DarkAngel1979 said:
In real life, knocking someone out is actually much harder than killing them. Or rather, knocking them out without the risk of killing them is almost impossible. Subdual or takedowns are easier.
Yes. Also, I don't know if they fixed this in 4e, but in earlier editions it was too easy for HT rolls to stack up from multiple sources. And also, GURPS has a human scale centricness which belies its claims of universalism. It doesn't have as much problem with 'human vs. house cat' as D&D does, but it does still have considerable problems.
As for GURPS, my experience is that it's a terrible system.
I wouldn't go nearly that far, though obviously I left it for d20 and would use d20 in preference for most concievable games I'd run.
Combat is overly complex for no good reason (i.e. the complexity does not provide any gameplay benefits, just nebulous ideas of 'simulationism').
I don't believe that this is true. GURPS combat is expressedly cinematic, in that every action is a literal action. You aren't getting an abstract result. You are getting a readily imaginable scene.
My problem with GURPS combat is that it is alternately at low levels too luck dependent to support storylines which feature regular combat, and at high levels too luck dependent to be satisfying as a tactical game. You either have to high of risk of dying regardless what you do, or the outcome isn't dependent on what you do.
That, and because of its bell curve system its highly sensitive to stacking modifiers and tends to be fairly all or nothing. No system I've played quite rewards power gaming like GURPS - with the possible exception of WoD.
If I go with a point buy system, it better be something in which the ability to min/max is curtailed a lot. Ex: WoD's system of freebies VS points that are dedicated to one particular category of character attributes is a good example of a less-crappy point buy system.
You think WoD curtails min-maxing??
c) It's a generic system. Jack of all trades, master of none. Pretty much any system is superior to GURPS in its own genre.
At low point buys, it's a very nice historical RP system. With some tweaking, I think it would be a decent hard Sci-Fi game as well. I might do it for post-apocalytic as well. One of the problems though is that most people who want 'gritty simulation' actually want 'noir' (I actually discovered this about myself), and hense want to be that 'lethal knife in the dark' rather than the bleeding sap at the end of the bar fight or random corpse on the battle field realism demands. GURPS can disappoint if you think you are getting realism, because you start out thinking you are gritty and then realize you are playing just another 'capes' game in disguise - especially when your players exhibit enough system mastery.
Most of the problems with the games at higher point buys can be handled by having players with simulationist tendencies rather than gamist ones.
But I do see what you mean, because GURPS drags all this extensive overhead into the game regardless of what you want to play.
