GURPS (Generic Universal RolePlaying System), created by Steve Jackson Games in 1986, is designed specifically to be a role-playing game that adapts to any imaginary gaming environment.

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 System, 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 Ross and FUDGE creator Steffan O'Sullivan).

Before GURPS, Steve Jackson wrote a set of games called The Fantasy Trip, which are strongly related to GURPS.

GURPS also became part of the hacker sub-culture, when the company's Austen offices were raided as part of Operation Sundevil, which was targeting the author of GURPS Cyberpunk. 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 Foundation.

Steve Jackson Games released GURPS Fourth Edition at the first day of Gen Con on 19 August 2004. It promises to simplify and streamline most areas of play and character creation. Some of the changes include: an edited and rationalized skill list, clarification of the difference between ability from experience and from inborn talent, simplifed language rules, revised technology levels. The 4th edition was sold as two hardcover, full-colour books.

GURPS in other media

The computer game publisher Interplay licensed GURPS as the basis for a post-nuclear war role-playing computer game in 1995. Late in development, after objections from Steve Jackson over some of the game's violent content, the GURPS character building system was replaced with an Interplay-created system, the GURPS name was dropped, and the game was released under the name Fallout.

See also

• List of GURPS books

External links

• A printable PDF version http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/lite/ of the "lite" rulebook
• Official website of GURPS : http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/
• Pyramid Magazine http://www.sjgames.com/pyramid/ , a weekly online magazine devoted to supporting GURPS
• 4th edition FAQ http://www.sjgames.com/gurps/faq/4efaq.html
• GURPS NPC Generator http://ayinger.no-ip.info/