GURPS opinions

[averagejoe]

Prior editions of GURPS were a lot more... "spread out" so to speak - if you wanted to know about how to play in a Supers world (rules-wise) you had to buy GURPS Supers. If you wanted to know how to play in a campaign with aliens, you had to buy GURPS Aliens.

I was just flipping through GURPS Space to make sure this has changed, and it has. All the abilities listed are page references to the core books, so a person can easily find them there if you don't want to buy Space.

I've seen those sourcebooks, but to clarify: am I correct in thinking that the books don't actually do anything that the GM can't do himself within the core rules, and they're mainly handy for the GM to not have to do the work himself?

However, I would like to recommend that you check out a competitor before committing yourself to GURPS fully: Hero System. It's also a universal RPG. I haven't really got a good grasp on GURPS 4E so I can't say which has a more intuitive and versatile powers set-up, but at least in prior editions, Hero far outpaced GURPS in this regard.

That's actually good to know. I've seen the Hero system, but from the title I thought it was a superheroes game, like Champions or what have you.