[simply Nathan]

General things I like about GURPS:
Active Defenses and armor working "correctly" to my JRPG sensibilities.

Being able to make wizards with arcane healing spells, not being restricted from armoring wizards.

Disadvantages to help flesh out characters (even if I think most give too many points compared to what they do).

HP based loosely on strength and mass instead of being an abstract construct that people sometimes tell me D&D HP is supposed to be - basically, GURPS HP works the way I always envisioned it from playing other games anyway.

Having good framework from which to make a holy man archetype something other than a wizard with better equipment and a different spell selection. Combined with earlier points, ability to meaningfully distinguish between a priest, a white mage, and a white mage who happens to be a very pious individual.

Making anthropomorphic animal races is really easy without needing to be too abstract.



Favorite books:
GURPS Lite, combining both versions to get even more content (such as stats for my knight's horse and being able to play with a wizard or buy lockpicks for my thief). Basically, any GURPS I can get for free I will take.

GURPS Magic for the extensive spell list even if most of it is stuff I wouldn't use/allow in a given campaign.

GURPS Martial Arts for giving me boomerangs, edged rapiers, late katanas, falchions, Heroic Archer, and a bunch of nifty combat options.

Dungeon Fantasy 1-3 for simply being excellent and helping direct my design towards what I want to play myself. I base my general race design principles around the templates from DF3 even if I don't use them as-written.

Tons of books I like for exactly one thing they give me and saying the rest is a nice side benefit - Charged Scrolls in DF4, extended equipment shrinking rules in DF Loadouts, animal templates in DF Allies, low-powered templates in Henchmen, a couple races and Perks from Bio-Tech, species generation tables in Space, etc. Even a GURPS book that sounds like it would be useless to me always has nuggets of very useful gold in it.