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While I don't really disagree with your point, I think even at that point there were some differences in how they presented the role of the two. Whether that showed up in play is a different question.

Well, that's a different set of problems; you see it often with game systems that are D&D 5e based where you ask if there's a real reason for that in actual design rather than marketing and familiarity, but I've seen some PbtA based games where I had to ask if they really thought about whether...

Our old girl Belle had that down to a fine art, and what's worse, before she left it, she taught it to Max the dog who came in as a puppy when she was still around (the fact he thought she was the Best Thing Ever probably helped...)

I don't disagree in principal, but I maintain its really, really easy for a fair bit of self-deception to creep in even on a well-meaning GM's part on whether his weaknesses are harming the game he's running or not (or even what those weaknesses are). And no, you can't count on his players...

I agree they have a worldview--as you say, its why you can run the same campaign with GURPS and Hero and get a pretty different play experience--but I'm not sold that's actually a support of theme.

There are two problems with that: 1. He may have pushed the dungeon pretty hard, but there was also a heavy focus in parts about wilderness play, and it was much more poorly supported; 2. Even within the dungeon play mode, there were design elements that appear pointlessly ad-hoc. Once he'd...

You start to have serious questions about the purposefulness of design when you see a bunch of independent subsystems for different things where the particular choice of subsystem does not point at any particular reason for the decision in the first place. It at least suggests a lack of care.

There are plenty that have degrees of success or failure. Eclipse Phase has both. While they often have combat applications, its pretty rare for the system to end there.

How do you view generic systems in this context? Or, as @Campbell referenced upthread, games that have, from lack of a better term, a topic, but don't really seem to have a theme, or at least the mechanics aren't set up to support that theme particularly?

While I get the distinction you're making, I'm not sold you can do a proper degree of success without at least addressing what you were trying to do. Or put another way, I'm not sure conflict and task resolution are always as separable as this post would success.

I don't know what to tell you man. I'm not exactly an enemy of generic systems (I spent probably half my gaming career running the Hero System with some step-outs to GURPS), but its not exactly hard to tell the difference between that and what, say, Chill 3e is doing. Basically, knowing the...

But that's not a specific intention. That describes every halfway complete game ever. The question is what kind of experience it was supposed to produce, and it didn't have much focus there.

Mine have been mixed too, except the first one. They've just largish breeds and have had runs of bad luck.

Yeah, its a big part of why I'm only gaming every other week right now.

The thing that always amuses me about the pineapple pizza question is that it doesn't always seem a coherent position. I dislike it, but then, I don't usually like mixing savory and sweet on, well, anything, but other people who have no problem with savory and sweet still sometimes seem to have...

I hope you will take it right that I am supremely jealous of getting that much time with a dog.

While obviously they're dogs, herders of almost any sort are kind of their own thing as dogs go, and until you've been around them for a while its hard to realize how true that is.

Confused since forever by it being repaired by healing magic and medical treatment.

Liavek. Its a little obscure these days, but its a setting where people's luck is the source of all magical power in the end, and everyone has some (and a finite amount, at that).

There's a lot I can call "more modern" than others, but "modern" without a qualifier is not terribly useful. Yeah, its a matter of degree. There probably are in the former case, but I'd probably need to see them in use before I gave them a nod that way. "Regressive". Not sure I'd go so far...