Відео

conan with occultism skill its insanely cool

I like to play Wyrmslayer on very cold days with the window open and Tundra Wind ambiance playing.

very elegant arguments, you are right about your points, but gurps 4e is still im my hearth as the great king of all rpgs. 3e is more like a retired wise father. this is just my fellings. i have no arguments.

I think that GURPS 3rd edition is better than 4th edition.

The wide arcs in Starfire have a realistic and sensible basis. Within the time frame of a turn, a ship can "roll" continuously so "off-side" weapons will come into play quickly. Rolling will also "spread" damage from the SOB hanging off your port quarter. And all weapons are considered turreted. Most other tactical space games are WW1/WW2 in space (Steve Cole actually got the idea for SFB while playing AH's Jutland and watching Star Trek at the same time, then sketched out the pocket SFB rules by the end of the Jutland game). Several games that are tactical butnot WW2 in space are the 3rd Ed Imperium, GDW/SJG Triplanetary (day long turns and amazingly simple vector movement), GDW Battle Rider. Brilliant Lances has facing and arcs based on the 3D sphere your ship is oriented in at the instant of firing. Lastly, Ad Astra simulates maneuvering and spotting and firing in a 3d space, map and HUD display. Amazing but horribly crunchy.

I see there's also a supplement called "Old School Monsters". Do you know if that is separate from this bestiary, or would this one include both? Thanks!

Are you going to talk about the box or the game?

GUPRS 4e lost the magic that was there in 3e. In 3e they had mastered the fine balance between writing an RPG book and writing an academic paper. The 3e books were intellectually stimulating, well researched, and most importantly inspired the imagination. They lost that with 4e. In 4e they crossed the line between RPG writing and academic writing and lost the art of being able to write an RPG book that inspire the imagination. Contemporary RPG writers want employment so they make up flaws with past systems so that they can write a new book that pretends to correct them. Case and point Passive Defence in 3e. Passive Defence represents armours ability to deflect a blow harmlessly with out effort and the part of the wearer. For example a sword deflects off of plate armour with out bighting. A nimble character may be able to evade a blow with out any contact being made however an armored character achieves the same result if the blow is deflected of the armour with out bighting. The artwork in 4e is atrocious! I find it so repugnant I don't even want to look at the books. The art looks like it was done by children's illustrators. The creativity and quality of GURPS (and SJGames in general) reached its peek when Loyd Blankenship was the line editor.

Thanks for covering this. I still regret getting rid of my original Conan RPG and Man-to-Man from back in the day. However, Girl Genius got me back in, and I'm working on rebuilding my collection.

Can you create skills in gurps?

Still playing 3ed since 1996 in Germany in a German translation. We never tryed the 4ed. So I don't know the diverence between the editions. There was never a 4ed in German language, so it's easier to stay in the 3ed. I never missed something

Is this still available on Steam? I cant find it in the Workshop.

Disagree, GURPS 4E is much better.

I was introduced to GURPS when 3rd edition came out and I have to agree with you it was in many ways better. First and foremost was the use of Passive Defense. We got in the habit of announcing "Hit by X" so both the GM and the players could instantly tell if said blow landed. It also allowed the creation of items that could not be replicated in 4th. I am specifically thinking of bracers for mages that were high PD but no DR. It was kind of awesome, I had a decent chance of avoiding a blow if something got threw my buddies BUT if I did get hit it would hurt. It made sense because I was a glass canon. Second, let's be honest, they were paperbacks. I love the full color art in gaming books now (except for GURPS 4th edition which I find HORIBLE.) but the price is insane. Lets all enjoy affordability. Truth be told, I would be happy with GM material being paperback and having high quality line drawings, maybe color just for the headers and formulas or a colored cardstock quick reference packet. Another problem I have with 4th edition is SO much space is spent on the multiverse idea and mixing this book with that book. 3rd edition had a couple of pages at most at the back of the books whereas 4th spends chapter after chapter on the idea. We kind of know you can do anything in GURPS, it's literally in the name. Back in the day we used GURPS to make games in our favorite worlds that did not have their own system or GURPS just worked way better. Now I don't hate 4th edition, I play it and have more than a few books for it. I just prefer many thing from 3rd. Skills for example were done way differently representing diminishing returns as the cost to improve eventually became so high as opposed to 4ths set number of XP to improve it by a point.

What's wrong with Ice Age? Some people (including myself) do like the idea of a Stone Age adventure in the vein of Quest for Fire or the Earth's Children series. Also, no love for Swashbucklers? And not just the pirate aspect, but also the musketeer and highwaymen parts.

