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Comment by cassianoleal | Hacker News Reader

> GURPS was Ada. Tried to make it all thoroughly designed and militaristic/industrial. Never quite accepted.

This is such a shame. I'm not sure I would assign a militaristic/industrial aspect to it but otherwise agree with your comment.

It's unfortunate because it was my system of choice back in the day. After a few years playing GURPS (medieval/fantasy, superhero, cyberpunk, the works) I tried to play a couple different DnDs but could never get into them. They were so limiting and with progression systems that IMO work well on a video-game but not as well on a tabletop.

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Militaristic as a use case, industrial as a design methodology. It's the only system I'm aware of that has a ballistic justification for both damage and armor (at least in 4E, for non-medieval weaponry).

I myself like GURPS a lot. The point buy nature isn't even the major factor here, but the "physics engine" stuff. A satisfying resolution mechanism where quite often when I ask "What's the equivalent for this real-world action" you got someting that slots in nicely. And a 3d6 bell-curve hits my sweet spot.

> a ballistic justification for both damage and armor

You may be intrigued by Phoenix Command. Written by a literal rocket scientist, it offers a level of granularity down to time-of-flight of bullets, penetration factors of various materials, and much more. Not everyone's cup of tea as you can imagine.

GURPS is Perl.

When you know what you want to do, there's almost certainly more than one way to do it. It's easier to come up with a new way of doing it than to do it again the same way, unless you wrote exceptionally good comments along the way. It's not the best at anything, but you can do everything. And you can make anything work with anything else.

And it hasn't had a major version release in N years, and that's just fine.

Perl is HERO. There's a module for everything, but the core isn't as exact/rigid as GURPS. ;)

(Having modules for everything would fit JS, too, but I'm not mean enough to call any RPG out as being the same as that.)

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