Editing GURPS (section)

==The GURPS Concept==
GURPS was part of the first wave of role-playing games that eschewed random generation of characters in favor of a ''point-based system''. GURPS was not the first role-playing system to present a "universal" set of rules for different gaming environments.

Role-playing games of the 1970s and 1980s, such as ''Dungeons & Dragons'', used random numbers generated by dice rolls to assign statistics to player characters. GURPS, in contrast, assigned each player a specified number of ''points'' for each category of their characters. Together with the [[Hero System]], GURPS was one of the first role-playing games in which characters were created by spending points to get characteristics, skills, advantages, getting more points by accepting low characteristics, disadvantages etc. This approach has grown increasingly common in part due to the success of GURPS.

Another one of the strengths of GURPS, say its proponents, lies in its hundreds of worldbooks describing settings from several science fiction, fantasy, and historical settings, adding specific rules but mainly giving general information for any game. Many popular game designers began their professional careers as GURPS writers including C.J. Carella, Robin Laws, S. John Ross, and [[FUDGE]] creator Steffan O'Sullivan. It is something of an open secret in the gaming community that a large contingent of people who do not play GURPS (or any other RPG) nonetheless faithfully buy GURPS worldbooks because of the detailed information.