Where GURPS Shines for Me

The specific. The details. Every little thing matters.

Knowing the rules. The hex-grid. Facing. Movement.

Building towards a mathematical advantage.

To me, this is where GURPS shines. The heart of GURPS is not point-buy or the best design system in gaming; it is the hard math between the hex grid, movement, carried weight, and using your skills to push your playing piece around that grid to achieve specific story objectives without dying.

Like The Fantasy Trip, the heart of GURPS lies in the same place. GURPS just lets you go so many more places than TFT. You can run a purely narrative game with GURPS, sure, and it works amazingly well. You can do theater of the mind with GURPS, and again, it works well. GURPS just does whatever it wants, and it does it well.

High fantasy or low? 5E doesn't even do low fantasy, and the last time they tried it broke the setting. Limit the gear of martial classes to wood, bone, and bronze, and the magic-based characters walk all over them by level five. In GURPS, oh yeah, this is good. The difference between a move of 3 and 4 could kill you.

GURPS is far, far better than 5E because you are not beholden to the whims of a game designer who tells you how you should build your character. You are the game designer. You design your character for what you want them to do.

Some games have a tight, highly tuned, very enjoyable gameplay loop, such as BX or Shadowdark. You play these games for that gameplay loop. I still enjoy the BX style of play, the counting down six exploration turns that a torch lasts, the regular wandering monster rolls, the forced rest turns, and encumbrance versus movement. That is a classic gameplay loop, and I enjoy it like a fine wine. It is very structured, and it clashes with today's narrative superhero fantasy games to the point that they are not even the same game.

The classic BX exploration, turn, and combat round game loop is very similar to a Car Wars Classic game. Every turn matters. You stay in that framework the entire session, tick off a time-tracking sheet, and never break out of it unless you shift into travel mode.

For the most part, in a dungeon, you are doing the exact same thing as you do in the one-second turns of GURPS, but you are in the 10-minute exporation framework of BX. You burn torches and oil for light. Lose your light, and that is like a SCUBA diver losing their air. It becomes a fight to survive when that resource runs low.

GURPS does that, but not really for the structured exploration turn. You can do that if you want, and you have experience running exploration turns. But that structure isn't in the game, and assumes you will port it in if you like it a lot. GURPS is that shapeshifter that will impersonate other games when it wants to, but you need to have experience in BX within that structure to know it even exists.

This is the invisible problem with GURPS: it is often a role-playing game you go to after other role-playing games that you like fail terribly. Maybe there are parts of them that you like, such as the BX exploration turn and the combat rounds, but you are expected to preserve those parts and translate the rest into GURPS.

That can be hard for players who don't have the concept, especially new players. They will see GURPS and look at all the math, the lack of structure outside of combat, and say, "Why bother?" GURPS assumes you BYOB for game mechanics that you love and cherish, but you have to have a B to BYO. The BX exploration turn is my B. I can bring that into GURPS, and even keep the wandering monster checks and strict light rules, and things become amazing. I can eliminate the resting turns and use fatigue instead, keeping that inside GURPS.

Every little thing matters again, but I have a bit of structure that forces it to matter.

Why do you have a move of two? You are killing us back there. Hand some junk off or drop it, we need to be able to move! The structure of the exploration turn will turn overloaded characters into liabilities quickly. 5E, and truthfully, some OSR games ignore encumbrance entirely and break the exploration turn framework, and they go full "combat action game." I can't play those, since that relationship between movement and weight defines us as humans, especially on vacation, in air travel, or on hikes.

GURPS can be relaxed and tell you, "Do theater of the mind, I do not care." The world is like a movie, and nothing matters except what happens on the screen.

Or GURPS can drill down like a second-by-second man-to-man wargame and give me the grit and blood of an epic fight. Or it can fall anywhere between, and shift identities like a chimera, giving you the exact level of simulation you need at the moment. Stay drilled down for an entire session and count the seconds. Or zoom out and say a month passes.

And GURPS can simulate that BX game loop, and kill you with encumbrance and light. Or you can ignore it. You have the freedom, since GURPS is freedom.

But with a little structure to force certain things to rise to the top, GURPS can be incredible.