What about GURPS?

[silva]

Mistborn, you say Im an ignorant twatshitter and then go on to show an argument agreeing with my point (that Gurps books are great sources and references).

Do you actually read what you regurgitate from Franks texts ? Or you just, you know, swallow it all like a good whore that you are ?

[John Magnum]

The point, silva, is that you said no one mentioned how good the source books are. Except someone did mention how good the source books are, you illiterate boob. And then you claimed other people aren't reading the thread! Holy shit.

[Sakuya Izayoi]

"Perhaps the only precept taught me by Grandfather Wills that I have honored all my adult life is that profanity and obscenity entitle people who don’t want unpleasant information to close their ears and eyes to you."

[silva]

The point, silva, is that you said no one mentioned how good the source books are. Except someone did mention how good the source books are, you illiterate boob. And then you claimed other people aren't reading the thread! Holy shit.

Oh, really ? My bad.

Sorry Mistborn. My apologies.

[TheFlatline]

http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=54384:

But I would go beyond even what AncientHistory said about book quality. It isn't that the books are individually "not bad", they are individually great. Steve Jackson brought in consultants, experts, and focus groups for these books. If there was a GURPS Asparagus, it would be written by someone who knew Asparagus backwards and forwards and not only liked Asparagus, but really cared about Asparagus and "doing it right". The irony of course, is that these people often don't know GURPS from a hole in the ground, so the presented GURPS mechanics are generally much clunkier and less lovingly crafted than the setting information. GURPS Asparagus is probably one of, if not the best Asparagus sourcebooks for Dungeons and Dragons. Or any other Asparagus related campaign you intended to run with any system.

-Username17

Quoted for truth. I use GURPS books all the time for non-GURPS games. The planet/tech/civ generating engine in GURPS space is one of the best I've ever encountered.

GURPS Traveller is actually a better book to introduce you to Traveler than the Traveller corebook is because Steve Jackson is probably one of the biggest fans of Traveler out there and wrote a more or less exhaustive (for it's size) encyclopedia for the setting. When introducing people to the game, I hand them the GURPS book for setting, but then the normal book for chargen.

[silva]

I heard similar things of Gurps Falkenstein and Gurps Mage the Ascension.

[momothefiddler]

Nobody really talks about GURPS because it's not worth the effort to grok or mock for a lot of people. It's a solid 3d6 bell curve system with a lot of fiddly bullshit that, as has been mentioned earlier, has no absolute meaning attached to it. So you have the setting and splat books, which are loosely related and don't create stylistic cohesion.

So the lack of setting makes for a lack of traction? Makes sense.

In trying to be everything, GURPS is nothing. At least HERO and FATE tell you what kind of genre they're supposed to emulate. They have a brand identity.

I never got that impression from FATE and haven't played HERO. Hm.

RIFTS' setting and gameplay is predicated on being a weird technomagical kitchen sink. GURPS is just a very intricate, decently crafted series of dials.

I was once invited to play RIFTS on the premise that "It's a crazy unbalanced mess, but it's fun because you can play anything you want! So I looked over the setting, decided on a character (iirc, a lizard-man raised to be a shaman who broke with proper spiritual tradition and wanted to be scientific about it), and after an ungodly amount of searching, determined that I could not, in fact, play anything I wanted. The game may be unbalanced, the math may be puzzling, the setting may be nonsensical, but I don't care because I am offended by the stupidity of trying to make every option available by writing infinite classes rather than by not having classes. And even if they did succeed in making an infinite number of classes, and even if I did manage to look through all of them, there's still no guarantee I'd find what I wanted to play just like there's no guarantee that you'll ever find a given string of digits in an irrational number. It would take a truly impressive offer to get me to consider that again.

Ahem.

My point (other than that I despise RIFTS) is that most of the dials are set for any given campaign and a large part of the utility of the system comes from the ability to change those dials between campaigns without changing the basic workings of the system. Some people seem to be under the misconception that the point of GURPS is to set all those dials to max and play RIFTS, and I suppose it handles that (I'm in a world-hopping game with a TL3 fantasy wizard, a TL8 modern fantasy mage, a TL9 sci fi brain-op psychic, and two new guys that I don't know yet. There was a TL11 cyborg at one point.) but the whole point of the system is that it also handles other things.

