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Message: <blockquote data-quote="der_kluge" data-source="post: 2055025" data-attributes="member: 945">As a caveat, know that I know nothing about GURPS, but I can speak to HARP a bit.I really like it.  I was a d20/D&D die-hard for many, many years, and I finally decided that I was just tired of trying to bandaid the entire thing to get it to do what I wanted.  What I specifically didn't like about it was the overall power level at the high levels.  I wanted something that didn't scale quite so rapidly upwards.  I think HARP accomplishes that very well.  I say think, because I've not actually played it. I'm going to run it at some game days coming up, so I'll learn more after those...Some of HARP's strengths:- skilled based magic. There are really only enough skill points available to pick a handful of spells and excel at those. This cuts out on uber wizards with tons of spells. It's simple.- metamagic is worked into the system - you want a "meta-magic'd" spell, just expend more points when casting it.  Simple.- Professions (classes) can be tweaked just how you want them. The cool thing is things like BAB and hit points are skills in HARP. So, if you want to make a wizard, and don't give a darn about how well you hit with a staff, you can just neglect putting any ranks in that at all. That gives you more points for magic, for example.  Or, if you want a meat-shield wizard, you can dump as many points as your friend the fighter into hit points, so you could essentially create a "d10 hit dice" wizard no sweat. It's all up to how you want to construct it.- In HARP, how well you hit, has a direct correlation to the amount of damage you inflict.  In d20, you could attack with a two-handed battle-axe, roll a 20, roll another 20 to confirm the critical, and then roll 1 damage. - HARP's races are more balanced. In d20, dwarves get all kinds of uber abilities, and half-orcs get jack. You can also mix-and-match the races to get cross-breeds easily. Half-gnome/half-halfling?  No sweat. The rules have got you covered.- Sometimes the little things are the best. You can customize some of the skill categories for clerics, so you can make a "lying, thieving" priest if you want to. There aren't any class abilities tied to the profession. In d20, if you want a cleric, but don't want to bother with the turn undead ability, tough noogies; you get it anyway. Rogue and thief are two separate professions, which is nice.- no alignment.To be fair, I'll list some of the things I don't like about HARP (the list is much smaller!)- The costs to calculate development points overly favor individuals with more attributes. So, to put it in d20 terms, let's say that the number of feats you got as a character were based on the total of all the attribute modifiers, so that if you had all 14s, you'd get 6 x 2 points to spend for feats.  Obviously, someone with all 18s is going to have a LOT more points to spend. HARP works in this way.  However, it can be mitigated in two very easy ways: Have the players build their characters using a point buy method. So, that everyone starts off with the same number of points to allocate to attributes, or just assign everyone a default number of development points to spend every level, and ignore the formula as given.- To resolve damage, you have to look up your result on a table, based on your weapon type. So long as you have all the sheets handily available, it's not that big of an issue, but the damage results often include "stun", so after a round or so combat, it seems feasible that many of the individuals participating would simply be stunned.  In my experience, being stunned is quite boring.  I'll have more insight into this problem once I actually run it. But, on paper it seems kind of flawed to me.  question to Rasyr - Would it be feasible to alter the combat mechanic so that damage = OB - DB?- Not as many options. One thing I do like about d20 is all the numerous feats, and 3rd party products. Despite the fact that d20 has become hugely bloated with all this stuff (much of it awful to be sure), there is a lot of really good stuff out there that players can use in creating their characters.  There's just not as much stuff out there for HARP.  I guess this can be either a good or bad thing, depending on perspective.- Not as many monsters, not as many spells; again a good or a bad thing.I haven't delved into a lot of the details. There's a lot of rules on say, magic item creation, lots of stuff in the martial law expansion, or some of the variant spellcasting options from College of Magics that I haven't really perused yet.  So, these observations are just the ones I can make from just the stuff that I have read thus far.</blockquote>

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