Laughs in GURPS
this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2025
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Oh man, I really tried it one time.... But I couldn't really wrap my head around it, nor get my players to learn it. Also I wanted some pre-made monsters to toss into an encounter... Couldn't find anything like that. You have to make every monster from scratch? I might be remembering that wrong.
There are a few places I've found with lots of prebuilt monsters for GURPS, though they aren't really consolidated in one place. I usually look through one if the following if I want something prebuilt:
- the creatures of the night books (mostly solitary monsters you could design an adventure around, with suggestions for each one)
- the fantasy bestiary (lots of generic and mythological monsters from all over the world, with stats and descriptions for each one)
- dungeon fantasy monsters 1-3 (lots of monsters, kinda built with dungeon fantasy settings and power levels in mind)
- the gurps repository also has tons of free and generic statblocks
You can do that in Dungeon Fantasy, which is basically just GURPS with a bunch of pre-made classes and stuff. But the strength of regular GURPS is the ability to handle any idea you can throw at it. It really shines when making your genre-bent homebrew come to life. Once you get comfortable with how the system scales things, you can really just wing it with monsters on the fly.
And yet, human fighter with basic sword and shield feats is still just as satisfying as day 1 :)
edit: Fuck, can I just gush about fighters in PF2e for a sec? Paizo really nailed the "boring normal" class, just by virtue of having them be slightly more accurate in combat - thereby boosting both crit rate for first swings, and offsetting the multi-attack penalty for followup swings. I've never had more fun dropping normal attacks in a ttrpg because each swing was just that much more likely to drop a juicy crit, followed up by a knockdown proc from choosing to be a hammer specialist or a pindown from being a bow specialist, etc. You then have a bunch of action condensers from your feats (which you can actually swap out on a day to day basis if you're so inclined) to do your cool normal attacks more often in a dynamic combat. And reactive strike at level 1 practically doubles your normal attack output right out of the gate if your cool pancake horfing teammates futz with some magic or wrestling bullshit to knock enemies prone.
Normal attacks fucking rule.
Pathfinder is for my soul. I live off that crunchy shit.
however 8 different spells from 11 different books that all give +1 to profession (tailor) checks at night time may have been a poor design choice
Haha we used to live for that shit in the days of 3e/3.5
EDIT: I see now you thought they meant Pathfinder 1e, which explains it. Since that's basically the same as 3.5 but better lol.
what spells are those
so today I realized this meme is about 2e which so far hasn't fallen into the same pattern of content bloat (give it time, we live in a society). so my point is moot, even if I wasn't exaggerating two complaints simultaneously .
but in 1e after years and years of releasing content to keep the business alive, Paizo ended up with spells like False Age, Wizened Appearence, Youthful Appearence, False Face, Transplant Visage, Disguise Self and probably some others that all did the same thing with slight changes. There's a similar abundance of spells to just help your character not read books like Skim, Memorize Page, Perusal, Commune With Texts, and Explode Head (the most redundant spell of all)
Then there's ones with mild bonuses to hyper-specific use cases. Polypurpose Panacea has 5 different effects that are all +1 to sleeping or digestion. Cultural Adaptation is similar but for every check that isn't speaking another language. I can't remember the name of it but there's one that just gives you +1 to checks made to be a Sailorman. Most of these are superseded by other spells that will just give bonuses to entire groups of skills like Crafter's Fortune but still have specific use cases
I cannot recommend the Pathbuilder app enough. It narrows everything down to the available options based on what you've chosen so far, without taking the option of house ruling away from you.
Just keep in mind that cross-referencing options with Archives of Nethys is also super important. I've had 2 players build overly complicated characters and needed a ton of help to unbork them simply because they didn't read anything before making a selection
Can you link the app? I cannot find it.
It's not available yet on iOS (though an iOS port is in development). You can find it on the web at pathbuilder2e.com. Mobile and web apps don't sync, though. The paid versions allow you to save characters to Google Drive, which you can use to sync them.
oh, it's just pathfinder 2? darn. Would love to switch off of PCGen, but there isn't much for just character sheets for pathfinder 1e from what I've found.
There's a Pathbuilder 1e, but I think it might only be for Android. I haven't seen a web-based version.
*if you have donated/bought the premium version
Okay, cloud saving, custom items and companions for a single payment of 4.50 EUR. But you can completely disregard the rules and freely give skills, spells and feats with the free version. The app is very well maintained, gets updates at least monthly. They were so fast with the implementation of the remaster. I'd love to gift the app to people in my group, who are struggling a bit more financially, but Google doesn't have a functionality like that unfortunately.
only 4.5 EUR... it's 20.99 BRL
i hate money :D (or maybe i just hate inflation)
I got a buddy that rolls randomly for all of those, only rerolling if they gets a combination they already used
the fun thing is, you could literally just do everything completely randomly and your build will still be good
I wouldn't know
I make all my choices based on sheer Rule of Cool-ness -- I start with a vibe and build for that.
BUT. None of my GMs are tryhards, so maybe if I brought my characters to a tryhard session they'd get wiped.
honestly choosing the coolest thing every time is probably the best way to build a character
maybe, but for tryhard games you'd make a tryhard character anyway
maybe, but for tryhard games you’d make a tryhard character anyway
That's the thing though
I have no idea how.
