GURPS has been one of my favorite
role-playing games for more than ten years. Unfortunately, I rarely got
to play with it until recently.
This is mostly my fault, since when I tried to introduce GURPS to my regular gaming group, I did it in a few, short, and disasterous campaigns that rarely lasted for more than three sessions, and permanently soured several members on GURPS (or so it seemed at the time).. But I'm a much better GM now, honest! ;-)
Things changed in December 2001. We were currently playing a Forgotten Realms campaign using the D&D rules, and that campaign had lasted for more than a year - we had started playing shortly after the 3rd edition of the Player's Handbook had come out. But now things were getting stale, the characters had reached the 17th level, and it was becoming increasingly hard to come up with adventures that would present a real challenge to the PCs.
This is mostly my fault, since when I tried to introduce GURPS to my regular gaming group, I did it in a few, short, and disasterous campaigns that rarely lasted for more than three sessions, and permanently soured several members on GURPS (or so it seemed at the time).. But I'm a much better GM now, honest! ;-)
Things changed in December 2001. We were currently playing a Forgotten Realms campaign using the D&D rules, and that campaign had lasted for more than a year - we had started playing shortly after the 3rd edition of the Player's Handbook had come out. But now things were getting stale, the characters had reached the 17th level, and it was becoming increasingly hard to come up with adventures that would present a real challenge to the PCs.
So we were looking at new possible
campaigns, as we always do every year or two. After some discussion, we
settled on the Warhammer World. But what system should we use?
Naturally, I pressed for GURPS, and was astonished when the other
players reluctantly agreed to it.
Looking back, I realized that a big reason for the failure of my previous campaigns was the lack of preparation. When it came to character creation, I brought along about a dozen GURPS books (this was in the pre-Compendia time) and mentioned things like: "There are advantages, disadvantagesm and equipment in these books that you might also want to take a look at". No wonder that all this did was increase player confusion... I resolved to do things differently this time - I prepared appriate racial templates, re-wrote and explained the combat mechanics, introduced new house rules, and compiled extensive equipment lists from various sources. All this work paid off - the campaign has been running uninterrupted since January until now (September 2002) on a weekly basis, and several players mentioned that they have been "pleasantly surprised" by GURPS. Perhaps I can convince them to play in a Transhuman Space campaign one day...
But I digress.
Since the subject of converting Warhammer to GURPS comes up now and then on various RPG messageboard, and I have been asked several times for my conversion rules, I decided to offer them up here on my home page:
I also decided to create several house rules to speed up combat and make combat more cinematic. It's not quite D&D, but it works for us:
And here is my latest project, inspired by the classic Aria RPG:
As always, any suggestions and comments on these articles are welcome!
Feel free to discuss them in my RPG forum!
Back to Main
Looking back, I realized that a big reason for the failure of my previous campaigns was the lack of preparation. When it came to character creation, I brought along about a dozen GURPS books (this was in the pre-Compendia time) and mentioned things like: "There are advantages, disadvantagesm and equipment in these books that you might also want to take a look at". No wonder that all this did was increase player confusion... I resolved to do things differently this time - I prepared appriate racial templates, re-wrote and explained the combat mechanics, introduced new house rules, and compiled extensive equipment lists from various sources. All this work paid off - the campaign has been running uninterrupted since January until now (September 2002) on a weekly basis, and several players mentioned that they have been "pleasantly surprised" by GURPS. Perhaps I can convince them to play in a Transhuman Space campaign one day...
But I digress.
Since the subject of converting Warhammer to GURPS comes up now and then on various RPG messageboard, and I have been asked several times for my conversion rules, I decided to offer them up here on my home page:
I also decided to create several house rules to speed up combat and make combat more cinematic. It's not quite D&D, but it works for us:
And here is my latest project, inspired by the classic Aria RPG:
As always, any suggestions and comments on these articles are welcome!
Feel free to discuss them in my RPG forum!
Back to Main