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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 8215056" data-attributes="member: 16814">Not quite.  It's the belief that all systems are functionally the same and the difference is only in the details.  The (poor) boardgame analogy to this is that all games are Monopoly, the only real difference is if you're playing Lord of the Rings Monopoly or Alabama Football Monopoly or some other version of Monopoly.  The details change, but the system is still the same.This is thwarted when you run into games that aren't Monopoly, and don't play like Monopoly, like, say Spades (a trick-taking card game, for those not familiar).  When confronted with this, the Monopoly player will usually react with trying to understand Spades as a variant of Monopoly, and importing their understanding of Monopoly play into Spades as much as possible. This is incompatible, so Spades gets labelled as poorly written, a bad game, not a true game just a card game (like Storygame), or just ignored as an option.Now, obviously, this metaphor is tortured, and bad, but hopefully gets the point across.  It's not that all systems are the same -- they are not -- or have the same core play loop -- they do not -- but that you can get into a situation where your experience with system is limited to a set that are similar and have the same core play loop.  This gets even more entrenched when most of the popular game titles are similar in this regard.  There's little difference in the actual core play of World of Darkness and Dungeons and Dragons -- usually it's a GM led story that the players participate in as much as the GM allows.  That's brutal, yes, but not unfun, as it's exactly how I run 5e with this foreknowledge.  I'm running Descent into Avernus right now, and that's about as prebaked a story the players participate in as allowed as you can get (other APs aside).  But, it's fun!  However, when my group gets back to Blades in the Dark, this play doesn't exist -- I can't prewrite a story outline in Blades, the system will eat it up and spit it out in the first five minutes of play.  The only way I can do so is to break that system.  So, system matters, but it's hard to see if you've never stepped outside of a similar set of games.</blockquote>

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