Since PF2 came out I got by just fine on making unique and fun but entirely unoptimised characters. So I never bothered learning what synergises with what to make a tryhard character.
oh well you'd just have to play a bunch of characters and see what is strongest
or watch videos about optimizing characters. there are a bunch of those (a couple of youtube channels i'd recommend for that are swingripper and mathfinder)
Eh, there's at least 1 exception: toxicologist alchemist. Especially if you're about to play Abomination vaults
Toxicology got some buffs in the remaster that let them morph poison damage to acid if its favorable, iirc
hmm why is that?
Lots of creature types are immune to poison, such as undead and automatons. And there's a lot of undead in the Abomination Vaults campaign.
Plus, there's a lot of poisons that are very underwhelming. Especially ones that have an onset period; those are essentially useless in combat
How easy it is for someone not knowing the game to build or even play a character? It's great to have thousands of option, except when you join a game, don't know yet all the option available and find up latter that your build doesn't work. Is it a risk in pathfinder, or are the options robust enough to neither close path early nor have necessary combo?
It's really easy so long as you a) start at level 1 or 2 and avoid building out too far ahead, b) build to a character concept rather than try to optimize mechanically, c) avoid options released in adventures. Oh, and d), understand that retraining is actually baked into the rules.
Adventure character content is less rigorously tested, and mostly amounts to professional homebrew. It's often super focused on the scenarios presented in the adventute and significantly less applicable in general.
Focusing on mechanical optimjzation rather than character concept often leads to madness, since feats are generally well placed within the same power bands (there are few stand out or trap options). For a crunvhy game, it's often best played descriptively.
Characters become mechanically more complex every level or two, so starting at higher levels can be very overwhelming for new players. Building out a higher level character means choosing a lot of feats, and often the utility of those feats is only really understood through play.
you do not have to worry about anything other than what you'd like to play. you could do everything randomly and you'd still make a pretty good character
While there are some dead-end builds, they're pretty rare. As in, avoid the toxicologist subclass for alchemist and you're largely fine.
There are some classes I wouldn't recommend for new players due to complexity, like the alchemist and the psychic, but that's only because they're complicated.
Another thing to keep in mind is that martial and caster classes are actually balanced against each other now, and melee characters are going to do more damage than ranged characters due to them being on the front lines and taking more risks. This isn't critical for effective gameplay, I'm just trying to let you know what to expect.
While you go about making a character in Pathbuilder, I recommend also looking up the same options in Archives of Nethys, which is the semi-official source of game rules. It will have everything available on there except for adventure paths and lore books, with the full text of every option and rule. There's chapters available on there on how to play the game and I recommend reading it.
Another reason to use Archives of Nethys is because it gives more context on options. You could build a character that is a rare ancestry like a Conrasu or Goloma, but without a picture and full description you're not going to know what your character actually is.
Just play a fighter/rogue. Best way to learn pathfinder 2
I have a new player in my group who plays a rogue and tbh she still struggles a lot with all the different ways to get enemies off-guard. But it's her first TTRPG overall and Pathfinder is not the best choice for that. Unfortunately for her no one in the group wanted to go back to Hasbro.
Try explaining things to her in more intuitive terms. She gets to do more damage when her opponent has significant trouble defending themselves. That happens when they have to split their attention across a wide distance (flanked), when they're on the ground (prone), when they can't see where they're being attacked from (hidden), or when you fake them out (feint).
Old hats tend to boil away the actual roleplay from combat, but the rules usually directly support a roleplay-based view of battle. Presenting the game this way had my then-9-year-old picking the game up really quickly.
I'd say it's not terrible if you have some experience with TTRPGs and use Pathbuilder (a free character-building site/app). That said, I obsessively research and follow guides while making my characters, so I might not be the best source on vibes-based character creation.
Call me when they have prestige classes
I miss prestige classes. Actually no I don't they're implemented in the form of archetypes (Dragon Disciple's actually kinda handy for some builds unlike in 1e), I just miss the idea of prestige classes.
what are prestige classes? (i only play pf2e)
Sounds like they're actually similar to archetypes and I'm just dumb, tbh, but basically in 3.0+ D&D there were classes you could multiple class into without multiple penalty if your character met specific qualifications (different for each prestige class, usually ability score minimum and knowledge of a feat, spell, or spell level, but sometimes specific race or language or whatever). These classes were usually much more specialized and specific than the general core classes, but also gave your character great powers and flair in that specific niche. Or at least that's the idea when they were well-implemented, which was not always the case, and prestige bloat is often cited as one of the worst parts of 3.0+ as nearly every single sourcebook would include at least a couple new ones (but I never saw this a problem, personally).
yeah sounds a lot like pf2e archetypes.
you take a feat that gives you stuff related to other classes (multiclass archetypes) or just more specialized stuff.
some of them require certain things, like the wrestler dedication feat requires you to be at least trained in athletics, or like the new necrologist, that requires you to be a spellcaster that can cast summon undead
and then there are class archetypes (not to be confused with multiclass archetypes), which are subclasses you take at level 1 and at 2nd level you have to take the archetype's feat
and like prestige classes, they seem to add a bunch of archetypes every new book they release, which is not at all an issue because that means MORE OPTIONS! and i love that
Paladium has entered the chat
what's paladium? (i only play pf2e)
OG publisher of notoriously crunchtastic system Rifts
FWIW, G.U.R.P.S., by Steve Jackson, is a very close tie, if not more so. (I misremembered them both being Paladium publications when posting above, honestly.)
If you don't see the Matrix as endless spreadsheets, these are not the systems you're looking for.
p.s. Sorry for the link to that other place, but it's hard to find non-paid/ad RPG posts from the 90s without it. 🙇🏽♂️