Actually, this touches on a question I am curious about.
What are the substatiative differences between versions of PD? Ignoring the underlying rules sets as much as possible, what are included in one set, but dropped from the other?
I wasn't aware there were any differences, until seeing two mentions that PD20 didn't have the ISC. Now I wonder what other differences there are. (Not enough, however, to actually buy PD20.)
Not only does GURPS PD let you play using the basic rules included in the book (D20 PD requires a separate book) there are no ISC races, no Seltorians, no Paravians, no Carnivons, no Jindarians, and no references to Andro robots.
(There might not be any Vudar either, but they will be in D20 Klingons anyway...)
I can't quite remember, but I'm not sure there are any Lyrans, Ranel, or Phelen either - or any Skoleans.
From a purely background perspective, I'd recommend GPD - for the same price, you get more.
Probably left stuff out for the same reason some of the profesional templates got left out of GPD when they updated to the fourth editon rules. Space and money. Increasing the page count means greater printing cost, so they have to leave stuff out or raise the books price.
Mind you I hope the stuff left out in GPD ends up in the upcoming Gurps Federation. For D20 it looks like they'll need a few more empire sourcebooks.
Edit:
Another reason to prefer GPD is that you can get the Gurps Character Assistant program and the GPD data files found at http://melange.no-ip.org/Submissions.html and character desing is a snap.
Last edited by rkbrown1800 on Tue Mar 20, 2007 7:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Reasonable enough guess. I was just wondering what it was about the d20 version that required more space for other things. But being unfamiliar with GPD, such information probably wouldn't help me much.
Part of the alleged advantage of d20 as a system is the ability to leave some of the rules infrastructure to other books like the Player's Handbook, so it'd be ironic that PD20 still required more room for the basics than the GPD version.
Having played both systems, I'd say that "best" is a misnomer - depends on what you want. For me, d20 is great for highly cinematic (and less believable) styles of play whilst GURPS is for those who like either a more believable approach or more flexibility.
The main differences are fundemental to the systems: d20 is level-up, computer games style; GURPS is skill-based and more flexible.
If you play d20, then you can easily enjoy PD20 with minimal fuss. If you don't already play d20, however, I'd recommend GURPS.
