GURPS Broken Into Pieces

GURPS is at its heart designed a a modular system.  Pile up all the parts and you have an overwhelmingly large and even unwieldy system.  However almost no game is designed to work that way. Instead you pick and use just the pieces that are appropriate to your campaign.

Pick Your Attributes

GURPS has just 4 core attributes, DX and IQ cost 20 points a level and HT and ST cost 10 points a level.  You start with a base of 10 and add or lower the attributes based on your character idea.

Brainy type? Up the IQ level.  Athletic? Up DX for a gymnast, coordinated type, HT for the long distance runner or ST for the strong muscleman. Adjust each to taste and within your point budget not random die rolls.

Higher point games are for more impressive character types.

Calculate Secondary Attributes

Secondary attributes include Basic Speed, Move, Basic Lift, HP, Perception, Will, etc.

These are based on your attributes and you can buy them up or down to adjust to get the type of character you want.  

Smart but head in the clouds so does not notice much? High IQ but buy down Per.

Not very bright but animal like senses? Low IQ but high Per.

Coordinated but not able to move very fast? High DX but buy down your Move (yards you can move in a turn) or even Basic Speed (Initiative and Dodge).

Tweak With Talents

Talents represent someone with a general aptitude. The basic set includes a handful and GURPS Power Ups 3: Talents includes a lot more and how to build them.

They can be for someone who is good with plants or animals, or maybe a natural hacker.  talents are not needed but they allow fine tuning and are cheaper than buying up core attributes.

Choose What You Are Good At

The last part of this process is deciding what skills or advantages you have.

Skills represent things anyone can do with the right training.

Advantages are special abilities, some you have to be born with, some could be trained (Improved memory or ambidexterity).  This is where GURPS really shines in allowing you to fine tune a character but the sheer number of choices can be overwhelming.

The GM should pair down the list and there are tools like the trait sorter that can help as well as free PDFs or the index in the back of GURPS Basic.

For any given campaign you only need a fraction of these abilities.

• GURPS Resource List
• Skill Categories
• FORUM list of Resources
• Skill Primer

Flavor and Getting More Points

Finally we have Disadvantages, Perks and Quirks to round things out.

Perks are very minor advantages and Quirks minor disadvantages for 1 point each that are mostly flavor.

Disadvantages are things like One Leg, Blind, Overconfident, Duty, etc that limit you in some way but also give you points in return to buy other stuff with.

That is really all you need to build a character in GURPS.

Though I do support this idea by T-Bone