---

I dont agree with those saying Gurps has no flavour. It has a innate realism, naturalism and sobriety that gives it a strong mundane, scientific, flavour to me, which fits in realistic/contemporary/historic/sci-fi settings and themes well, in my opinion. In fact, the Cyberpunk and Transhuman Space games I played did run well.

I don't think people are claiming it has no flavour. LAGO pointed out that it has a very specific feel due to the mechanics, regardless of the setting you're in. That can be adjusted a bit, with things like the cinematic trigger, but without changing the underlying mechanics entirely (and thus the system itself), you're gonna have things like internal consistency taking precedence over narrative direction, and that's a definite limiter on the games you can play with the system.

---

The skills issue in GURPS is even bigger than this. Many skills, although they exist, have no guidelines as to their use. While there's a skill for cooking, for instance, it says, "A successful skill roll allows you to prepare a pleasing meal." And that's all. That's fine, actually, because the skill is fucking Cooking and who gives a shit, but most noncombat skills are like this (e.g. "A successful Prospecting roll lets you locate minerals, judge good or from a small sample..., and find water..."; "Roll against [Research] to find a useful piece of data in an appropriate place of research"), so unless you scour the book for the skills with actual associated rules (e.g. Panhandling, Merchant), the game involves a lot of bullshitting the GM that some random skill you have applies in some random situation and bullshit how much time it would take to perform such a skill and bullshit the materials needed to perform the skill and bullshit the difficulty of using the skill for the proposed purpose.

For all its ability to build characters from any genre, once those characters are built what they really know, can do, and how they can do it involves a lot of GM calls.

As a detailed character-building engine, GURPS is pretty awesome. As a for-reals playable low-combat game in which noncombat skills are supposed to many solve problems because combat's fucking deadly, it falls well short of expectations because it's up to the GM to determine what many of the skills do by the goddam skills' names.

Yeah. The lack of average time no a lot of skills has bothered me, especially because one of the more common modifiers is time spent - +1 per doubling of base time, which can be a huge deal... if you know what the base time is. I haven't yet played a game, though, that had more detailed rules for anything else than it did for combat. And the only time it's been even equal is in rules-light, narrative games where the same mechanic is used for everything. I was actually considering starting another thread on this because I was wondering what TTRPGs would be like as a whole if they hadn't grown out of wargaming. But I think GURPS has a pretty impressive amount of skills that are directly usable, compared to a lot of systems. The invention system may be baroque and out of the reach of most players, but it's at least there, as opposed to "you don't get to even try to conjure and mix those chemicals because that information could change the world."

---

I heard similar things of Gurps Falkenstein and Gurps Mage the Ascension.

I'm playing a GURPS Mage game right now, actually. And the thing where the MC was like "Yeah, we'll use 4th and use the 3rd ed book as-is and convert what we need to on the fly" is... baffling. But the game itself is still more playable (so far, at least) than the game of Mage that I'm also in, which consists entirely of mother-may-I.

[Sakuya Izayoi]

Here's my genre impression from each game:

Hero classifies it as being more dramatic when The Hulk lifts a buss than when Superman lifts a bus, because The Hulk has to put his groin into it, where other games might say lifting a bus is interesting no matter who does it.

GURPS is about making it fun to be Nick Fury or The Punisher, even if the enemies have more interesting powers than "dude with a gun"

Fate is about Tony Stark not having to beg for Tea Party Points because he got drunk before getting in the suit, since there's a mechanic for that.

[ishy]

I'm playing a GURPS Mage game right now, actually. And the thing where the MC was like "Yeah, we'll use 4th and use the 3rd ed book as-is and convert what we need to on the fly" is... baffling. But the game itself is still more playable (so far, at least) than the game of Mage that I'm also in, which consists entirely of mother-may-I.

Thing is, GURPS has problems and Mage has problems.

