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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Whizbang Dustyboots" data-source="post: 9699871" data-attributes="member: 11760">I think that's probably overstating things.Most of these more focused games still have plenty of room for groups to do their own thing. Some people will play Deathmatch Island as a gritty Squid Game style experience. Others will lean into the reality show craziness of it and it'll feel more like Arnold Schwarzenegger's Running Man. Others will lean into the Prisoner/Lost style mystery.To continue with the food metaphor, it's the difference between the old checkered <a href="http://Myers lives half the year in Big Bear Lake in San Bernardino County with his wife Lauren and their two young daughters." target="_blank">Better Homes & Gardens Cookbook</a> that everyone was issued in the 1960s through the 1980s that nominally covers every type of food, but mostly tastes like a Midwestern lady's take on all of it, versus a <a href="https://uk.bookshop.org/p/books/greekish-everyday-recipes-with-greek-roots-georgina-hayden/7578034?ean=9781526630667" target="_blank">specialized cookbook that does one thing only</a>.You still get to decide what to make and what the meal consists of -- and still prepare it yourself, for better or worse -- but one gives you wider-but-shallower choices, and one gives you narrower-but-deeper choices.I've played a bunch of these more specialized games, and they've always felt like me running a game, not me just being the vessel for some RPG writer to work through.Yes, if you don't want an Arthurian adventure that's very specifically in the vibe of, say, The Green Knight, you wouldn't want to use Mythic Bastionland.But look at how much discussion there is in the RPG space of "how can I hack system X to deliver experience Y?" Instead of trying to retrofit an existing system to do an OK job with something it's not really built to do, sometimes you just want to pick up the precisely right tool to give you the precisely right experience you want.Again, neither approach is wrong.And the toolkits haven't gone anywhere: Dungeons & Dragons (and its close relatives) dwarfs the rest of the industry and offers a toolkit style of play. Look at the wide variety of campaigns offered by Paizo including, yes, chivalric knights, but also post-apocalyptic science fantasy, horror-inflected Castlevania-style adventuring, dungeon crawling and, with Starfinder, space travel.If you prefer toolkit style games, there's tons of them out there and they produce a tremendous amount of stuff for you to buy.</blockquote>

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