Happy April Fools! Well, sort of. We were busy. We actually were hosting a quiz show thing on April 1st proper. So this early April episode will have to serve.Well I suppose it was about time. Let’s dive into the world of world creation by taking a hard look at GURPS, one of the earliest examples of the “Do anything at all” RPG model, from Steve Jackson Games. If I can post this right. My tech level is pretty low.
System Mastery 
Based on your analysis, the switch from 3rd to 4th edition was largely bad. 3rd had a basic book, then supplements then a compendium. It seems they replaced the basic with the compendium, making things a lot more difficult. When I was playing GURPS, if you were doing the math by hand, you were doing it wrong; much the same way I would treat playing Lancer without COMP/CON.
Attatching hp to strength instead of health is also newish in 4th edition. (optional rule in 3rd) It was done to reflect reality, thicker muscles let you take more damage while being in better health makes you able to exert yourself for longer periods.
As for the GM having a whole lot more work, not so much as you’re thinking. You do have to think up the general idea for the campaign, but that was fairly typical for the time and even now is still pretty common. As for creating enemies to fight, why? You don’t care about their point cost, assign them a number 11-16 based on how strong they are. If they’re good at something, roll against that number, if they aren’t roll against that number minus 4-6 depending on the skill difficulty. The fight ends when you think it should end. You only need a full character if you want to share the enemy with other people.
For the pilot problem, if the pilot is rolling, I’ve decided the plane might crash. At that point, a 2% chance is pretty low, I’d probably not give them the +4 as any time I’m making the roll it isn’t routine.
Forgot the most important thing. The ability to create anything isn’t the strongest point of the system. Nor is the weight of being able to create anything the weakest point. The reason you’d choose GURPS over any other system and the reason you’d choose any other system over GURPS is the realism, or rather the sense of realism.
The actual realism is debatable, but the feeling you get when playing is that the things that happen in game could actually happen the way they do. People die when they get shot.
If you want to play a game with characters that feel like real people, GURPS is the system I’d choose. By the same token, I hardly ever want to play games to tell a story about real people. Reality isn’t fun, and the parts of it that are fun are simulated by a single die roll in game.
It is a joy to see someone who does not have the specific kind of autism that I have (and I mean that literally) that lets me enjoy messing with this game take a look at it and see just how weird and dumb it is. It is gloriously over-engineered and it takes a certain, strange intersection of obsession and being mentally calloused to doing hard math enough to make exactly what you want to the letter. I love it and hate it in equal measure, thank you for looking at it!
As an active GURPS gamer for 30 years I was bit disappointed by how negative tone both of the podcast hosts took and they both went for this rant of this and that and I found that this game was presented in quite negative light and also they made this system sound extremely complicated and hard to approach. I find that it was not good approach to the introduction of the game at all. Yes, it can be very complex but reality is that it is super simple to start with and THE best part of the system is that it bends to every single game world and it is extremely diverse and flexible and one of the best parts is that a player has 100% control over their character and not only you build a character but also their personality and you can play a character that has their basic attributes to their advantages, disadvantages and skills and all the creates your character that has actual personality and that gives so much more immersive experience than most RPGs. Have bunch of friends who have started playing GURPS without knowing anything about the game and they learn it quite fast, heck I was 9-10 years old when we started playing GURPS and our native language is not English and we learned it pretty darn quickly. We have played so many different campaigns and taken various RPGs and dumped their stupid nonsense game mechanics and used GURPS system. Example we have played Cyberpunk 2020, 2300 AD, Star Wars and created various worlds in Low Fantasy, High Fantasy to modern times and all the way to Fallout etc and just taken their world and left out the mechanics if converted from RPG. Obviously there is some things that are not necessity and I would highly recommend that if approaching GURPS do not read the books(Characters or Campaigns) as you would read Law, be lean and introduce some rules when needed and be flexible and it makes your gaming experience better and easier at the start and don’t be afraid of making mistakes and start introducing house rules if you feel that something is missing or doesn’t make sense to your campaign. GURPS is system that gives you the game mechanics and you can and should wrap it beneath your game world and it will shine. Also they have not made new editions since the 4th and it was around 20 years ago and to me it is a statement from Steve Jackson Games, it works and no need to cash in on new releases every year and yes they have ton of books to extend but they are more new campaigns or lean mostly towards them. We have only the core books and that is literally only ones that you ever need to invest in. Also I have loved the idea of creating characters our of points and trying to balance them out with negative character traits that disadvantages and quirks that gives back points to get more them to skills or attributes, it just makes sense to build a character with actual flaws and weaknesses and not only advantages and better you play your character in your campaign more points GM is willing to give for your character and that makes the game system very beautiful and makes you to focus more in your character in sense of how you play as a player. Can’t say enough good things about GURPS, just so versatile system. 3D6 is also great and simple way of doing ALL the dice checks in the game, we literally have 3D6 for each player and that’s it, no nonsense 4,8,10,12, 20 to 100 sided dice.
Personal recommendation for modern world or sci-fi campaigns is to have 100 characters points and limit Disadvantages to -45p and -5 points to Quirks and have a cap for attributes at 15 for humans. Fantasy campaigns we have been used 75 character points. 100p is enough for sci-fi characters because you might end up with more skills etc and pretty much anything over 100p is making super-humans and 75p is regular hero character without making them OP. Also if you are extremely bad at simple math just use ChatGPT to calculate for you them and make them to list, example for falling damage or collision or other stuff like that. We are using 3rd edition rules still in some cases because there is some flaws when calculating things in 4th edition but in 30+ years we have had enough time to make house rules for some minor issues that we have come across over the years.
But most importantly DO NOT let these guys to intimidate you to trying out this beautiful RPG system and YES it is a system where you can and should create world to play in or take ANY game world or RPG world and use the system that GURPS is intended for!
Cheers everybody!