Is GURPS Really Universal? Retrospective and Analysis

16 Nov, 2025

When someone says Steve Jackson’s Generic Universal Roleplaying System can run anything you want it to, they’re correct. On technicality.

Dadstep of To Be Resolved had asked if anyone had written a blog post on the styles of play encoded in “generic” systems (such as Cypher, Genesys, Basic Roleplaying, among others). This is a wonderful idea, but there’s a roadblock preventing one person from being able to write the definitive post here, as I think there would be very few people with enough experience in the broad swaths of these generic systems.

My solution, if all goes well, is to collaborate with some other bloggers on sharing our experience with our preferred (or at the very least most-played) generic systems to build towards a larger conversation about these games. So here’s my part, a brief analysis and retrospective of my experiences with GURPS. Edit: Success! We've got great posts by To Be Resolved on Cypher, Fluorite Guillotine on Cortex Prime, and LootLootLore on Savage Worlds. Go check them out!

Note: Since I don’t have the energy to go through and hyperlink all of the different GURPS books I may end up discussing here, I’ll just say everything can be found easily on the Steve Jackson Games store.

How does GURPS work?

Let's start by explaining some top-down stuff about GURPS. Recently, I’ve come to think of GURPS as an engine that never got a flagship game, rather than a game in and of itself. GURPS is a massive collection of rules of varying tone and complexity, sometimes in direct contradiction of each other, united by a core chassis. GURPS is always a 3d6-roll-under system, it is typically a point-buy system, and it has a reputation for heavy crunch.

Despite its reputation for crunch, there are many supplements such as the free GURPS Lite and GURPS Ultralite that turn the system into a 32-page booklet and a 1-page foldable pamphlet, respectively. GURPS Action has rules to simplify the process of setting modifiers and even reducing the skill-system to generalized umbrellas called “Wildcard skills”.

My GURPStory

I first discovered GURPS through a TikTok meme account (that app is out of my life now, don’t worry) called “gurpsfederalagent” making tongue-in-cheek “anti-5e propaganda” posts. These were amusing, and they kept popping up, but at this point GURPS was still basically a meme to me; nobody actually plays GURPS. I mean, look at that silly name? Who’d play something with such a silly name?

What started to win me over were these videos where gurpsfed would effectively translate fight scenes from film and TV into the GURPS ruleset. Here’s a somewhat more recent example I could find on Youtube Shorts, though the videos I had seen were a few years older than this. These videos are very effective at making GURPS combat seem dynamic, and to this day I am still a sucker for some good action (I still love me some crunchy combat, I still run Pathfinder 2e after all), so I was hooked.

Guided by gurpsfed’s advice to use as few rules as possible and stick to the core chassis presented in GURPS Lite, I set up a historical fantasy pirate game. This game was very brief, 3-4 sessions of some swashbuckling sword fights, a bit of King Kong-esque island exploration, and a small naval battle to tie it together. It was a lot of fun! I took things pretty easy on combat, so while players were shocked at how deadly things could get, they never ended up on that end of it (this is a running theme in my own GURPS experiences). Trawling through the depths of character generation options gave some neat prompts, a personal favorite being the navy veteran who had a bad back; the party would have to stop in their tracks to try and crack her back after every encounter to prevent penalties on her Dexterity checks. My players took a long time to make their characters, but I never felt too intimidated as a GM.

My second game was an ambitious mess. We had this bizarre homebrew apocalyptic Weird West setting, the party composed of an undead surgeon, a vampire (part of the conceit was the sun was rarely out in this world), a sorcerer vampire-hunter who could harness the sun even when it was down, an oil-baron with an elephant rifle, and a nun with a shotgun. Taking about 8 sessions, it was a relatively simple investigation with some over-the-top gunfights with werewolves, a vampire cult, some wild chupacabras, and finally a showdown with a freshly-revived ancient necromancer (did I mention there were cowboys?).

My players love it, and insist it was the best campaign I’ve ever ran, but I think there was a lot wrong with it. I was beginning to realize that the intense character creation process (it took my players about a week to get them in, I was chasing people after the deadline, it was a lot to start a game) combined with the lethality of combat made me very afraid to meaningfully challenge the players. It wasn’t until far too late in my prep I had finally come to the realization that not every fight has to be winnable, either, so what we ended up with was a game where almost everything could be taken down with ease; negotiations were rarely had, and were to an extent robbed of meaning as the players could intuit that they’d easily stomp their enemies should it go south. The only exception were those damned random encounter chupacabras; I didn’t realized when I picked them out from one of the supplements that their Health score was insanely high, and since you have to fail a Health check to fall unconscious in GURPS until you’re at -4 times your max HP or something ludicrous like that, those fuckers just would not die. It was a mess, and I gave an easy “we can skip this encounter” out to the players, but for whatever reason they didn’t bite. There were some other things I wish I did differently in the game, but those don’t have to do with GURPS; things were still running pretty smoothly with the system.

My third game was a cyberpunk psionics game. This 4-5 session run-and-gun action game was a bad campaign for mostly non-GURPS reasons, but the system had a few things to do with it. At this point, where you get into the super high tech-levels, guns become a pain in the ass to manage:

When you roll to hit with firearms in GURPS, you have to first determine how many shots you’d like to fire, up to your gun’s rate-of-fire stat. You roll your gun skill minus the range modifier (which you determine from the utterly disgusting speed/range table, please just use the range bands in Action instead) but plus the Rapid Fire Bonus (also a table). Should the roll succeed ,each full multiple of the gun’s Rate of Fire on your Margin of Success (target number subtracted by dice result) determines how many extra bullets can hit the opponent should they fail to defend. The target rolls their dodge, and if they succeed dodge a number of bullets equal to their Margin of Success. Then, you roll damage for each bullet individually, subtracted by the target’s Damage Resistance, then multiply the remaining damage by the relevant Wound Multiplier (usually 1.5x for Large Piercing).¹ The VTT did a lot of the number-crunching for us, so running with very low Rate-of-Fire 18-19th century weapons wasn’t too bad, but adding high rates of fire really slowed things down and the procedure became a bit of a headache.

