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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9140425" data-attributes="member: 4937">The fundamental problem with GURPS is something that I feel it shares with most modern RPG design in that the rules were built before the game was played.  I think the early game of GURPS with just tri-stat and a simple 3D6 resolution mechanic and roll under might have been OK.  I have problems with those design choices already, but I can imagine that game being playable.  And the example of play from the core rulebook is not actually for GURPS, but for that core simpler game that plays very loosely with the rules (something I now recognize as a huge warning sign).  One of the biggest problems in GURPS is the skill system is the core of the game and is absolutely horribly designed.  It gets one of the fundamental rules of good skill system design completely wrong.  The fundamental rule of good skill system design is that the broader your gameplay the broader of a range of activities each of your skills has to cover.  If you don't adhere to that rule, all sorts of bad things happen.  GURPS though tried to create a universal game system where every single skill was very narrowly defined despite hitting on a solution (Tech Level) that could have prevented that because "realism".  Not every athletic male in TL7 knows how to jump out of an airplane with a parachute, so we need a separate skill for that if we are going to be "realistic".   But assuming that everyone in TL7 who was athletic could use a parachute would have been much better for the game and most genre emulation.  It's something that would have been better handled with rulings do not rule and a side panel about optional modifiers for lack of experience in a particular endeavor.  And on top of breaking that rule, it also broke the rule that the defined set of skills needs to be both space spanning (anything a player could propose fits in a skill) and discrete (its obvious what skill relates to what proposition), again opting for "realistic" solutions like multiple similar skills default to each other with small penalties.  And for a game that's core mechanic is "roll against a skill" this is lethal.I look back at a lot of my gaming in the 1980's and early 1990's and what I see now is attempting to run the software for a videogame on a meat processor.  What I see now is a lot of frustrated video game developers making video games like "Starfleet Battles" and "Car Wars" who were frustrated by the lack of capabilities of the common video games of the time and trying to solve those problems by running the game as pen and paper.  There are so many games I played back then that I'd never touch now because they are video games written on paper.  The better examples of design in that era, say Battletech 3025 recognized the problem and created simplified versions of the game they wanted to make knowing the full game would need to wait for a computer, but so many designers in that era were lost in the simulation that they were excited about and wrote things that should have been video games in the first place.  GURPS, Rolemaster, and others are the RPG versions of that trend, and while there are aspects the video games don't capture the experience they were going for is much better on a video game.Believe me, I've been there.  I at one time set out to create a system that had each weapon inflict multiple types of damage (lethal, stun, knockback just that I remember) simultaneously that was each individually resisted.  I was making a cool video game and trying to run it on meat, and it took me a while to realize that.</blockquote>

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