GURPS is more of a universal game with problems, there is no reason to try and fix GURPS because I'm better off creating something specific for the game I want to play.

If I wanted to create a better mage game, I probably want to create something specifically for mage. Since that is easier, less likely to have unforseen problems and you can do some cool specific stuff etc.

[Aharon]

I played in a GURPS group that lasted for about 10 months (8 or 9 sessions). We only had access to the basic rulebook. I was the only one who cared to learn most rules, we had changing DMs and they mostly just used ability checks for everything.

So basically, we used it as rules light to allow for the concept we had in mind (playing in Tad Williams Otherland) - we had a cowboy, a 14th century knight, a time traveller from 2400, and some other guys in the same group.

It allowed for a combination of those concepts, and would even have allowed for this combination if we had sticked closer to the rules.

I am having a hard time even imagining GURPS with mostly just ability checks. How did that work? Was it meaningfully different from any other system with mostly just ability checks? Was it meaningfully different from RISUS?

Well, I exaggerated a bit. We did use a very barebones variant (basically, not a lot more than Gurps lite (http://www.warehouse23.com/products/SJG31-0004)), and the game was very roleplay heavy, with little fights and other situations that required dice rolls. It felt meaningfully different from both SR 3rd Edition and AD&D, which I had played before.

[tussock]

I can't start a GURPS game for trying. People just don't like the workload. d20? No trouble.

Is it actually less workload, though, or is there some reason it feels that way? D20 chargen is a daunting prospect for me, even without the need to look through a bunch of books that aren't named coherently for rules that aren't sorted in any reasonable fashion. It's at least better than WoD, where even the chapter names require a Decipher Script roll, but....

d20 benefits greatly from classes and levels. Once you pick a class, most of the options just aren't for you any more, and even with the big ones like full casters you start at lower levels as a newb and still have very few spells you're allowed to choose from.

Then each level or two gets you a small number of additional choices. Each new book carries only a handful of things that suit your current character. Even choosing your equipment is quite limited and inflexible.

So I'm biased if I think it's not fiddly, but you're saying the fiddly bits do their jobs? Whether they're worth the effort is, I suppose, a separate question.

Part of the fun of GURPS is fiddling with every little knob on the great machine. Not just every last point in a tight character build, but every last dollar (from points) for gear, and all the numbers on it and how it interacts with your build and the expected challenges, and picking from all the different tactical options in response to the circumstances in every second of combat. Constant fiddling for that next +1.

I significantly prefer point-buy games to level-based games, and point-buy games with non-point-buy chargen (lookin at you WoD) make me sad. But I can see how it makes it easier to obtain power chains, yeah.... Is there a way to avoid that, short of keeping the total number of options small enough to combinatorics-crunch it all? Because a system with four options is not one I want, but point-buy is nice and being able to get better at swordmakin without getting better at swordswingin is a big deal for me.

I use a gentlemen's agreement for open point-buy games. You need to be able to participate in the proposed scenes: which is getting to them, doing something useful, and surviving the process. You also need to let everyone else at the table do the same, no cock-blocking the other PCs. Lastly, if you make yourself invulnerable to enemy action, that's your problem, I will not change things up to challenge you.

---

So what's the etiquette on splitting posts? Responding one at a time seems spammy, but this got pretty long.

That was good. Splitting a post is ... not really done here, unless they're truely epic and header/spoiler breaks no longer get the job done.

[momothefiddler]

Here's my genre impression from each game:

Hero classifies it as being more dramatic when The Hulk lifts a buss than when Superman lifts a bus, because The Hulk has to put his groin into it, where other games might say lifting a bus is interesting no matter who does it.

GURPS is about making it fun to be Nick Fury or The Punisher, even if the enemies have more interesting powers than "dude with a gun"

Fate is about Tony Stark not having to beg for Tea Party Points because he got drunk before getting in the suit, since there's a mechanic for that.

Fair enough. Reminds me of the M&M game I played, though, where I put all my points into abilities and skills and gear and none into powers and ended up being the most effective guy on the team. Obviously, like GURPS, that stops being viable after a certain power level.

