From the FLGS gamers perspective, I suspect that it's less "math" and more "thinking". But, the math is an excuse to run for the hills.
(And, I've run and played and taught people to play HERO FRED-once you can teach them that, everything else is easier.)
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Originally Posted by rknop
Sigh. Welcome to modern American society. It's even worse teaching students at a liberal arts college -- people in college mind you -- and they get angry when you have the audacity to think that they should know how to do basic algebra and fractions.
The ironic thing is that to GM or play GURPS, the amount of actual math you do is less than what you do in a typical Pathfinder game, particularly at higher levels. Once you get to a moderate level (6 or 7), buffs and conditions come and go very regularly, and you're adding a whole bunch of penalties. Your attack bonus is likely two digits as well.
In GURPS and Dungeon Fantasy, almost always the penalties are single-digit. When you're creating your character, most of the time you're adding +1 to +4 to your attribute to get your skill. (Or -1; subtraction is hard, though, right?) OK, the 80% for figuring out your Move when you're at light enumbrance is a bit harder... but you do it once, whereas the 1.5x damage bonus to vulnerable creatures is something you're doing all the time in Pathfinder or D&D. (To be fair, you're doing 1.5x for cutting damage a lot in GURPS as well... but again with smaller numbers.)
If you sit down to design systems or things like vehicles, then, yeah, the math in GURPS (which is nearly always still arithmetic, sometimes a wee bit of very simple algebra) becomes frequent. But for GMing and playing, the reputation GURPS has as being more mathy than the most popular games is entirely undeserved.
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