Quote from: David Johansen;596847I think GURPS struggles with flavor as much because the art and layout and page design all scream GURPS as anything rules related.  It would help a great deal if there was a stylistic character sheet for each genre and the books each had their own style.

But even I'll admit that GURPS only works if the GM is fluent in the rules and good at creating flavor on their own.  The tools are there and knowing how and when to use them is important.

For example in our horror game on Monday one PC emptied a clip from his FN-FAL through a closed, armored door into the room behind (armored door? It's a FAL!) I didn't layout the room behind the door and check to see which targets were hit.  I just had him roll the attack and determined the number of hits.  It's far easier to abstract a concrete system than it is to draw concrete data out of an abstract one.

There's still the tension of the unseen and unknown that way.

But, yeah, you'll never see GURPS using a Jenga tower or anything like that.

Quote from: Justin Alexander;596720It's certainly possible. But GURPS had enough popularity in the first 20 years of its existence to support one of the largest libraries of supplemental material in the RPG industry. So it seems more likely that something changed to reduce its popularity, rather than that everyone woke up one day and said, "Holy crap, that's a really stupid name."

Off-hand, looking at the timeline involved, there appear to be three possibilities:

(1) Something happened shortly before the release of 4th Edition that reduced the popularity of the system (and possibly prompted the release of 4th Edition in effort to get the system back on track). 4th Edition came out in 2004: That suggests that the D20 boom or the industry contraction in 2003 could be pointed at. But it's also possible that GURPS had simply reached the end of a very long supplement treadmill and/or was now sufficiently "archaic" by industry standards that it was losing popularity to newer, arguably superior generic engines.

(2) The release of 4th Edition itself precipitated the problem. This is my personal theory: By 2000, the GURPS engine was something of a relic. It continued to enjoy immense popularity, however, because it was uniquely well-supported as a universal game engine due to the legacy of its huge support library. 4th Edition eliminated the only advantage GURPS still had going for it.

(3) Some combination of both #1 and #2.