---

I'm playing a GURPS Mage game right now, actually. And the thing where the MC was like "Yeah, we'll use 4th and use the 3rd ed book as-is and convert what we need to on the fly" is... baffling. But the game itself is still more playable (so far, at least) than the game of Mage that I'm also in, which consists entirely of mother-may-I.

Thing is, GURPS has problems and Mage has problems.

GURPS is more of a universal game with problems, there is no reason to try and fix GURPS because I'm better off creating something specific for the game I want to play.

If I wanted to create a better mage game, I probably want to create something specifically for mage. Since that is easier, less likely to have unforseen problems and you can do some cool specific stuff etc.

What's wrong with you? Mage has a cool setting. Settings are easy to port. Mage has utter shit for mechanics, and that's way harder to fix. Like I said there, even with an unwise mash of editions, GURPS Mage is more playable than Mage Mage. And while I grant that not all fixes are necessarily the same difficulty, the fact that various games has problems is in itself a reason to want to fix one generic system rather than fix a new system for every setting you wanna play.
Like I mean GURPS has issues and Mage has cool things and I get that but none of the cool things about Mage are mechanical and none of the setting in any way arises from the mechanics, so I see no reason at all to try to build something on top of that foundation.

---

I played in a GURPS group that lasted for about 10 months (8 or 9 sessions). We only had access to the basic rulebook. I was the only one who cared to learn most rules, we had changing DMs and they mostly just used ability checks for everything.

So basically, we used it as rules light to allow for the concept we had in mind (playing in Tad Williams Otherland) - we had a cowboy, a 14th century knight, a time traveller from 2400, and some other guys in the same group.

It allowed for a combination of those concepts, and would even have allowed for this combination if we had sticked closer to the rules.

I am having a hard time even imagining GURPS with mostly just ability checks. How did that work? Was it meaningfully different from any other system with mostly just ability checks? Was it meaningfully different from RISUS?

Well, I exaggerated a bit. We did use a very barebones variant (basically, not a lot more than Gurps lite (http://www.warehouse23.com/products/SJG31-0004)), and the game was very roleplay heavy, with little fights and other situations that required dice rolls. It felt meaningfully different from both SR 3rd Edition and AD&D, which I had played before.

Ah. Sorry for my earlier overreaction, then. I misunderstood. This makes more sense.

[TheFlatline]

Homework on Mage. There's problems with the setting, but it was generally a goofy fun time.

http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=54524

[Aryxbez]

Oh, really ? My bad.

I'd recommend in the future you actually READ the first page (or maybe 2) before posting in a Thread perhaps? Going by that, and your prior post, you really did seem rather confrontational (I.E. Picking a fight w/Denners,least in this thread), which was unneeded in a discussion like this.

As for GURPS, it's a good reminder that I should perhaps consider reading some of its supplements for interesting reads. Otherwise, as I recall, it's a game that mainly supports the "Human-level REALIZARM skirmishes". Trying to go beyond that tends to bring disappointing results (I've heard tussock made example once where Brick-Supers would eventually succumb to Minigun fire within a minute/and-or their fiat damage soak resource runs out).

[fectin]

The person who gave me the Star Wars RPG (second edition; blue cover) when I was young did a bunch of writing for GURPS. Even separately from that group though, I've run into more GURPS players than Shadowrun players. For a long time, my then-local hobby store had GURPS, shatterzone, In Nomine, and Star Wars, but not DnD. So GURPS has always just been one of the games I assume is a major player in the market.
However, like Shadowrun, I never picked it up myself, so I avoid commenting on it.

[momothefiddler]

d20 benefits greatly from classes and levels. Once you pick a class, most of the options just aren't for you any more, and even with the big ones like full casters you start at lower levels as a newb and still have very few spells you're allowed to choose from.

Then each level or two gets you a small number of additional choices. Each new book carries only a handful of things that suit your current character. Even choosing your equipment is quite limited and inflexible.

