There are things about GURPS that bug me so badly that I have never got around to actually playing a game. A lot of them are variations of the theme of confounding things together 'to make the game simple', and then disambiguating them with special cases , so that you end up with a game that is more complicated than if you treated them separately from the start. And with runs rougher.
GURPS stats are one example. Steve Jackson started from the beginning with the axiom that a 'modern' (this was 1984 or thereabouts) RPG would have no more than four character stats. He therefore shoehorned cunning, book-learning, perceptiveness, empathy, firmness of resolve, etc. inot one mental stat: IQ. And he shoehorned agility, manual dexterity, and hand-eye co-ordination into one physical stat (DX); strength, and (at one stage) charisma and good looks into another (ST), and size, physical toughness, stamina, and good immune system inot a third. Don't get me wrong, that can work fine in a simplistic and quirky system. But Steve Jackson didn't want simplistic and quirky. So he introduced a bunch of advantages and disadvantages such as wealth, social status, appearance, some of which partially modify the effects of stats (eg. to reduce agility skills below DX but leave manual dexterity skills alone or vice-versa). Some of these in effect optionally increase the number of stats. Others represent a compulsory choice (eg. of welath, status, physical attractiveness) that is just like a stat except for not being on the same numerical scale as the stats, and therefore not being suitable to base a skill on or to roll against. GURPS has in effect about 12 stats, but eight of them are kludgey special cases, and four or five of them don't do things they ought.
There is a similar nest of horrors surrounding the interaction of weapon type with armour type. The original system had three types of damage so that it would need different types of armour (clever). But it worked back-to-front and had a nasty trap in which you had to work out what part of your target you would hit before your could determine whether you did hit. In tidying that up without ever acknowledging that any of the initial design decisions had been misguided, GURPS has ended up with a hideously involved procedure in which the weapons' damage roll is modified by the armour's DR, which has previously been modified by the weapons armour divisor, with a special qualification for whether the armour is flexible, and then by the weapon's damage type. And the procedure is modified in many cases by notes for specific wepons and specific kinds of armour. There are 13 types of weapon damage (only eight if you disregards 'afflication', burning, corrosion, special, and toxic, considering only mechanical damage), besides armour divisors, and some types of armour still need different DRs against listed damage types.
Many people are blessed by not being bugged by the sorts of things that bug me. Some of them seem to like GURPS.
Even I could probably play and enjoy GURPS if I could get past the desire to disambiguate the stats, introduce systematic armour rules and tidy up the weapons types, etc. If GURPS would open and play I would probably enjoy it well enough. But to set up a GURPS campaign I have to tabulate the specifics of the weapons and armour in my SF settings, design a tech level system that captures the details I am concerned with, tabulate specifics for the status systems and rank systems of my social institutions. And while I am attempting that I am always overtaken with an irresistable desire to change the things that bug me.
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