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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8312910" data-attributes="member: 82106">I don't think there is ONE KIND of flexibility. There is 'mechanical flexibility', are the rules tolerant of alteration in a strictly mechanical sense. In that light D&D, as an example, is certainly reasonably flexible. It has fairly high level generalizations like AC, HP, levels, and ability scores. (Speaking only of classic D&D) you can certainly alter these things. There will be many minor impacts in some cases, but each rule pretty much covers one small niche area. It may become largely irrelevant (IE if you have 'D&D In Space' you won't use a dungeon level based wandering monster rule much) or it might be 'broken' (IE if you don't have a STR score then you need a new rule to lift gates) but since each rule is pretty much stand-alone it is just a matter of playing and fixing these things. The GM has absolute sway anyhow, so none of the details are critical. Traveller is a fairly similar design, though a lot more of the rules tend to work together, the core mechanics don't really care.Still, even in a system like D&D, the rules themselves can become awkward. D&D combat comes across as fairly silly when employed in a game full of firearms as its gamist abstractions rise to the level of plain unreality. Likewise if you played 'D&D with Traveller' your characters cannot advance and melee combat is exceedingly bloody, nobody would ever get far in a 'dungeon crawl' under any reasonable extrapolation of those rules.There is also 'thematic flexibility', which picks up where the 'awkwardness' above comes in. D&D simply isn't thematically very flexible in that its whole agenda involves advancing your PC in levels of power which are pretty steep. Most genres simply don't come off well with PCs so covered in 'plot armor' that they can leap off buildings and laugh about it at higher levels. If you get rid of leveling, or use an 'E6' sort of hack, the game largely loses its point. You may find a way to squeak by, maybe building up a super heroes milieu where every hero starts out as an almost nothing and becomes an 'Avenger' or 'X-Man' purely by dint of experience and equipment. It would be a particular variation of the genre largely shaped by a need to support a certain game's built-in ideas. Gamma World took a slightly different tack, basically giving you a 'level 10' character equivalent from the start and making advancement about nothing but equipment (Power Armor or Die). GW is a pretty slapstick game overall though (again I'm really talking about the original game, not later ones). When we thought of using Traveller in other genres and such, we found that you simply had to discard most of the MATERIAL of the game anyway, except maybe basic tech 6- firearms and such. It can form the basis of spy games and such, but there's little impetus, since you pretty much have to start over with nothing but the skill system, ability scores, and a few core rules that are not exceptionally better than many other games mechanically. It does work, but if you want to do James Bond, then Top Secret S.I. works perfectly fine! Nor would a game like Traveller have any use in making a Super Hero genre game, you might as well start from scratch, or play MSHRP.</blockquote>

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