Of course, some people can't move on either and will rack up an arm's length worth of reasons why they can't possibly change. Instead of the what, 13 minutes of protestations why don't you just admit the real reason; it smells like home. Home, home, home.

When did war games go to childrens wooden blocks? Was it to make them more expensive?

Awesome dive - love your channel!!

Looks like I'm gonna have to start saving up some money.

I should get the 3e. I've been holding out for to long on this game.

Thanks for the info Jim! Nice video

I need that game. Where can I buy the 50th edition in Canada ? (anywhere on that map would be great).

I love GURPS and the expansive tomes of “knowledge” in 4e. :) That said, it can’t beat the layout, font and playability of that 3rd Edition. It screams “play me now!”, while 4e says, “Grab a cup of coffee and study me.” So 3e much quicker to the table. Also, because I’ve become a fan of random adventure and character gen due to EasyGurps, I think the random character generator is a great way to get new players to the table. Underrated. And of course All in a Night’s Work.

Passive Defense is added to any Active Defense. Which means that since most Dodges are below 7 (or below 10) the added PD is in the more likely spaces of the bell curve. Yes the attack might still deflect off but it _*STILL MAKES CONTACT*_. Because of this it is no help against Mage's Touch which requires avoiding the attack completely and while the hand or staff attack might not get through the armor, the spell might. Only roll once but calculate Dodge success against both separately. Eg. A DX10 HT10 player has a dodge of 5 in full plate PD 4 which gives a total of 9 to avoid a swung staff but only 5 to avoid the Deathtouch it carries. Importantly the weight of the armor reduces the Dodge ability if it pushes the wearer into a higher encumbrance class. PD remains the same but the wearer's ability to move out of the way because of the weight will suffer. In addition to Mage's Touch, Knockback also should be considered. Knockback typically forces 1 yard of movement per 8 points of damage *_BEFORE_* DR. Likewise whether this attack hits should be considered without PD. An AoE explosion is purposely hard to Dodge - not allowing PD to help with this demonstrates that. The damage from it might deflect off (PD) or not get through (DR) but the impact is still made and can knock the wearer around. Knockback has the effects of moving the target and possibly knocking them down. If forced into a wall or another player then they might take additional damage as if thrown into it. If forced off a walkway they could then suffer falling damage. Also they require a DX to remain standing. Failing this changes their position and invokes all the attack and defense penalties thereof. Getting back up with extra encumbrance should take time. I don't think that removing PD is the best option. Rather, using the rules given to reinforce PD's weaknesses should be done instead. There is a lot that can be done within the framework of 3E.

I personally didn't like what 4th did to fatigue and hit points. When you get tired (low fatigue) it makes more sense that it is based on your strength as you feel weak and cannot over exert yourself to lift heavy objects or even yourself. A dieroll to remain standing is difficult and should be off of your strength not health. When you are close to dying (low Hp) it makes more sense that you are less healthy due to blood loss, organ failure, potential infection from open wounds, etc. A dieroll to remain alive is difficult and should be off of your health and not strength. While I get that they changed these for play balance they don't make much sense. Being strong but unhealthy doesn't make you able to take more damage before collapsing. And being healthy but not strong doesn't make you able to perform more heroic extra effort feats.

I wanted to like 4e, but ultimately found it too overwhelming. I found the original 3e book much more accessible. Less bloat in terms of advantages and disadvantages, and the way the skills are organised into categories makes character creation much easier. I also like the way the early splatbooks are morec streamlined and get you into a particular genre quickly, whereas the 4e manuals give you everything including the kitchen sink and again it's overwhelming.

Passive Defense was a horrific rule. It made armored knights in full plate better able to dodge or parry than lightly-armored swashbucklers, and broke the system in so many ways it wasn't funny. (Imperial Stormtrooper types suddenly dodge better than unarmored heroes, it messed up the supers rules, it caused bizarre results when somehow having PD 2-3 medieval leather or mail armor made it easier to dodge or deflect tank rounds unless awkward retrofits were applied. It is my absolute favorite rules change in 4th edition, which grew out of years of testing and play in my own GURPS fantasy and science fiction campaigns.

Oh no, the PD can of worms opened again! :D (kidding) Seriously though, I'm not a fan of PD. I like armor to absorb (displace) damage not help you avoid being hit. I love DR and feel that that is enough to simulate armor shapes and materials. It's just a feel thing I gues, but for me PD does not support simulation (non-ballistic resistant armor helps me avoid bullets?) I know that 4th added an overall +3 bonus to defenses which is like PD. I don't like that either, but I prefer a more deadly game. I guess I would favor PD more if it wasn't added to Dodge, and only the shield's PD was added to Block (which it kind of is now in 4th). Just my .02 cents..

