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Message: <blockquote data-quote="aramis erak" data-source="post: 7839985" data-attributes="member: 6779310">GURPS was originally aiming to be a detailed simulation; 1 point represented (IIRC) 250 hours of study/training in a feature.The fundamental design elements are, at least by the 1E designers notes, were the low attribute count, high melee realism, buy the cause (rather than the effect), skill difficulties varied by difficulty of learning the skill in the setting, bell curve, and boardgamable combat.Somewhere along the line after 1E and before 3E, the variability of skill difficulty by setting went the  way of the dodo...The buy the cause element isn't called out in the designers notes directly, but the correspondence to specific training times is, and when psionics were added in G:Horror, you bought the power, then the skill or skills to use it. Likewise, the magic system is a lot of fiddlingly narrow spells with lots of prerequisites. I've seen it happen a fair number of times. Usually with players new to point buy and used to niche protections. Like Danny, I fully disagree with thisI disagree on both counts here. point buy is about the only sane way to let players create the types of characters they want in a system with as many options as GURPS has.I also disagree that GURPS is all that free form, but that's just another quibbleI find exactly the opposite to be true... it's the novices who build specialists... catch them storywise a couple times with the wrong character having to do something, and it gets a very different player reaction next set of Char Gen.GURPS is less fit for turning players loose autonomously to do CGen than Hero, in part because it doesn't have the GM and group generate the limits first. Hero makes that a core element of the campaign: Defining the limits. There's even a nifty form for it.Many hero fans (including myself) like hero for doing things more sanely than GURPS. It is buy the effect, which makes the balance actually happen, it calls out in the rules where optimizations are easily done, it uses campaign limits to help establish feel, and it fully endorses the concept that PC's ARE better than normals.</blockquote>

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