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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8116831" data-attributes="member: 82106">[USER=42582]@pemerton[/USER] Frankly I would say that Traveler DOES effectively have a universal system. Anything a PC does is invariably resolved as a skill check, there really is no other 'in game' mechanic. Its true, it has a bunch of other 'referee side' charts and whatnot (and the chargen system, which players do see). However, those fall more under the rubric of "here's a random dice throw way to decide something, ref." In other words, yeah, they are systems, but clearly since referees aren't PCs they don't need to roll skill checks to decide the diameter of planets! The game would PLAY the same, technically, if those systems didn't exist or were entirely different, or if the only source of setting info was, say, a pregenerated environment. I think this is an important distinction when talking about 'universal' sorts of mechanics, as it is really only those systems that adjudicate what happens when you play that are really under discussion in terms of being unified presenting an advantage. I see no advantage to 'back side' systems being 'universal' and I am not even sure what that would mean...I'd also note that, D&D seems to have largely eschewed such systems in the last 2 editions. I'm not 100% sure about 5e, but 4e simply doesn't have anything like a "DM rolls some dice to decide..." and the DMG really has no charts of dice roll outcomes at all. Again, if it did, I wouldn't consider that to be a "not universal" feature of the system since it isn't part of resolution, just part of content generation. I think the only content you can generate in 4e at all are treasure parcels in the RC version of the rules, and even there it just species some "dice shaped" ranges of values for gold pieces in a parcel.</blockquote>

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