What's wrong with GURPS

So, I've been hearing a lot of good stuff about GURPS since I've been looking for a system which can be used for lots of different settings, but I'm wondering what the downsides of it all are. So yeah, what do you dislike about GURPS in general?

your picture confuses me, why are they erasing the contours?

The magic system is organized like a mad dyslexic scrabble player decided to "fix" it, there's no official prerequisite chart, melee combat turns into a slog of similar actions against foes with high points, enchantment is designed to be unusable for PC's and it sucks at running any fantasy.

My buddy said that he had tried it, he had liked the variety of the character creation but in the end he got turned off by the over complicated combat system.

I forgot to mention, the semi official program for building characters, GURPS character assistant is a steaming pile of shit, and is made of bugs.

Outlines are used to mark abrupt changes in color; none of the erased lines represent hard edges, so they shouldn't be there. Over outlining is a great indication of symbol drawing.

/ic

GURPS is RPG Tofu. It takes quite a lot of work to prepare, but can be used to make a huge variety of dishes. But no matter how different they are or what extras you add, at the end of the day you're still eating tofu.

This doesn't make it bad, but it's the reality of the system. As a GM you need to take GURPS and use the pieces it gives you to build the system you want, but you'll never capture the distinctly different feeling mechanics you get if you use a different system to run one game or another.

If you're fine with the system always feeling the same and putting the work in to rebuild it for each new campaign, GURPS is great.

It's very labor intensive compared to other games. The gm needs to know what he's doing, and the players need to be under his oversight at character generation

Like Pathfinder and all White Wolf games, the system isn't that bad, but the fanbase is so horrible that you don't want to be associated with it.

This is the kind of stuff I feared, to be fair.

Well, how would it fair as a "template system" I could use to homebrew something a bit more specific?

>the magic system
Which one? There are at least eight and five or six of them are simple as hell.

The base system. Threshold is also badly organized because it uses the same spells. The magic book is just awful at spell organization

When we say it's hard to learn, we mean that it's simply demanding you look at things in terms it dictates for design. There's nothing inherently complicated, it just doesn't have simplistic crutches like DnD and the like.

The easiest way to jump into the game is to have the gm make character sheets for the players for session 1, or at least sit alongside in session 0 where you setup the game. Once character gen is out of the way, it's a damn easy to run game.

Just remember; less is more, have fun, and ask the folks in GURPS general for any specific questions

You can't make true zombies or vampires in it.

Gurps has a number of abilities that are straight-up broken like damage auras and innate attacks, so the GM needs to go through each characters sheet with a fine-toothed comb to prevent clusterfucks in-game

Also the amount of math and paperwork to get most things done is irritating

Because to make a decent game you have to gather options from a shitton of books.
Also, they try to be realistic but very few people want that much "realism" in fantasy/sci-fi.

Quick contests don't work as intended beyond 20 points in skill/ability on both sides. You need to use proportions to get somewhat close results.

Is that really true? You need the basic set and like one or maybe two others depending on your game.

Nothing. It's the only system with a future as it was written with the superior asian mind in mind from the start.

Isn't that in the basic book? Something about taking one of the two's skill level down to 14 and adjusting the enemy's by as much.

No it isn't.

If you want the relative number of options, but more simple design, try Savage Worlds. It's in the same vein, with a point buy design, and it's also a generic system with a few supplements for various genres.

It's more pulpy through, and tends to be more cinematic than realistic.

But it's got exploding dice in it, which is always fun.

A lot of people on here say it's boring though, which I really can't understand.

It's not more shit than much shit Veeky Forums loves, like L5R. Probably better, but still shit.