What are GURPS' true strengths?

[Embassy of Time]

I may just have committed a social faux pas in the Raise a million for GURPS thread, by questioning the value of adding new licenses to GURPS. I re-joined the forums recently because I have been considering creating free GURPS material for a project I'm working on (reviving a small city as a creative and nerdy place), but that whole thread has got me bothered. It seems that people have a problem finding ways to truly flaunt GURPS' strength as a game, and it got me thinking about what those strengths actually are. I have my own answers, of course, but I'd love to know what others think.

So, if you had to explain to someone why GURPS would be better than Brand X RPG, what would you describe as GURPS' real strengths?

[johndallman]

At a game design technicalities level, it handles a wide range of power levels well, in many types of setting. It notably does a good job with ordinary people, real-world knowledge, technology and weaponry, and with the recent past through to the near future. It stands up well to being extended without suffering severe "power creep".

As examples, I've run three campaigns in it which it handled well, and which I don't think would have worked nearly as well in other systems.

Steam! was a steampunk game that entered a technological runaway in the 1890s, and was aiming for a singularity by 1940. It will never be completed now, because one of the core players became unable to continue, but it featured enemies with time travel, who succumbed to Moravec's version of Niven's law of time travel, a Martian invasion that was essentially a sociological problem, variant laws of physics worked out in enough detail to make nuclear weapons impossible and reactors easy, and minds uploaded into Babbage machines.

Laundry was set in the world of Charles Stross' Laundry stories, and featured plotlines arising from the implications of P=NP, the true purpose of Stonehenge having been a mystery for most of the last 5000 years, and the Laundry's semiotics department.

Infinite Cabal uses the Infinite Worlds setting, with rather loose adherence to canon, and rational Cabalists as the PCs, charged by the Grand Master of their Lodge (Isaac Newton, and the Royal Society) with finding out how the universe really works. They've learned one anthropomorphic answer so far, and are working on a physics-based one. This Wednesday evening, they may discover where echoes of Homeline come from.

GURPS lets me run this kind of stuff and doesn't fight back. Hero System is too based in superhero tropes for me to be happy with it, BRP/CoC doesn't handle the power levels and lacks the technological and magical support material, and FATE is too much about story action points.

[GM Joe]

I have many universal RPGs, and the strengths of GURPS for me are:

1) The design is cohesive, coherent, and complete.
2) The writing is excellent - it's friendly, fun-to-read technical writing!
3) It does regular humans really well, from realistic to fairly cinematic.
4) There's a lot of stuff that's been published for it.
5) It is well supported* by new publications, with a great dedicated monthly magazine and at least one supplement coming out every month.
6) There is a great community of GURPS enthusiasts.
7) The people who develop for it are active in the community.
9) It's from a great, well-respected company.

* If you like PDFs. I'm OK with them, since SJG makes explicit and clear my permission to print a copy for personal use.

[ericthered]

Gurps handles blow by blow combat a way that lends itself to visualization
Gurps has a strong skill system.

Originally Posted by johndallman

Infinite Cabal uses the Infinite Worlds setting, with rather loose adherence to canon, and rational Cabalists as the PCs, charged by the Grand Master of their Lodge (Isaac Newton, and the Royal Society) with finding out how the universe really works. They've learned one anthropomorphic answer so far, and are working on a physics-based one. This Wednesday evening, they may discover where echoes of Homeline come from.

Oh my I want those answers! </tangent>

[Otaku]

GURPS is to RPGs as a laidback version of the Borg would be to Star Trek:

Resistance is futile! You will be assimilated... or we'll adjust to you: either is "cool"!

...

No? Alight so the strength of GURPS is exactly what it says it is: a generic, universal role-playing system. So many diverse elements can be mixed and matched, including ones that are less likely to go together like a "harsh realism" designed to completely align with a real world setting... except the first Supers have suddenly shown up! Fantastic elements can be handled as realistic or unrealistically as the mundane.

GURPS 3rd Edition was my first role-playing game and so far the only thing that I have found 100% better was GURPS 4th Edition and it isn't like I thought either were perfect.

[smurf]

There is nothing not to like about it :)

[Gigermann]

If the objective is to run a "realistic" campaign/setting, I don't know what system you would look to other than GURPS.

[dfinlay]

Originally Posted by johndallman

Steam! was a steampunk game that entered a technological runaway in the 1890s, and was aiming for a singularity by 1940. It will never be completed now, because one of the core players became unable to continue, but it featured enemies with time travel, who succumbed to Moravec's version of Niven's law of time travel, a Martian invasion that was essentially a sociological problem, variant laws of physics worked out in enough detail to make nuclear weapons impossible and reactors easy, and minds uploaded into Babbage machines.

Wait, you ran a time-travel game which used the Novikov self-consistency principle? I've thought some about how to do that and concluded it was impossible, because you have to base outcomes in the past around decisions the players will make in the future and you can't know what those will be. How did you get around that?

More on topic, I know of no other reasonably crunchy game where players who know absolutely nothing about the rules can describe what their characters are doing and have their descriptions be reasonable things to do that the rules reflect well. The one exception that jumps to mind are Targeted Attacks. A lot of people will describe their characters as doing things like "punch him in the face" or "slash his neck" when they don't have the skill the pull it off as a targeted attack. That's a relatively minor issue, though, on the whole.

[johndallman]

Originally Posted by dfinlay

Wait, you ran a time-travel game which used the Novikov self-consistency principle? I've thought some about how to do that and concluded it was impossible, because you have to base outcomes in the past around decisions the players will make in the future and you can't know what those will be. How did you get around that?

The PCs never had access to time travel, nor communication with the people who did. The time travellers didn't understand about the self-consistency principle, and after a while, simply vanished from the campaign.

[RogerBW]

Another thing that I find GURPS is good for: if you're in a fight, you have lots of options. I grew up on AD&D, where the fighter's choice was basically which monster to hit and maybe with which weapon. In basic-set GURPS you have three levels of commitment (AOA, normal attack, AOD), there are different sorts of AOA, you can Evaluate, you can strike at a location, you can Feint… and these are things that anyone can try, not special feats that you have to be a fighter to learn. That can seem overwhelming to a new player, but it means you can change your tactics to suit your foe and the sort of outcome you're looking for.