I played and am mostly familiar with GURPS 3rd, just FYI.CraigM wrote:How so? I'm very interested in what folks find mechanically unsettling about GURPS.Archmage wrote:Edit: Oh, and the skill system is inane. I can't disagree with that.
Okay, so you have four stats: Strength, Dexterity, IQ, and Health (ST, DX, IQ, and HT). Skills are either physical or mental, and they are graded as easy, average, hard, or very hard (E/A/H/VH). (NB: In GURPS 4e, skills are just easy/average/hard, and there's no physical/mental split. The table is also less inane.)
When you buy a skill, you pay 1, 2, 4, or 8 points for it depending on whether it's E/A/H/VH. At base cost, you get that skill equal to your stat. So if your DX is 14 and you spend 4 points on a Physical/Hard skill you get a skill of 14.
But wait! What if you don't want to spend that many points, or you want a better skill rating than that? You consult the skill costs table (you can work out the progression, but it diverges at high costs for VH skills).
So if you want that Physical/Hard skill at 15 (which is DX+1), you pay 8 points. You can pay 16 to get it up to 16 (DX+2). Or you can pay 2 points to get it at 13 (DX-1), or pay 1 point to get it at 12 (DX-2).
The best way to explain this to people is that there are two ways to approach skills: Decide what rating you want and then figure out how many points that costs, or figure out how many points you're willing to spend and then derive the rating from the table. Both work, but it's a convoluted process either way until you learn the table--it's basically half-cost to go down a rank and double-cost to go up a rank, but that's not actually 100% true and the whole thing is kind of a pain.
Luckily, the game tells you that rudimentary training with a skill is equal to rating 10, an expert is 16, and all sorts of other various benchmarks above and below. So what you want to do is have your player describe what they want ("I want to be an expert swordsman") and then you can figure out how many points it would cost for that character to have Broadsword - 16 based on their DX. Or whatever.
GURPS 3e had weird crap about "improving skills from defaults" that made learning to use a bastard sword easier if you already knew how to use a broadsword, but the math was really weird and I can't explain how it worked without the book in front of me. I can't find my core book, and these rules aren't in GURPS 3e Lite, but they're listed in some random sidebar in the skills chapter. I think GURPS 4e did away with this, but I'm not sure.
You really do have to go through and make a list of skills that will be useful or allowed in your game. Acrobatics might be useful in almost any genre, but Masonry or Occultism might not, and technological skills are for specific tech levels. So there's no generic "medicine" skill, there's Medicine/TL. Modern day is approximately TL7, so a 21st century doctor has training in Medicine/TL7. This is ostensibly so that characters from today's Earth marooned on desert islands or traveling through time can't use their modern-day medicine skills to accomplish jack shit using either coconuts and twine or electrofrobotzillating neurocardioverters as applicable (okay, they can try, but they're at a penalty...to be fair, they're better off than people with NO Medicine skill).
Also, there are advantages and disadvantages that can make skills cost more or less, respectively. Magical Aptitude is required to cast spells, but it also comes in three levels and adds to your IQ, but only for the purpose of learning spells. There's some inane Eidetic Memory advantage that cost either 30 or 60 points by itself but that either halved or quartered the costs of all non-magical mental skills, so you can save a whole pile of points if you're willing to spend time bean-counting.
Note that many skills can be used untrained, but "defaulting" on a skill results in a penalty ranging from -4 to -8 depending on how hard the skill is--you might seriously be trying to roll under a 4 on 3d6 to succeed at a hard skill untrained. Good luck.
What else do you want to know about? The combat mechanics? The magic/psionics/super-power systems? Equipment subsystems?