Games - GURPS

	Games - GURPS

The Generic Universal Role-Playing System, commonly known as GURPS is a form of a role-playing game (RPG) designed to adapt to any imaginary gaming environment. It was created by Steve Jackson Games in 1986. In 1989, GURPS won the Origins Award for Best Roleplaying Rules of 1988 , and in 2000 it was inducted into the Origins Hall of Fame. Many of its expansions have also won awards.

History

Prior RPG history

Prior to GURPS, Role-Playing games of the 1970s and early 1980s were developed especially for certain gaming environments, and they were largely incompatible with one another. For example, TSR (the publisher of the Dungeons & Dragons
game) published its D&D game specifically for a "fantasy" environment. Another game from the same company, Star Frontiers
, was developed for science fiction-based role-playing. TSR produced other games for other environments, such as Gamma World
, Top Secret, Gangbusters, Boot Hill
, and more. Each of these games was set with its own self-contained rules system, and the rules for playing each game differed greatly from one game to the next. Attempts were made in Advanced Dungeons and Dragons to allow cross-genre games using Gamma World and Boot Hill rules, but the obscure rules went largely unused. GURPS is an attempt to create an all-encompassing, "universal" role-playing system that allows players to role-play in any environment they please without having to create a new set of rules for each game.

The GURPS "Concept"

GURPS was part of the first wave of role-playing games that eschews random generation of characters in favor of a point-based system. GURPS was not the first role-playing system to present a "universal" set of rules for different gaming environments. The Chaosium role-playing system, best known for the highly successful Call of Cthulhu
and RuneQuest
role-playing games, were also developed to be a "generic" set of role-playing rules.

Role-playing games of the 1970s and 1980s, such as Dungeons & Dragons, use random numbers generated by dice rolls to assign statistics to player characters. GURPS, in contrast, assigns each player a specified number of points for each category of their characters. Together with the Hero System, GURPS was one of the first role-playing games in which characters are created by spending points to get characteristics, skills, advantages, getting more points by accepting low characteristics, disadvantages etc. This approach is increasingly more common, in part due to the success of GURPS.

GURPS' emphasis on its "generic" aspect has proven to be a successful marketing tactic: it is one of the most popular role-playing games on the market today. GURPS' approach to universality includes using real world measurements wherever possible. This allows players to fairly trivially convert things from the real world, other games or their imagination to GURPS statistics.

One of the strengths of GURPS, say its proponents, lies in its hundreds of worldbooks, describing settings from several science fiction, fantasy, and historical settings, adding specific rules but mainly giving general information for any game. Many popular game designers began their professional careers as GURPS writers (including C.J. Carella, Robin Laws, S. John Ross, and FUDGE creator Steffan O'Sullivan). It is something of an open secret in the gaming community that a large contingent of people who do not play GURPS (or any other RPG) nonetheless faithfully buy GURPS worldbooks because of the talented and creative writers.

GURPS History

Before GURPS, Steve Jackson wrote a set of games called The Fantasy Trip, which is mechanically similar to GURPS.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for GURPS ]

Games - GURPS

History

Prior RPG history

The GURPS "Concept"

GURPS History

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