The Generic Universal Role Playing System, or GURPS, is a tabletop role-playing game system published by Steve Jackson Games. The system is designed to run any genre using the same core mechanics. The core rules were first written by Steve Jackson and published in 1986, at a time when most such systems were story- or genre-specific. Since then, four editions have been published. The current line editor is Sean Punch.

Sessions are run by a game master (GM), who controls the world and adjudicates the rules, with any number of players controlling the actions of a character. Most actions are resolved by rolling three six-sided dice (3d6), trying to roll below a certain number, usually a skill. GURPS uses a point-based character creation system; characters are represented by four basic stats (Strength, Dexterity, IQ and Health), and players can buy any number of advantages, disadvantages, perks, quirks and skills.

GURPS consists of a GURPS Basic Set, which contains the core rules required to run most games. In addition, more than a hundred supplemental books provide optional rules and details about different settings and genres (GURPS Martial Arts, for example). By adapting the various optional rules and systems, GURPS can be run with as much or as little detail as required, and can accommodate virtually any genre, character or style of play.

GURPS won the Origins Award for Best Roleplaying Rules of 1988, and in 2000 it was inducted into the Origins Hall of Fame. Many of its expansions, such as GURPS Infinite Worlds, have also won awards.

Prior to GURPS, most roleplaying games (RPGs) of the 1970s and early 1980s were developed specifically for their gaming genres, and they were largely incompatible with one another. For example, TSR published its Dungeons & Dragons with a fantasy genre. Another game from the same company, Star Frontiers, was a science fiction genre. TSR produced other games for other genres, such as Gamma World (post-apocalyptic adventures), Top Secret (spies and secret agents), Gangbusters (Roaring Twenties adventures), and Boot Hill (American Old West). Each of these games was set with its own self-contained rules system, and the rules for playing each game differed greatly from one game to the next. Attempts were made in Advanced Dungeons and Dragons to allow cross-genre games using Gamma World and Boot Hill rules; however, characters could only be used in a new genre by converting their statistics. GURPS was preceded by Basic Role-Playing (Chaosium, 1980) and the Hero System (Hero Games), a system that expanded to multiple genres starting in 1982.

The precursors of GURPS were Steve Jackson's microgames Melee and Wizard, both published by Metagaming Concepts, which eventually combined them along with another Jackson game, In the Labyrinth, to form The Fantasy Trip (TFT), an early role-playing game. Several of the core concepts of GURPS first appeared in TFT, including the inclusion of Strength, Dexterity and Intelligence as the core abilities scores of each character.

By April 1984, the core rules for GURPS (at that point referred to as the "Great Unnamed Universal Role-Playing System") was being playtested in preparation for a GURPS question-and-answer seminar at Origins 1984 in Dallas. The combat system for GURPS was published in 1985 as Man to Man: Fantasy Combat from GURPS to meet the deadline for Origins 1985 and was followed up later that year by the adventure supplement Orcslayer.

The Basic GURPS set was published in 1986 and 1987 and included two booklets, one for developing characters and one for Adventuring.