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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 381845" data-attributes="member: 4937">bret: &quot;Funny you should mention that, since I play GURPS in preference to D&amp;D.&quot;So did I for a while after I got disgusted with the limitations of 1st ed. AD&amp;D.&quot;I personally find the GURPS skill system gives a lot more realistic feel to skills and skill levels.&quot;Absolutely.&nbsp; But although it has some huge advantages, it carries some pretty big prices as well.&nbsp; For one thing, GURPS is much more complex than D20.&nbsp; And GURPS suffers from the problem of being just good enough to be better than any other wide spread mature generic system and seem realistic, and yet just bad enough to need endless house rules to make needed fixes (GULLIVER anyone?).&nbsp; Ultimately, the extra realism and character building mechanics of GURPS wasn't worth the overhead for me.That said, I'd still probably prefer GURPS for certain gritty settings.As far as your D20 criticism goes, I don't think you've actually hit the system in the quick until the last line of your post when you raise the problem D20 has when average DC's of challenges rises to 20 or higher, and average skill bonuses rises to a significant fraction of 20.&nbsp; In such situations, only one member of the party has a reasonable chance of succeeding at the challenge, and that one member cannot but succeed.&nbsp; But I would argue that is an enherent limitation of any dice system, and is evident in a different fashion in GURPS when for example active defences rise to around 15 or so and only critical hits can hit the target or when two opponents have skills so high that victory is more or less determined solely according to the luck of criticals. (according to the usual rules).&nbsp; Maybe we could partially avoid the problem with large dice ranges (like say CoC did), or large dice pools (like WEG's SW did) but ultimately the same problem will keep cropping up as you reach the upper end of the system and the randomness starts to go away.CR: I've seen alot of rogues built with higher INT than DEX.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 381845, member: 4937"] bret: "Funny you should mention that, since I play GURPS in preference to D&D." So did I for a while after I got disgusted with the limitations of 1st ed. AD&D. "I personally find the GURPS skill system gives a lot more realistic feel to skills and skill levels." Absolutely. But although it has some huge advantages, it carries some pretty big prices as well. For one thing, GURPS is much more complex than D20. And GURPS suffers from the problem of being just good enough to be better than any other wide spread mature generic system and seem realistic, and yet just bad enough to need endless house rules to make needed fixes (GULLIVER anyone?). Ultimately, the extra realism and character building mechanics of GURPS wasn't worth the overhead for me. That said, I'd still probably prefer GURPS for certain gritty settings. As far as your D20 criticism goes, I don't think you've actually hit the system in the quick until the last line of your post when you raise the problem D20 has when average DC's of challenges rises to 20 or higher, and average skill bonuses rises to a significant fraction of 20. In such situations, only one member of the party has a reasonable chance of succeeding at the challenge, and that one member cannot but succeed. But I would argue that is an enherent limitation of any dice system, and is evident in a different fashion in GURPS when for example active defences rise to around 15 or so and only critical hits can hit the target or when two opponents have skills so high that victory is more or less determined solely according to the luck of criticals. (according to the usual rules). Maybe we could partially avoid the problem with large dice ranges (like say CoC did), or large dice pools (like WEG's SW did) but ultimately the same problem will keep cropping up as you reach the upper end of the system and the randomness starts to go away. CR: I've seen alot of rogues built with higher INT than DEX. [/QUOTE]

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