Quote from: Dumarest;992503I very much get tired of a system after a while and want to change to another every so often. I can't imagine sticking to one for everything. I also stopped using Hero because every game felt the same to me; more to the point with Champions every power feels the same to me because they're all so abstracted that it really doesn't matter what the power is, it only matters how many six-sixers you get to roll against a defensive power. Not that it's a bad game if you like that; I just don't really like it much anymore. Plus I'm a believer in horses for courses: use the game that has mechanics that were designed for the genre or setting rather than try to force the genre or setting into the preexisting  mechanics.

I like mechanics.  I like playing with them and thinking about them outside of the game.  This disadvantage to that is that every mechanic begins to have that "feels the same," different paint on the same underlying structure.  Which if you aren't careful, turns into "familiarity breeds contempt."  I know I'm going to look behind the curtain, and I know it's eventually going to risk spoiling the experience, but I can usually compartmentalize that part while playing, and enjoy the game for whatever it is.  Especially when caught up in the antics of the players.  In order to maintain that separation, I have to put the game aside for some time, before I reach the "don't really like it anymore" stage.  

I like Hero more than GURPS, on average, but if I were to run either of them right now, all else being equal , it would be GURPS, simply because it has been longer since I ran it.  Whereas I could play either one and enjoy it.

Quote from: David Johansen;991836I think it would be more accurate to say "GURPS can't 'do it all well' with all of it's books, not in any edition."

Yes, obviously in theory it could attempt to do it all, but outside of a certain range it can't do it all WELL.  GURPS is very good for low-powered stuff, including historical campaigns. The higher-powered it gets, the more clunky it becomes.

Quote from: Skarg;992495There can be a vast difference between how different GMs run GURPS. Not just all the different settings, but which rules are used, how they use them, and various other things, can make it play like a very different game. For example, super-detailed mapped tactical battles versus mostly-roleplaying and little/no reference to rules with an occasional skill roll translated into results by GM intuition.

Absolutely. While the core foundation of 3d6 roll-under remains the same, the wide variety of rules modules and campaign switches make it surprisingly easy to tweak and hone the flavor, weight and "feel" of the game in play to your table's preferences and the goals of a given campaign. Every table playing GURPS does it in very much their own way to their own ends, and I think this is a huge credit to the system's flexibility.

Another under-appreciated facet of GURPS is that you can run all kinds of different rules modules, setting switches, character options, etc. together without breaking the game in half, making it trivial to expand an existing campaign to encompass a new variety of characters and spheres of conflict and challenges without missing a beat. Whether your dungeon-delving PC's decide they want to cut the physical danger out of their lives and invest their wealth into starting a trade empire (or get awarded their own hold and they decide to raise an army and expand their keep and holdings), or aliens with psychic powers crashland in your not!WoD Monster Hunters campaign... well, just grab any rules you need/want and plug 'em in.

If you want to, you can even let players individually buy into different setting switches/toggles by character. So you could have your simplified "narritivium-powered" high-flying cinematic wuxia martial artist that uses the rules for bulletproof nudity, mook gun etiquette, flesh wounds, wildcard skills like Karate Master! and bullet time in the same campaign as the gritty peasant farmers with pitchforks, no luck advantages allowed, realistic injury rules, etc. for the "default" campaign assumptions, you can!... although the martial artist would probably pay a hefty point premium for the options, most likely including some kind of specific Unusual Background as justification. (and of course, it would require buy-in from the GM; no convoluted amalgam of rules stripped from some books will trump what flies for a given campaign and table, which should go without saying!)

Combined with more "traditional" rulings/houserules, this makes for a nearly unbeatable level of flexibility. Of course, it does require a not-insignificant amount of buy-in from the GM to learn the game to the point where he can remain flexible and understand the implications of changing or adding specific rules, and certainly there are still certain concepts that will fall outside the "sweet spot" of system competency for GURPS campaigns. But for 95% of the campaigns I'd be interested in running, as a system it does a fantastic job of replicating the feel and the objectives of whatever game type I'm interested in exploring. At a certain level of competency, the rules practically fade into nothing to the point where the person running the game is basically living and breathing it, and making a given campaign play the way you want it to becomes as easy as blinking (though of course this could be said about many other systems as well, it feels important to point this out for a system commonly perceived as overly complex).

For people who get bored with mechanics, I can certainly understand why this would be antithetical to their long-term enjoyment of any system, however. I can also easily understand the delights of simply exploring something new and different, which is a fine motivation for playing different games.

