Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 6133780" data-attributes="member: 82106">I think tone and style are more baked into the game than setting is. I've seen people do everything from a wide variety of fantasy genre to post-apocalypse, magi-tech, and pure space opera using 4e rules for instance (and mostly just by reflavoring the classes and such, though some 3PP stuff certainly adds classes and etc). 4e however in tone is a heavily action adventure oriented game. In that sense you're not going to get too far from its core competency without heavy rewriting of subsystems and core rules. This was also true of 3e's flavor of d20, though it tends to a more pulpy sort of action where 4e is pretty much a supers game in fantasy dress.Anyway, the point is you can only get so far with a game as a 'toolkit'. Look at explicitly toolkit games like GURPS, which does a pretty good gritty sort of game, possibly with some pretty wacky elements added in, but can't really replicate what 4e does at all well. Again, it has its built-in tone/style, and you can only stretch it so far. Still, D&D is a fantasy RPG toolkit to a large extent. OD&D/BECMI, and to a bit lesser extent AD&D aimed at this deliberately, 3e and 4e are more complicated, but still do a large range of fantasy settings and genre quite well.</blockquote>