YMMV / GURPS

• Broken Base:
  • There are quite a lot of "fans" of GURPS who buy every book the series produces... except the actual rulebooks for the game itself. The attitude among these people is that while GURPS has some of the best source, setting, and background material around, the actual rule system (in the word of one reviewer) "stinks from the head like yesterday's cod". They mine the source material for useable stuff, then apply it all to a different rule system (usually Dungeons & Dragons, Traveller or Champions). Some fans prefer GURPS' rule system, and use the settings of other games instead.
  • GURPS Lite vs. GURPS Basic Set. Lite is a 35 pages shorthand of the most important rules and tables and while it is obviously missing a lot of stuff and few important tables, it is still a fully playable game. Basic Set is meanwhile two books, both over 400 pages, that by its size alone is a great way to scare off new players. Proponents of Lite point this out as its main advantage, proponents of Basic Set simply accent the sheer amount of things covered in the two tomes. And to make it more clear - there are people playing 4th edition for over a decade, without ever opening Basic Set.
• Common Knowledge: The near-memetic perception of GURPS as a complicated game with countless rules and requiring a Math degree to play. In reality, it's a 3d6 roll-under game, that's significantly easier to learn than the majority of TTRPGs, precisely due to how uniform the rules and their resolutions are. Not to mention the fact that the vast majority of those "complex rules" are purely optional: GURPS Lite contains all of the game mechanics actually needed to play and it barely clocks in at 30 pages. Now try to cram Dungeons & Dragons in less than 200 and make it still simple and error-proof.
• Do Not Do This Cool Thing: Mentioned in the rules as how the skill of Fast-Talk is generally learned:
  This skill is not taught in school - at least, not intentionally.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: GURPS was the first RPG to be released in Brazil by publisher Devir in 1991, and as such it was relatively popular in the '90s until the early 2000s. However, its popularity started waning while other systems were published, eventually even running out of print. Nowdays it's mostly a Cult Classic for the older generation of RPG players.
• Game-Breaker: For the most part, GURPS seems content to leave the game breakers in, but charge so many points that your character may end up a Bunny-Ears Lawyer. For more details on the more mundane Game-Breakers, consult this RPG's section here.
  • Unkillable and Supernatural Durability are what they sound like. Unkillable could be worked around by, say, jettisoning the character into a nearby star, but that won't stop someone with Unkillable 3.
  • Allies, if abused (Noticeably, several Allies).
  • Warp allows a player to go basically anywhere with a thought.
  • Modular Abilities. It's New Powers as the Plot Demands in character form.
  • The Time Out spell from GURPS Magic allows you to suspend time in an area for as long as you’d like for a relatively small energy cost of 5 per yard of radius.
  • Super Luck allows you to dictate the out come of ANY 1 roll every so often.
  • Word of God: Altered Time Rate costs 100 Character Points. That's 100 points of unfairness against the guy who doesn't have it.
  • 3rd edition had the beautiful Eidetic Memory. For 30 points, it halved the cost of all other mental skills.
  • Outside of advantages there's Ultra-Tech's inclusion of the Grav Heavy Needler which makes 90% of other man portable weapons obsolete. Forever.
• Popular Game Variant: A popular house rule that became canonical was the change to hit and fatigue points. Formerly, fatigue points (tiredness) was based on Strength, while hit points (being cut to pieces-ness) was based on Health. Compendium I suggested reversing them; after all, muscles can help stop injury, while someone who's fit should have more endurance in a marathon, right? As of 4th edition, that's official. (Also helps mages from trying to get 12 ST to help get the FP needed for their magic..)
• Quicksand Box: The excess of options for character creation regularly cause this to new players when they aren't supervised by someone more experienced, with points being spread either very thin over dozens of skills (often overlapping) or on a single one. Templates mitigate the problem, but if you stick too strictly to them, you'll miss out on the main benefit of the system.
• That One Disadvantage: Depending on the GM, this might be any of Easy to Kill, Cursed, Destiny, or Enemy.
  • Specifically Cursed means the GM gets to do anything he wants to your character for any reason at any time and you can't complain.
  • Destiny is a bit more complex. GM abuse stems from the notion that you don't control how your Destiny (positive or negative) is fulfilled, the GM does. Exact Words can bite you bad if you try to become invincible by taking a seemingly impossible Destiny that involves your death.
  • Easy to Kill is more likely to act as a subversion to this trope; it sounds nasty, but it's really just a simple penalty to a rarely-seen HT roll, and this trait is a major part of an infamous game breaker.^note Raising Health costs 10 points, reducing the speed bonus from this is -5, reducing the energy bonus is -3, reducing the roll to survive death at negative HP is -2; taking all these at once, HT rolls to resist poisons or disease and all skills based on HT go up a level at a net cost of 0 points.

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