A GURPS $ is worth 1.27 D&D 5e SP, which is interesting because in GURPS Dungeon Fantasy, the typical $1 coin is a silver piece. And a D&D GP is worth about $7.87 in GURPS.
So, where does that come from?
A while back, I cautioned someone considering using (among other things) GURPS Renaissance Venice: Merchants of Venice in a non-GURPS game that prices listed in the extensive lists of trade goods were expressed
in GURPS $, which might not have obvious conversions into other game
systems. But if one wanted to convert GURPS prices into D&D or vice
versa, how would that work?
It crossed my mind to take a "basket
of goods" approach. Economists measure inflation not by picking a single
commodity, like the price of gold or oil or wheat, and seeing how that
changes over time, but by taking the combined value of a set of common
commodities. This provides a more comprehensive picture of the cost of
living. Perhaps gas becomes less expensive while the price of wheat
rises, resulting in little or not net change in total living expenses.
You need to look across commodities to get a better idea of what's going
on.
So instead of calculating a CPI (Consumer Price Index), I
needed to assemble an API (Adventurer Price Index). What goods are most
relevant to the cost of living for a dungeon delving adventurer? Why,
adventuring gear, of course! So I started with some basic adventuring
gear from GURPS Dungeon Fantasy 13: Loadouts: minimal
delvers kit, group kit, fighting cleric, medium knight (with
sword-and-shield), basic thief, and scholarly wizard lenses. For
comparison, I downloaded the D&D 5e SRD
from dndbeyond and combed through the equipment list. Some equivalences
ended up being rough approximations. For example, the GURPS armor was
by-the-piece, while D&D armor is basically full suits. The SRD
doesn't have some tools and other mundane gear like canteens, so I had
to find similar rather than identical. I downgraded some of the fancier
bits of GURPS equipment (the cleric's fine mace and the wizard's
elaborately decorated staff) to more quotidian versions. And some stuff
just doesn't track, like some of the GURPS potions, so I excluded them.
What
I ended up with was a value of $3587 for a basic set of adventuring gear in GURPS for an equivalent value
of 456.05 GP in D&D, which breaks down into the conversions above.
So if you're a D&D player, there's your conversion factor for stuff
in GURPS.
(This is the kind of thing I'd have sent into Pyramid back in the day, but that's not an option now, so here we are.) The GURPS Action series is the gift that keeps on giving for a lot of modern-and-later gaming. GURPS Action 2: Exploits has rules for sneaking around, running away, and all kinds of other activities which can be easily transplanted to cyberpunk and other high-tech settings. GURPS Action 6: Tricked-Out Rides provides more of the same for its topic, giving an easy framework for describing and even designing common types of vehicles without all the math and paralysis-by-analysis of GURPS Vehicles. Pick a standardized vehicle type (van, compact car, etc.) and apply modifiers (rugged, tinted windows). But, of course, it’s limited. It’s just ten pages, after all, so it’s great for common passenger vehicles for the modern(ish) era. But higher-tech vehic...
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