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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5877893" data-attributes="member: 54877">Yes.  You can pick a different tech level in GURPS.  You can lower or raise the starting points used to build the characters.  You can swap out different magic systems.  You can pick different optional rules.  As I understand GURPS 4E by reputation, you can even make some of your own subsystem widgets to fit your vision.  And if you want to simulate somewhat different worlds, even different genres, and then play GURPS in them, this will all work wonderfully.  But you will be playing GURPS in all those worlds.   Where I think the "same words for different concepts" part comes in here is that for a dedicated but narrow immersionists, those are different playstyles.  Because for them, as I understand it, they need basically two things to vary their "play style":  1) The world simulated with some token fidelity, especially in regards to cause and effect (as they view it, not necessarily in reality), and 2) Familiarity with the system so that it can fade into the background.  If you've got a blaster in Star Wars and a sword in Conan and a fireball in D&D, you are set.   Of course, some of these people will find GURPS overly fiddly or detailed in the wrong place or whatever, because everyone has their own preferences.  So they might prefer Hero or something lighter than either GURPS or Hero (e.g Runequest) or even mistake "d20" for a "universal system" on the grounds that they can play whatever they want with it, always playing d20.  Same reasoning, different starting points. This is totally different than what you, pemerton, lost soul, or several of us mean by "playstyle"--even though we also have our different preferences and distinctions within our broad agreement of what a "playstyle" constitutes.   All that said, it would be theoretically possible to build a game that will support multiple playstyles, as we mean them--especially within a somewhat less than universal genre, such as "D&D fantasy".  What such a theoretical system cannot do, however, is afford useless and nonsensical mechanics that exist almost entirely for simulated illusionism.  This restriction is going to necessarily exclude a certain subset of extremely dedicated immersionists, who effectively want, "Make something up that sounds about right.  I can always ignore it, handwave it, or outright fudge it away when it produces results that I don't like."  By definition, you can't produce tight, robust, multiple playstyle supporting mechanics, for such an audience. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /></blockquote>

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