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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Strider1973" data-source="post: 8198230" data-attributes="member: 6798760">Yes, system matters, according to me. Playing a Fantasy Adventure or Campaign with Rolemaster is very different than playing them with D&D 5e: the approach to the game and to the adventure itself is very different from one game to the other. Even when playing within the same setting, system matters: playing in Middle Earth is very different if you use Merp instead of The One Ring, or Adventures in Middle Earth, or even The Lord of The Rings Roleplaying Game by Decipher. Even generic and universal rpgs can differ wildly and offer very different gaming experiences, depending on the system a group chooses: Gurps plays very differently from, let's say, Fate, or Cypher, or Savage Worlds.I go a little further: in my opinion groups of players choose the game they want to play even considering the features of the system they want to use. Two groups of players may want to play Heroic Fantasy, but one of them may choose to play Pathfinder, 1e or 2e, because its players love endless possibilities of rules-wise character customization, tons of options and a crunchy and very detailed ruleset, while the other group may choose Dungeons & Dragons 5e because its players want maybe a simpler, faster, less crunchy system. System matters, otherwise there wouldn't have been the OSR movement (besides and beyond the philosophical differences and approaches to gaming, between old school and new school games and players), or there wouldn't have been Pathfinder in the D&D 4th edition days, or, more recently, there wouldnt' even have been the Pathfinder adaptation to Savage Worlds. In my opinion if played with the RAW approach, systems matter because they set the tone and the expectations, so to speak, according to which you play the chosen game and the adventures: if you play Middle Earth using Merp, particularly at lower levels, you'd better watch out and be wary and cautious even facing a single orc or goblin; if you play Middle Earth using The Lord of the Rings Rpg by Decipher, even playing a character with few Advancements, you can expect to slay single handedly more than one orc, and not just because the latter game may have been poorly playtested, but because the two games see characters and heroes in two very different ways. In Merp characters are slighlty better than normal people, particularly at the beginning, in a vast, threatening world, while in the Decipher Lord of the Rings RPG Characters are meant to mirror as soon as possible the Fellowship of the Ring Heroes' deeds.</blockquote>

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