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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Votan" data-source="post: 5051079" data-attributes="member: 18680">While I agree that any ruleset can be adapted to a specific style of play, sometimes the relative effort to adapt a ruleset can be fairly high.  4E is a fine game and very well designed.  But as part of the design, the developers made decisions about how to balance things and about the style of play that would be most easily supported.   Other games (for example, GURPS or Rolemaster) make different assumptions and provide different balance points.  You could turn 4E into GURPS but the effort seems high compared with simply picking a ruleset that fits well with a playstyle.  Nothing in 4E can compare with seeing a 25th level Fighter die from a single arrow from a lucky critical from a 2nd level Orc (which I have seen in Rolemaster).  It's a whole different style.  4E makes a lot of inherent assumptions about player strength and has an extremely dense system of options.   This makes for a very fun game.  But the same richness makes tweaking it into a "grim and gitty" rules system complicated unless there is a simple trick that is easy to balance.It's not so much removing races and classes (an all-elf, all-primal 4E campaign would be possible without anybody being in trouble) is the issue as the assumptions for what a 1st level (or 5th level) character should be able to do.  So I do think that ruleset does help define the game and that there can come a point where you tweak so much to reach the ending that it makes more sense to start at a different point.  4E accelerates this a bit with options like the character builder (a marvellous tool that manages the complexity of 4E rather well) which is difficult to use in conjunction with extensive house ruling of powers and classes (absent a straightforward "banned list").</blockquote>

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