Alternatives to GURPS? Other tabletop RPGs to try?

[Anaraxes]

Originally Posted by RyanW

So it's more like Tri-Stat dX was extracted from BESM.

That's usually the case. GURPS is one of the few I can think of that was designed rules-first, rather than game-first, with rules extracted later. (Unless you want to count GURPS as having been extracted from TFT. There's certainly some shared design thoughts there, but they're different enough that I don't really think of TFT as "GURPS 0e".)

You might also include FUDGE and hence FATE, indirectly -- though that's really coming at the question completely from the other end. FUDGE never struck me as a set of game rules; it's a set of suggestions on how to go about constructing a rule set. ("Pick some attributes that suit differences you want to reflect in your game, then pick some levels for those attributes, then maybe throw in some skills that player characters would need....") There's not even a rules system there to extract until after you build one. The 4dF roll is all that you start with. FATE's a few steps down that path already, having defined certain numbers of and names/uses for traits, so it better counts as a generic core system.

There's also the "One Roll Engine" that you could count as having been extracted from an existing game to make generic. (If nothing else, GURPS made that notion trendy.) But like FUDGE, that's really more just a core dice mechanic and a few themes, as it seems to change a lot from game to game.

Champions -> HERO is probably the most successful extraction-to-generalization.