This is a monthly r/GURPS thread for anything and everything related to your own campaigns. Tell us how you and your friends are making out. Update us on the progress of your game. Tell us about any issues you've run into and maybe we can help. Make suggestions for other players and GMs.

This is a monthly r/GURPS thread for anything and everything related to your own campaigns. Tell us how you and your friends are making out. Update us on the progress of your game. Tell us about any issues you've run into and maybe we can help. Make suggestions for other players and GMs.

Hello everyone, I'm new to GURPS but not new as a GM. We play via foundry and are currently in a testing phase with oneshots etc. to see how we like the system. So far it looks extremely promising and Charaktercreation is a lot of fun.

My goal ist to GM a grim dark fantasy world and from what I've heard my players want to play the following characters: Investigator with a cursed book, drunk paladin, ranger with beast companion, some kind of Frontline fighter and a minotaur shaman.

Now to the questions that came up:

- wich rulebooks would you guys recommend I get to aid me in creating a grim dark fantasy world and wich let my players build exactly what they want.

- how does wealth actually work it said 80% should go towards housing when you have a home. But I couldn't find prices for a house and the monthly costs seem a little high.

- how do you guys handle magery it looks like it's pretty cheap to upgrade but the highest spell I could find required like magery 3 wich seems low for only 35cp. Is there a guideline on what is considered "high" magic?

- how do you handle recovery? 1HP per day (when successful HT) seems pretty crippling when you drop to -10hp I guess it's realistic but it kinda forces a time skip after any large battle.

Thanks in advance

I've been interested in making a gadget armor but it seems really costly to scale with armor examples. I want to throw out some theoretical scenarios to try and understand. These are also somewhat extreme examples cause that is where i like to understand things.

For these examples i am gonna reference the TL 12 Warsuit from Ultratech p185.

So example 1 is a gadgeteer in a super game who likes 40k style power armor. Could i use signature gear (cost adjusted for TL) to get my super suit and then buy other powers as gadgets saying they were upgrades? Additionally if i wanted to adjust the armor in anyway is that possible or does signature gear lock that in? (I.e. adding to the DR or hardening it by paying the difference in cost)

Example 2: As a disembodied AI, if i was using the power armor as my current body, would i have to buy it's statistics and abilities as gadgets? Or if this was a gear option of the world, would signature gear work there?

Example 3: A wizard wants to summon ethereal armor that has the exact stats of Warsuit in a high power fantasy game. How would this bs done?

Please feel free to add more or responf to only one thing. I just want to understand this so i can better help my players

Does any form of the Resistance help to not be teleported?

Resistant from B80-B81, or any other I don't know.

I assume Metabolic hazards immunity helps landing wherever?

Long time fan and player of gurps, no hate for the game, more critiques from a place of love.

But I was really hoping some things would get fixed that didn't with the rerelease rules. Curious if I have this right according to RAW because obviously can house rule, that's not what I'm after.

Each of these is something I encountered when rebuilding characters for our regular group’s long term game using 2026 revised.

Small Potatoes:

Slippery allows you to have +1 on escape rolls. This isn’t terrible at +2/lv but it’s not good as escape rolls require a full action. I’d propose a better route would be +1 to escape rolls and -1 to apply grapples at lv 1, 3, and 5. Something slippery should be harder to grapple as that’s famously how it works IRL, ask anyone who ever tried to pick up soap in a shower after dropping it. In this fashion it still caps out at -3 for the most slippery you can be in RAW, but you still benefit from escape rolls. This just bugs me a lot because it provides such a niche utility that kinda sucks and is rarely used, whereas at least avoiding a grapple now and then has some less common use. Even if you charge 3/level it would still be nice/worth it because of the grapple penatly, because escape rolls are kinda so niche that putting any points into it feels like a waste when there’s so much better uses for points. The main thing is that if it takes an action, because action economy is SO expensive in GURPS, this ends up being a garbage purchase when there are times you should really apply this to a character (ie my personal PC has an alternative form liminal tentacle monster, so at least slipppery 1 should be there, and it ends up being just wasted points, particularly when you consider how much 2 points can contribute elsewhere if carefully constructed, especially when you have cosmic background like I do on this character).

A Big Fish:

This next one is one of the other PCs. This gripe has 3 things to consider for interactions regarding RAW.
Altered Time rate costs 100 points per level at baseline and is meant to represent time going twice as fast for the character.
Extra attack is 25 points per level baseline, meaning they are functionally better at discharging repeated attacks.
Alternative Abilities require a full ready action to switch unless it’s an innate attack being switched to, and then it’s a free action, however, it is expected as a standard turn, when you switch to an attack that every attack you use is of the same type.

