GURPS Template Toolkit 5: Quick and Pointless

Extra-Large Template, Hold The Points

GURPS delivers on its promises of "Anything You Want" and "Any World You Can Imagine," but often at the price of "All The Accounting You Can Stand." Although that's fine for GMs – who signed on to run the show, after all! – it can be intimidating for players, particularly newer ones, who must pore over long lists of traits and then distribute points in ways that demand more math than they enjoy . . . or that some of them enjoy too much, leading to optimized characters that steal the spotlight. While character templates help address these issues, they can become gray walls of numbers if they offer many choices, or straitjackets if they don't.

For the GM, Quick and Pointless provides a recipe for creating one giant "campaign template" that includes only traits that matter in the game they want to run, simplifies those traits (especially skills!), and eliminates points and math on the players' side of the table. For players, it reduces character creation to picking a modest number of capabilities from a few menus and fleshing out personalities with user-defined flaws that are fun to create. And everybody benefits from the built-in Destiny Points system, a narrative tool that rewards roleplaying and lets heroes thrive in their domains without having to weigh short-term success against long-term growth.

GURPS Template Toolkit 5: Quick and Pointless requires only the GURPS Basic Set, Fourth Edition – and once you've built your "campaign template," you might not even need Characters!