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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8128889" data-attributes="member: 82106">[USER=42582]@pemerton[/USER] I think there is also just 'fate' involved in game's influence. Pendragon was published by Greg Stafford in 1985. It was the first game in this genre, and one of the first really highly thematic RPGs that had no aspirations to be 'generic'. Many people picked it up and, whatever its flaws, it became the defacto standard in this genre. 4 years later Stafford published Prince Valiant, which essentially covers the exact same genre! I think there were few customers of Chaosium who bothered to pick up this game, as they already had an offering, by the same company no less, which covered the subject adequately.So the game kind of sunk without a trace. It certainly saw SOME play, but I never actually saw a copy in use, ever, myself. I tend to agree with you that it is a tighter and 'cleaner' game and is more effective than Pendragon at getting to the nuts and bolts of the genre and evoking the desired style of play. However, I think Pendragon, being more closely aligned with BRP, was easy to digest, and there was a LOT of 'background' detail built into the game. It also has a lot of support for a wide variety of different sorts of characters.Prince Valiant is a decent system (I like PACE, which is basically a diceless simplification of PV). However it is SO simple and streamlined that it can be difficult to elaborate characters. Games are often more successful when they present concrete mechanical goals and mechanically generate 'story flow'. Pendragon really does that in spades with its "and in the spring (toss the dice)." PV certainly can flow well, but I think it is less adept at this than some later systems, like PbtA. Because it is so simple it can be difficult to really see "where am I going with my character?"Interestingly, the complexity of a game's mechanics don't necessarily produce automatic velocity. I always found this problem to exist in Traveler as well! Its hard to see what the motivation for PCs IS. Either you have a ship, which you could just sell and live on the proceeds comfortably for life, or you are just a drifter. Nothing really PROPELS the game forward. The patron system (or alternatively the mortgage payment on your 200 ton free trader) may be enough, but it is a little inconsistent. The milieu is rich enough to kind of paper this over, but lack of real character advancement, even in social and economic terms, usually eventually spells the end to any Traveler campaign. I didn't play PV, but I have a suspicion something similar happens there eventually.And this, frankly, is why D&D is still utterly dominant. This is the strongest thing players WANT in an RPG is a strong sense of character growth and progression, IN A MECHANICAL AND MATERIAL SENSE. Most people will play a thematic RPG with limited goals, but it will be a sideline. A D&D campaign can go for 20 years!</blockquote>

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