It occurs to me that this is probably why it's so daunting to me. I have some idea of what a Scout or a Cleric or an Artificer can do, because I've made those characters, but if I want to make a Wizard, that's a completely new set of options to poke through. And every time I have to go through all the stuff to find out if it's relevant to me because it's not actually sorted or tagged, except, like metamagic feats, but I don't examine it in enough detail to know it when I wanna play a Wizard. But this isn't actually a point in favor of GURPS or anything - GURPS just front-loads all of the rules learning and, because I've already done it, I mistakenly thought it was less. But at least with GURPS the rules toggles are clearly marked. Magic and Thaumatology are where you get rules for games with magic and Ultra-Tech and Bio-Tech are for sci-fi games and while it's certainly possible to run games using all of them, in most settings it'll be pretty clear which are relevant. The fact that I have to read through Races of the Wild for any game that allows it to see if there's something that might be relevant to my character concept seems unpleasant (e.g. is there reason to believe from the name that a dex-oriented fighter with high crit chance gets at least one really impressive option here? Not until you at least figure out the subtitle of the book is Elves Are Better Than You.)

'Course that comparison leads me to realize that for any given campaign you're probably going to have more relevant rulebooks for 3.5 than for GURPS and it seems really disingenuous to complain about there being too many options, so maybe the example isn't a valid one.

Part of the fun of GURPS is fiddling with every little knob on the great machine. Not just every last point in a tight character build, but every last dollar (from points) for gear, and all the numbers on it and how it interacts with your build and the expected challenges, and picking from all the different tactical options in response to the circumstances in every second of combat. Constant fiddling for that next +1.

Huh. While I have experienced some of that during play, it's less important for me during char creation and certainly less so than you're mentioning. Gear, for one - I'll happily figure out appropriate gear that's an important part of the concept, and I'll worry about gear in-game in a post-apocalyptic game, where that's the point, but you're making it sound like the point of GURPS character creation is to be like Shadowrun gear selection and I can't play Shadowrun because looking at a reasonable character's gear list is like gazing into the abyss and my characters end up pathetically useless because I didn't want to constantly fiddle for the +1.

I use a gentlemen's agreement for open point-buy games. You need to be able to participate in the proposed scenes: which is getting to them, doing something useful, and surviving the process. You also need to let everyone else at the table do the same, no cock-blocking the other PCs. Lastly, if you make yourself invulnerable to enemy action, that's your problem, I will not change things up to challenge you.

"You need to participate in the game at hand without keeping anyone else from having fun, and if you go out of your way to keep yourself from having fun, that's not my job to fix."
I'm absolutely in favor of this and I suppose in a well-balanced level-based game some of the points are gonna need less emphasis, but shouldn't this be part of the social contract at the table, not just for a given system? Certainly if someone isn't willing to do that, they're desirous of a vastly different game than the one I want to play, which is fine, but it means I don't want to play with them.

---

Homework on Mage. There's problems with the setting, but it was generally a goofy fun time.

http://tgdmb.com/viewtopic.php?t=54524

I've read that a couple times now. Here are some quotes from the first page that describe the game I've played.

But while oMage is less incoherent than nMage (as all game books are), it's still an insane rambling diatribe that was already the clear result of too many chiefs and not enough indians.

and thus was born the eternal storm of omniscient vs limited 3rd person perspective for determining what kind of magic your'e doing.

Fuck MtA. Every session I ever played on that bullshit GM fellatio fest was 70% 'Can I do this thing with my magic?' 'No.' 'Can I /do/ anything with my magic?' 'Not until I let you.'

And if the GM liked you, they would go out of their way to give you awesome shit. 'Oh, your motorcycle turns into a robot? That's totally coincidental because sleepers saw Transformers.'

Even without clearly biased GMs, I spent less time playing and more time playing Mother May I. Fuck that game.

