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Message: <blockquote data-quote="bento" data-source="post: 3675803" data-attributes="member: 36597">I have a couple of problems with universal systems, which I've experienced both True20 and GURPS.  The first is the amount of prep you have to do before you have the first game and the second is the blandness of the books.    My first choice as a GM is to decide what kind of adventure we'll be playing.  In the case of the historical horror game I ran, I had to develop additional gunpowder rules which True20 has not covered in an official capacity.  In GURPS it was selecting appropriate advantages/ disadvantages/ abilities my players could choose from when creating their characters.  With a system built around a setting or genre, the authors include only rules and options that work in their system.  A sci-fi based game will have starship rules and a fantasy game will have magic rules.  When I want to play a genre/setting that already has a great ruleset, I don't mind playing that, rather than spending the time shaping a universal system to fit the genre.  When I run a dungeon crawl, we play D&D.  BUT when I want to play an Asian fantasy game, I've gotten better results tweaking True20 rather than tweaking D&D.  BUT universal systems work well with groups that have a limited amount of time to learn the rules and love to jump from genre to genre.  You see this with a lot of GURPS groups - hardcore sci-fi this month and swords 'n sorcerery the next.  Smaller investment of time and money.  As for the blandness, I know that its difficult to pitch something to new players that has a very broad approach.  If you flip through the 4th edition core GURPS books there are pictures of superheroes, knights, dragons, aliens, detectives and other genre-specific tropes.  For a group looking for a system to only play horror games, the CoC books will have a greater visual appeal.</blockquote>

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