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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Argyle King" data-source="post: 7615414" data-attributes="member: 58416">It's an odd thing to say, but, in some ways, I find GURPS less complex than D&D.For me personally, a lot of that comes from the system generally producing results which just kinda make sense.  While there are certainly oddities born of the game rules, most of it seems relatively intuitive.  Even when dragons, magic, and laser pistols are brought in, there's still some manner of general ballpark in both intuitiveness of results and plausibility of results in comparison to how I imagine even a fantastic situation might play out.  For example, one of the first campaigns I ran for my friends was a street-level Supers game, and an early combat turned into a high-speed chase and a combat on a moving vehicle.  I didn't know the rules well enough to know exactly what I was doing, but following the general rules upon which the game is built and (being transparent about) making a few guesses about how things should work to keep the game moving produced results which were palatable and serviceable to the group.  Later, I went back and compared to my notes to the better understanding of the game I had acquired with time and found that I wasn't too far off from what the game would have said I should do anyway.  In addition, a lesson I learned from D&D 4E which I applied to GURPS is that enemies don't necessarily need stats for everything.  I have a good enough grasp on the system that I can mentally hash out a police officer, shopkeep, or orc mook without too much trouble.  I only need a general idea of what I feel their 4 primary stats should be and a guess at 2 or 3 skills which make sense for their primary skills.  I may need a few minor adjustments based upon genre...  say an extra point of strength or some fancier weapons for a high fantasy town guard versus the same dude in a low fantasy or sword & sorcery game, but it's all relatively consistent regardless of what I'm doing.In contrast, even after years of playing D&D, I have a hard time being able to make decisions from an in-game perspective because (after a certain level) the way in which the game world works and functions only really makes sense in the context of D&D (and becomes strongly divorced from how I would even guess to mentally imagine the situation playing out in a movie, book, or real-ish situation).  In some editions of the game, knowing how to play the game didn't translate into knowing how to run the game at all.  I certainly didn't find creating a NPC spellcaster in 3rd Edition (or Pathfinder) to be easier than GURPS; I'd argue that (in many ways) building something for GURPS is simpler.I can try to guess at numbers when building something (and both 4th and 5th had okayish guideliness for doing so), but there are still a lot of extra steps to consider.  What level are the PCs?  What classes and abilities do the PCs have?  What do they not have?  How many encounters have they had today?  What feats, skills, items, powers, etc, etc do they have?  Sometimes (depending on the edition), the game works drastically differently depending upon which pieces of the game are being used.  I'm pretty good at remembering formulas, and I eventually got the hang of a lot of the things under the hood of how the various editions built things, but there are still a lot of variables.  The biggest one is level. I do believe that, to some extent, 5th is better at this, but there's still a point at which (to me) certain things aren't exactly intuitive.For example, I mentioned vehicles in my first GURPS game.  As I did with GURPS, I can (and have) made judgement calls about how something should work.  Vehicles, mounts, and followers always seem to work in a somewhat wonky way in D&D.From the player side of things, I also find there are times when it's difficult to make an informed decision based upon in-game information.  On one hand I can skydive without a parachute, into the the middle of the BBEG's fodder troops, and survive.  On the other hand, I might die after failing one save.  The game narrative and how it relates to the way the game works can create a thin line between cakewalk and TPK, without much of an indication either way from what my character can observe of the world around him.</blockquote>

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