GURPS General

Click it
It is a .PDF

Pros: if you like customizing things, GURPS is built for that. It's got systems for creating spells and powers with a simulacrum of balance, multiple ways to skin the same cat so you can choose the one that's appropriate for your play style.
Eg: hiking can be done by simply rolling dice against a hiking skill, or by doing some in depth calculations of terrain, fatigue, weather, leadership capability, survival skill, and navigation.
Cons:
If you don't want to use one of the established lines that do a lot of the work for you in establishing which rules are appropriate (eg, action, after the end [post apocalypse], dungeon fantasy [sword and sorcery dungeon crawls], or monster hunters [modern day Buffy the vampire slayer like stuff]) it might take a while to spin up enough system mastery to put together your setting of choice.

>spin up enough system mastery
rule of thumb when youre just setting things up with gurps? Pick a number, have them roll 3d6, make a note and move on
then, after the game, do a bit of reading up on the thing that caught you up, and learn. Its how I found my blindspots.

thanks anons

Much obliged

Welp, tried making a small urban SWAT mech using 3e Mecha, using pec related as inspiration; holy shit I can see why the old method was unpopular. I realized I could have afforded to make a set of arms much stronger five steps ago, but by then it was already too much work to go back and fix it, so now the arms are incredibly tiny in comparison to about everything else about the mech.

None of it was *hard* by any stretch, but it was tedious even with the tables and a calculator. An automated spreadsheet would do wonders.

Addendum: Having finished it, the arms are hilariously spindly; going by the book, even the heavier ST40 arms have Reach 0. Without a spreadsheet to automate the process though, I really don't feel like trying it again despite me understanding the system better and probably being able to get something closer to what I wanted this time around.

Using Vehicles 3e or the Mecha rules?
Because for Vehicles, there's the GVB program. It's great.

I glanced through Vehicles and was having trouble finding mech-related things, so I used Mecha instead; from what I can tell it's the same system and Mecha just streamlined the options to legs, arms, and other giant robot things instead of types of wheels, treads, propellers, and other things you would want for normal vehicles but not mechs.

>3e
Oh gods the pain
My favorite game Ive run in recent memory was where the party made street urchins and derilicts with 25/-50, and started with -1 wealth built in. They get 'recruited' by the local police, rounded up, and shuffled off to work off their debts.
They get handed to an eccentric man with a weird European accent, named Nicola Tesla.

He shoves them into strange canvas and brass pressure suits, then into big robot mecha.

And thus began the craziest mecha game I ever ran; The Diesel-Jet Mecha of Nicola Tesla, Against the World!

That beign said, I'll look at GVB when I get home, thanks for the suggestion!