I don't really have much to add to the thread.
In the late 80s I played at a game store where the owner ran a game based on The Fantasy Trip. This was before GURPS and he used a modified version of the game to run a superheroes in space game. His core group had characters who were effectively the Fantastic Four. Any customer of the shop could join in the game, but got to make a 25 point character based on a fantasy oriented quick summary sheet (The regulars were 500 point characters or more). When people inevitably made fantasy style characters because of the quick summary sheet they were chastised for making a D&D character. If and what powers your character got depended entirely on the GM/owner's whim, but the idea was that you would mutate and become a 100 point character if you carried the heroes flashlights for long enough and didn't get killed.
Basically the game was 4 main characters, about 6 people who the GM liked enough to give decent powers, and 10 others who were just there to carry flashlights and serve as cannon fodder. I was always in the third category.
It definitely colored my opinion of The Fantasy Trip, even though I never played TFT or even saw the real rulebooks for it.
And that ties in to GURPS.
When GURPS was new, the owner mentioned above was in love with it. He really pushed GURPS at his store. But honestly, I never had a problem with that. I saw him as a positive fan and promoter of GURPS. No, the person who irritated me and poisoned the GURPS well for me was my best friend of the time.
My best friend of those days was a complete GURPS fanatic. Every game suddenly had to become GURPS. GURPS was the only game worth playing. I remember the last time he played Ghostbusters with me and some other friends, he bitched for half the game session about how it would be so much better if it were GURPS. He got introduced to GURPS and then absolutely refused to play anything unless it was convert to that game system. And that's fine if that was his preference, but he was positively obnoxious about it. So, I kind of hated GURPS because of him.
My friendship with him ended as the 90s dawned. My hatred of GURPS sort of evaporated after my association with him was gone. I didn't love GURPS. I didn't play GURPS. But I owned a copy of the 3e corebook, and the only reasons I didn't play it is because I just couldn't think of anything I particularly wanted to use the system for and my crew during the 90s was as ridiculous about Palladium as my ex-friend was about GURPS.
I was thinking last night about my first actual GURPS character I ever made after I got my original 3e corebook. She was a beautiful albino hemophiliac. She was a classic example of the kind of GURPS character that gets made that's completely unsuitable for actual play. In my defense, I had just read the Elric books.
My original 3e book fell completely apart. Still, I got a replacement. Sometime around the early 00s, I picked up a 3e revised hardcover and GURPS Traveller along with both the compendiums. I even got Prime Directive somewhere along the line. The closest I ever got to doing something with GURPS was when I was thinking about it for a sci-fi game. But I never did. I even picked up the 4e corebooks when I saw them on sale. In the end, when I went through my purge years ago and cleaned out half my RPG hoard, the GURPS stuff was among the stuff I got rid of.
And now...
Well, I'm thinking about picking up GURPS core again. I'm not really sure why, but when I think about the level of crunch it had, it sounds very appealing right now. I haven't decided if I'll go with a 3e core or the two big 4e books or maybe not at all.
I'm also thinking of getting The Fantasy Trip. It actually sounds pretty appealing, like a hardcore tactical RPG in tabletop format. After all these years, I'd like to see what it's actually like rather than through the filter of that old LGS game.
Thats it. Random ramblings complete.
