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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Staffan" data-source="post: 9145171" data-attributes="member: 907">At one point in my life, I liked GURPS in theory. It was at a time when I didn't do much active playing, and it was a pretty good game with which to build stuff (mostly characters and space ships) just for the heck of it. When GURPS 4th edition came out, I bought it to see if it was any interesting, and my immediate reaction was "Well, maybe someone could run something cool with this, but that's not me."Some time later, I lent my books to a friend, and said friend is now running a GURPS game and... I'm not a fan. It is very much not what I like in a game. Some of my issues with it:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Far, far too many skills. The core rules have about 200 skills (I haven't counted them, just an estimation), and that's not counting skills with mandatory specializations and/or differentiation by TL (which is relevant in the campaign we're playing, because we're students who got transplanted from the modern day to the 15th century, or at least a version of it). There are some places where you can see a bit of self-awareness regarding this, such as the Soldier skill which covers elementary aspects of other skills (like Armory (small arms) to maintain your weapons, Electronics Operations (comms) for operating radios, and Engineering (combat) for digging fox holes). But they didn't take the obvious lesson from that and go "Hey, if we need a patch skill like this to make a common soldier work without requiring them to have 50 points in different skills, maybe we should rethink our approach?"</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Too strong of a dependence on Dexterity and Intelligence. This was slightly lessened in 4e by making skills (at least physical skills) cheaper and DX/IQ more expensive, but that's just a band-aid on the wound.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Myopia. Almost everything in the game (other than damage, which just uses hit points) focuses on minute details. The most notable culprit here is the one-second turn, but there are so many other examples. For example, when we were throwing a grenade, it took like 15 minutes to resolve: first by finding and figuring out the rules, then figuring out where the grenade hits, then how much concussive damage it does based on distance from the explosion, and then dealing with shrapnel separately.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Over-reliance on penalties. This might be because we're playing a fairly low-power campaign (starting with 100 points and making fairly realistic characters rather than 250-point ultra-specialists), combined with the time travel aspect that throws a -7 penalty at many of our IQ-based skills (because we're using TL8 skills in a TL4 environment), but there are plenty of other aspects that just pile on ridiculous penalties. When your skills that you aren't specialized in hover around 10 to 12 even small penalties can be devastating. It feels like the game is designed around people with skills at 15+ so a -3 or -4 penalty hurts a bit but can be dealt with.</li> </ul></blockquote>

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