I certainly understand that a wide variety of styles can be played with GURPs, but that is true for many systems, including the old warhorse D&D. These days it seems the core still using it are very much those with an interest in crunch though, not rules light role playing.

Quote from: Voros;993271I certainly understand that a wide variety of styles can be played with GURPs, but that is true for many systems, including the old warhorse D&D.

Sure, system flexibility is hardly unique to GURPS.

Quote from: Voros;993271These days it seems the core still using it are very much those with an interest in crunch though, not rules light role playing.

Frankly, I couldn't say. I would say that the majority of GURPS discussion tends to drift in the direction of crunch, though I think that's largely in part due to the fact that if you run the system light or narrative then there's not much value in discussing crunch; giving those running the system more lightly a comparatively smaller representation in internet discussions, which might account for that perceived slant in the direction of "crunchier" games. This is also partly why you don't see many GURPS games run online as light/narrative games; if your campaign doesn't use tactical combat, you won't get much use out of something like Maptools/Roll20, so you likely won't be hosting your campaign there at all; more likely you're on Hangouts, Skype, or something like that.
I would also say that GURPS' available crunch does to some extent draw in those who desire complexity; its availability makes it attractive for that purpose.

I myself tend to run about 2/3rds of my campaigns lighter and more streamlined, leaving about 1/3rd to the heavier crunch/sim angles which I tend to reserve for campaign types where it would be most appropriate to use (from a "rules weight-to-enjoyment" standpoint; the rules should serve the campaign and not be bolted on willy-nilly simply because you can, which is a common mistake in a modular system like GURPS, BRP, even FUDGE).

As you say always hard to know for sure but I wouldn't say that those using Rules light systems aren't on Roll20. Since it continues to be the dominant online gathering place I see lots of rules light, text only games on there.

Quote from: Voros;993275As you say always hard to know for sure but I wouldn't say that those using Rules light systems aren't on Roll20. Since it continues to be the dominant online gathering place I see lots of rules light, text only games on there.

Yeah, I honestly couldn't say anything of substance one way or the other. Certainly there are some rules-light games being played using those tools; I just wanted to list a few possibly-less-obvious factors which could be contributing to the perceived crunch-heavy tendencies of the bulk of GURPS players, since my own anecdotal experiences are hardly enough to substantiate any valuable assertions.

Quote from: RPGPundit;993137Yes, obviously in theory it could attempt to do it all, but outside of a certain range it can't do it all WELL.  GURPS is very good for low-powered stuff, including historical campaigns. The higher-powered it gets, the more clunky it becomes.

My belief is that the break-down point is around 600 points, where you could just buy straight 20s and call it a character.  However, the more points you have the more stuff you have on your character sheet is also a problem.  GURPS does have Bang! skills that let you take things like Gun! or Science! as a Very Hard x 3 skill.  But it needs some similar short hand for advantages.  Powers almost gets there but never makes the leap.  It also needs a better rule for damage and damage resistance relative to other points values because they scale badly as written.  The funny thing is that for the most part it's not the mechanics of play that break.  They're pretty solid.  It's the points system for character creation.  Even the diehards admit that there's a point where the points are just meaningless.

Quote from: David Johansen;993277But it needs some similar short hand for advantages.

There are rules for Wildcard Powers (page 41 of GURPS Supers), in case you did not already know. I'm not saying this at all addresses "sheet bloat" in any significant way, just wanted to mention it in case you had not already looked at them as they're a nifty little tool.

Quote from: David Johansen;993277It also needs a better rule for damage and damage resistance relative to other points values because they scale badly as written.  The funny thing is that for the most part it's not the mechanics of play that break.  They're pretty solid.  It's the points system for character creation.  Even the diehards admit that there's a point where the points are just meaningless.

Yes. There are multiple instances in GURPS of scaling that breaks down at the high end; while many patches exist, few of these core issues have been addressed in satisfactory ways.

As for point value/totals, I very rarely use them even at character creation (and even in those rare cases I tend to use Point Buckets rather than a grand total). I vastly prefer "pitch me a concept, if it fits we'll put it to paper and see how it looks/tweak as necessary" as a character generation method. This can frequently end up with disparate point totals, but this never effects play in any negative way so long as everyone understands the campaign premise and how their character fits into it. In fact, properly asymmetric play has produced some extremely memorable and well-loved experiences within some of my own groups which would have been lost had we adhered to some nebulous and arbitrary point standard.