When I decided to run another Fallout game, I wasn't sure if I wanted to use GURPS, Fudge, or the Fallout PnP game. I eventually decided to go with GURPS because I'm most familiar with it, and I felt that the "grittiness" of the system mixed well with Fallout.
There are some really great resources that others have put together for a GURPS Fallout game, and while looking through many of these I noticed there were a lot of folks trying to emulate the "perks" and other traits from the games in GURPS.
At first I was caught up with this idea, and started looking at what perks I wanted to bring over as meta-traits for my game. But after awhile, I started to feel that this idea was a bit silly.
Video games have been trying to emulate the table top for a long time. The original Fallout game was going to use GURPS, before the SPECIAL system, and even that has a lot of similarities still to GURPS. The Perks and Traits from Fallout are just takes on Advantages and other traits that can be taken in GURPS. They are far more restricted and limited though, as you'd expect in a video game.
So, why are we not trying to emulate in a table top RPG a system that was designed to emulate table top RPGs? This is chasing our tails!
I had to ask myself, do I want to use GURPS to play Fallout, or play GURPS in the Fallout setting? GURPS allows both, but in the end, I'd rather just use the setting and not worry about a set list of meta-traits.
