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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9243340" data-attributes="member: 4937">Agreed with the lot less patience for Car Wars, SFB and the like.  I have never played GURPS Fantasy, and I suspect of all the ways to play it that would be the most functional.  You keep the skill set small, and as long as you don't squint and don't play the same characters for too long, as long as the point buy is 100-150, and as long as no one tries to break the game during CharOp it will probably work out.   In particular, GURPS active and passive defense scores are most interesting in a Fantasy like setting with shields and melee weapons and reasonably effective armor against the scale of the weaponry you are facing, and notably when you don't let active defenses go too high (or you do but you have an aesthetic of play where running roughshod over foes is acceptable because you really don't care about challenge just fantasy). You mention the Supers game not working out, but I really wonder about the science fiction game as well.  Horror sure, as you can definitely make characters go splat in GURPS, but science fiction starts really hitting GURPS problems.  How much time did you spend on each of these campaigns?The very fact that you played so many different ways suggest to me that you weren't putting 200+ hours into any one story and any one group of characters, and so I suspect that like me at the time you were a bit blind to the actual effect of the rules on your gameplay.  It took me until the mid-1990s (in my 20's) to start taking seriously what rules were doing to my game and where the frustrations I was having were coming from, and at that point I tried GURPS as a rules set for a near future science fiction special ops horror sort of game - commandos versus aliens if you will.And oh wow did that turn out to be a mistake.  BRP would have suited me much better. Everything about GURPS fell apart for me when tested.  CharGen was bad.  Speed of play was bad.  Balance was bad.  The math didn't work.  Created narrative was bad. For like 15 years I'd been hearing complaints about hit points, levels, classes, combat resolution as a separate system to task resolution, abstract combat, armor should reduce damage not cause misses and so on and so forth, and here I had all of that and the rules problems were worse than ever.  It was probably the biggest Eureka moment I ever had as a GM or rules designer.</blockquote>

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