Home > GURPS

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 , 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. 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.

GURPS is 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.

GURPS is part of the first wave of role-playing games that eschews random generation of characters in favor of a point-based system. 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 SystemThe Hero System is the overarching name given to the generic rules underlying the Hero Games role-playing games such as Champions, Fantasy Hero, Star Hero, and Justice, Inc. It was one of the first systems to forgo the use of polyhedral dice. Originally,, 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 more popular role-playing games on the market today.

One of the strengths of GURPS, say its proponents, lies in its large number 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 Robin Laws, S. John RossJohn Ross was born Samuel John Ross, Junior in Cumberland, Maryland on July 15, 1971, the son of Sam and Donna Ross. He is known primarily as a writer of adventure- roleplaying game material, including work for Steve Jackson Games, TSR, Wizards of the Coa and FUDGEFudge the Freeform Universal Do-it-Yourself Gaming Engine is a generic role-playing game. Aptly described as a gaming engine, Fudge comes with neither a preset world nor a preset list of attributes for characters. Game masters, players, and world builders creator Steffan O'Sullivan).

Before GURPS, Steve Jackson wrote a set of games called The Fantasy TripThe Fantasy Trip is a role-playing game that was designed by Steve Jackson and was published by Metagaming. It was developed from Metagaming's Melee and Wizard microgames, which provided the basic combat and magic rules. These games could be played on the, which are strongly related to GURPS.

GURPS also became part of the hackerHacker is a term used to describe different types of computer experts. It is also sometimes extended to mean any kind of expert, especially with the connotation of having particularly detailed knowledge or of cleverly circumventing limits. The meaning of sub-culture, when the company's Austen offices were raided as part of Operation SundevilOperation Sundevil was a 1990 nation-wide Secret Service crackdown on "illegal computer hacking activities". Along with the Chicago Task Force and the Arizona Organized Crime and Racketeering Bureau, they conducted raids in Austin, Cincinnati, Detroit, Lo, which was targeting the author of GURPS CyberpunkWritten by Loyd Blankenship and published by Steve Jackson Games in 1995, GURPS Cyberpunk is a sourcebook for a cyberpunk-themed role-playing game based in a fictional, near-future dystopia such as that envisioned by William Gibson in his influential nove. Word spread that the feds had mistaken a guide to pretending to take down fictional computers for a handbook on computer crime. The incident was directly contributory to the founding of the Electronic Frontier FoundationThe Electronic Frontier Foundation EFF is a non-profit advocacy and legal organization with the stated purpose of being dedicated to preserving first amendment rights in the context of today's digital age. Its stated main goal is to ". educate the press,.