Sorry. That seemed funny when I wrote it.
If you’re choosing independent items from a huge menu, yes. But when there is a forced choice of one five templates, each of which involves certain social, political, and religious roles as well as unique Gifts that’s not so clear. If I designed templates for Werewolf auspices in such a way that Ahroun were useless or superfluous except in actual combat against supernatural foes, and therefore no player ever chose to play one, I would have failed to design an adaptation of Werewolf.
Yup, that’s it in a nutshell. Everyone has to pick 3 Gifts - one for their Breed, one for their Auspice and one for their Tribe. You usually have a choice of 2 gifts at each stage.
So character type A might have a choice of a 20 point gift or a 25 point gift for their breed, but character type B gets a choice of a 5 point gift or a 100 point gift, and character type C gets a choice of two 100 point gifts. Poor old character C has no points left to buy skills and thus cannot walk and chew gum at the same time.
I think my response to that is either:
(a) “to hell with it, we’re playing WoD, we don’t need a balanced party, so ignore the point cost of gifts”
or
(b) “OK, everyone gets 200 points for gifts plus whatever they need for walking and chewing gum, and any leftover points can go on other stuff”.
The way I see GURPS and other point-buy systems is that the more points a trait is worth, positive or negative, the more effective it is as getting that character chunks of narrative time - whether it’s Master Swordsman, Blasty Magic, huge resilience, compulsive flirting, or a crippling fear of flying. Positive or negative, they push the narrative towards being more about that character. So the concern I’d have with option a, which I suspect is the same as I’d have with WoD under the original rules, is that some characters are way more effective at grabbing the narrative than others, and it’ll need cooperation from players and GM to make sure that doesn’t happen.
Getting back to this, I have basically resigned myself to GURPS dying a slow death. I would be happier with it if it was an active growing community, but it isn’t, and it would take a serious black swan event to change that.
The suggestion I made in about 2012 (in conversation with Ross, Randy and Sam, all SJGames people though not GURPS people) was a series of introductory sets: effectively, a further-cut-down GURPS Lite plus the minimum you need to play one of (dungeon bashes, modern action, occult investigation, bughunts, etc.). The idea would be that you have a one-stop book for the genre that interests you, and if you want more complexity and options you can go to full-on GURPS.
They seemed interested, but nothing ever came of it - unless you count the Dungeon Fantasy RPG.
That’s pretty much the opposite of what I want, though. I want a general-purpose RPG with which I can readily take up a combination of setting and genre that occurs to me, attract a quorum of players, start up a campaign without too effort and balking, and get reasonably good resolution of a fairly wide range of actions. A shelf full of games with similar mechanics, each specialised for a different thing that I don’t want to run just now, doesn’t do the job.
I’m not particularly averse to complexity: I recognise it as a cost, but it’s a cost I can be tempted to pay. What I can’t accept, though, is a system that most players find aversive. That starts with a system that imposes a heavy load of work before play, including a voluminous list of optional rules and rules deltas, but it culminates with a brand so toxic that most players refuse point blank to consider the pitch.
I don’t think there is anything on the market that meets these needs. I am aware of several systems that meet everything but the last point. I believe you’ve tried FATE, and I use FUDGE myself when I want a really light system, but they are low resolution. GUMSHOE is low resolution. I think the Apocalypse Engine is too, but I’m only passingly familiar.
There are a few high resolution genericish systems out there, but I think they are all pretty niche in my experience and not really that approachable. (D20, Palladium, Champions ,and Rolemaster all tried for generic systems and none really seemed to get traction.)
Comprehensive, fine grained, and approachable is probably too much to ask, honestly. Maybe not impossible, but hard and no one has managed it successfully.
Now GURPS adds a terrible reputation on top of the unapproachability, which makes it even less suitable for your needs. I understand why you might want a version without the rep and better approachability … but I’m not sure how you get there from here.
I have in the past considered running a game where the player’s had charsheets that were purely descriptive, or perhaps in a very approachable system like Fudge, while I ran the Game in GURPS in the background, to put a realistic “fog of war” on the PCs understanding of how they fit into the world and play silly buggers with mental disads, but the effort never seemed worth the reward.
One could, however, do the same thing to make games “systemless” to the players while using whatever game engine one wanted. “PCs in this game don’t know their stats just like you don’t know yours, but behind the screen I’m using a terribly good out of print system called Foresight that you’ve probably never heard of and don’t need to understand to be successful in this game. Just play your PC and roll percentiles when I tell you and you’ll do fine.”
Are we perhaps weird, in that we want a generic system which covers all eventualities?
The rest of the world seems happy to buy a new system for every genre. Or indeed to buy a new system for a new variant on an old genre (I’m guilty of that myself, but it is a reflex action hailing back to the time when science fiction games were as rare as hen’s teeth).
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That makes sense if you want to play in genres that (a) have a fairly strongly defined set of mission statements, typical characters, and typical conflicts that are generally recognized and (b) have enough mass appeal so it’s profitable to do a game that specifically targets their audience. I don’t do all that much of that. When I want to do a game in some eccentric genre that I’ve just made up—anthropologically based multiracial Bronze Age fantasy, transhumanistic cosmic horror, covert supers—I probably need a multigenre system, because I’m not going to find a unigenre system tailored for any of those.
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Ah - so we’re weird because we’re GMs! 
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It’s the depth of creation that one wants to do, perhaps. One might rate this:
- Pre-gen characters in pre-written adventures
- Own characters in pre-written adventures
- Own characters in own adventures, in a generic or pre-written world
- Own characters in own adventures, in one’s own world
Only the last of those is really good for letting the GM move the big setting levers; if I say we’re playing Airship Pirates or Achtung Cthulhu the players can get a fairly good idea of what the game will be like by reading stuff not written by me.
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I have done more or less this. I ran a game (six or eight sessions) for my girlfriend and a couple other friends, none of whom were gamers at all. The premise was they were playing rather cinematic versions of themselves, post alien invasion. (A few years later, it would have been post zombie…) I talked to each player, they wrote a description, we figured out what they’d be able to do. I made gurps characters for them, which they didn’t ever see. On the whole it worked pretty well, but it was a fair amount of work for me.
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