Talk:GURPS

This article was nominated for deletion on 24 August 2007. The result of the discussion was Keep.

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Fallout[edit]

Re GURPS Fallout: I don't think it was violence in the material that caused the falling out (no pun intended) between Interplay and SJG. Almafeta 02:44, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)

It's not clear that there were "disagreements" between the two companies. Per the Daily Illuminators for March, 1997, Steve Jackson thought everything was going along fine until Interplay publicly announced they were dropping the "GURPS" part. 12.45.255.66 (talk) 17:52, 28 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

SunDevil[edit]

The raid on the GURPS offices had nothing to do with Sand Devil operation, follow the link and see. —Wikijeff

Isn't it called Operation Sundevil? I had always heard they were specifically after the Cyberpunk author because he was a hacker, but since SJG was raided and all their files taken it had hurt the company financially until the investigtaion ended, which is why they sued for invasion of privacy and harrasment. So yes, it a way they were "involved" with Sundevil. I had also heard they raided the offices of Alternative Tentacles the record label of Jello Biafra at the same time which was in the same building as SJG. Cyberia23 18:26, 7 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Heres the relevant quote from the SJGames site linked in the dispute notice:

5. This was part of Operation Sun Devil.

No it wasn't. Sun Devil was a totally separate project, aimed at credit card fraud. Because it had a neat name, it got a lot of headlines. Since computers were involved, some reporters got the two confused. The Secret Service helped the confusion along by refusing to comment on what was, or wasn't part of Sun Devil. Sun Devil was not a "hacker" investigation. So says Gail Thackeray, who was its spearhead.

How is this as a corrected paragraph?

GURPS also became part of the hacker sub-culture, when the company's Austin offices were raided by the Secret Service. The target was the author of GURPS Cyberpunk in relation to documents stolen from Bell South relating to the E911 Emergency Response system. The incident was directly contributory to the founding of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. A common error suggests that this raid was in fact part of Operation Sundevil and carried out by the FBI. Sundevil was in action at the same time, but was completely separate.

Brehaut 03:32, 8 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Sounds alright to me. Just seems like a lot of confusion as to what really happened out there. Like I mentioned, I had always heard the Feds also raded Jello Biafra's record label at the same time, since SJG shared the same office building. That raid was supposedly over an indecency charge and had nothing to do with computer hacking. I guess they were trying to kill two birds with one stone that day. Cyberia23 15:58, 8 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Seeing as nobody else commented, i went and made the change and removed the dispute warning. Also, the whole GURPS Concept section probably needs to be a bit refactored, its a mess of random paragraphs Brehaut 10:07, 12 December 2005 (UTC)[reply]

"overview of the GURPS mechanics" is too self-referential. i'm changing it to "Mechanics of the game" Blueaster 20:55, 27 August 2006 (UTC)[reply]

"Kromm Notes (3rd edition) The collected rulings of Dr. Kromm, GURPS Line Editor at Steve Jackson Games" - links to a site that is no longer valid. It should be deleted. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ubrgeek (talk • contribs) 17:57, 30 June 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Commercial success?[edit]

Some discussion of the commercial success of the GURPS system would be a welcome addition. -Toptomcat 02:22, 26 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Reviews[edit]

Just a quick note to mention there is a review of first edition GURPs in WHite Dwarf (Magazine) #83 page 4. -Waza 13:34, 20 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Other reviews to help aid this article. Will add when I get the chance.

Web Warlock 12:41, 19 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Somebody might also check:

http://www.gamingreport.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=Reviews&file=index&req=showcontent&id=1341

Goochelaar 17:04, 19 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Research request[edit]

A request to search academic journals for GURPS has been received and completed. Results may be found here. Wish there was better news for you guys. /Blaxthos 00:31, 19 October 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Since 2007, things seem to have changed... Below are results from the first three pages of Google Scholar results. Several are conference papers and a book or two, but the journals include library science, education, philosophy, and design. Some are more passing references, but several of them focus specifically on GURPS. —Carter (talk) 13:26, 1 July 2021 (UTC)[reply]

The following references may be useful when improving this article in the future:

