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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9544576" data-attributes="member: 4937">Well, basically everything.Probably the single biggest problem is that GURPS is an almost pure skill based system with the worst skill system ever designed in the history of gaming.  That's the core problem.  The fact that it violates every aspect of good skill system design but in particular in the context of a universal system it violates the one most important rule when designing a skill system - the broader your gameplay the broader of a range of activities each of your skills has to cover.  All the complexity of the skill system is so much unneeded nonsense because it fails to understand what you are trying to do with a skill system.  Instead of good game design or instead of organic design, GURPS is guided by that idea so common until the early 90s that all problems at the table stem from a lack of realism, and so just making things realistic will fix all problems.  But "realism" as GURPS defines it tends to be sort of intuitive, rather than practical.  So it goes with a bell curve because intuitively everything should fit to a bell curve with the most extreme cases being rare.  And that's intuitive and realistic sounding, but it's just wrong. Ultimately all fortune mechanics are just rough percentile generators.  How likely is something to happen?  And 3D6 modified by some number or the other isn't an intuitive number, much less a realistic one.  When it's going wrong it's not easy to see why it is going wrong or what modifiers to the roll are doing in a particular case.  It obfuscates the probabilities and treats that obtuseness as realism.  It's not actually simulating anything.  And if it isn't simulating anything particularly well, then why should it be excused for game play that comes down to "first side that rolls a critical hit wins"?Is that interesting?The point buy is also impossible to balance with numbers pulled out of the air so that the ultimate totals are meaningless, and the system is too complicated to use to by the DM.There are a lot of complex parts of the system that are interesting, like Tech Levels, and skills being of different difficulties to advance, and negative encumbrance from GULLIVER was really cool.  But... all the complex interesting parts prove to be really difficult to deal with in actual play.  They ended up influencing me as a designer/game master, but they weren't super useful as written.  GURPS prompted a lot of introspection from me because it called into question almost everything I'd taken for granted before that point.  Why was it that all the inelegant unintuitive aspects of D&D like hit points, classes, levels, Vancian magic and AC modifying the chance to hit and not being DR - all the stuff everyone who thought they were cool mocked - worked so much better than skills, point buy, classless, mana points, and all the stuff that literally everyone in the 80's and early 90's was saying was the right way to play?  So GURPS was important for me but not because it was good, but because it made me really think hard about how a game actually works at the table.</blockquote>

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