Why is GURPS not considered a good fit for the Supers genre?

[Refplace]

Originally Posted by Otaku

But this leads to my final question: I have GURPS Supers for Fourth Edition, but I haven't read it exhaustively. I know it has some good advice for running a Supers campaign, and for playing supers... but I'm wondering if it might be good to release some splat books to go into more detail or cover some of the ways to effectively run and/or GM a particular superhero archetype in GURPS, and at varying levels of power. Maybe no one actually needs such a title, but I think of the cool stuff I've seen on the forums, or have seen over the last 20 years of fiction. Realizing how sneaky a low-to-mid power tank can be. Can't Hulk out and rip the turret off of a tank? Ah, but you're practically invulnerable to small arms fire, strong enough to quietly break locks on doors, and - should the setting allow - carry a weapon that can make good use of your ST, be it Striking ST or Lifting ST?
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It is not on the wish list so a potential author would have to make an especially good pitch. And my impression is that SJG does not think Supers sell well in GURPS. Most of the comments here would support that impression, making such a pitch even harder.
For what its worth on my blog my Speedsters post (Mar 17) has 55 views and my Bricks post (Mar 22) has 74 views. That is well above average though not my highest viewed content.

[David L Pulver]

Originally Posted by deanjday

I hear this a lot, that GURPS as a system does not fit well with the superhero genre. Why is this? whats the reasoning given? and is it true?
Or do you think that it does supers just fine? if so again whats your reasoning?

I ask because I have been asked by my players to start a new supers campaign and i have to choose a system.

GURPS works okay for low-powered supers like, say, Batman or Spiderman. It has trouble with more powerful supers of the sort who could punch a hole in a tank or lift up a house because of the way GURPS scales its numbers (damage, point costs, etc.). In GURPS, a pistol does 2d of damage, a rifle 5d-7d, a machine gun 12-14d, tank gun 40-150d, a big aircraft bomb 100ds of dice, and nuclear weapons thousands of dice. This means if you want supers who play at the high ends and can do damage equivalent to a tank (or a nuke) you need ridiculous numbers of points and ridiculous amounts of DR and HP to survive them, and anyone without that is screwed. On the other hand, things like teleporting great distances or flying at hypersonic speeds or mind controlling or having tons of magic aren't priced that way, so if you do run a campaign where people have the points to be physically as tough as the Hulk or Thor, the folks who didn't spend points on these can have a field day buying up hundreds of spells or DX 40+ or whatever.


In contrast, a game like HERO system, equally crunching to GURPS but more optimized for supers, has scaling systems where a pistol does 1d, a rifle 2d, a machine gun 3d, a tank gun 6d-8d, and a small nuke maybe 20d. Everything is on a highly logarithmic scale, and much more manageable and balanced. (Hero has its own complexity issues, but I'm just using that as one example. Other super successful games tend to have similar scales.)

[martinl]

IME, GURPS Supers tends to look more like The Boys than DC or Marvel properties.

If you want to do that, and are willing to abandon point balance, you are golden.