Phillips, Brian David (November 2011). "Interactive Pynchon: Teaching Thomas Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49 with Roleplaying Games" (PDF). Journal of Interactive Drama. 4.1: 37–50. ISSN 1994-1250.
Sich, Dan (2012). "Dungeons and downloads: collecting tabletop fantasy role‐playing games in the age of downloadable PDFs". Collection Building. 31 (2): 60–65. doi:10.1108/01604951211229854. ISSN 0160-4953.
Tabletop Role-Playing Games and the Experience of Imagined Worlds. Camden, London, England: Palgrave Macmillan. 2019. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-29127-3_6. ISBN 978-3-030-29126-6.
Forsythe, Carlie (2020). "Roll for Initiative: A Librarian's Primer for Collecting Tabletop Role-Playing Games". Emerging Library & Information Perspectives. 3 (1): 187–198. doi:10.5206/elip.v3i1.8637.
Hall, Cristin M.; McMullen, Sonya A.H.; Hall, David L.; McMullen, Mac J.; Pursel, Barton K. (2008). Perspectives on visualization and virtual world technologies for multi-sensor data fusion. 11th International Conference on Information Fusion. Cologne, Germany. pp. 1–6.
Björk, Staffan; Zagal, José P. (2018). Game Design and Role-Playing Games. Milton Park, England: Routledge. ISBN 9781315637532.
Liberato, Vinícius; Pegoraro, Éverly (2019). RPG e Steampunk: Questionamentos do Tempo Presente [RPG and Steampunk: Questions for the Present Time] (PDF). Intercom — Sociedade Brasileira de Estudos Interdisciplinares da Comunicação: XX Congresso de Ciências da Comunicação na Região Sul (in Brazilian Portuguese). Porto Alegre, Brazil.
Machado, Mário Lúcio Mesquita; de Souza, Diego Gomes; Dandolini, Gertrudes A.; de Souza, João Artur; Silveira, Ricardo Azambuja (July 2004). Implementing a Pedagogical Game: an Aproach using Multiagents Systems. IADIS Intertnational Conference e-Society 2014. Ávila, Spain. pp. 292–298. ISBN 972-98947-5-2.
Alves, Fábio Pereira; Santos, Jean Carlos Oliveira; Maciel, Cristiano (November 2015). Evaluation of character creation rules in RPG as a guide for creating personas. IHC '15: Proceedings of the 14th Brazilian Symposium on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Salvador, Brazil. p. 1–4. doi:10.1145/3148456.3148506.
Vu, Ryan (2017). "Fantasy After Representation: D&D, Game of Thrones, and Postmodern World-Building". Extrapolation. 58 (2–3): 273–301. doi:10.3828/extr.2017.14.
Garthoff, Jon (2018). "Playability as Realism". Journal of the Philosophy of Games. 1 (1). doi:10.5617/jpg.2705. ISSN 2535-4388.
Attebery, Stina; Pearson, Josh (2017). "Today's Cyborg Is Stylish: The Humanity Cost of Posthuman Fashion in Cyberpunk 2020". In Murphy, Graham J.; Schmeink, Lars (eds.). Cyberpunk and Visual Culture. New York, New York: Routledge. pp. 55–80. doi:10.4324/9781315161372. ISBN 9781315161372.

Thanks for this research, Carter! I switched this to the Refideas template, as I am currently testing a new template on a small selection of articles, and when the editnotice goes live anyone who edits the article will get a notice about references on the talk page. :) See Template talk:Refideas editnotice if you want to give feedback to that. BOZ (talk) 13:53, 14 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Not the first commercially successful generic system[edit]

This article claimed that GURPS was the first commercially successful generic RPG system. I don't know about Supergame, but Chaosium and Hero Games had GURPS beat by 5 years, and both still have games on the market using that system. I reworded it as the most commercially successful such system, though even there we'd need some good solid references.DreamGuy (talk) 22:01, 1 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Champions may have been in print before GURPS, but the HERO System, as such, was first published in 1989. Basic Role-Playing wasn't published as a standalone game until just a few years ago; like Champions, it started out being genre-specific. If we do get to count Champions and CoC, then by rights we should count Fantasy Trip as in equal fashion being GURPS' lineal predecessor ... which dates from 1980 if you hold with In The Labyrinth, and 1977 if you date from the publication of Melee. Ravenswing 08:37, 2 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, but no. BRP was, in fact, published as a standalone book in 1980. I don't know why you think it came out only recently. If we were to give the first date of the first game to use a similar system, that would be Runequest. The Hero System *book* was not released until after GURPS, but the Hero *system* itself was used in a wide variety of products before GURPS was released, and that's what that part of the article is talking about (needing separate systems for every game). Also, Champions *itself* started as genre-specific, but the system was developed from the ground up to be used for multiple genres - Fantasy Hero was originally going to be released first, Danger International and Justice Inc. came out with the Hero System also before GURPS did. So both by "first published generic game system" (BRP) and "system created to be used in multiple genres from day one and used in many published games" (Hero System), GURPS came only later.

Your argument for then including the Fantasy Trip as proof of GURPS being first doesn't work either, as it was neither generic (it and its predecessors were all fantasy-based, which does not distinguish it from Dungeons and Dragons' problems modeling other genres, which is, again, what the article is talking about) nor an example of many games in different genres being out at the same time using the same system. If you are comparing it to Champions and related products in that way, then the second game out using the similar system and a non-fantasy genre would be GURPS itself, which would mean it again still comes after BRP and the Hero System.

Please do not revert to historically incorrect version of events to give GURPS credit for something it does not deserve any which way you decide to measure things. DreamGuy (talk) 20:12, 4 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Additionally, even if you deny the existence of BRP in 1980, there's always it's expansion, Worlds of Wonder, which is multi-genre like the Hero System's various games and still came out before GURPS. DreamGuy (talk) 20:27, 4 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Now with reliable source added, as we should have had many years ago. DreamGuy (talk) 20:56, 4 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]