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Message: <blockquote data-quote="lordabdul" data-source="post: 7839461" data-attributes="member: 6994956">[USER=6999616]@John Dallman[/USER] is completely right, and I think this "GURPS is a toolbox" thing is way too often overlooked. People  say that GURPS is crunchy, and they're mostly right, but that's not totally correct either: I know people who run GURPS with just the super basics (either GURPS Lite or GURPS Ultra-Lite rule sets). It's very important to not only pick the rules that you need for a specific game and nothing more, but also try not to expose the players to all the stuff you didn't pick. I made the mistake a couple times of giving the Basic Set book to my players, telling them "here, but try and make a normal FBI agent", instead of printing out just the relevant bits, some character templates, etc...So who is it for? I compare GURPS to Linux, really. It's like Debian or something. It's for tinkerers and DIY people. From this complex toolbox, they're going to make something hopefully user-friendly (like, say, Ubuntu), hiding most of the work and only exposing what's needed for a good game. And I totally realize that me turning this into a Linux analogy might actually lose half the people that this analogy is supposed to help <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />And what is it for? It's for any game where you want a specific way that mechanics work. Remember, a decade or two... or three... ago, there wasn't such a wide breadth of game systems, so if you wanted something specific, you kinda had to design it yourself... or hope that GURPS had some rulebook for it, which it often did. Nowadays, arguably, there's a lot less of a need for something like GURPS, because we have sooooo many different game systems that do so many amazing things in their own way, but I still find GURPS very effective for gritty games, modern games with firearm combat, or any game where you need some "original" magic system. Other people might find it useful for other things too. My players really like the point-buy system (so that there are mechanics to back up their character choices), and the player agency in mechanical effects (as in: they can say "I do this thing but I do it this way" and it often has a simple modifier or outcome bonus or something that makes it interesting, instead of always boiling down to the same roll).As for the "high input dependent exception based design" comment, it's indeed possible to end up there. I think it happens when the GM puts too many rules in play, i.e. "takes too much of the toolbox out". It could get ugly pretty quick with GURPS 3e, actually, and to me the Compendiums were a symptom of that problem... if your GM uses the Compendiums for more than one or two odd rules, that's a red flag for me. GURPS 4e streamlined a lot of this "exceptions explosion", and there's no Compendium in sight so far. There shouldn't be "high input" though -- in theory GURPS front-loads information at character creation/advancement so that when you're in play, there aren't many factors to take into account (unless you find that looking distance penalties is "high input" in which case you should tell your GM you want something less crunchy). In practice, our GURPS action scenes tend to play as fast, if not faster, than our D20 action scenes.All in all, I'd say GURPS, at its core, still has some very particular "feel", and I can totally imagine people not liking it. I know people who don't like D20 systems, or dice-pool-based systems, or whatever. That's all fine, like I said, there are hundreds of other games waiting to be loved.</blockquote>

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