I voted "I Love It" and could just have easily vote "I Hate it". GURPS is a game I love conceptually. In application I have mixed feelings. It's the first thing I reach for when I'm thinking gritty, realistic (not really, but a gameable approximation) with tactical options.. I spend a ton of hours getting it ready to go, and then we play. It's a huge shift in how I normally run a game. I nearly always have some on the backburner for GURPS (right now its GURPS Dungeon Fantasy sandbox Pools of Radiance/Ruins of Adventure game and a gritty Symbaroum hack) and I'm never sure I'll bring them to the table.
Every
successful attack in GURPS takes a minimum of three rolls, typically four.
- Attacker rolls to hit (Base skill, +/- modifiers)
- Defender attempts active defense (base defense, +/- modifiers)
- Attacker rolls hit location (no roll needed if (a) you performed a called shot or (b) you assume everything goes to the torso)
- Attacker rolls damage
Then we have to assess DR in the specific location vs. Damage to the specific location, and then once we determine what got through the DR we apply the damage multiplier based on the damage type. Every. Single. Time.
Do that with with a 4-6 players on a VTT and it becomes so much clicking, applying, rolling, assessing. It's just really slow for us to resolve at the table.
That said, if GURPS is
your game, meaning its what you play most of the time, and regularly, I have no doubt it speeds up.
I haven't mentioned the 300+ skills in the core rulebook (even the ready to run, scaled down Dungeon Fantasy series is ~150 skills), the plethora of options, switches, toggles, buttons, and every other thing. You can skills the skill count up and down a couple of ways, primarily by choosing what's relevant to genre, TL, and setting or by implementing Wildcard skills (Bang! skills). There's probably a pretty decent low fantasy, gritty OSR game in there. Wildcard Skills (Fighter! Thief! Wizard! Fighting! Shooting! Casting!) and base game options and off you go.
At the end of the day GURPS is not a game. It's a toolkit to build the game you want.
You can build nearly any game you want out of it. It excels at anything approaching reality from a real physics point of view (at least as much as an rpg ruleset can). It would be my first choice for anything historical, alternate history, action oriented historical gaming, modern action + supernatural, for a Night's Black Agents (it was my first choice and then I moved it to Savage Worlds).
It would not be my first choice for a limited time slot game (we play three hours on Tuesday night over a VTT) or for a game that you want to run over a VTT (If I run it again on the VTT we won't use the VTT character sheets, just the dice roller, modifiers, and map functions). I think it struggles at higher points levels, high powered Supers might be a problem. Street level, no problem at all.
If you want to build exactly the game you want though, and are willing to really dig in and learn it, I think you will be rewarded. Everything said up-thread about the supplements is true, both as setting guides and the rules supplements themselves are top-notch. There are at least three primary, well supported, different magic systems for GURPS (RPM, Sorcery, Magic + Thaumatology) and plenty of guidelines for tweaking or building your own from scratch. The game can do all the gear porn you want and more.