I get to
roleplay about once every few
decades, and then, I have to play whatever
game everyone else is playing, so despite my truly
immense collection of GURPS books, I've never actually gotten to
play a game using the GURPS system.
Nevertheless, I've spent enough time
reading the books that I have most of the
core rules memorized, and I can tell you that it
is one of the more
complex roleplaying systems out there. There are a lot of rules for how to do some very
complicated things -- immediately springing to mind are the highly-
technical Vehicle Creation Rules and the Advanced
Combat Rules, with rules to govern what part of the
body you hit, how much you're weakened by
bleeding, and how much the
terrain can aid or hinder your attacks -- but luckily, those complicated rules are completely
optional; if you don't want to mess with them, you can completely
ignore them.
And the rules for
character generation tend to be pretty complicated, too. Personally, I love 'em that way. It takes some
time and
math skills to build a
character in GURPS, but the time and
knowledge required are not
extreme. I can put a new character together in less than
30 minutes (though I've had a few years to practice), and my
feeble math skills (I
was a
liberal arts major in college, after all) are not significantly
taxed. (You wanna see a complicated system? The
character sheets I've seen of
Champions characters look like
random combinations of
numbers and
acronyms. I can't make
heads or tails of 'em...)
Most importantly, when I'm finished with the character, I know
exactly what that character can and cannot do. I know how
strong he is, how
fast he is, what he's
good at, and what he's
inept at. And thanks to the rules on
mental disadvantages and
quirks, I've got a pretty damn good idea how to
roleplay him, whether
greedy,
horny,
noble,
honest,
depressed,
angry,
confused,
frightened,
sadistic,
obsessive, you name it.
White Wolf's overpraised
Storyteller system tells you a
Brujah vampire is
angry and
rebellious and usually expects that to be enough; GURPS suggests a few disadvantages to use, like
Bloodlust,
Bully,
Fanaticism,
Stubbornness, and
Weak Will: Self-Control.
In fact, a GURPS character tends to be so
complete and
detailed that when I write
fiction, I keep a couple of GURPS books on my
reference shelf for
inspiration ("Oooh, wouldn't it be
neat if my
protagonist was a
lecherous solipsist with
Tourette's Syndrome and a fondness for
yellow baseball caps?"), and after writing out my
main characters'
descriptions and
histories, I usually convert them into GURPS stats so I'll have access to an easy-to-understand character
reference I can consult when I need to.
UPDATE: All of the previous was for GURPS
Third Edition. The Fourth Edition of GURPS, however, is a disaster. The rules have been made a great deal more complicated, apparently because the company wants to appeal to gearheads, wargamers, and theoretical math majors. I've picked up three of the new GURPS books, expecting to be able to jump right in with the new system -- and damn if I can't make hide nor hair of what's going on in these books anymore. And if I can't understand the new system, with a heavy background in GURPSisms, what chance does a neophyte gamer have?
I'm still using the Third Edition rules. They ain't perfect, but at least they make sense.