GURPS 4th Edition

Now I've got my hands on a copy of GURPS 4th Edition.

GURPS 4th Edition is a major overhaul of the rules; it takes the 18 year old 3rd Edition rules and all the additional rules accreted from the 100+ supplements, and tries to streamline the whole thing and cut out a lot of the cruft.

It's much bigger than the 3rd Edition Basic Set. The core rulebook now covers not only mundane but alien and superhuman abilities, so you can build non-humanoid characters like uplifted animals, really weird aliens, giant robots and spandex-clad superheroes who wear the underpants outside of their trousers.

Now I have to decide whether or not to convert my existing online games. Most of it's quite straightforward; it's a matter of updating those skills and abilities that have been repriced; character's point values will change quite a bit (especially because they've repriced the attributes!), but capabilities should stay much the same.

The one big area of change is Psionics, which has a totally new system in 4E. By the looks of it there's no way to do a like-for-like conversion; the best way will be to go back to the character concept and rebuild them from the ground up. This might well make any 4e versions of Reylorna, Hollis, Duplar and Kir look a lot different from their 3e version.

Looks like there are several options

• Keep on using 3rd edition
• Do a 'quick and dirty' conversion to 4e
• Retool the characters from the ground up and possibly revisiting the concepts
• Say "Oh sod it", and convert the whole lot to Fudge
• Something else entirely