No analogy being perfect but I tend to view AD&D as the MS-DOS, 2nd ED as Windows 3.x -way more players, starting to get somewhat mainstream, some noticeable improvements, lots of issue, Win95/97 as the D&D 3.0 equivalent, big improvements and much more common among the populace, and 3.5 as XP, a highly funcitonal system followed by a less functional one, e.g. WinVista as D&D 4th Ed.




Well, D&D regularly gets bitched at for the books thing, and that was fairly legit in 2nd Ed, and early 3rd, not because of book number but for new books making an incompatible or redundant hash out of the old, new equipment, abilities etc making the old ones useless. THey stopped doing so much of that and started realizing, sort of like the Pathfinder break of has, that you keep everything new compatible and on par and emphasize flavor and campaigns. I like the premade stuff even if I don't run it much, it can be adapted or yanked out for emergencies. The 3.5 era stuff, here's a new prestige class or three, a new character class, a few new spells and bits of equipment, lots of fluff, but unlike previous eras it wasn't "Here THE New class/race/etc." that makes all others inferior. They weren't over-powered plus they were pretty standardized, if a new class came out, it didn't use its own nearly unique system you had to learn for it just to make a wild guess as to whether it was a total gamebreaker because it was standardized, a player who picked it up could just hand you a photo-copy of the 3 or 4 pages that had everything, and you knew it had been play-tested.



Yeah, my buddy Ron who was my prime DM for D&D 3rd ed when that came out was a playtester for Steve Jackson, he didn't run GURPS but lots of those smaller little games he puts out, I have few negative things to say on that score. He had the GURPS books and he and one of the others kept trying to get me to learn the system in detail for that very end - I can run those kind of horribly complex systems - problem was I was still to new to running anything at all back then to want to do it. I've found that I can better apply that complexity knack elsewhere too, and more effectively, hand me a new player and I can spew them out an upgunned character sheet where all their spells are printed out in neat format and pass them an appropriate number of colored paper clips (i.e. red for 1st level spells, green for 2nd etc) to just mark their spells. Random example but I find focusing that on setting up the newbs and spewing out a complex detailed plot and background is a better use of my attentions then keeping track of the 5 jillion little 'realistic' details of GURPS.

Classic GURPS commentary: Biomechanical dimensional analysis shows that the natural frequency of leg oscillation varies as the inverse square root of leg length, but the natural length of oscillation varies as the length; putting the two together, movement speed is proportional to the square root of length, which for a given build is proportional to the square root of overall body dimension. Now that's all great, and yeah I do like that sort of thing, but when you get around to it that sort of thing is no more pertinent to gaming then physics is lightsabers and enjoying Return of the Jedi, with the right group that sort of thing is fine but most of the time, with most players, nope, and I try to make my game appeal as broad as possible. I'd just rather spend an hour pumping out a detailed setting map then brushing up on how height effects speed via a stride modifier.




D&D's focused on the Sword and Sorcery bit, it does have decent rules, like modern D20, to cover that sort of set up, but my stance is pretty simple, I could run a surreal moment on "The Island" just as well with almost any system, though in fairness the way my style runs these days it would tend to feel far more the Simpsons Parody thereof, by all accounts my games have a lot more Terry Pratchett then Richard Matheson of late. I don't really need a rulebook with the bubbles, or a system that lets me convert it easy, I can just decide how relatively hard the thing should be and improvise it. Gurps does do a good job as a generalist but heck, individual system tailored to a genre just do better. Want sci-fi? Go Traveller, want modern-ish supernatural? White Wolf or Beyond the Supernatural, there's a game for every genre, and the flavor and rules and such are usually better setup for it.