What I LOVE about GURPS

[mikeejimbo]

With all of the excellent GURPS books published, I don't know if I'd say it's my favorite, but GURPS Uplift deserves very special mention for me, because it's the book that introduced me to GURPS in the first place. I discovered it on David Brin's website, probably about 15 years ago by this point.

[GM Joe]

I didn't mention what I like mechanically about GURPS:

- 3d6. To me, bell curves model skill usage better than linear probabilities.
- The melee combat system. At its core, it is tactically interesting without being overwhelming.
- The way GURPS handles armor, including penetration multipliers.

I also like the style the books are written in!

[acrosome]

I started with basic D&D back in, wow, was it 1983? Pretty much stuck with TSR for years (Star Frontiers, Gamma World) except for Traveller, which I loved. Eventually found GURPS in the mid-90s.

I like crunch, so my favorites are all stuff like:

Low Tech and its Companions
High Tech
Martial Arts
Instant Armor
Pulp Guns
Tactical Shooting
Social Engineering and it's follow-ons like Boardroom and Curia

But by far the most impressive GURPS supplement ever is Horror (4ed.).

[RogerBW]

Lots of things, but in this post: Disadvantages (and Quirks).

Before GURPS, the games I met tended to treat this sort of thing as role-playing flavour, or to have some basic broad-brush mechanics ("if you do this you stop being a paladin"). GURPS was the first game I played in which it was explicitly worth defining things that were limiting to your character, because of the combination of point benefit with clear mechanics on how they'd take effect rather than just leaving it up to the GM to remember them.

[DouglasCole]

http://gamingballistic.com/2017/03/2...s-it-good-for/

It's a bit of a long answer, and comes at it from a slightly different take, but there it is.

[Leynok]

After the End and Sorcery are probably my favorites, and I would love to see more of them.
ATE because... Not really sure, I've never really been into the kinds of series that this one takes inspiration from, but I really enjoyed the ATE books and I've wanted to run an RP using them ever since I got them.
Sorcery just feels like a nice elegant Magic System that I can get behind, and isn't confusing.

I mean, Martial Artists and Powers as well, but that's like answering "bread" when someone asks you what's in your favorite sandwich.

[JMason]

I love GURPS because:

It makes sense! HP is physical damage, Armor reduces damage, etc. Other rpgs tend to use abstract concepts that require explanations that I find less than satisfying.

Active Defenses! Nothing worse than having a passive role in your character's defense.

Spells as Skills! I know some folks aren't fans, but this was the first RPG magic system that didn't feel like a wholly different game tacked into it. Spells as skills fit the rest of the system.

3d6 Roll Under. I like roll under systems b/c target number always feel arbitrary to me. I prefer to know what my "base line" is and have modifiers to the skill. I also like the bell curve of 3d6.

The Community! This is one of the best, most helpful groups of folks online.

I could go on and on... but that covers some of my top reasons.

[Otaku]

It might be easier to list what I don't like about GURPS, and that can be broadly classified as it not always living up to its "generic" and "universal" claims.

My first pen-and-paper RPG was GURPS, specifically Third Edition (Revised). It can be weird going back to it now and wondering "Why'd we make certain things so complicated?", though there is usually a rational explanation (besides not knowing better XP). I love how GURPS can let me do any kind of setting, with any level of detail, and any sort of "flavor" (or genre). I love how a person can adapt almost anything to GURPS, or GURPS material to almost anything. All these "switches" means not only wonderful things when customizing a particular campaign, adventure, or character, but the joy of remixing it later when you want something familiar and yet different.

Templates instead of character classes, Disadvantages and Quirks instead of Alignments and (maybe) Flaws: as I began with GURPS these couldn't have been selling points, but they were "retention points" as I explored other systems.

So from Third Edition (Revised) I love

• Basic Set
• Compendium I
• Compendium II
• Lite
• Mecha
• Rogues
• Steam Punk
• Supers
• Warriors
• and probably more I just don't remember right now

As for Fourth edition, I haven't anywhere near as much but

• Basic Set: Characters
• Basic Set: Campaigns
• Lite
• Powers
• Power-Ups (Series)
• Social Engineering

which is basically the entire thing I have read. I am not trying to defeat the point, it is just I tend to favor "Kitchen Sink" style settings that involve a bit of everything. For years I hated that 4e had two books in the Basic Set, unlike 3e having only one. The big change was I removed my double standard; I always considered the "true" Basic Set of 3e (Revised) as being Basic, Compendium I, Compendium II and really also Magic, Grimoire, Fantasy Folk, Martial Arts, Psionics, and Supers. Now that I am so used to templates, Rogues, Warriors, and Wizards from 3e would join that massive list. I love that the backwards compatibility of GURPS means some of the great setting specific stuff like Steam Punk can be adapted to 4e (not that I've done that, since I don't own most of my 3e stuff anymore). I'll add in that GURPS Mecha mostly makes the list because it was my first 3e book. ;)

The thing is, I like all of this at least a little better than any and every other RPG I've played.

[Poppyseed45]

For me (as a person coming back to GURPS from a many year hiatus) GURPS, because of its focus on a sort of realism, makes ME focus on what my game worlds actually are, and what I want for them. Whether porting another setting into GURPS (as my famous GURPS Game of Thrones game) or my own settings (like my equally famous GURPS Fall of Constantinople) I'm forced, thanks to things like Status and Ranks and other things, to think about what the world really is and how I'm going to get what I want from it.

GURPS also let's me "realistically" think about characters and figure them out. Like, in Fate and other games, I can get character concepts sometimes, but sometimes it takes some hand waving. Also, if everyone doesn't buy into the premise of the "cinematic-ness" (or have different definitions of such) it's nice to have a "realism baseline" to use. I like that if no one cares too much, we can wave away the precise rules on speed/distance, no worries. But if someone DOES care about them, why, they're right there!

As for books:

GURPS Mass Combat
GURPS Interstellar Wars
GURPS Fantasy

Those are the three that have seen a lot of use. I'm slowly gathering the hardcovers (and I only have those three on PDF) but every time I buy a GURPS book, I KNOW I'm getting something good, and don't have to worry if it'll be fun to read or interesting. With other companies, there's always that question mark (and Dear God, why can't people hire semi-decent editors! There are so many game products I find hard to read because of that; GURPS, of course, doesn't have that issue).

[GM Joe]

Yes, let's celebrate the GURPS editors! What they do makes such a huge difference every single time we read a GURPS book.