The Business: End Users Don't Want Developer Kits

GURPS is one of the perennial RPGs that profess to be universal.

In principle, this means that you can use that one game to play anything you want. In practice, every such game works as intended only within a specific range of playability and rapidly breaks down outside of this range.

For example, GURPS works best as a man-to-man skirmish game (as that is the wargame it derives from) in a pre-Modern setting of some form or another.

It creaks as it approaches the present day, and breaks under everything more powerful than that. GURPS Lensman is just one of many supplements that makes this obvious to the observer.

Take note of this fact, as you will see that it becomes a pattern once we look at a few others.

The other that everyone who sticks around a while hears about is HERO.

HERO is also derived from a man-to-man wargame ruleset, but one meant to focus on superheroes: Champions.

Specifically, it focuses on recreating the feeling of Golden Age and Silver Age comicbook slugfests. The further you go from this, the more the ruleset struggles to deliver, with it falling apart in the ranges where GURPS works best.

Like GURPS, it has a massive supplemental product line meant to provide ready-made rulings and other customizations to cover adventure genres other than its presumed default as seen in Champions, and has had the same problem as GURPS: breaking through.

The answer is as simple as this: They are not full games.

The "universal RPG" is nothing more than a Developer's Kit, like you see when you look at the gear that console videogame developers use to make their games.

It is not, as much as both their publishers and their users want to believe, a complete game to itself.

The tell that even the publishers acknowledge this to be true is how the products are explained to prospects: "You buy the Basic Set/Rulebook AND (Setting/Genre Book)."

That's a lot of dense technical writing for a prospect to deal with, and most bounce off as if they hit a brick wall.

There has been, at most, half-assed and half-hearted attempts to make a proper game product out of this mess.

The reality is that most people have no interest in Make Your Own RPG stuff. They want a game, games are complete products, and not "Some Assembly Required"- and no, Universal RPGs don't even get to that point.

The limit to their appeal is obvious, and it remains so to this day. Yet they may remain a dominant game in their home niche for a time, until a specific complete game comes along that is easier to acquire and use- and if cheaper, guaranteed to overtake. (e.g. Mutants & Masterminds overtaking Champions, despite the former also falling into the Universal trap.)

Chaosium's Basic Role-Playing shows this in its most obvious form. Rather than by the big golden rulebook and a setting or genre supplement, most would rather just buy Call of Cthulhu or some other specific complete game that uses it in some fashion.

Proper wargame publishers get this. It's long overdue for RPG publishers to return to reality and do the same.