GURPS Basic Set: Characters, Fourth Edition – August 21, 2004 Author: Steve Jackson | Language: English | ISBN:
1556347294 | Format: EPUB
GURPS Basic Set: Characters, Fourth Edition – August 21, 2004 Description
- Age Range: 8 and up
- Hardcover: 336 pages
- Publisher: Steve Jackson Games; 4th edition (August 21, 2004)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1556347294
- ISBN-13: 978-1556347290
- Product Dimensions: 10.9 x 8.6 x 0.9 inches
- Shipping Weight: 5.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Those of you who don't know about the basic concepts of GURPS should go to the marvelous review that somebody wrote for the 3rd edition basic set.
I'm a game master with 25 years of experience who turned to GURPS about 7 years ago because the game systems I was using didn't support cross-genre play very well. I loved the 3rd edition in spite of its problems, which could be daunting at times. The biggest problems were that the stat generation system encouraged "gaming" the system, there were an awful lot of little loopholes in the skills that the players could exploit, the psionics system was overpowered, and the game system had kind of sprawled over the years. I've got a good group of players and we worked around the problems but kept encountering new ones as we delved further into the world of GURPS.
Enter 4th edition! It solves the gaminess of the stat generation system with such a simple rule I couldn't believe I hadn't thought of it. The loopholes in the skills have mostly been resolved (I haven't finished checking them over yet) and the Psionics system has been dumped in favor of a different simpler system that still seems to get the job done. This book sticks with the character generation system so I can't address the rules sprawl issue yet.
I had concerns about spending so much for a single book (I've only gotten Characters so far but I'll be buying Campaigns as soon as the budget allows) but one of the little secrets is that you really aren't buying a single book. The Characters book includes all of the rules from the following 3rd edition books: Basic Set, Compendium I, Martial Arts, Supers, and Psionics. No more digging through multiple books! Furthermore you are saving a lot of money by buying a single book at $23.00 on Amazon vs.
The idea behind GURPS is that it provides a set of core rules that can be adapted to any setting (thus the "universal" part of General Universal Role-Playing). It does a good job of this, although it is better suited to a somewhat more realistic feeling than heroic wackiness. A human isn't going to take too many sword hits and shrug them off.
The strong point of GURPS is character generation. Players are allotted a number of points to build their characters, and may buy characteristics, skills and "Advantages" (things like the ability to use magic, being wealthy, or any of hundreds of other things), and may get additional points by taking "Disadvantages."
This new 4th edition is in by far most ways an improvement over 3rd edition. They closed a lot of loopholes and fixed a number of less-than-optimal things. I like the changes to combat especially.
There are a couple of things I would have done differently.
1) They took the skills out of psionics (and every other supernatural system, for that matter), making it purely advantage based, but they left magic as skill based. They really should have made each magic spell into an advantage too, because now it's not as well balanced with the rest of the system as it could be. Couple this with the fact that you can now take IQ at 10 points a level if you don't take the associated Will and Perception, and you can easily have a Wizard character with an IQ of 17 or so in a 100 point campaign, who can buy spells at a very high skill level with 1 point.
2) They should have dumped the "earn character points through study" system.
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