Let’s kick off some activity here with a question:
How much crunch do you, personally, like in your games?
Ultra Lite? Lite? Basic Set? Every book you can get your hands on?
Light on combat, heavy on skills? Vice-versa? Light overall with some aspects way more fleshed-out? Heavy overall with some aspects way more simplified? Are there specific mechanics you like to take full advantage of? Mechanics you like to gloss over?
No wrong answers, let’s just get some discussion going
Man, I haven’t played GURPS in decades. I naturally barely remember its play tbh.
But I’m generally a crunch friendly GM, but not a crunch mandatory one. I tend to prefer crunch where it’s useful, meaning in combat. Outside of combat, there’s much less use for it. You don’t really run into things where it makes a lot of sense unless there’s a lot of quasi-random factors in the activity in the real world.
That’s interesting, I was drawn to GURPS precisely because it offers so much crunch outside combat. As much as I do appreciate the granular combat mechanics, I like the unique blend of freedom and consistency offered by the skill mechanics. I’ve grown tired of DnD which forces the GM to either spontaneously adjudicate an action and try to stay consistent the next time the scenario comes up, or just forbid any action not specifically described RAW.
Yes, obviously, the GM is still the one to have final say, but I think it’s so much easier to have RAW defaults to refer to when needed.