The 35th Anniversary of Man To Man

Celebrating the anniversary of Steve Jackson’s seminal GURPS title Man to Man, we reprinted an article from Space Gamer #76, with retro art and ads! Look for the first tease of Roleplayer, the now-classic zine dedicated to GURPS and roleplaying games.

Man to Man is the combat game from my Generic Universal RolePlaying System (GURPS for short), It’s the product of years of work, and the first in what I hope will be a very long line of GURPS releases.

I started work on the (then unnamed) GURPS in mid-1981, Steve Jackson Games had been going for almost a year, I knew that — someday — we would need our own roleplaying system, Which was fine, since I wanted to design it!

I wanted a game that would satisfy three basic needs. First, it would be detailed and realistic; I don’t like games where the referee is forced to “fake it” constantly. Second, it would be logical and well-organized. Third, it would be adaptable to any setting and any level of play.

As I worked, I quickly found out that I had bitten off a lot. Time passed. Then, in 1982, Metagaming went out of business. This raised an interesting possibility: Could I buy back the rights to my first RPG, The Fantasy Trip, and
rework it into the kind of game I wanted? Unfortunately, that didn’t work out, The asking price was in six figures . , . a bit much!

Between the fruitless TFT negotiations and other projects (Car Wars material, for instance), not much got done until early 1984, but gradually, it began to come together, In July ’84, I announced that we’d shoot for a February 1985 release. That time kept getting pushed back — and farther back — as other projects interfered.

And time crept on — and the projected release date kept getting pushed back — and certain staffers quit using the term “deadline” in my presence. By early 1985, we had decided that, come hell or high water, it would have to
be either an Origins or GenCon release — we just couldn’t wait any longer.

So I agreed to concentrate on the combat system — to make sure we would have something really good to release for GenCon, And that’s what happened.

False Starts

As you may have gathered, the design path wasn’t smooth. Something this big required a lot of testing at every stage,.And sometimes the testing showed me that my theories weren’t so good.

For instance, I really wanted an “action point” system to govern both movement and combat. Each action would have a point cost. Moving one yard would cost 1 point; swinging sword would cost 2 points; picking something of the floor would cost 4 points; and so on. The higher your DX, the more action points you would have each turn.

The trouble was, when it came down to playtest, nobody liked keeping track of their action points! The system was fairly realistic, but it wasn’t playable — because it wasn’t enough fun. So we went to the “maneuver” system, where you pick one maneuver each turn, and do only the things allowed by that maneuver.

Another false start involved the map grid. I really wanted to use a square grid for mapping, for several reasons. It makes buildings work out better, for one thing. Well, I worked at it for months. The good news is — it can be
done. The bad news is — hexes are still better, The very best square-grid movement rules that I could write were still clunky, compared to
using hexagons, So . . . back to the old faithful hexes I went.

And, up until the last month before release, I wanted Man to Man to include all types of weaponry. Unfortunately, there just wasn’t time to playtest every sort of device — or room to fit them all in and still have a game that would sell for our target price of $9.95. So I had to take out everything from black
powder on up. It’ll go into a supplement, to be released in ‘86.

Design Philosophy

Man to Man was planned as an introduction to the GURPS system. It is GURPS, in microcosm. If you know MTM, you’ll find that everything to come will fit in logically. There will be very few rules that don’t have some basis in the material presented in MTM!

Several basic guidelines shaped the whole GURPS design. In no particular order, they were:

It’s all right to have a lot of rules, as long as you can find them. Experience proves that garners don’t mind complicated rules. In fact, many of us thrive on them! What everybody hates is badly-organized rules. Therefore, I
felt free to indulge my own desire to write rules for every likely contingency, and provide a lot of variety — as long as everything was in the Glossary, or the Table of Contents, or both.

Now, nobody will be able to sit down and learn this game from scratch in 30 minutes. Even though the organization is good, there are 60 pages of rules — and at least 25 of those are necessary to start play. But, once you know the game, you can talk a friend through it in 30 minutes or so — or just drop him in and let him learn. And that’s the way most people learn new systems. A few brave pioneers learn from the books — everybody else learns from the pioneers.

Friendliness is next to godliness. So the game is indexed, and extensively cross-referenced. A separate pull-out (“Instant Fighters”) boils 17 pages of careful character creation explanation down to two easy-to-use pages of notes and tables — for use once you understand the system. Between the separate
charts and tables provided with the game, and the Character Record Sheet, an experienced player can almost dispense with the rulebook! And when the rulebook is required, the Glossary and ToC make it easy to use.

Game designers should be rigorous; supplement designers should be creative. The job of the game designer is to provide a good, solid skeleton that later writers can flesh out in their own ways. I want MTM, and the GURPS rules to come, to be solid enough that they free adventure-writers from concern about the rules , , . the rules are there! That will let them relax and tell a good story —
which is what an adventure writer is supposed to do.