There was also a lot of chafing with the psionic powers, especially in the weird ways the designers decided to allocate points. For example the rule that “You can manipulate distant objects just as if you were grasping them in a pair of hands with ST equal to your Telekinesis (TK) level” required a very heavy point expenditure to do the sort of Akira wall-slamming shit; 50 points would get you the strength of an average human being, whereas a Psychic Vampire can drain a target’s intelligence to 0, effectively removing them from combat, in less than 3 rounds, using a skill roll contest that is much more likely to succeed than a typical attack roll. We really started to chafe with the system here.

My last experiment with GURPS was a terribly simulationist heist game set in the late 1960s. This was my personal favorite, a brief 3-session scenario with only a single, very brief, combat. At this point I had read my fair share of OSR blogs, and wanted to experiment with some of the techniques I’d learned in this system, and it went wonderfully. The lethality of combat was emphasized to the players, and they spent a ton of time planning their heist and making sure everything went smoothly. Even the complications I’d included were dealt with efficiently, the job never turned sour, and everybody loved it. I’m being quite a bit spare on the details as I want to write a future post about the experience of running this game. In short, GURPS worked really well here, but there are many rules-light systems out there that also keep that philosophy in their character creation; sorry Steve Jackson, but I will never defend having to budget 100+ points.

What did I learn from all this?

GURPS is an old system; its newest edition is 20 years old at this point. Needless to say, RPGs have changed since then. If I had to sum up the design philosophy in GURPS in one sentence, it’d be the introductory sentence to the Throwing Distance rules on page 355 of the Basic set: “To avoid slowing down the game with math, the GM should allow any throw he deems reasonable . . . but when you need to know the exact distance you can throw an object, use the following procedure”. The wargaming roots run heavy in this system, its overwhelming deluge of rules are designed for the primary function of solving table disputes, like the earliest editions of the Guinness Book of World Records existed to solve petty arguments at the pub. Rules are a safety tool to take heat off of the GM for any unfortunate consequences.

As rules are meant to outline “general expectations for how the world will behave” (thanks Markus!), the primary mode of the Basic Set rules of GURPS is to attempt to produce a believable simulation of the game world. This is not to map GURPS onto the Gamist-Narrative-Simulationist model, or any sort of model of RPG design in some sort of “is it a sandwich” or “is water wet” semantic kerfuffle, but to establish how and why I think GURPS fails as a truly universal system. GURPS’ design is additive: it begins with an ultra-simple core chassis, and rules are fit atop of it like a Lego baseplate to suit the needs of your game. The problem is that in order to achieve its “rules as impartial referee” goals, it had to adapt a rather limiting foundation.

GURPS assumes that by default you will be playing as an average person in a realistic world. Every change you would like to add from base reality is an additional rule you add to the game, additional effort on the GM to discover and implement and the players to remember. There is no genre of fiction that you absolutely cannot run in GURPS, but there are some that require an exponential amount of effort compared to others. Sure, my 1960s heist was about as easy to run as my historical fantasy pirates game, but if you told me to run Dragonball Z in GURPS I’d have to ask for a TI-84 calculator and a fucking salary. Just look at this fan-made statblock for Spider-Man!²

My campaigns were designed to push the envelope of GURPS in different directions, some much easier than others, but they always worked. I very rarely felt as if it was the designer’s fault for any mishaps in my games as these rules have a remarkable internal consistency. Yet for all the reasons I’ve described here, I would hesitate to call GURPS my first choice for any specific genre.

Do I still like GURPS?

I’ve been pretty brutal towards this system here. I’ve rambled on about all the ways it made my GMing life harder and took a dump on its core design goal. It really seems like I don’t like GURPS.

I’m going to run it again soon.

Sure, GURPS is not a good universal system. It’s also not the best system at emulating any one genre or style of play. Anything you run in it will above anything else feel like GURPS. And I think I still like it.

I’ve been gravitating towards the OSR/NSR as of late, but I can’t deny I’m still a sucker for some good combat mechanics. The mechanics on display here are wholly unique, and at their best they really do feel as dynamic and dare-I-say "cinematic" as those silly gurpsfederalagent TikToks/Youtube Shorts. I’ve had injured party members crawling behind cover to line up the perfect shot, a desperate hand-to-hand struggle between a pirate and a navy soldier to drown each-other in the waters of a dark cavern, a corporate mercenary toss a grenade at the group only for their telekinetic to just toss it back with their mind. Of course all of these things are possible in a rules-light system, but I cannot deny that sometimes my ape brain likes rules, and enjoys the fact that we made all of this happen naturally within the tight constraints of a traditional, crunchy roleplaying game.

That same form of ape-brain rules-validation (no shame in it, honest), comes in the character creation process. GURPS makes me understand modern D&D and Pathfinder “build” culture in a way no other system I’ve played has. It feels like a back-and-forth between you and the designers, one where the designers somehow always have your back; I remember testing the system by trying to make a fencer (a consistent archetype of mine likely spurred by Count Dooku and Inigo Montoya), cracking open the Martial Arts supplement, only for it to ask me if I was referring to the Italian, Spanish, or French styles.

It’s 2025, and I’m done having guilty pleasure. I will continue to love GURPS even as it goes against all modern design sensibilities, including my own, and I’ll keep running it knowing it’s the one of the biggest punchlines of the RPG scene.

GURPS sucks, and I love it. But it's only sort of universal.