Buzz Word Salad

I've been a staunch advocate for GURPS for nearly 40 years now.

I've endured a lot of people who've clearly never played it dismiss or insult the system the entire time.

Certain phrases keep cropping up.

One that's certain to raise my ire is "story driven".

What's story driven?

That's when the story is in the driver's seat and the players get to make a limited choice of actions; none of which affect the course of the plot.

The GM is letting the players add some color to their story, not the players making their own.

The counterpart is "character driven" and that's the characters in the driver's seat and the GM "simply" provides a space for them to run amok.  The players call the tune and make their own story.

Wanna know something?

They are both game system independent.

You can be story driven with ANY RPG.  You just need a GM to sit down and write one, then insert the players into their world.

If you prefer one system over another, that's OK, but don't think that it's inherently better for your preference.

My preference falls from having a setting in my imagination that cannot be presented with rules carefully tailored to a single setting.

Once I'd learned GURPS, I discovered that its toolbox could be applied to the settings with the tailored rules.

Remember that "for nearly 40 years"?

I also remember changing rules every time we changed setting.  We had at least four different rule sets for fantasy settings along the way.

Sorting out the details and differences of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, from Chaosium Basic Roleplay, from Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying from Rollmaster Rolemaster was NOT easier than converting them all to GURPS.

And those were JUST to play fantasy worlds.

Aside: To anyone bitching that GURPS is too complex and hard to play, try on OG Rolemaster someday.  It's got rules and a table for what you want to do, in one of those books, someplace...

We quickly found that we could play in any of those settings using GURPS, but often couldn't play the setting from one fantasy RPG using the rules from another.

They were too setting specific.

But the road to GURPS wasn't paved from trying to run Warhawk with Chaosium.

It really started when a player in Twilight: 2000 tried to get a sword.  Years before GURPS came out.

The thing that cinched it was the "reality check," or as I've said here a couple of times, "Will it GURPS?"

The challenge:  Without writing new rules, take a real world situation and play it out in-game.

Over and over GURPS has succeeded and other games failed.

Aside: I am sick to death of people dismissing or condemning GURPS when it's obvious they've never played it.  I've been doing this a long time and I have seen all of these arguments before, almost to the word, and the person struggling with the rules will phrase it differently from the person repeating criticism that hasn't applied since the very crude 2e rules were in print.

What GURPS is, to me, is a way to tell MY story without making my own book of rules to supplement the published text and having learned its subtleties, found that I no longer needed to learn a different ruleset every time I wanted to tell a different story.

At the end of the day, what I think the real problem is for most people is that GURPS doesn't come with a setting.  The GM has to, literally, make up everything from scratch and gets nothing pre-made for them.  That will include informing the players of what kind of characters they should and should not make.

The player is presented with more work as well.  For many, GURPS will be the first time they HAVE to make a choice about everything on their character sheet.

I've guided a lot of players through this process and the "HAVE" to make these choices often becomes "GET" to make these choices when the GM du jour goes "story driven" and they have to make a D&D character and find many of the things they want to do are precluded by their character's class.

PS: You do need to LEARN other rulesets to port their settings to GURPS.  I've done it many times.  Its main strength is that you CAN.