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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 7316184" data-attributes="member: 82106">Oh, sure, and we did it, at times anyway, though it was considered in those days a sort of 'variant' kind of RPing in the circles I traveled in. There were many lists of backgrounds and personality quirks and whatnot you could dig up from various magazines, as well as the 1e DMG, Arduin Grimoire, etc. 'Shared Narrative' where everyone was allowed to add things to the world was a fairly well-known technique, though it usually was relegated to 'experimental' games. Yeah, Traveller is muddy in general about EDU vs knowledge. Presumably every skill has an associated knowledge, a ship's engineer with Engineering 4 is presumably pretty up on the technology of fusion reactors. Maybe he's not a physicist and INT/EDU would better answer a question about that, except of course there's no indication of what EDU actually MEANS, a 15 might indicate a guy with 3 PhDs, but in what? Chargen doesn't answer that at all! Its a system that is ALMOST there, but it just falls short. Knowing what I know now, I can easily enough mold it into what I want, and I like that and favor using Traveller for that purpose, but when we played in the 70's and 80's it failed us in the end, or we failed it...I think fighters are the issue here more than anything. Clerics are a bit bland, but 4e does rather encourage you to push the players into specialized priest classes (in my 2e campaign the cleric was banned). Wizards are pretty rich too, though richness through vastly better options isn't a genius game design, it still kinda works.We kinda moved on and didn't mess much with WSG/DSG, so I don't even know what the issues are there. OA is a great game, but it is actually a good bit different from classic D&D. It uses the RULES, but there's a completely different emphasis on 'social adventure' rather than dungeon crawls, troupe play where you run your clan, event-based play, and other such things. That being said it can also play a lot like 1e/2e of course, being mechanically almost the same game. And yeah, the checks in OA are too hard, you have to lower them, except maybe for a few combat-usable ones that might break the game (sort of like what you are referring to I think with WSG/DSG). I think clearly Traveller is closer, I don't think we are arguing that, really. D&D is still reasonably flexible, both games real limits are in terms of their basic core genre, you can't really make Traveller into a more fantastical game very easily, and you can't make D&D feel at all realistic, or do fantasy genre very far from what it is built for, but this is pretty much true of all RPGs. I mean people tried to make the 'Ultimate RPG' and we got GURPS, which is an OK game, but vastly too complicated for most uses IMHO.Yeah, RQ is stupid brutal, silly really. I think we once calculated that in a battle between 1000 trained warriors on each side an average of 200 of them would accidentally kill themselves with a bad roll, and another 100 would be killed by friendly fire. RQ combat also takes a LONG TIME to play out, unfortunately. I think this, more than anything, doomed the game to niche status. The play experience just doesn't stand up to D&D.RM is nice, but too fiddly for most. It seems more like 3e before 3e than anything else. I think I bought just about the time I finally figured out that more rules wasn't better, lol.I understand, that was why my example was D&D that was NOT doing that <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=";)" />. It can be done, but you gotta have players that are willing to try.Sure, there's a sense in which there's more subtlety to a realistic sort of game.I think they were made official, or semi-official somewhere along the way.</blockquote>

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