Its GURPS Thursday so a bit of personal history and making GURPS bigger

Well its becoming a custom in the community to post about the game on Thursday and though I'm not calling Thor's Day GURPSday seeing as how I've been part of the community for a very long time I figured I ought to contribute with an article on my personal history with the game

I've owned  GURPS since Man to Man and been a playtester and for a while it was the only RPG  I bought anything for or owned. 

For all that  I've only played or  run it a handful of times,. 

I've played a ton of games but  run mostly 2nd thru Pathfinder editions of D&D, some games of Marvel Superheroes and a lot of GURPS's cousin Unisystem (Buffy/Angel/All Flesh Must Be Eaten) 

And there is a reason for that. Lack of players and GM's  

In my experience not  many people at least in the US actually play GURPS or gravitate to it given a choice. 

There are a lot of reasons for it, perceived complexity , lack of flavorful rules (GURPS is workmanlike not exciting) too realistic for personal  taste and so on. 

Back in the heyday of print books and  mostly before the Internet was ubiquitous  this didn't matter much. Most GURPS books were bought as source books anyway. Some of them were well written enough you crib nearly an entire high school level maybe  college Freshman paper  from them.

Even the ones that weren't that dense were pretty much almost everything you need for gaming that setting style. 

Now though times have changed, 

Don't get me wrong, GURPS is not ill its in fact as healthy as a horse and in raw terms has more support than it ever had in the print book days. You can count on getting something cool every month and htis doesn't seem to be going anywhere   

But what it does not have is space in  the average gamer's mind. GURPS is a bit invisible to most being limited to a few hundred sales of its best stuff and maybe the core books on the shelf (my FLGS has them) 

That can change though and it is where we come in. 

If we want GURPS to be something more than a tiny niche for gearhead gamers , we the GURPS fans have to make it happen. 

We have to run them, encourage others to play and put in the hard work needed to make the game newbie friendly. Make the pregens  master the rules (easier said than done) and make the  game smooth as butter 

Its not always easy since most of us have lives, jobs, careers but if we are willing to say put in a few hours over a weekend we can make it happen. 

I'm in. Are you?