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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8269365" data-attributes="member: 18">Looking at this from a slightly different angle, I've actually found D&D isn't the game or genre where I've most often seen a rules/subject conflict, nor seen "system matters" illustrated so obviously.Supers is.Virtually every generic RPG has tried to do Supers, and some have even made it their main thing (HERO/Champions). Virtually all of them are godawful if you're trying to run a game that feels like a comic-book or a superhero movie, because the rules push so hard against that. HERO/Champions was the first time I really felt this was thrown in my face. Rules-on-paper, it's basically a tightly-designed squad-combat game, ideally suited to having say two relatively small squads of soldiers shoot it out with each other in a pretty precise and balanced way. Yet it's being given all these massive superhero and superpower rules. And if you actually play it, does it play out like a comic-book, even if the players and DM try to make it? Not really. It plays out more like if XCOM involved superheroes. There's huge effort put in to try and allow for some superhero stuff, but it's very clunky and the game really shoves you towards this tactical approach pretty hard.Whereas the somewhat naively-designed FASERIP worked extremely well for Supers, and still does.And then loads of Supers games came after FASERIP... and most of them had issues like HERO/Champions - they didn't promote play like comic books or movies, they promoted something more like their underlying design. GURPS Supers is particularly bad for this too.But finally MSHAG came out in the late '90s and did a good job... and again, into the '00s a lot of Supers RPGs continued to take a really HERO/GURPS-y approach of "Well we provided rules for loads of powers and power pools and power stunts and so on, so we must be a good superhero RPG!", despite having rules which didn't really support hero-ing.Of course the funny thing is gore-y superhero deconstruction stuff like The Boys would probably work better with HERO/Champions than, say, The Avengers or or most Marvel stuff. Right tool for the job. If I wanted to run something like Guardians of the Galaxy I'm pretty sure I'd be looking at PtbA or FASERIP or the like (maybe a hack of City of Mists), but if I wanted to do Suicide Squad, bring on HERO or GURPS, because brains splattered on walls and guns being actually useful and so on works great there.I'm not using CoC as an example on purpose, because CoC is pretty naively designed and BRP isn't really designed for horror. And the SAN system creates a kind of horror but it's not necessarily very compelling.Games with systems where PCs regularly have to make Fear checks (esp. which aren't as ludicrous/OTT in results as D&D) or the like, and where enemies are extremely hard to kill or require very specific tactics, where players can lose control of their PCs in ways that don't just feel tactical or boring, and where it happens routinely tend to support horror a lot better. Where magic and so on isn't completely reliable/predictable.5E is a bit to keen on tactics and balance to really mesh well with horror, even beyond HP/levels/etc.</blockquote>

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