paizo.com - GURPS Fourth Edition Basic Set: Characters Hardcover

GURPS Fourth Edition Basic Set: Characters Hardcover
Steve Jackson Games

Anything You Want.

Basic Set: Characters combines information from Basic Set, Third Edition and Compendium I, plus hundreds of new and updated rules! This book and Basic Set: Campaigns together replace Basic Set, Compendium I, and Compendium II, plus add new material.

GURPS is the most flexible roleplaying system ever created. With just this book, you can adventure in any world you can imagine. Use all types of weapons from clubs to lasers, magic and martial arts, psionics and superpowers.

Create exactly the character you want to play—your favorite fictional hero, or your own original invention. Choose from over 400 advantages and disadvantages, over 350 skills, spells, and techniques. Customize your character with individual perks and quirks, and you're ready to go.

No more switching game systems when you change campaigns! GURPS gives you one set of clear, comprehensive rules to cover any background. This new Fourth Edition is based on 16 years of gamer feedback from the Third Edition, and is faster and easier to play than ever before.

GURPS makes the Game Master's job easy and fun. All rules are carefully organized, indexed, and cross-referenced. Charts and tables are clear and legible. And to help you introduce new players to the system, there's a "Quick Start" section which covers the basics in a few pages.

This is Book 1 of the two-volume Basic Set, and contains everything you need to create and play a GURPS Fourth Edition character. Only this book is necessary to play. Game Masters, and players wanting more detail, will find Book 2 valuable.

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So, I'm totally new to GURPS. My impressions are almost all positive. The book is well put together and has a good production value. A while back I had been designing my own RPG system to fix a lot of the things that annoyed me about other systems I'd used, and lo-and-behold: GURPS is like a properly well-developed end-result of where I was going. I love the flexibility of the system and it's ability to capture a wide variety of characters. As a first test I made a character representing myself and it was incredibly accurate. As a lover of the rules of RPG systems this was a great buy.

New editions fill me with a sense of apprehension. With a few notable exceptions, there generally isn't enough different to have a purpose to a new edition.

I'm happy to say I was wrong. GURPS 4th edition is polished, primped, buffed and trimmed to be slick, easy and expandable, moreso than all the previous editions. This book, the base "Player's Handbook" if you will, has all the basic stuff you need, breaking down Advantages, Disadvantages, and Traits into categories (noted by icons) so that a GM can easily select the abilities available to players in any campaign that a GM may wish to create. Urban Horror? Can Do. Space Opera? Can Do. Fantasy? Can Do. Cyberpunk? Can Do.

GURPS is known to have a whole metric buttload of sourcebooks, but they've managed to condense several notable sourcebooks (Magic, Powers) into bite-size chapters - enough material that you could run a decent game with what's there. In the book, they also provide several examples of campaign settings, something that was previously lacking in the Basic Sets of previous editions.

Another first in this Fourth Edition is color. All the pages are in bright, glossy full-color with illustrations. While the pages are a bit thinner, they should stand up to a lot of flipping between sections. The book is also well organized with a very comprehensive index (something that can't be said for some of the recent WotC books).

If you're looking for a flexible game system that can handle any campaign you want to play, or a mish-mash of genres, GURPS (Generic Universal Roleplaying System) just might fit the bill.

To give you an idea of how excited this new edition is, my husband, a long time gamer, was just flipping through it going, "Wow! They've really changed things up!"