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Message: <blockquote data-quote="woodelf" data-source="post: 1463311" data-attributes="member: 10201">"regardless of the actual system"?? You just said it's a D20 System game and D20 System supplement--they're the same system*; of course the game stats are mostly useful. As for unfamiliar stats vice fiction: no, they're not equivalent. In general, the novel might tell you that A is stronger than B--though it might not, depending on the plot and writing style. Game stats will not only tell you that A is stronger than B, but that A is 60% stronger than B--easily and accurately translated into your game system of choice. For gaming, you often need a fair bit of info that just doesn't show up in typical fiction (supers being the most notable exception). OTOH, you don't necessarily need game stats to provide that info--things like The Dragonlovers Guide to Pern, The World of the Dark Crystal, and the Star Wars Technical Manual all provide the level of detail and precision an RPG expects, without any actual game stats. So it's perfectly possible to write an actual RPG supplement with sufficient detail but without game stats. And if you use some game stats, they can still be sufficiently generic to translate to the system of your choice--take a look at the Citybook series for an excellent example.On the one hand i agree. But my whole point is that there are *very* few RPGs out there that are "too different" from one another, and thus become of lesser value. Off the top of my head, the only ones that come to mind as being sufficiently different from D&D3E to potentially present a diminished value are Everway, Over the Edge, Psychosis, Nobilis, Heaven & Earth, Story Engine ,Universalis, Epiphany, Amber DRP, & maybe Castle Falkenstein. Give me a supplement for pretty much any other RPG out there, and i'll get "full value" out of it for my D&D game (or my W:tA game, or my Star Wars [D6] game, or...).And i agree with you that "incompatible" stats are worse than no stats. Which is precisely *why* i'd rather see a generic RPG supplement than a D20 System RPG supplement--the generic supplement is useful to the D20 System player and every other RPer out there. The D20 System supplement is most useful to the D20 System player. To be clear--it's not that the other can't use it, and it's not inherent to D20 System. It's the way most are written, and i have the same problem with some GURPS supplements. The more crunch there is, the trickier it becomes to extract the content. If you give me a paragraph quantifyinga  character's abilities with some precision, i can put her into whatever game a want, with or without statting her up, with no problem. If you give me the same character as a statblock, i can reflect the character only to the degree that i'm familiar with the system the statblock is done in--the more the character is conveyed numerically, and the less narratively, the less accurate translating becomes.But, and here's the important part: this is true whether they use the same system, or different systems. Most RPG supplements make assumptions of setting, playstyle, power level, magic, and/or other elements that make them less than fully-compatible with one another. This goes as much for D20 System products as non-. IME, to use almost *any* RPG supplement in a game, i have to tweak it. And i don't have to tweak it any less just because it happens to use the same system. So, if no matter what, i'm gonna have to make adjustments, it may as well have the maximal useful content (narrative) and as little content that i'll have to rewrite (crunch) as possible. Now, i'll grant that this is partly a playstyle issue, and partly a cognitive issue (some people probably "digest" crunch better than fluff). But i also claim that it's partly a matter of belief: if you believe that it is "difficult" to use content with gamestats for one system in a game using a different system, you'll focus on the difficulty; if you believe that it is "easy" to use content with the same system, you'll think of it as easy even if you have to put in just as much effort for your particular campaign. And since i think it's partly a matter of self-fulfilling prophecy, i decry anything that propagates the myth [IMHO] that RPG systems are sufficiently divergent to hinder cross-compatibility.* And i'll stick by that until someone actually releases a D20 System product that is sufficiently derivative/evolved to *not* be compatible.</blockquote>

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