As longtime readers of this site may be aware, I have a long history with GURPS. GURPS was the first game I GMed for what is still my primary gaming group, and I GMed GURPS for the majority of all games that I ran from 2006 until 2014. In the intervening decade I moved away from the system because my own interests changed; I began seeking out specific experiences and different approaches to game design. Some of my favorite games and game systems from the last decade, systems as diverse as Twilight:2000, Electric Bastionland, and Apocalypse World, all share the common property of being designed for a specific circumstance. In other words, all of these games could be considered the antithesis of GURPS at least as far as design goals are concerned.

That said, my affection for GURPS and generic game systems in general has never completely waned. Beyond that, when it comes to a more simulative approach to gaming, to times when you want to know how to make a very wide range of situations relevant, GURPS is still king. I cannot think of a better game for bringing verisimilitude and consistency to a very wide set of characters and circumstances. However, as much as I hold a lot of affection for GURPS, there are still some things I’d want to change if I were to return to the system. For this System Hack or two (or three?) I’m going to look at GURPS and look at things which haven’t gotten as much revision and research as the tech level system, or the frightening number of weapons, or the comprehensive and extremely math-heavy solar creation templates of GURPS Space. No, I’m going to be talking about things that have received a lot of attention since GURPS Fourth Edition was released in 2005. Spotlight management. Player-driven goals. And today, advancement.

Advancement in GURPS has been left as an exercise to the reader for a very long time, and that has some advantages and a whole lot more disadvantages. It is an advantage that advancement is defined entirely in terms of character points, because that makes it as modifiable, hackable, and adaptable as every other part of the ruleset. Similarly, the comprehensive time use rules mean that though it wasn’t clearly delineated as such, GURPS had very detailed downtime rules way before Blades in the Dark made it de rigueur. On the disadvantage side is simply that that is all you get. In terms of what your players could spend their newfound character points on or any other ideas about how to structure advancement within the game, we got almost nothing. Today I’m going to change that.

For this System Hack I’m going to detail a new method for putting advancement into GURPS. This method is actually adapted from another game and, in what may be a significant amount of irony for how I’ve described GURPS up to this point, it actually comes from an even older ruleset, BRP. Once I describe how to patch BRP advancement into GURPS, I’ll discuss a bit about how this will change the game and what, if anything, you should do around and in addition to this new bit of mechanics.

On page 498 of the GURPS Basic Set (Characters and Campaigns are numbered in sequence, so the second book starts at page 338), awarding bonus character points is discussed. The average rate of award is 2-3 points per session, with a number of admonishments for players playing their characters ‘inappropriately’ (this has aged poorly, needless to say). This 2-3 point number allows a player to gain a new skill rank either once every session or once every other session, depending on how many ranks they already have in the skill. Of course character points can be spent on anything rules-as-written, and the book gives little advice on how to moderate this other than using your GM-ly powers to force them to justify their purchases. Ugh. It’s this surprising lack of structure (compared to, well, everything else in the entire game) that makes an alternative method of advancement not only appealing but needed for GURPS to stay relevant.

There’s one primary start point for this alternative method. In BRP, when you make a successful skill roll you earn what is called an experience check. At the end of each session you have a chance to roll against the skills in which you earned checks, adding an experience bonus (equal to half your intelligence stat). If you roll a value higher than your skill’s rating, you earn 1d6 (or three) percentage points in the skill. This makes character development feel a bit random, yes, but it also makes it organic, taking any sort of planning out of your hands as a player. Although I may be in the minority here, I like this. I am a big fan of making advancement reactive, having your character’s mechanical abilities develop depending on how you use them. And in BRP, the experience check method works for anything that runs off of a percentile roll, including skills, attributes, spells, and many other mechanics.

In GURPS, the same principle can be ported over with a few minor changes. First, the 3d6 mechanic of GURPS has one sixth the steps of a percentile die, so we are going to slow down the advancement a bit instead of giving a character an entire skill rank every time they make an experience check. Second, GURPS has a very different way of handling untrained skill rolls, so we’re going to modify the rules slightly to adjust for that. In GURPS, you’ll earn an experience check in the same way you do in BRP: making a successful roll using that skill. At the end of the session you’ll roll your experience checks, aiming to exceed your skill’s rating on a 3d6 roll. If you succeed, instead of earning an incremental amount of skill, you will earn one character point to go towards the skill. In GURPS, skill ranks cost between one and four character points: The first and second ranks cost one, the third one costs two, and every subsequent rank costs four. This does mean that earning skills slows down significantly after a few ranks, but this is realistic. It also helps account for the fact that this system, like everything else in GURPS, will be on a bell curve. While a BRP player who rolls really well could see their character earn a 12% increased rating on a skill after two sessions, that same player using this method in GURPS will see double that in two sessions, or potentially even more depending on what the skill’s default is. Given this frontloaded advancement, it makes sense that the rate drops off on the back end.

