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The biggest question often comes to what degree he's playing in a principaled way about what the consequences of those encounters. In other words, to what extent do those introductions of chaos matter? Its easy for a GM to decide most of the time that they don't, or only do so in a very...

Yeah, but the core mechanics had some pretty severe levels of abstraction; that was even obvious to people in the 70's. When the abstraction gets deep enough, its functionally indistinguishable from a gamist decision. I know you get soggy about hit point being brought up, but the combat roll...

While I thought the rest of this post was sound, I'll state flatly that there are moves in Monster of the Week that cause you to pass or fail intended actions. They may well lead to other situations, but that's not exclusive of passing or failing something.

That explains it much more, I think. Effectively you were kind of in a box of a particular time and variety of D&D much longer than I'm used to.

Hmmm. That begs the question what even counts as "simulate"? D&D style hit points never seemed to simulate "reality" to any degree, and you can even question if they very properly similated most fantasy fiction. They were pretty gamist right out the gate.

I guess technically OD&D didn't have rules for those, either. They were used a lot, but that may have had to do with people coming from wargaming just taking them as a given. The rules were certainly going to force you track distances pretty specifically, though. I was just noting that it...

I was seeing race and class treated as separate in 1975 (that races were to be treated as quasi-classes may have been the intent but it was muddy enough in OD&D that after Greyhawk came out I never saw anyone treat it that way), and while dedicated mechanics for grids wasn't present, there was...

You could make an argument for this for various editions of Shadowrun.

This was visible even in OD&D once you got out of the most basic classes; things like rangers and druids were always pretty clearly as much about who you were as what you did.

Pretty much. I didn't mean to contradict you in any way. I was mostly noting it as an oddity from someone who normally leans in to relatively complex systems.

I was really interested in Spacemaster many years ago, but before I tried to introduce it to people I decided to create a couple characters--and crashed right into a wall. And I wasn't exactly hostile to complex character gen.

Yeah, I responded to a poster (Loverdrive I think) earlier on that; I just wanted to make it clear I wasn't personally qualified to say if it was true or to what degree. Yeah, while I have a tendency to occasionally put my oar into a game system rules-wise before playing it, I try to see if I...

While generally true, there's a tendency for people grabbing an extent base system to decide it can just do what they want it to without doing any lifting with popular systems that may make that actually worse than with custom built systems. At least I've seen it more than once with Savage...

@Jacob Lewis, while I thought your post was thoughtful, I've seen enough cases of campaigns chosen for various time frames to suggest picking them on that basis may be uncommon for you, but its not generically so (though 60 is clearly a nice-round-number case, but I've absolutely seen campaigns...

Its still well enough known that whether its particularly active now, its design--which is the point of this thread--is relevant.

I'd have to suggest you're not sufficiently familiar with GURPS if you think there are not different rules in some of its books. They, in fact, actively change rules and how they're applied for certain genres and subgenres. Again, I'd have to suggest here you are not showing sufficient...

I know that. I was giving it as an example of a game made with a toolset (PbtA) that previously didn't exist Also, I suspect strongly here that your assertation here is not something everyone would agree with, and its largely because the parts you focus on are very different, so how...

I might have mentioned Earthdawn as a zero-to-hero alternative if I'd thought of it.

Yeah. As I noted earlier, Monsterhearts is a good example: I'm not quite sure what someone trying for something like that would have done in 1985, but at best they'd have had to be inventing a lot of mechanical scaffolding almost entirely from the ground up. But that doesn't mean everyone...

No, its really not. If you have a problem with what I said you do, but I said what I intended.