I never played that much GURPS. I used to buy the books for the way that they would look at their subject matter through a variety of lenses.

It's very much RPG-as-toolkit which I like but I always felt that GURPS was geared towards trope-wrangling like 'What if it's a western but with mechs?' or 'What if the British empire has super heroes?' and my mind doesn't really work that way.

I also played it at a club and we played in 5 game blocks and the entire first session was characters.

@Taskerland My problem with GURPS was that it very much rewarded number crunchers over people who just wanted to make a character and move on. I played in an SF game of GURPS3 where I made a navigator, someone made a captain, someone made an engineer, someone made a marine, and the final person, an old GURPS hand to our neophyte status, made the helmsman.

Who was better at literally every job on the ship than anybody else who'd made specialists.

🧵 ️

I never played that much GURPS. I used to buy the books for the way that they would look at their subject matter through a variety of lenses.

It's very much RPG-as-toolkit which I like but I always felt that GURPS was geared towards trope-wrangling like 'What if it's a western but with mechs?' or 'What if the British empire has super heroes?' and my mind doesn't really work that way.

I also played it at a club and we played in 5 game blocks and the entire first session was characters.

@Taskerland I didn't mention it, but I have the same love/hate relationship with Traveller as I have with Ars Magica.

Accountants in space... Bluergh!

@satsuma @Taskerland in that kind of setting I can see a VTT as quite useful, indeed.

@Taskerland I played lots of GURPS and it never saved me from years of RPG Kit Bashes. I just learnt from it and Hero how much I despise points based systems and their "fairness"

@Printdevil @Taskerland The joy of character creation is rolling up some mechanically terrible dude and figuring out how to play that.

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@AndreasDavour @Taskerland If you have one player who enjoys space accountancy, you can hand it all off to them and just ask them "which planet should we go to next".
Often that player is me.

@AndreasDavour @Taskerland the gm also made use of Google Streetview so we could see the real world locations that we were travelling through which added to the immersion

@Taskerland OK so big GURPS fan here… but yes, character generation is not only too long, it's generally the most complex thing you'll have to do in the game, and it's the thing you have to do first. GURPS is a product of mid 80s gaming in which campaigns tended to be long so it didn't matter as much if you took a while to get a character ready for play.
In play? Dead simple, 3d6 roll low and tell me the margin, job done.
And I do genuinely like the _result_ of character generation, in which my occult detective doesn't just have an Occult Detective Trait but rather stuff they're better at and stuff they're worse at, so they're not just like every other occult detective. (And all that stuff is right there on the character sheet, I don't have to keep it all in my head from session to session.)

@Printdevil @Taskerland The joy of character creation is rolling up some mechanically terrible dude and figuring out how to play that.

@RogerBW @Taskerland yes, very much this. I've run it for people who didn't even know they were playing GURPS (not girls, autocorrect, though that suggests new campaign ideas) because they had pregens and were running 3d6 and roleplaying a handful of character traits with me handling the mechanics as necessary.

Templates were… a good idea, stymied by implementation.

@sbszine @Printdevil @Taskerland POW 3 Cthulhu character remains probably my favourite, though in hindsight a little close to home at that point in my life

@shimminbeg @Taskerland A minor innovation which I think would make templates much more usable: turn every instance of "choose X from among" to "here's the standard set of traits, and if you want to tweak it a bit, drop this and put in one of those instead". So that you can have a bog-standard ready to play whatever instantly, _and_ leave it tweakable for those who want to tweak.

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