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These are the most comprehensive build-a-character-with-points games for sure. Someone who wants a holistic look at game design should check one of them out.

That's relying on heavily on the hope that the designers are consistent! I'd say that, to reframe it a bit, more rules provide more predictability. They give players a better idea of what their characters are capable of, and how often they might succeed at it. Of course, that also depends on...

The ability to read a table and respond to what it needs at a given time.

Do you require knowing how to practice a martial art to be a monk? Ars Magica's rules are complex to allow you to propose any magical effect. A lot of that heavy lifting is done for you in games with spell lists (which AM also has).

Two youngsters in their 40s, 3 in their 50s, one who is 60.

I like the Luck mechanic. It's another dwindling resource like Sanity, but the player has more control over its use. However, the same reason it exists is the same reason the Push mechanic does: the more times you have to roll for a success, the more the game will derail when unlikely results...

I was in an adventure set there. It's torn down - to spite Nazis, always a good motive - but for several years Spandau prison had a single occupant, Rudolf Hess. It was probably just random chance, but the idea of a single inmate in a prison is always an interesting one. Plus, although it was...

Be warned, some of those annotations are small in the physical book. One anecdote after I had started my second run - the authors signed a GenCon program for one of my players. Gareth slipped in a new clue: look at the church scenes and count the number of parishioners.

I have a similar experience. I ran it twice, deliberately not repeating the same elements. Both games were great: ending in two different climaxes (another positive feature being a definite end to a campaign). I have even played in a campaign that was derailed by covid, and was not privy to any...

In Delta Green - which is a percentile blackjack system - criticals are any doubles. Successes if you roll under your skill, failures over. That's a bit of a wrinkle in a blackjack system, and requires buy in as to the frequency of them happening. But it is pretty simple and elegant.

There can be systems where a low-skilled person's proportion of critical successes exceed those of a more skilled character. If I need a natural 20 to hit that dragon, all of my hits are going to be crits!

Way back in Pyramid Online, Ken Hite wrote five supers seeds set in historical periods: Marvel Heroes in Imperial Rome DC Heroes in Renaissance Italy 99 Muslim heroes - one for each name of Allah - in the Crusades Civil War Indian Wars. Each one sounded great. "The alien craft fell to earth...

In a low roll wins scenario, there will be more instances where the more skilled individual succeeds while the less skilled one fails altogether. But in the cases where the latter succeeds, it negates the former's higher skill level.

I would say that Ars Magica is a progenitor of the d20 system as well. Jonathan Tweet worked on both, and the universal resolution is pretty similar.

The more a game is an exercise in tactical combat, the more it will benefit from a catalog of monsters. This is both for the novelty of encountering different challenges, and the likely necessity of antagonists at different power levels. Gumshoe occupies an interesting middle ground - in most...

"Realism" in a system is a perfectly acceptable goal, and GURPS has indeed striven to achieve it. But it clashes with principles of PC generation for me. I understand why Nuclear Physics should cost more than Unarmed Combat in reality; chances are, however, a higher rating in the latter will...

"You think he's being sincere" has enough room for a duplicitous NPC to be lying.

Crom! My games tend to be contiguous, but there is always room for discrete adventures.

Night's Black Agents. Arguably the only thing the author has tinkered with since its release is the chase rules. Other GM-forward releases have only expounded on the core material.

A giant beehive balanced on top of a mountain, and the PCs and major NPCs swinging a lot of ten foot poles around near the summit.