Wildcard:
@tmagann: Thanks, I will look into GURPS, but other players have commented that it is a bit number-crunchy when I tried to run a superhero game using it.
Building Characters in GURPS freeform is very "number crunchy" in that they have to add and subtract numbers, and if Supers especially if they're building their own powers it gets... numbers heavy (and you have to deal with multiplication and percentages! Teh horrors). If you're not running a Supers game and you use Profession Templates, most of that goes away.
quote:
@evileeyore: Thank you for the input. I hope GURPS would work well with this. What is HERO? I feel like I've heard of it but I don't remember.
HERO is another freeform, point build, generic, universal system, it came out roughly at the same time as GURPS (mid 80s to GURPS late 70s-early 80s), but it's more geared towards running "action" and "Supers", so the system has a lot less fine detail options and is inherently less gritty (those are options you can 'switch off' in GURPS though, but they don't even exist as options in HERO).
It was originally released as Fantasy Hero, a generic fantasy game; then as Champions, a generic superheroes system; then others came out using the same "core heroic system", Danger International, Justice Inc, Star Hero, etc. By the end of the 80s GURPS "popularity" as a "true generic" system caused the designers to redo the "core heroic system" as HERO, and instead of having a slightly different 'core' system for each 'sub-genre', you can now just pick up HERO and run "anything", but can pick up the genre treatments for NPCs, power's examples, and extra minor rules tweaks.
GURPS literally operates the same way, just grab the two core
Basic Set books (
Characters and C
ampaigns) and then whatever genre treatments you want. Both systems have some landmines though, like HERO can go highly lopsided quick if you don't watch a few key easy to "min-max" abilities and in GURPS it's easy to get lost in the weeds of "building things the hard way" when there is an easier way that might not be immediately obviously (the biggest one is not looking at what an ability actually does and relying solely on the name or fluff description).
Don;t hold me to this, I haven't looked at HERO since the like 98, so... I honestly have no diea what they are doing now and I was never very deeply into the system, but one of the guys in my group back then like to run Champions every so often, it wasn't a bad 'supers' system. It's not what I'd run, but it wasn't bad.
I'm going to tell you right now, I don't see how you'll be able to mix those game styles into one game where different 'genres' are playing together at once. Like how would a 'Turn Based' PC and an 'FPS' PC interact?
DarkLightHitomi:
My here though, is that if the players find gurps to be too number crunchy...
GURPS has no more 'numbers crunch' than any other system
once you're done making characters. But that's the rub, chargen is the first thing everyone does so it tends to color people's perspective. But using Professional Templates strongly mitigates that (it's not quite "character classes", but it's character classes for GURPS).