Missives from the 6th Floor

Seeing that I work at a game company, I finally figured I'd look in my backyard and sent a note to the internal discussion lists to see if there are any "old school" gamers in crowd... Sent it moments ago.

The motivating factor was that I picked up a few game books - The Iron Kingdom World Guide, Five Fingers: Port of Deceipt, and Grim Tales.

The guys at Privateer Press do world building on a scale, and level of detail rarely seen, and despite my current low level of interest in swords-and-sorcery fantasy, I couldn't buy any gaming stuff without checking those two off my to-buy list.

Grim Tales was more of an impulse buy - it'd been on my Amazon wish list for a long time - and when I discovered it's been discontinued by the publisher, I figured I'd better get a copy if I wanted one. I flipped through it tonight, and it's got some good ideas for running a low-magic high-grit campaign, independent of the genre trappings.

Course the problem is that all of the above are d20 books - and I can't get excited about the class-level-based system - haven't been able to for years. I think I've finally come to understand that what I want is either a system that gets the hell out of the way and let's the group tell a story (like, say, FUDGE), or a system that at least tries to be grounded in reality (like GURPS).

Which is sorta funny, 'cause when I was younger, I had no patience for "generic" systems (which FUDGE and GURPS are both examples). I wanted flavor, setting, and perhaps most importantly good art.

That's not to say other systems aren't fun - it's just that they eventually get on my nerves - either they restrict character development in capricious ways, or have ridiculous combat mechanics, or play fast and lose with probability & statistics and hope no one notices. If the focus is story, then the system is just there as a framework and the fewer rules the better. Give me a task resolution mechanic - preferably the same one in and out of combat - and leave me alone. The GM is there to arbitrate, and if you don't "trust" the GM to make decisions for the best of the groups enjoyment, you're probably playing with the wrong people.

This works great for fantastic settings like swords-and-sorcery, hard-boiled/noir fiction, swashbuckling, horror, etc. In cases where the very foundation of the game world violates reality as we understand it I don't try to construct a "realistic" system - 'cause it always feels like a fool's errand. (I've come to realize that the reason I disliked Role Master so much, when first exposed to it as a teen, was probably that genre/realism mismatch - well that and that there were soo many damn books to buy, that always tweaked me too.)

A minimalist system approach doesn't generally work as well (for me) for "harder" SF genres like Cyberpunk/Steampunk and Space Opera. There "rationalism" is a large part of the "flavor" of the setting - understanding the rules of the universe or, as is often the case in the 'punk genres, gaming the system is part of the meta-game.

In those cases, I want the system to have a gritty, realistic feel - and I've found the best way to get that feel is to use a system that's - wait for it - realistic. While it's easy to argue that GURPS can be too realistic at times (vehicle design, anyone?), the engineer in me says it's better to have too much realism and discard selectively than to take a flawed model and try to impose realism on it. But hey, that could just be me.

Oh, and for the record, I still like good art.