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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wik" data-source="post: 4671947" data-attributes="member: 40177">To answer my own question:BECMI:  Great for exploration, "sandbox" style play, and crazy effects (magic pools, and the like)If tweaked, it can handle quite a bit (realms play, for example).  I imagine it'd have a hard time running a horror game.  1e:  Similar, but a bit more dangerous, in my experience.  If tweaked, it can handle mcuh the same as BECMI, though with greater character variation.  It did not handle "gritty" well, though.2e:  Lose some of the "sandbox", and add in a bit more character customization.  Very malleable setting, good for "fringe" campaigns - it almost seemed to encourage them.If tweaked - and this game, more than any other, seemed made for tweaking - it could handle almost every campaign concept I had come up with.  That said, it didn't handle "Pirates!" very well, and lacked some of the fun in Dungeon Adventures.  3e:  Dungeon Crawls, Epic fantasy, though it could do "gritty" pretty well, too (in a sense -it can be a very lethal system!).  It was pretty open if tweaked, though I find Exploration really hard to get "right" in 3e.  It was pretty awful at large-scale combats.  4e:  Heroic epics.  Anything combat-based.  Skill Challenges can create some interesting exploration dynamics.If tweaked, it could do a very many things, but I think 4e is the worst edition to choose if you want to run a sandbox game (Due to the difficulty in balancing treasure and encounters to PC level) - and I beleive it doesn't do investigation well (unless you want to rely only on skill use, which I think would be boring from a player perspective).  GRITTY, SURVIVAL-BASED GAMERules-as-written, I'd go with 3e.  There are numerous skills that can be used to model finding food and surviving with a lack of food (though no Endurance skill, unfortunately).  The wide range of useful wilderness skills (Swim, Climb, Survival, Search, Nature, Handle Animal) means that no character can really cover all the bases.  The swingy nature of critical hits in 3e can really add to the gritty feel - not to mention that with only -10 hit points before death, a character in the low positives could be outright killed in one hit, which is about as gritty as you can get.The problems with the system, though, are in the spells.  Magic can be used too often to override survival situations (Create Food and Water, for example), and unlike in other editions, Spells in 3e were pretty cheap to cast.  In 1e, you had a very limited number of spells, after all.  Now, if I could tweak the system, I'd probably go with... I don't know.  It's a tough question.  2e is my gut instinct, because I've run DARK SUN games using 2e, and it really caught the tone I liked - and 2e DARK SUN was already 2e using tweaked rules.  Many of the things I like about 2e in a gritty setting are those that aren't changed - 2e had limited spells per day, for example.  ON the downside, you'd need to rework hit points, because decent-level 2e characters were TOUGH to bring down.  And the system lacked a decent set of survival-based skills that really felt "right".I'd almost lean towards BECMI, with a  tacked-on skills section.  Or maybe 4e, with less powers (powers seem too "gonzo" for me, at times).</blockquote>

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