Does D&D fill every niche?

[Umbran]

But there are some basic ideas built into d20 that are hard to get away from, that make it hard to simulate some genres:

1) play is centered around the idea of a 'party'. Much literature is centered around a single heroic individual and his sidekick

2) characters grow significantly in capability over the life of a story in a d20 campaign.

As you note, these aren't really criticisms of D&D. At worst, they are criticisms of RPGs as a whole, for pretty much every game has these elements, probably because, as you say, they make gaming fun and social. A game that purposefully limits the party size to one or two people, or that eliminates character growth, is likely to fail to interest most of the gaming community. Seems to be in the nature of the gaming beast.

GURPS allows a customization of characters that is as far as I know simply not available with any of the current variants of d20.

On the other hand, GURPS seems to require that you have something beyond the core rules to make it function. You need to have Transhuman Space, or GURPS Somethingorother (or personal homebrew work of equivalent magnitude) to get much in the wya of coherent flavor from the system. IMHO, Gurps goes so far in trying to be generic that it hamstrings itself.

There's an old saying about being open-minded: the trick is to not be so open-minded that your brains fall out and spill on the sidewalk. This basic precept works for games, too. It is good to be flexible. But if the game is too flexible, it becomes a limp and bland noodle that supports nothing well in and of itself.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

I might have agreed with that... maybe... before d20 Modern or d20 Call of Cthulhu was released.

d20 Modern is all about archetypes. "The Strong Hero", "The Tough Hero", "The Fast Hero"...

I concede the point that the PCs of Cthulhu d20 do not fall into specific archetypes. However, they can all be grouped as "ordinary humans with little or nothing in the way of special powers". Entirely appropriate to the genre, of course - but doesn't serve well as a showcase of the flexibility of d20. (And as a matter of personal taste, I don't like how d20 was implemented here - like the fact that characters automatically go up in combat power as they gain character levels).

Now we've had games like Mutants & Masterminds and soon Blue Rose that only fail to be d20 by a technicality that literally blow that theory completely out of the water.

I don't know anything about Blue Rose, but I will grant you Mutants & Masterminds.

Still, Mutants & Masterminds was written with superheroes in mind - a strong archetype in themselves. There are some character types that it doesn't handle well - such as characters with primarily social influence or skill-based characters. And even the powers they have, while more flexible than any other d20 variant I have seen, are limited in their scope.

 

[Desdichado]

But there are some basic ideas built into d20 that are hard to get away from, that make it hard to simulate some genres:

1) play is centered around the idea of a 'party'. Much literature is centered around a single heroic individual and his sidekick

That actually has nothing to do with d20 at all.

2) characters grow significantly in capability over the life of a story in a d20 campaign.

That one is true, although there are add-on rulesets and alternate rules out there that go a really long way towards mitigating that, if that's your taste.

3) People in d20 tend to be specialists, at least where skills are concerned, since the cost to buy a rank in a skill remains constant, rather than increasing (ranks 1-3 cost the same as 4-6).

I'm not even sure what your point is there.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

On the other hand, GURPS seems to require that you have something beyond the core rules to make it function. You need to have Transhuman Space, or GURPS Somethingorother (or personal homebrew work of equivalent magnitude) to get much in the wya of coherent flavor from the system. IMHO, Gurps goes so far in trying to be generic that it hamstrings itself.

I don't see this as a bug, but as a feature. You can easily use GURPS with pretty much any setting out there - in fact, I've recently started a GURPS Eberron campaign, and it seems to work quite well. GURPS puts far less limits on possible genres and setting than, say, the D&D Core Rules do.

On the other hand, GURPS 4E does come with a "default setting": "Infinite Worlds", where you play inhabitants of an Earth that has discovered crossdimensional travel a few decades ago, and now is exploring numerous parallel Earths and other worlds while fighting other, less benevolent crosstime civilizations and organizations. You don't need to use this setting, but it is there if you want some flavour...

There's an old saying about being open-minded: the trick is to not be so open-minded that your brains fall out and spill on the sidewalk. This basic precept works for games, too. It is good to be flexible. But if the game is too flexible, it becomes a limp and bland noodle that supports nothing well in and of itself.

I dunno. If I want to fit d20 to a particular genre and setting, I usually have to work out which rules to add from which books. With GURPS, I have to ask myself which part of the Basic Set I don't need (usually most of it).

 

[Desdichado]

d20 Modern is all about archetypes. "The Strong Hero", "The Tough Hero", "The Fast Hero"...

I'm not sure that those are exactly archetypes, though. Plus, d20 Modern operates under the assumption that you will multiclass freely, thus even further diluting any semblance to archetypal character builds.

I concede the point that the PCs of Cthulhu d20 do not fall into specific archetypes. However, they can all be grouped as "ordinary humans with little or nothing in the way of special powers". Entirely appropriate to the genre, of course - but doesn't serve well as a showcase of the flexibility of d20. (And as a matter of personal taste, I don't like how d20 was implemented here - like the fact that characters automatically go up in combat power as they gain character levels).

Those are not unwarranted criticisms, but they are tangential to the point. CoC characters still don't fill "strong archetypes", or even really any archetypes at all.

I don't know anything about Blue Rose, but I will grant you Mutants & Masterminds.