This isn't everything by a long shot - the mechanics discussion isn't on the first page, after all. For instance, nobody discusses the fact that there are skills on the character sheet, which you'll take, there are skills on different versions of the character sheet that may or may not be the same skill that your MC is gonna call for because he used an old printout from a different version, there are special secret skills for each splat that mages are gonna be expected to have AND there are secondary skills with a different cost that exist only to A) break your character upwards by making it stupid cheap to specialize in your shtick, or B) break your character downwards as your MC levies arbitrary penalties on you for only using Expression instead of Singing.
As for core mechanic, it goes something like this: describe an action, suggest a stat+skill combo, have that combo approved or overruled, roll the appropriate number of dice, ask which numbers to count, count those numbers, ask if your relevant specialities apply, fiddle with them a bit, give the MC a number and have him then pick a target number based on whether that sounds like a lot and whether he wants you to succeed. Day before yesterday (I think) I rolled 6 successes (non-extended) to craft a wooden mask and it was "pretty good", which means fuck all. Don't even get me started on magic. How does Prime 3 interact with your ability to regain Quintessence? Whatever you said, you're wrong, because the answer is "it depends on whether your MC thinks that's too powerful today".

I've played a lot of WoD, and in none of those games has there been any sort of system beyond "throw some decahedra around, big numbers are better". It's not a framework I'd every want to build anything on. It's barely something I'm willing to play as-is.

---

As for GURPS, it's a good reminder that I should perhaps consider reading some of its supplements for interesting reads. Otherwise, as I recall, it's a game that mainly supports the "Human-level REALIZARM skirmishes". Trying to go beyond that tends to bring disappointing results (I've heard tussock made example once where Brick-Supers would eventually succumb to Minigun fire within a minute/and-or their fiat damage soak resource runs out).

If you're just standing there taking minigun fire for sixty rounds, you're basically either immune to it or you're dead. I guess there's the weird edge case where you take 1 point from a max damage roll and you have $TEXAS HP or something.
I don't see the lack of "a weapon I have to deal with because it's dangerous" that is also "something I can safely ignore for sixty rounds" as a disappointing result, but maybe that's just me. That seems more the realm of, like, poisons.
Tussock, is the referenced "fiat damage soak resistance" Ablative DR? If so, what makes that any more fiat than HP?

---

The person who gave me the Star Wars RPG (second edition; blue cover) when I was young did a bunch of writing for GURPS. Even separately from that group though, I've run into more GURPS players than Shadowrun players. For a long time, my then-local hobby store had GURPS, shatterzone, In Nomine, and Star Wars, but not DnD. So GURPS has always just been one of the games I assume is a major player in the market.
However, like Shadowrun, I never picked it up myself, so I avoid commenting on it.

That's reasonable. Have you avoided it for any specific reason or has it just never come up?

[ishy]

What's wrong with you? Mage has a cool setting. Settings are easy to port. Mage has utter shit for mechanics, and that's way harder to fix. Like I said there, even with an unwise mash of editions, GURPS Mage is more playable than Mage Mage. And while I grant that not all fixes are necessarily the same difficulty, the fact that various games has problems is in itself a reason to want to fix one generic system rather than fix a new system for every setting you wanna play.
Like I mean GURPS has issues and Mage has cool things and I get that but none of the cool things about Mage are mechanical and none of the setting in any way arises from the mechanics, so I see no reason at all to try to build something on top of that foundation.

Generic systems don't work though.

And if I want to fix a game, that usually means it needs a mechanics overhaul while trying to stay true to the spirit (setting/ flavour etc) of the game.
If I work from the GURPS rules, I'm limited by those and I'd be better off starting from scratch.

[momothefiddler]

Generic systems don't work though.

And if I want to fix a game, that usually means it needs a mechanics overhaul while trying to stay true to the spirit (setting/ flavour etc) of the game.
If I work from the GURPS rules, I'm limited by those and I'd be better off starting from scratch.

I don't see how trying to kludge Mage's mechanics gets you any of that, and I don't see why GURPS' mechanics are a limitation, but I'll grant that starting from scratch is probably going to get you closer to what you want than anyone else's system can, so I guess I get that.

[fectin]

It just never comes up as a game. I've read through some sourcebooks, which are good, but have no basis for opinion on the mechanical bits.

[momothefiddler]

It just never comes up as a game. I've read through some sourcebooks, which are good, but have no basis for opinion on the mechanical bits.

