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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Whizbang Dustyboots" data-source="post: 9699846" data-attributes="member: 11760">I don't think that's it, so much as these tightly focused games have rulesets and options all tuned for a precise experience.So instead of, say, having a D&D game -- which is a big toolkit full of lots of things -- where you tell your players that you're going to be playing a surreal Arthurian experience, and on game day, you still have someone show up with a tiefling swashbuckler, a goblin artificer and someone playing a character named Colonblow the Barbarian, you get Mystic Bastionland, where everything in the game -- from characters, to monsters to every mechanic -- are designed around delivering a surreal Arthurian adventure, and nothing else.It's the difference between going to a nice buffet and everyone getting a pretty good meal of whatever sort that they might want, versus going to a very specific type of restaurant where everyone is going to be getting much more limited choices (northern Italian food only, and no chicken fingers for the kids), but it's going to be excellent, if that's the kind of food that you like.Neither approach is wrong. It's just different.Sometimes I want to play D&D and let everyone do their own thing and play a wide variety of adventures that mostly feel like D&D with various flavors laid atop that. Sometimes I want to play Monster of the Week, which really only does episodic monster hunting adventures in the style of X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Supernatural, or Pirate Borg, which can really only do Pirates of the Caribbean as interpreted by Sam Raimi in full Evil Dead mode. Nothing in those games is extraneous -- you can't go off and play a wizard lurking in the Tower of London in Pirate Borg, even though the Tower of London presumably exists in the world of Pirate Borg and magic definitely does -- but it excels in its narrow range.</blockquote>

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