GURPS is Beating 5E for Me Now

While I love 5E and Tales of the Valiant is a strong implementation of the system, for the types of stories I tell, GURPS wins hands down. The 5E character sheets get too long, they are too much, and I find myself flipping through over a dozen pages of information (every turn) just to run a character effectively.

With GURPS, my character sheet is a single, double-sided character sheet. If I am going onto a third page, that is a complicated character. Rarely do I need four sides of a sheet of paper. And 90% of the information I need is on the first page of that sheet.

No wonder 5E player turns are 30 minutes long for some; they are reading a short story just to process their turn. Shadowdark shines in comparison. Why does 5E have such huge character sheets? Do a PDF printout from the Shard Tabletop of your sheet and count the pages, especially for characters above 10th level. Multiclass characters are worse. Subclass features can have special rules that are found nowhere else in the book.

With GURPS, all of the rules are in the books. Your character sheet only contains choices and the numeric values that affect them.

I used to feel GURPS characters were the complicated ones. Now I am not so sure.

With 5E, all of the rules are on your character sheets, and it reads like a rulebook. I own games with shorter page counts than some 5E character sheets.

The multiclass problem hits me hard in 5E, especially when a character changes their lifepath mid-arc. A scout (ranger), who later becomes a knight (paladin)? I am leveling up as a ranger, then need to swap, and I am overall weaker than a paladin who started at first level, but has some ranger utility? I have overlapping choices? I will never get my 20th-level ability?

With GURPS, it is no problem, just start training in the new areas and organically grow. Whatever you spend your character points on is what you get. Want an "ultimate paladin ability?" Go design it with a superpower, and be the only one in the world with it.

It is near-impossible to fit my ideas into a rigid class-and-level system. Multiclassing makes things worse.