Fair. Thanks for the perspective.

[Username17]

I don't see why GURPS' mechanics are a limitation

Seriously? You don't see how starting with a fixed system is a limitation? Limiting yourself to a single system that is already defined is pretty much the definition of a limitation.

Now GURPS as a system is pretty much pointless. It's a point based system, but the points don't actually mean anything. And it's a skill based system, but the skill values don't mean anything either.

So let's say I want to have an Administration of 15. As you know, depending on what I bought my IQ to, that will cost different amounts of points. But now I want to do some Administration, so I roll my dice and get a 12. What happens? There really aren't even any guidelines for that, I might as well be using 2nd edition AD&D Non-Weapon proficiencies.

-Username17

[silva]

So let's say I want to have an Administration of 15... But now I want to do some Administration, so I roll my dice and get a 12. What happens? There really aren't even any guidelines for that

I think giving skills fixed meanings would go against the universal premise of the game, no ? It looks reasonable to me that an Administration 12 skill level should mean different things to a Bronze Age setting, a Victorian Age setting and a Hard-Sci Fi setting.

[Red_Rob]

I think giving skills fixed meanings would go against the universal premise of the game, no ?

See, this is why we should keep guys like silva and shadzar around. Comedy gold!

[momothefiddler]

Seriously? You don't see how starting with a fixed system is a limitation? Limiting yourself to a single system that is already defined is pretty much the definition of a limitation.

Okay, that's true. I should have said I don't see how GURPS keeps you from building functional Mage-setting mechanics any more than Mage does, or even nearly as much.

Now GURPS as a system is pretty much pointless. It's a point based system, but the points don't actually mean anything.

What would you want points to mean that they don't? Matched point values don't make people equally able to handle a given challenge, but they don't do that in Shadowrun either.

And it's a skill based system, but the skill values don't mean anything either.

Is your argument that the skills don't mean anything? Because percent chance of success seems like a pretty concrete meaning, and that's what GURPS skill values give you. WoD skill values don't even get that far, because outside of combat (and often in) the target number and threshold are MC whimsy.

So let's say I want to have an Administration of 15. As you know, depending on what I bought my IQ to, that will cost different amounts of points. But now I want to do some Administration, so I roll my dice and get a 12. What happens?

You get a +2 reaction bonus when dealing with a bureaucrat or you are able to predict the best way to deal with a bureaucracy, depending on the use you're using. It's not terribly specific on that, but it's no worse than Gather Information (roll some number greater than 14 to find out some information about something!)

---

So let's say I want to have an Administration of 15... But now I want to do some Administration, so I roll my dice and get a 12. What happens? There really aren't even any guidelines for that

I think giving skills fixed meanings would go against the universal premise of the game, no ? It looks reasonable to me that an Administration 12 skill level should mean different things to a Bronze Age setting, a Victorian Age setting and a Hard-Sci Fi setting.

First Aid/TL3 and First Aid/TL11^ are going to involve your character doing some pretty drastically different stuff, but if the skill does something different, it needs to be a different skill. A skill needs to be sufficiently abstract to cover both situations or it needs to be split into multiple skills - Physician doesn't exist below TL5 for the most part, because Esoteric Medicine isn't the same and doesn't do the same thing.

[silva]

Momo, how would you describe an Administration skill 12 then, in the different settings ? What does it mean to the King steward from a Bronze Age Babylon, and to a computer AI from a 22th century low-orbit station ? Shouldnt it have different meanings ? And the same goes for Engineering, Anthropology, Music, etc. Even a mundane skill like melee fighting could mean different things to different ages and cultures. No ?

And now Im wondering how to scale skill levels in a setting like Infinite Worlds (or Continuum: roleplaying in the Yet, or any other time-hopping one). I mean, your melee fighting proficiency could mean a rating 15 in your hunter-gatherer tribe in your Neolithic age, but compared to a Spartan elite fighter from his age, it would hardly mean 10. The same goes for most other skills - a skill 15 engineering from ancient rome should not equal a 15 engineering from a MIT engineer from XXI century.