[CraigM]

I was introduced to roleplaying with ICE's MERPS game. Since then, I've played and run D&D, AD&D, Paranoia, Rolemaster, Call of Cthulhu, Hunter Planet, It Came from the Late Late Late Show, Justifiers, and assorted other things I can't remember right now. Add in a bunch of LARPing and Freeforming too.

GURPS is the king of systems to me, and by a healthy margin. It's not an easy system to get in to; you need to be comfortable writing your own adventures, and it's easy for a munchkin player to trash the game if allowed to by an overly timid GM. But if you've got that sorted, it's the best around.

The reasons I prefer GURPS to other systems are fairly simple:

1) It's the only game around that doesn't routinely crap on my willing suspension of disbelief. The simulationist basis of the system means that actions usually have realistic, predictable consequences.

2) It doesn't artificially constrain player actions. GURPS is one of the few systems where the answer is almost never "you can't do that", but is instead "well, you suck at that, but roll the dice anyway; you might get lucky...".

3) It doesn't overly constrain GM choices. To me, the lack of tightly-defined settings is a feature, not a bug. I like Banestorm as a loose framework, but there's no way in hell I'd want to use most published RPG settings. They're just not very good, as a general rule.