Play should be quick. Character creation shouldn‘t. Most people seem to like complex character-creation rules. If the rules are too simple, then the characters you create will be equally simple. Or simple-minded. Complex
rules allow variety . . . and close duplication of your favorite real (or fictional) characters, MTM has fairly complex rules — simple enough to learn, but lots of options! And when later releases add IQ-based skills, lots more “advantages,” and disadvantages , , , well, you ought to be able to create any sort of character you can think of.

It’s not my job to tell you how to play. Every group plays in its own way. So,
wherever possible, MTM is written in “multilevel” fashion. If you want detailed combat, use all the optional rules. If you want simple combat (kill the ores and grab the treasure!) use only the Basic Combat System. You can choose to play rookie fighters, battlescarred heroes, or anything in between. And though the character creation system is complex, there’s an alternate system for “rolling up” characters on the dice. Take your pick!

When in doubt, check reality. The “reality check” became a way of life while MTM was in progress. How far can a man throw a grenade? Get a grenade, or something that weighs the same, and check! How much does it weigh? Look it up in an ordnance book. Better yet, find one and weigh it! How fast can you
run carrying your own weight in armor? Well, put on the armor and get a stopwatch . . . My old SCA connections were very helpful here. I bet the folks in Shipping will never forget the day I walked in with an armload full of
assorted weapons — real swords, spearheads, axes, maces, and whatnot — to weigh them on the postal scale. One thing I found out was that most fantasy games grossly overestimate the weight of weapons. A good broadsword is
three pounds, tops. On the other hand, good armor is heavy . . .

Realism also helps with consistency, making sure that things from the different worlds will “fit together.” If swords have their real weight, and guns have their real weight, then there can’t be any silly “Murphys” about relative weights when a 20th-century soldier visits a medieval world. This preoccupation with realism is going to have interesting ramifications
soon — what is “real” when you deal with magic, or with superheroes? But I still feel it’s the best way to handle the design.

The only thing more important than realism is playability. I really wanted a “realistic” game. But on those occasions when realism butted head-on with playability — that is, with fun — then fun won.

For instance, the first couple of drafts of the combat system followed strict reality on “hit points.” An average man swinging a club could incapacitate another average man (if he was unarmored) with a single good blow, and kill him with two or three. That’s the way it really is. And edged weapons — or guns — are far deadlier!

But a combat system that lets one blow decide the battle isn’t much fun. Especially considering the time it takes to design a character. Even if you bring him back to life to fight the battle again, one-blow combats are a drag.

So, at every little decision-point that went into making up the combat system, we chose in favor of less damage. Thus, no individual subsystem is wrong — but, added all together, they give a combat system that makes player
characters a little harder to kill than “real people” are. Just because it’s more fun. However, you’ll never see Gonad the Barbarian running around with 80 hit points. No way. A superhero, maybe — but no natural person is that tough in real life, or in MTM.

The Next Steps

So . . . what’s next for GURPS? A lot. We’ll do several MTM supplements as soon as we can. The first one, Orcslayer, will go to press soon. It’s a true roleplaying adventure, but (naturally) it’s very heavy on combat. My high-tech weapon book will be out when it’s ready — probably the second or third release.

Other proposed MTM supplements include a whole book of pregenerated characters; an arena campaign background (including rules
for animals); a “city guards” adventure that would include problem-solving as well as hack-and-slash; a dungeon-crawl; a modern day street-gang adventure; and a lot of others. Some of these will be produced in-house;
some will be farmed out to freelance designers (or design groups).

We’re also starting a newsletter — free to anybody who buys MTM and sends in the questionnaire. It will be a GURPS “house organ” with short scenarios, Q&A, errata, revisions, new talents, gadgets, and characters, and whatever else we come up with. The tentative title is Roleplayer. It may someday evolve into a “real” magazine — or it may not. Time, and demand, will tell.

And I’m still working very hard on the boxed fantasy set. This is the “complete” roleplaying system . . . total character creation rules, reactions, and all the other things you expect from a full RP system. It will also include the fantasy game-world rules — magic, medieval social systems, fantastic beasts — the whole nine yards. I’m shooting for Origins ’86. A great deal of the work has already been done — after all, the original plan was to release the whole thing at Origins this year! And the biggest reason I didn’t make it
was the combat system — which is now finished, out, and done. But wish me luck anyway.

Once the fantasy set is out, we start releasing the other game-worlds. But that’s more than a year from now.

The Final Goal

What am I trying to accomplish with MTM and GURPS? In a nutshell, I’m trying to establish a game system simple enough for beginners, detailed enough for experts, flexible enough for everybody — and infinitely variable to fit the infinite worlds of fact and fiction. I’m hoping to establish a new tournament standard.

And so far, I’m happy with it. Pick it up, and let me know what you think.