To be fair, Blue Rose uses more or less the same system as M&M, and its written by the same author and published by the same company. It's not really a discrete example, in that case. Although it does invalidate much of your criticism below (which I did not quote), in that it's not a superhero genre book at all.

The thing is, you seem to be saying that GURPS is better for non-archetypical characters because it's more flexible. I think that's misplaced logic; you don't really play GURPS without one of the "setting" books that adapt the system to the genre. The same is true of d20; it's just that there's not a specific discreet ruleset that strives to be all that generic. But that various adaptations of d20 that have appeared under that label, or under the OGL label (which, as I said, are only not-d20 by a technicality; as far as I'm concerned they're still part of the same "system") do the same thing; they adapt the system to the genre they are emulating. Just because there's not a completely generic d20 document or book available of Ultimate Flexibility is hardly a valid criticism of the system, IMO.

And really we're going fairly far afield; my only bone of contention with what you said was that d20 only works well for genres that have strong archetypes. I believe there are plenty of d20 games that don't operate that way and which work very well.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

And really we're going fairly far afield; my only bone of contention with what you said was that d20 only works well for genres that have strong archetypes. I believe there are plenty of d20 games that don't operate that way and which work very well.

I probably let my bias speak there for me - I guess I should have said that I will use d20 for genres and settings that use strong archetypes, while I will look for other systems for other genres. This might be why I am fairly happy with Fading Suns d20 (which is a setting with rather strong archetypes), while d20 Modern somehow left me cold, despite being mechanically solid.

Maybe this is also why I can only bear prestige classes and rules supplements for d20 only in moderation. I like the archetypes and classes of basic D&D, but trying to shoehorn every possible character type and power into it with additional feats, prestige classes, and whatnot simply seems wrong to me, somehow - they dilute the strong archetypes, and thus a part of what I like about D&D in the first place. If I want to play an RPG without such archetypes, I will simply use one without the level and class structure.

Am I making sense here, or am I just rambling?

 

[fusangite]

D&D/D20 tell certain kinds of stories well. Other kinds they do not tell especially well. While one can situate these kinds of stories in places with various levels of technology, magic, etc., the range of stories is circumscribed.

The other way that D&D limits things is that it, like any other RPG system, has an implicit physics. It can therefore only represent worlds that share the physics of the system.

I firmly believe that one can never achieve a generic RPG system because any remotely complete system is, by virtue of its nature, a physics.

 

[Desdichado]

No, that makes absolute perfect sense.

Of course, my taste is pretty different, so I don't agree with you, but I can see where you're coming from!

To me, the D&D classes aren't so much archetypical as they are D&Disms. I'm OK with archetypes, and I agree that d20 does them well, but I'm not OK with my woodsman archetype being a two weapon fighter (and yes, I know this is only one of two options now) that casts spells, for instance. That's not archetypical of the woodsman, that's just a D&Dism.

So I do prefer a proliferation of classes, I guess. To me archetypes are stronger if they allow me to put my own interpration of the archetype in instead of telling me how the archetype should be played. The D&D ranger, to continue with the same example, is not a strong archetype, because it doesn't resemble any archetypical woodsmen from history or fantasy fiction (barring D&D fiction, of course.)

 

[Umbran]

I don't see this as a bug, but as a feature. You can easily use GURPS with pretty much any setting out there - in fact, I've recently started a GURPS Eberron campaign, and it seems to work quite well.

Yes, but honestly, Eberron is not really significantly different from D&D, making it a poor test case.

Marvel Superheroes and WoD 1.0 and Shadowrun are significantly different from D&D. But, any system that can handle power levels from Superman down to Mulder and Scully do so with either too much granularity, or not enough granularity, depending upon which end you sit. Alternatively, they need a clumsy method of patching between the ranges. Bleah.

On the other hand, GURPS 4E does come with a "default setting": "Infinite Worlds", where you play inhabitants of an Earth that has discovered crossdimensional travel a few decades ago, and now is exploring numerous parallel Earths and other worlds while fighting other, less benevolent crosstime civilizations and organizations.

Sorry, that sounds less like a setting than it sounds like an excuse to dabble with things without going into any of htem in dpeth.

I dunno. If I want to fit d20 to a particular genre and setting, I usually have to work out which rules to add from which books. With GURPS, I have to ask myself which part of the Basic Set I don't need (usually most of it).

Right. Either way the GM has to spend time reworking the system. To-may-to, to-mah-to.

My personal basic problem with GURPS (or any other system that tries to be too generic) is that they ignore the basic fact that the root game mechanics strongly influence the flavor of the game. As a GM and as a player, I want a system that works with me to produce flavor. Generic systems cannot do that - since they use the same base mechanic for all genres, they give the same basic flavor to all genres. That flavor may be neutral enough, and it may fail to be an active hindrance, but it also fails to be an active help.

For the same amount of work on my part, I'll get more comic book goodness out of my Marvel Superheroes game than I will out of GURPS. And I'll get better dark angsty modern fantasy out of White Wolf Storyteller than I will out of GURPS. It is a matter of choosing the right tool for the job, rather than choosing to carry around one massive multi-tool that is slightly sub-standard for all cases. A well-designed specific tool will always do better at its particular job than a well-designed generic tool will.

 

[The_Universe]

Of course it doesn't fill every niche...but it does a passable job of filling the "high fantasy adventure" niche, for me.