A spellcaster is lucky to get a new spell by half a point. You can never increase your ability scores. You get diddlysquat character points upon adventure completion that maybe allow you to improve one skill from a 14 or less success to a 15 or less success. I enjoy my character getting better at what he does and being able to do cool new things as the campaign develops. rather than just finding the next monster to kill. they're more likely to try non-combat solutions and more interested in looking for clues, meeting people and exploring the setting. Plus, I've found that if the game is lethal, the players tend to play more intelligently. there are optional rules for that as well. only needed if you want ideas, want to see how someone adapted a specific settings, or want more detailed rules for a genre (like superheroes or magic). The "splatbooks" are completely optional. As for a "steep learning curve", there's a download-able version of the rules that gives all you really need as a player. Some things don't work as well, but others work very well.
Once you get out of the "rut" of high fantasy, GURPS lets you explore any genre, in setting. Add in a steep learning curve, a massive and modular ruleset (thus the splatbooks), and the relative lethality of combat and it's not surprising that there aren't many GURPS games on here.This. GURPS seems like it handles "real-world/grittier" games better than high fantasy (which is probably the most popular genre of tabletop game). Hi, my name is Stories and I'm a GURPSaholic.
Once families and such started, it was tough to find the free time for something like GURPS. Once we fell out of GURPS for a few years to do other things, no one wanted to slog through the effort it would take to get back to relearning the system, or at least relearning it to the point that we weren't looking stuff up for half the game. It also worked great for our campaign concept (Cthulupunk postmodern with magic worked in) because it mixed genres so well. Some on my best characters ever were GURPS characters, despite never really having done a big GURPS campaign (well, one by email).I do have to say that some of my favorite characters (not just mine, but the group's as a whole) came from our one and only long-running GURPS campaign, probably because all the character building had to come from scratch and you did not have some decisions 'auto-made' for you by choosing a class at the start. All of my characters really did have character. In a way, GURPS does encourage more self-sufficient, well-rounded, stand-alone characters more than a specialist-oriented game like D&D. I must have made about a hundred stand-alone characters for GURPS over the years.