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GURPS
The RPG of slow-motion combat between one-eyed sadists with no sense of smell
GURPS (the Generic Universal Role-Playing System) can be summed up neatly like this: the books are really well written and useful resources, but the rules system is bloody awful.

GURPS has a basic rulebook which sets out a set of rules which can be used for any background. Then it has a huge array of supplements. Some cover general game ideas, like GURPS Magic and GURPS Hi-Tech, and others are specific game settings, like GURPS Camelot. Every one of these supplements that I've read or used has been really well done. The historical settings are very well researched: I've sometimes used them as background resources for non-GURPS games. The hardware supplements give you ready-made systems for magic, spaceship and vehicle design, superpowers or whatever. This gives you the ability to pull a book off the shelf and use the rules from it without having to do much work. For instance, I once ran a one-off scenario where the player characters were evil cultists. I decided they should have limited access to magic, so I said each character could have one spell or power from the Magic, Psionics or Supers books. It was all there, ready to go.

That's the good thing about GURPS. The bad thing is the rules system. I'm afraid I'm going to bang on a lot about this because there are just so many things wrong with the game that annoy me. If you like GURPS, you should definitely read everything below and then you'll see the light and start to dislike GURPS as I do. If you don't play GURPS, you may want to skip to the summing up at the end.

THE MECHANICS SYSTEM

GURPS is written around the idea of having stats for everything, and giving those stats a points value. A character is built on Character Points, and GURPS makes a strong effort to allow those points to buy any traits that a character might conceivable have.

Points buy the four primary stats (Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence and Health). Skills can be bought with points (their value is based on points spent and a stat value). Skill into which you put no points have a 'default' level based on a stat. They also buy Advantages and Disadvantages (Advs and Disadvs), which aim to cover everything else. Advs cost points whereas Disadvs cost negative points, ie. they give you points back.

Advs and Disadvs cover a huge range of things. Appearance, Social Standing and Wealth can all be bought up or down. Some Disadvs are restrictions on behaviour, eg. Pacifist, Code of Honour, Addict.

A few generate derived stats: Will and Perception both have a basic value equal to Intelligence, unless bought up with Advs or down with Disadvs (called Strong Will and Weak Will for the Will stat).

A character has a points value, which is the total of all the points values for all his stats. Ordinary people are typically 25 points character. Player characters are normally 'hero material', 100 points. But a 100 point character is not 4 times as powerful as a 25 point character, because 0 points does not represent no abilities. A 0 point character has average primary stats and all skills at default.

Experience Points simply add to a character's total of Character Points. If a character gains some new advantage, or loses a disadvantage, he has to pay for it out of experience points. But if he loses an Adv or gains a Disadv as a result of play, he simply loses the points. So, for example, if a character gains a lot of money in the game, his Wealth level increases and he has to put experience points into it to pay for it. But if he loses a lot of money, his Wealth level simply goes down (resulting in a drop in Character Points total) without compensation.

WHERE IT ALL GOES WRONG

There are two big problems with this approach. First, it encourages people to take Disadvs to get lots of points, and so they end up playing one-eyed sadists with no sense of smell.

Second, you can't put a Character Points price on everything. This is because the 'value' of something to a character is ambiguous and changeable. Here are a few examples.

Social Standing: A character can have a low Social Standing as a result of what he is or his origins. For example, someone seen as 'valuable property' (eg. a slave) has a low social standing. Now, suppose a slave character joins a slave revolt. In his new social situation, ex-slaves are accepted as brothers while ex-free men are looked down on as never having suffered as a slave. Because of a change of social situation, something statted as a Disadv actually becomes advantageous.

FIDDLY LITTLE RULES

Here are two rules which all games designers should be forced to learn to recite verbatim:

Captain Anorak's first rule:

A rule in a game must be easily understandable and unambiguous. It must be completely clear: no interpretation must be needed by the GM or players to make the game playable. It must not encourage misinterpretation.

Captain Anorak's third rule:

All rules must work properly. The more rules you put into a game, the greater the chance that there will be some rules that don't work properly, and that a number of rules will interact in an unforeseen way to produce an undesirable effect.

These rules are particularly applicable to GURPS because it has so many rules. With so many rules, some of them are bound to be ambiguous, unclear, or poorly thought out. GURPS has many of these. While no one of them alone is a game-killer, there is enough of a mass of them taken together to really put me off the system.

Delusions: Delusion is a Disadv. It consists in having a belief about the world that is untrue - not inconvienient, but untrue. One example of a Major Delusion given in the rulebook is 'the world is flat'. This is simply stated as a blanket example, not tied to any particular game setting. Suppose you're playing a game set in a society where everyone believes the world is flat. Does this mean that everyone in that society has to have the Delusion disadvantage? Imagine a game in a society where it is heresy not to believe that the world is flat. In such a society, it sounds disadvantageous to believe that the world is round, and advantageous (ie. conducive to survival) to believe that it is flat. Yet still the rules tell us that believing it is flat is a disadvantage, and believing it's round is not.

The best way to have handled Delusion would have been to say that it counts as a disadvantage if it inconveniences the character - not if it's untrue. As written, it's a very bad rule.

Will: There are an Adv called Strong Will and a Disadv called Weak Will. A character with neither has Will equal to Intelligence. Each level of Strong Will confers +1 Will, each of Weak Will -1 Will.

