So, my game group is now two sessions into our GURPS supers game (basic setting is Brandon Sanderson's "Reckoners" universe).
And here's the thing that keeps coming to me time and time again --- the system just keeps getting in the way more than it facilitates the effectiveness of the narrative. Way too much time is getting spent referring to the rules, checking equipment stats (oh my goodness, so . . . many . . . weapon . . . stats).
And because the GM claims to "love" the GURPS system, but only has a relatively passing familiarity with said rules (he's only GM'd maybe 3 or 4 times in his RPG "career"), a lot of stuff is just getting hand-waved anyway. "Oh, I don't know about that, buuuuut, I think it's sort of like this, so . . . we'll just go with that for now."
Which is fine. Except that a "hand-wavy" approach isn't really what GURPS is supposed to be about. You play GURPS because you want to have the level of detail presented in the rules.
I've played GURPS before, so this isn't my first exposure to it, but I'm once again reminded just how non-compelling I find the system. I'm getting nothing from GURPS in terms of character flexibility, gameplay, and narrative that I wasn't getting from Savage Worlds at 1/5 the rules complexity, and was additionally getting a much, much, much easier system to improvise with.
To its credit, I do appreciate the fact that GURPS does make it possible to fully realize nearly any character concept. My "superhero" character pretty much turned out the way I envisioned with his available "powers"/advantages/skills, so that's a notch in its favor.
But my character-building exercise further convinced me that the GURPS core-four stats aren't as granular as they need to be, while the skills are ten times more granular than they need to be.
And even if I could forgive GURPS' overbearing complexity, I've never liked GURPS' flavor of "roll under" for basic task resolution. I hate the way it seems to obfuscate the difficulty of a task---"It doesn't matter how hard something is to do, it only matters how skilled you are at it." I realize that underneath it, the math is actually just a "reverse" of "Check against a target number of 21, plus or minus modifiers." But I still despise the way it feels in play.
Anyway . . . I glad that all of you GURPS fans have the system and can enjoy it. More power to you.