In GURPS, my party ended the campaign with ~70 character points because they were civilians, which means a single shot from a rifle would flatline them without question. They were super picky about combat (as was intended) and only ended up in around 7 fights throughout the 12 session adventure.
Every fight I designed was basically guesswork because I can't be assed to learn encounter balance for a campaign that's meant to have sudden, instant death (it's the zombie apocalypse). It's actually a miracle that the combats in that game were as tense as they were. I also ended up using alternate combat objectives a lot because killing 200 zombies before they kill you isn't exactly an interesting fight.
So now I'm prepping Draw Steel and the book has math for how many creatures I should have. I just set a budget and then I spend it and it ends up balanced? I don't have to worry about the PCs dying because they got sneezed on too hard? There's a book containing a bunch of monster stat sheets that are actually readable and don't require me to flip through the book several times? What the hell?
And don't get me wrong, my GURPS game was awesome. I loved running it, but holy hell the combat SUCKED. I swear 90% of a GURPS combat is asking the player "I'm going to hit you, any malices?" and then "okay, 11, it hits. roll for dodge or parry" then they roll a 5 and you've just spent 1 minute going back and forth to come to the conclusion that nothing happens. It works really well for a bunch of chunguses with baseball bats killing zombies but I'd hate to play a game where everyone has a billion modifiers.
For as quirky and kind of bad GURPS is, I'd be lying if I said I didn't really enjoy running it. The character customization is really solid, and I liked being able to give character points to players who took interesting actions or did something sufficiently cool. There are also so many rules that you couldn't possibly use all of them, which means you get to pick the ones that are relevant and leave the chaff. When my player's character got his arm chopped off, the game had built in rules for how many character points you get back for losing your arm, which softens the blow.
TLDR: GURPS is so bad but also awesome. Happy with the campaign I ran in it and very excited to be running Draw Steel next week.
pixelskylines
jacobvanloon
turnnoffyourmind
snowghoul
kianamaiart