Will is strength of mind - it would be used to resist torture or temptation. Why should this be based on Intelligence? I can easily imagine the stereotypes of the big stupid fighter (stupid but very strong willed, having a high resistance to torture) and the cowardly scientist (highly intelligent but he's never had to endure pain and would break at the mere threat of torture). So this idea of basing Will on Intelligence is ludicrous. It would have made a lot more sense to make it a fifth primary stat.

Also, the rule lends itself to misinterpretation. As written, Strong Will and Weak Will are simply modifiers to Intelligence to determine the Will stat: someone with Intelligence 14 and Weak Will 1 would have Will 13, while a character with Intelligence 10 and Strong Will 1 would have Will 12. Thus a character with Weak Will can have higher will than one with Strong Will. This sounds ludicrous, but if you ignore the stat names then it makes perfect sense in itself.

But the names of the stats induce GMs to treat any character with Weak Will as being weak willed, and with Strong Will as being strong willed, in contradiction to the Will values. Once I had a character with Intelligence 14, and I decided to bring the Will down by having Weak Will 1, as I didn't envisage her as being that strong-willed. But she still had Will 13, better than an average human. Yet the GM sometimes said 'All characters with Weak Will suffer this effect', which affected her even though her Will was high. This was because the GM interpreted the Weak Will Disadv as indicating that the character has weak will, which is not what it does in the rules.

MAXING OUT CHARACTERS

In any game where characters are built with points, there is always potential for maxing out characters. At a basic level, this means putting all your charcater points into combat skills and leaving everything else out. At a more sophisticated level, it means working out how to screw the rules system to get an unfairly powerful character. GUPRS' idea of having points for everything, even stuff that other roleplaying games would never put stats on, means that there are more ways of finding extra points for combat skills. Its plethora of badly written rules means that there is a cornucopia of shoddy rules for the unscrupulous player to exploit. Here's what I think may be the worst example:

Allies and Dependents: Ally is an Adv. It means that you have someone who helps you. Dependent is a Disadv. It means that you have someone who you have to protect and care for. They have points values (positive for Ally and negative for Dependent) which vary with the Ally/Dependent's Character Points value and frequency of appearance. I don't have a copy of the GURPS rules to hand, but as I recall the text runs something like this: An Ally is a character of 50 points or more. A Dependent is a character of 25 points or less. A character of between 50 and 25 points would be an Ally costing 0 points.

The potential for abuse here is huge. According to these rules, a player character could have a 49 point Ally for free - costing no points - or he could have two such Allies, or ten, or a thousand, or a million. Leaving this obviously mad rule (which no sane GM would ever allow) aside, there is still a lot of scope for fucking the system here.

First, you can make a useful Dependent. Imagine your character has a child who is physically disabled (very low Strength, Dexterity and Health) but has incredibly high Intelligence and lots of knowledge and computer skills. You could then keep this child at home, and you would essentially have a second character to do all your thinking stuff for you. Yet this doesn't cost you any points - you actually get points back for it.

But the best exploitation is chaining. You create an Ally who's a 60 point character - this will be pretty cheap, but you can still build a very powerful if limited character on it (a combat monster for example). He has three Allies of the same calibre. They each have three Allies of the same calibre. They each have three Allies of the same calibre. And so it goes on.

Chaining Dependents is even better. Suppose I have a brother who got hit on the head and is now mentally retarded. He's my Dependent, and I keep him at my house. He has four children, who are his Dependents. They all have different skills. They also live at my house. They're not my Dependents, so there's nothing in the rules that says I have to look after them. That means I can take them into dangerous situations to help me out. They have to do what I say, since I feed the ungrateful little bastards and put a roof over their heads. Because my brother has very low stats (he's terribly sick) and so many Dependents, he has a very low points value and so I get an unusually high number of Character Points back for taking on this Dependent. Yet I get a huge amount of benefit from it - four characters who can help me out with their many varied skills.

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

I've moaned on about quite a lot of specifics in the above sections. Now here's what it means when you step back and look at the big picture.

GURPS has stats for things which there's just no need for a game to stat. If you want to roleplay someone with a code of honour, or an addiction, or odious personal habits, or a particular social status, then you can do that without it being statted. Having stats for these things adds nothing to the game, it just makes it worse because having rules for these things means that you can't roleplay them as freely.

The reason that GURPS has all these things statted is that it tries to make all characters 'fair' and 'equal' with its points system. This will always fail with points allocation systems, because some people will try to use points to make a normal person and other will abuse them to make combat monsters. GURPS has made this worse by having more points to play around with (and therefore abuse) and more rules, leading to a greater number of shoddy rules that can be exploited. Some of the most villainous examples are mentioned above. Thus a system that was conceived to make characters more fair has in effect made them less fair. The simple dice-rolled characters of Dragon Warriors seem a haven or reasonable normality compared with the distorted monsters that GURPS can create.

That is why the GURPS rules system is so bad. As an afterthought, no critique of GURPS would be complete without mentioning its combat system.

GURPS COMBAT

GURPS combat is a bit like waltzing. A waltz goes slow-slow-quick-quick-slow. GURPS combat goes slow-slow-slow-slow-slow. I've known it to take an hour to play one second of combat in GURPS. One round represents one second, and it can take an hour to play. (This is in a different league to the next worst offender: a Vampire combat round represents three seconds, and it routinely takes half an hour to play one.) Sometimes I feel that GURPS combat is basically fairly simple, and if all the players knew the combat system reasonably well it would be quick and easy. But I don't think I've ever seen that happen.