They put your ideas into a box, define all your powers and abilities, and allow you to think that the few choices they give you are complete freedom and customization. D&D's class-based system has always tried to define your role narrowly to make the game easily approachable, but at the expense of constantly offering ways to break out of the small boxes it puts you in.
And these days, if you multiclass at all, you never get your 20th-level power. So we are back to punishing those who seek freedom and customization. The punishment is a lie, since almost no campaigns ever reach 20th-level play, but the threat is there. Disobey the centrally planned single-class paradigm, or the game-designer-as-state shall punish you for self-expression.
We had all this figured out in the 1980s when all of us AD&D players dropped D&D for GURPS. This happened, and it was partly responsible for the end of AD&D 1E. These pre-Battletech days were brutal, and AD&D declined in the late 1980s as other games took over. Magic: The Gathering in the mid-1990s was the nail in the coffin.
But we all wanted more character customization, which is why most hardcore groups went to GURPS and never looked back. The "central planning committee" of game designers at TSR could not contain our ideas, and we needed games that could do it all. Some went to Champions, and many flocked to GURPS. The only really strong class-based game to survive the 1990s was Rifts, which was greatly helped by the TMNT franchise.
And GURPS doesn't tell you that you can't have a power because you multiclassed. There are no classes.
These days, it is the crowdfunding grift crowd keeping 5E alive, and even this model is crumbling. We have far too many options in a game that can't support them; the character designers with a few dozen books have UI dropdowns to pick classes, feats, and powers that extend for a few screens and a few hundred selections, and the choices we were promised become shackles and confusing, messy, junk-filled lists to sort through. There are times in 5E character design when I feel I am digging through a garbage can of smelly, disorganized trash to find the one thing I am looking for.
GURPS? All options are equal; there are no class or level requirements, and they are all in one chapter. Buy them if you can afford them. They aren't scattered across six classes, with vaguely similar options with different names here and there, and only found in some "digital purchase" that took someone weeks to piece together in a database program and you paid forty-dollars to have the right to access.
D&D is a centrally planned game, but with a deeply capitalistic and exploitative sales model. There is always something new to buy, and another brand-new platform to buy it again on. Yet, you get these shill gaming sites calling D&D a "deeply socialist game," yet that is a deeply dishonest lie, and everyone can see how the digital sales model flies in the face of that statement. Are you kidding me? Even with the Open 5E clones, I am buying multiple digital copies of the same thing so the character designer can work on the latest site to support it.
GURPS, with its "buy what you want" character design system, feels like a game that leverages capital and the buying power of character points, has zero crowdfunding grift, and is far, far, far less exploitative since if you own the core two books, you own the entire game with zero digital add-ons needed to create any character. In GURPS, you "own the means of production" of all your characters, and these powers aren't given to you by the game designers far away, piece by piece, always for another buck for a new option, always something new the next quarter.
To be fair, you also "own the means of production" in the OSR, too, for all your characters. So this concept is a universal selling point for most old-school games. Modern games? Mostly live-service models, and mostly forgettable. They will all go away when the websites go offline, and we will be expected to buy the next thing.
A universal, open, no-character-class point-design character-creation system solves all of D&D 5E's problems. You don't need to keep watching YouTube videos on how to fix the game. You don't need to keep buying books to fix the game. You don't need to invest in more and more DM advice books on prep and adventure design. When you realize all of D&D's scaffolding is there to entice you into a buyer's market and collector's FOMO mentality, it all becomes clear.
Also, if it is printed in a physical book, and the character creation system works offline, it is a real game. Many of these modern games trick you into thinking the "first few levels are fine," but by the time you hit level five, the software requirement to manage complexity hits hard and you are forced to open your wallet.
And the surrounding D&D 5E market feeds off that buyer's market; the YouTubers and add-on book sellers are all fighting for a piece of the shrinking pie, and the parent company will start cutting off markets and keeping them for itself. Of that crowd "willing to spend big for a game," everyone is fighting to get that money. Even the media sites surrounding this market have been compromised by this cash flow.
We had all this figured out in the 1980s.
Most of the kids we played with were so poor they were lucky to own one or two gaming books. A live-service model game back then? You're kidding, right? None of us had the money to buy imagination, nor go into debt for a game. We picked games that gave us the most flexibility for the money we had. We dropped AD&D 1E for GURPS and never looked back.
These days, with AD&D 1E making a comeback for nostalgia, I play it again and am right back in the 1980s. Wanting to switch to GURPS.
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