Here’s the rub: I can see extra attack constraining as a limitation if you want to eliminate flashy anime combos just from buying extra attack as part of a grounded system, so sure, this is an extra triggers squeeze, swing of sword, etc., but RAW, Altered time rate technically does not allow you to switch even though you should, in theory, be receiving “two turns”, but understandably they don’t state it that way because that would have all kinds of issues regarding duration effects (exact wording indicates you double your available actions), so I get why, but that also means your altered time rate ends up being unable to switch attack types in AA between innate attacks, even though logically it should if you were considering the ATR as faster moving time (which is what it is by description), and that means when you have a speedster type built with exponential stuff like compounding extra attack and ATR to functionally do a ton because that’s their point sink, you still end up locked in a single attack cycle, no combos or switching AA like one would expect you should be able to with AA because you technically don’t get more than 1 turn. Obviously the fix is just to treat this as rules oversight and house rule, but the point is a rerelease is an opportunity to fix stuff like this.

Huge Gripe Stuck in my craw:
Last one is the same as last PC, noting my two biggest gripes aren't about my character at all. This biggest gripe is about how incredibly harsh the guilt complex is. This is the one that makes me insane.

-5 points for feeling sad because bad stuff happened doesn’t sound so bad right?

WRONG. You get no will contest at all no matter how battle hardened you are, and are taken out of the game for days at a time laying in bed because of how the rules work for chronic depression. Sure you can try to make a will save to do something, but you have to make a will roll EVERY TIME YOU DO ANYTHING other than minimum survival. Put on your pants? That’s roll. Put on shirt and shoes? 2 More rolls. Brush your teeth? That’s another roll. Unless the character has an outrageous will there’s a good chance they fail a roll and go back to bed before they can even leave their room. For -5 points? And that's not to mention the tedious table procedure of making 20 rolls to leave the house.

My fix theory: Grade it based on severity: Definitively not your fault and provably so (IE you can still feel guilty, you’re just punishing yourself absurdly which jives with it) roll will, presume quirk level guilt anyway on a save, but allow activity. Something that maybe you could have done something about reasonably but didn’t? Maybe will -2 to -6 depending on severity of situation. Something you actively did that was preventable and caused the bad thing? Sure, then auto fail, but the way this works, anyone in your network your character cares about suffers a slightly off day and you’re crippled in bed for days at a time.

And we’re not done; it still gets worse. While your character is nursing their guilt and ignoring their responsibilities and calls to action, that’s just more time for more bad news to arrive from any progression that occurs in game without them (ie party is hampered because of their absence), turning into a potentially endless cycle of chronic depression because their second cousin stubbed their toe and dared to complain about it out loud, and then Bob the construction worker lost his job, and then, and then, and then... It’s just insane this works this way without a save at all because this functionally means your character is fully crippled from day 1, especially if they are meant to be an adventurer where bad things happen all the time. I get it, mild mental stuff, just take a quirk… but this is not a -5 disadvantage, this is a “this probably shouldn’t be a PC option” because of how it auto triggers, or better yet, has a bad design premise overall. Because you know what’s really not fun? Going to gaming night with your friends excited to play, then not playing for not just a whole session, sessions on end. This is imho, way too overpunishing for a -5 disadvantage.

I mean I understand the design notion: You don’t want to make it worth more because than any character dumping into will can basically take this for a free five point reduction in the will cost when will itself is only 5 points per level, ie, at Will 16 you’ve got over 98% chance to not fail. But making it cheap with that harsh of an auto trigger is just obscene. So don’t make it worth more, just allow some remedy to be possible… It just really annoys me that this is still broken because of how broken it is and has been for years.

Point with all of that is: If I'm wrong about this, please correct me, it's possible I'm not reading the rules correctly but I don't think that's the case as I've tripple checked this stuff. For me I just get annoyed when I find niche issues like this because 99% of gurps design is so well thought out and managed.

There's a lot to pick from. I'm mostly curious about which supplements you think represent the SJG's team on how they'd do it again in a hypothetical next edition, rather than example builds / purely variant options.

Howdy!

I've only been playing GURPS for a while (around a year and some change), but I'm becoming more and more interested in being a GM. While the thought of GMing GURPS doesn't make me uncomfortable, I do run into one constant issue: I don't know what I want to run! It's not from a lack of ideas, either!

I have many settings ideas, ranging from different TLs and different levels of cinematic to realistic, the difficulty lies in settling on just one thing with the goal of having a long term game. I'd prefer to only have one game as a GM, so I feel a bit stuck. It's almost like FOMO on the fun of all the other settings I don't pick.

I did have the idea (which would be thoroughly discussed with my players prior to starting) about an episodic nature to the campaigns. Complete an arc/season/etc and jump to something else for a bit, but that seems like it might annoy folks.

I also had the idea of just having shorter campaigns with a well defined end state, but I also enjoy the idea of emergent narratives and having a sandbox style adventure that just goes on and on (speaking hypothetically, of course).

So after whining and complaining to my buddies about this for a while I thought I'd come and ask the subreddit for any advice. How do y'all pick what you're running when there's so many things to run?

Hi all, just wanted to ask for clarification about reduced FP cost for spells. In the basic set it states that a spell known at levels 15-19 has its FP costs reduced by 1, and a spell at 20-24 has it reduced by 2. Would this also effect overcharging costs for missile spells? For instance, say I had Fireball at skill 17, and Magery 3. Naturally I assume I could bring it to 3d damage at 2 FP, reducing the cost by 1. But if I were to charge it with a further 3d damage, would that cost the full 3 FP or be reduced to 2 as well?