Even though I'm Brazilian and therefore use the third edition in Portuguese, it's visually extremely similar to the original in English (and I think they took the same care in the translation as they did with the fourth). That's why I agree with everything you said in this video. Despite that, I admit that I don't know much about the Fourth Edition. I've been a GURPS player since 1995, obviously playing with the third edition, and even though I know that the fourth edition was released, I've never had the courage to learn what's changed. For some time now I've been looking for videos on UA-cam explaining (preferably point by point) what the differences are, but I haven't found any specifically about this yet. I don't know if you have something like that on your channel, but if you don't, here's a video suggestion.

Well, with the knights and Muslims deal, how do you exactly make Islam look good when they spread terror and slavery for hundreds of years before the Crusades? Serious question

You point up a problem I see with lots of modern game system books. The art and layout are often so lush that it obscures the text needed for game play . they're beautiful, but less useful than they might be.

I don't care about fonts or art. I look at the rules. I did like the passive but in play it is not missed. I did not like the 3 templates due to how they worked with the higher point cost for stats that 4 got away from. I liked 3 for how they split quirks from disadvantages giving a separate total. I don't think it is clear in 4 that quirks are just a type of disadvantage and included in that total.

GURPS has a lot of strong points. 3E (and before) does have problems moving away from a human baseline. This is fine-you can do Star Trek easily, for example. But, as you move away from that baseline, it does struggle. One of 4E's bits is definitely trying to handle that. It still has trouble, but it does better. If you are sticking closer to that human baseline, I definitely recommend 3E, it is a *great* done-in-one RPG. (I had the silver logo 3E main rules until it came apart, and after, still have 3ER.) PD... I'm mixed on that. It's a good concept, but dropping it is also decent streamlining. (Non-mechanically, what's the difference between glancing off from PD and not getting through DR?) Look up "A Short History of GURPS" on RPGG for my overview of the system. Dan Smith... nope, don't care for his art. Give me Dennis Loubet. The 4E art is also very lackluster. Also, yes, late 3E has them performing a lot of failed experiments with fonts. Quebec 1759 is a great game! So are its sisters War of 1812 and Napoleon.

I totally agree I preferred the 3e core as a product...I think the book was more newbie friendly, more usable, better organized and had better presentation. The setting and expansions books were much easier to parse out what is what, and what they are for. But, rules at the table, GURPS 4e is just better for me. Every change made from 3e to 4e is a refinement, and improves the game at the table in my opinion. Passive defense being streamlined out was a positive change IMO. Not having to recalculate your active defenses every time you roll for a hit location is worth the price of admission alone. Dodge, Parry, and Block just have a built in +3, and certain things (like shields) will give you a universal defense bonus. The other thing passive defense did in 3e that was exploitable was that it was used when you otherwise had no defense, so you could effectively remove the penalties from all-out-attack and other maneuvers and conditions (stunned, knocked out, paralyzed) that dropped defense. Honestly, I don't think Passive Defense makes much sense as a concept with how GURPS handles attacks and defense. Damage Reduction IS passive defense. I shouldn't be able to dodge or parry better with armor on. My DR reducing a hit to 0 is the equivalent of a glancing blow. Combat without Passive Defense is much more intuitive in this way. I'm always reticent to advise new players start with an older editions of something. Whichever edition has more players and more community support is the one I would always recommend for new players, even if it isn't MY favorite. I will always recommend D&D 5e to new players, even though I'm a Rules Cyclopedia guy. It's not always the case, but it's usually the case. For new GURPS players, my recommendation is always one of the all in one standalone GURPS books like the Disocworld RPG, or the Vorkosigan Saga.

100% agree. Bias, I guess, but the layout of 4E really turned me off of it. The 3E books with their black & white layout and line art were just so much more appealing. 3E was also the edition I really got into GURPS with my group, so it was also just "what we knew" (Even though we had initially played back in the Man-to-Man and Orcslayer days (and 1st Edition box set).

I've always wanted to try GURPS! I've just never had anyone close to me interesting in the game. It might be time to just run it myself!

I have a book with a different cover which says GURPS Basic Set 3rd edition. I bought this after The Fantasy Trip became defunct but I didn’t really appreciate the extra complexity.

As a GURPS enthusiast I think I am in the same camp. There is a simplicity in 3E that got lost in 4E. Plus I prefer the Basic Set to be more bare and requires a sourcebook for particular genre. Also, the Basic Set that is the be all end all diminished the value/usefulness of the sourcebooks. The Passive Defense was removed because of a David Pulver Star Wars house rule we found online. The goal was to make characters more cinematic and needing less armor. It became standard in 4E and made the game instantly less deadly, slightly more action oriented. Overall I think it is better. What is the actual percentage of realistic historical campaign compared to the usual cinematic ones? I would be it is minimal. GURPS has embraced (and should more) the fact that most games are not set in our reality, but in imaginary settings.