Speaking of defaults. In GURPS, skill ranks are recorded relative to attributes; a skill may have a rating of Attribute+1 or Attribute-2 depending on how many points are invested. Because most skills require points invested to get up to Attribute+0, the unskilled roll for a skill, or the ‘default’ roll, is typically at a steep penalty, often as low as Attribute-5 or Attribute-6. The issue here is that getting that first skill point is going to be the highest jump in probability of success, and trying to roll over that default value typically gives you between a 95 and 98% chance of success (and it gets lower the better you are in the base attribute, which doesn’t really make sense). That seems rather high for learning something completely new, so for untrained skills (and untrained skills only), you will make a standard check against the attribute that the skill is based off of. So, if the skill is based off of Intelligence and you have an Intelligence of 11, you will try to roll *under* 11 as if it were a normal attribute check. While this still won’t be a hard roll for characters with a fair number of character points, it also won’t be an automatic win.

On the flipside, characters will eventually get to effective skill ratings of 18, making it numerically impossible to continue advancing. Therefore, while this will still be very slow advancement, if you roll an 18 on an experience check, no matter your rating, it counts as a character point towards the skill. This is reflective of BRP’s 100% rule, where any roll over 100% (possible due to the experience bonus) counts as increasing the skill even if it doesn’t exceed the skill rating.

Similar to BRP, we can also apply this to any GURPS element which uses the core 3d6 roll, including attributes, spells, and techniques. While I’m normally cagey about allowing attributes to increase at all in GURPS, if we keep the character point math it will slow attribute increases down fairly significantly; remember that Strength and Health cost ten points per level while Dexterity and IQ cost twenty. Besides that, pure attribute rolls come up rarely in GURPS; the only checks you’re going to be making with any frequency are Perception, Will, and maybe Health if you get hurt a lot.

There are a few things that are just off the table for experience checks in GURPS. First, if a skill has no default, there’s no way to learn it without being taught. Although that gates some skills fairly significantly, I like that consequence. It feels more realistic and more interesting that a character would, say, have to go find a sensei to learn Karate rather than just putting a couple points in it. There’s also no way to earn advantages in-game, and in my experience with GURPS I see this as more of a benefit than a drawback. Additional advantages bought midgame can often be really unbalancing, to the point that I usually disallowed them. If, however, an advantage makes sense, then you can do what is suggested in the GURPS Basic Set: give rewards other than character points. There are many advantages and non-skill attributes (like Status and Rank) which both can’t be earned using this experience check method but also would make sense as rewards when they’re diegetically appropriate. If the PCs overthrow a king and take his place on the throne, they can just outright get status from that instead of a more generic reward. If the PCs get an ally, they can claim the mechanical benefit of the ally advantage. By completely stepping away from treating advancement as a currency, it allows the characters to advance in a way that suits the ongoing story and possibly enhances it as well.

---

Suiting the ongoing story is going to be an ongoing theme in my GURPS System Hacks. The underlying mathematical tools used to develop the skill system are powerful, but what GURPS often lacks is framing that would help use these tools more effectively and in a way more reflective of a wider range of game experiences. Next time, I plan on looking at Disadvantages which use the Frequency of Appearance mechanic, and using that mechanic in a different way that is more reflective of the spotlight impacts of these Disadvantages than a simple negative point value. It also addresses the fact that Merit/Flaw-based character generation is seen as archaic these days, and lets you use the GURPS Disadvantages to their fullest without being sucked into a min-max vortex. If you have your own alternate rules or hacks for GURPS feel free to comment or reach out, and maybe some of these will be featured in a future System Hack. For now though, play some games, roll along a bell curve, and let’s keep the GURPS hacking going.

Like what Cannibal Halfling Gaming is doing and want to help us bring games and gamers together? First, you can follow me @LevelOneWonk@dice.camp for RPG commentary, relevant retweets, and maybe some rambling. You can also find our Discord channel and drop in to chat with our authors and get every new post as it comes out. You can travel to DriveThruRPG through one of our fine and elegantly-crafted links, which generates credit that lets us get more games to work with! Finally, you can support us directly on Patreon, which lets us cover costs, pay our contributors, and save up for projects. Thanks for reading!