[Raekai]

Here's my experience:

Spoiler:  

• GURPS
  • I've played GURPS fairly regularly for over half of my life at this point, and I like to think I know it fairly well. When we played 3e, I was a player. Then, the old GM left, I became the new GM, and I transitioned us to 4e. I love GURPS for the reasons that I think most people tend to love it. There are so many options, there's so much thought put into all of the supplements, and I can simulate just about anything in GURPS. I love not having classes. I love point-buy systems. I love the flexibility—if something (like a spell or item) doesn't exist yet, I can make it exist quite easily!
  • However, I struggle with it for the reasons that I think most people struggle with it. Most of the time, I don't need all of the options, I don't want to do all of the simulating, and I even sometimes want someone just to tell me how to play. GURPS tends to look at me with its seductive gaze, begging me to come over and tinker with it. But I think I've been tinkering too much (they say it'll make you go blind!), and I feel like I need to try something else or I'll keep thinking "Wait, I can fix/enhance that with some optional rules tucked away in a Pyramid article" every 5 minutes. I've tried to play with just GURPS Lite, but it's hard to pare back like that when I know the system enough to screw myself over by compulsively adding too much. As much as I love GURPS, it may not be the best fit for me right now. I'm also too tired at this point in life to world-build like I have been, so I've been trying to find games with settings that have several pre-written adventures.
  • I don't blame GURPS at all. Of course, I will never stop buying GURPS material. I'll be back. I get the feeling that GURPS players always come crawling back. Right now, I just think playing something else might help me get out of the mindset that I've been stuck in. That way I can stop trying to hack in "Knowing Your Own Strength" and "Conditional Injury" together while also getting rid of the Rule of 16 by having many mechanics use their version of Control Points while also having my own custom attributes. The more I add, the more work I have to do in converting things when I want to use stuff that's already written or using another setting. It's exponential. I I add Rule A, that's fine. But, if I add Rule B, I have to remember Rule A, how Rule A affects Rule B, Rule B, and how Rule B affects Rule A. Then, I get tempted to add in Rule C, and I'm spending 20 times the amount of time prepping and writing my own rules to fit things together than I am actually playing the game. Oh, and it's not a big deal, but support for virtual tabletops is lacking.

• Dungeons & Dragons
  • I enjoyed 3.5e a lot when I was in my early teenage years. I had already begun playing GURPS, but I was still learning what a tabletop RPG was as well as that there were different ones. More than anything, I loved reading the Monster Manual and looking at all of the cool lore and artifacts. Anyway, it ended up being my first foray into GMing for my sisters. I discovered Eberron and Dark Sun, which are still two of my favorite settings (and I even got my GM to run a few sessions of an Eberron campaign using GURPS, but we all had differing and changing schedules in high school, so that didn't get very far).
  • Naturally, because I thought I liked D&D 3.5e, I bought the 4e books when they came out. I never got much use out of them, and I sold them at my parents' garage sale some years later to a nice man who probably got way more use out of them.
  • I have always enjoyed GURPS way more as a whole, so I left D&D behind. I like not being locked into a genre, I can't stand not being able to roll to defend, and I like that GURPS is (usually) way more flexible (although, I had always been likewise frustrated with vanilla GURPS Magic's lack of flexibility).
  • Oh, and I haven't tried 5e. There seems to be a near-unanimous consensus that it's the friendliest D&D so far. It seems fun, I've listened to podcasts where people have played it, but I don't see myself going back to a more narrow RPG. (But you bet that I'll still be buying Eberron books when I can.)

• Fate
  • I'm talking the 4th edition of Fate—Fate Core. I've also dabbled with FAE and FCon. I had some fun with Fate, but I think it was too low on the crunch and simulation scale, which made me feel like characters started to feel very same-y. I tried adding crunch in the form of assuming that the adjective scale was a logarithmic scale (on the same level of GURPS's +6 = ×10), but that just led me back to GURPS. I definitely enjoyed not having to think too hard about things. I really, really, really enjoyed Fate Points, which made me so happy that GURPS Power-Ups 5: Impulse Buys exists. I like the fast-paced nature of the game, and I liked that so much of it was around BSing/justifying things based on the narrative. If your character is a fire mage, they can use fire magic. You can add optional mechanics to cover magic, but it can also just do whatever seems fair or right.
  • However, the bare-bones nature of Fate was also a huge weakness for me. It felt too lacking. I tried some offshoots, including Spirit of the Century, Atomic Robo, and Venture City. Like I said, though, things started to feel same-y. There's a difference between flexible mechanics and feeling like pretty much anything goes. The truth is that I may have been playing it wrong. I'll admit that. I also think that it's just not the right game for me.

• Everyone Is John
  • It's a one-sheet tabletop RPG, and it's fair to say that it's more of a party game, but it's some of the most fun I've had. I can GM and get drunk with my players at the same time, it gets the players competing against each other, and even people who think that D&D is for nerds will try this game.
  • However, that's where it ends, of course. And that's not a complaint! It does what it does well, but it'd be pretty silly to try to do too much more than a one-shot with it.

• Dungeon Fantasy RPG
  • I own the boxed set, I keep backing the Kickstarters, and I absolutely love all of the Norðlond stuff, but I haven't actually played it yet. That makes me a big goof. I really want to give Norðlond the love it deserves, but I keep trying to add all of my homebrew to the DFRPG, and that's killing me. I'm also really not a huge fan of the vanilla GURPS Magic system, so that's a bit off-putting as well. However, there's been a voice in the back of my head telling me to just run it as-is because that's way more fun than doing nothing. But I'm trapped in my mindset.