked those guys out because when I tried to just run a typical combat encounter that could reasonably be expected to occur in a fantasy game, I realized that I could not just fake my way through a session in the same way that I could in other games. GURPS is built on top of a core of the old Melee and Wizard microgames. It is perfectly reasonable to want to play out a modest battle with it. In GURPS that means figuring up weapon damages from Strength and then working out how much their Basic Speed drops due to their encumbrance from their armor. You can’t handwave this stuff. IF YOU DON’T DO THIS YOU ARE NOT ACTUALLY PLAYING THE GAME.

The_RyujinLP acts like I am nuts for wanting to be determine in the exact details of a party of 1d6 half-orcs on the fly for a random encounter. What is their gear? Do they have more ranged weapons than average? Is the extra-strong one in the group? Do they have shields? Is the one with the decent armor in the group? With a one-page writeup formatted as a d12 table I am ready to go. I am prepared. I can answer all those questions in a fair way. Even better, the stats correspond to these iconic Denis Loubet illustrations. Combined with my prep, the counters are What You See is What You Get and everyone looking at the combat map can immediately grasp what is going on and make informed tactical decisions. This is something that GURPS does well and anyone that cares about what that rule system has to offer in comparison to classic D&D will want to explore how this impacts session play.

I am not the only person in gaming that ever thought that this sort of thing would be good to have on hand. I am far from alone here! Consider these stats for Starport Security that are laid out in Dave Sering’s superlative 1980 Judges Guild Traveller supplement Tancred:

If one of these guys is in the starport bar, you can roll a d8 and immediately know what his attributes and skills and background are. If you need to know if a random trooper can be dropped by a hit from a body pistol, you can answer that question instantly and fairly by randomly selecting one of these guys, picking a random physical attribute, and then checking to see if the weapon damage is equal to or greater than that.

Serenity!

But now I’m supposed to believe that the GURPS people have never needed to be able to answer questions like that in the heat of play. Really? Are you telling me that every single one of these situations is addressed by the Game Master handwaving the entirety of that foot of GURPS supplements on their shelves and just arbitrarily making a ruling to determine the outcome?

That’s stupid.

You’re not playing the game that you purchased. You’re not playing a game at all!

It’s just completely stupid even as a premise for an rpg. First GURPS takes away your Monster Manual and says you need to make one yourself when you set up your campaign. Then its design decisions are such that even making a healthy set of humanoid figures with melee weapons is a major chore. Then guys like The_RyujinLP roll up and give people the absolutely TERRIBLE advice that you shouldn’t even have this kind of a resource at all.

Are you telling me that GURPS referees are so brilliant, so utterly competent that they don’t even need little cards with NPC stats on them in order to play their rpg? Or are you saying that GURPS is so cumbersome and so poorly supported that in practice GURPS Game Masters do not bother using the rules contained within that yard of source books on their shelves to come up with NPCs for their games?

Either way, I think guys like The_RyujinLP are tacitly admitting that nobody runs games with this rule set at all.

Sad!