This was the first TTRPG I got into! Also, nice shoutout to Smif!

Hi! Firstly, thank you for making a video which specifically answered my question from an earlier video - its appreciated! And yes, i can see where you're coming from on some of the points: Price - yep. Artwork -yep. Passive defence - yep. As far as layout is concerned, i hadn't even noticed it was 3 columns until you pointed it out (and ive been using it religiously for almost a decade!) so clearly that didn't bother me that much. To be honest, i tend to use it as a reference more than anything. Gurps is a toolkit, and the idea (in my opinion) is to use the values and calculations in the books as a baseline for building your own thing. And this brings me to the meat of why i prefer 4e... it really drives this idea home by introducing limitations and enhancements and techniques (for example) - actively encouraging you to build your own thing. This is built on specifically in supplements like Powers and Thaumatology (which i strongly recommend as toolkits for non-gurps games too btw). I love the fact that i can knock up a genre-specific 1-shot quickly by inventing advantages, skills etc which meet exactly my needs at the time, and then go back to the books to reverse-engineer point costs etc by using the rulebooks as a baseline. So my approach to gurps is 1. Understand the mechanics and how characters are built. 2. Build your own thing conceptually. 3. Refer back to the rules to see how to build it. I don't really feel that 3e pushes the whole "toolkit" idea enough - it feels like a collection of spanners, whilst 4e feels more like an infinitely adjustable monkey-wrench. But if you only need the spanners, then i totally support you in that. Either way, i love both editions, and at the end of the day i think it boils down to personal approach and personal preference. Oh, and as an aside - i rarely open the Campaigns 4e book - once you have the basics in your head its mostly fluff! IMHO!

I am so happy to see this, GURPS needs more attention, hoping to do a Fallout GURPS campaign soon once I iron out some kinks in combat encounters I don't like

This is really interesting! I have read a lot of GURPS 4e and you're totally right about the readability of the text. One of my biggest gripes is the GURPS seems to hide new rules in paragraph form with just italics to indicate it's a new rule. I didn't realized it bothered anyone else.

Never was greatly interested in GURPS, save the sourcebooks seemed cool. I would probably have gone 3E Revised prior to watching this video. On the thesis that newer != better when it comes to RPG editions, absolutely agree (OSR guy, kinda comes with the territory). There's often a point where a game's mechanics are OVER-thought. Like a step past rational. Often (not always, I am obviously not talking about GURPS) it seems 2E is the best edition of a given game because 1E is hardly playtested, then 2E is a response to the 'playtesting' done by the fans of 1E. By the time you get to 3E it becomes about building out, pushing rules into unknown territories with questionable outcomes and possibly dubious motives. Sometimes the system is changed entirely in 3E to something completely alien to the fans of the editions before it. There are plenty of games that don't fit this paradigm but tons that do. Especially if the 2E came out 20+ years ago and the creator decided they could make another buck on it with a 3rd edition. They haven't even thought about the game in a decade and are now thinking "Well, how do I make it sufficiently different from 2E to charge money for it?" Recipe for disaster. Thanks for the video.

I pull a little from 3rd and 4th for my TFT solo gaming. Great to see you covering this!!

So who's going to play this while listening to the soundtrack to Last of the Mohecans

I've "convinced" my group to switch from dnd to gurps by choosing to run my upcoming campaign in gurps. Then as I looked into it, I've been making remarks about all the ways dnd doesn't account for very specific things the players have been trying to do, like make vital point strikes, swim in heavy armor, all sorts of stuff. And it all started because I became aware of the tyranny of the flat probability of a d20. Like I always knew it was a flat 5% chance for any outcome, but never realized there's a bell curve with 3d6 or 2d10. Then it got bad when the dm for our ATLA campaign had an npc that was supposed to be a good earthbender but always rolled very poorly. We were all able to just accept she's good at it, but watching her struggle to do any damage in battle was frustrating.

Man I would LOVE to see more videos of people playing Classic Car Wars. Thank you for making this video!!!

I have a question... I played GURPS 3e for many years and loved it. No criticisms whatsoever. But then I got 4e and for a while didn't really see any difference. But the more I read it and thought about it, the more I realised that it provides a MUCH more powerful toolkit than 3e. So my question is simply this: Why do you prefer 3e?

This vid was recommended for me today-my copy is going to arrive tomorrow! Boyoboyoboy! Happy Solstice!

In all honestly playing an Ice Age game is something I would very much like to do.