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<blockquote data-quote="Crazy Jerome" data-source="post: 5657764" data-attributes="member: 54877">The best statement I have ever seen on generic systems was the poster that said many years ago that you can play any game you want with GURPS--as long as you want the game to run like GURPS. &nbsp;I had already come to the conclusion that systems can be generic, but not universal. That is, you can have a generic mechanical framework that you can then flavor for a campaign in a particular genre and/or style. And if you know the system really well, you may do it well. But you can't have universal mechanics that themselves invoke &quot;things&quot; that will satisfy all people, because the things evoked are too tied to the mechanics.&nbsp;The only way to get around that is to remove things from the system--until you finally hit total freeform where you have finally removed all mechanical evoking--and find that you also have no system left. Attempts at trying to have a universal system are really attempts to narrow the window looked at down to what the game author want to bother playing. For some people, it is possible to achieve a system sufficiently &quot;universal&quot; for their purposes.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Crazy Jerome, post: 5657764, member: 54877"] The best statement I have ever seen on generic systems was the poster that said many years ago that you can play any game you want with GURPS--as long as you want the game to run like GURPS. I had already come to the conclusion that systems can be generic, but not universal. That is, you can have a generic mechanical framework that you can then flavor for a campaign in a particular genre and/or style. And if you know the system really well, you may do it well. But you can't have universal mechanics that themselves invoke "things" that will satisfy all people, because the things evoked are too tied to the mechanics. The only way to get around that is to remove things from the system--until you finally hit total freeform where you have finally removed all mechanical evoking--and find that you also have no system left. Attempts at trying to have a universal system are really attempts to narrow the window looked at down to what the game author want to bother playing. For some people, it is possible to achieve a system sufficiently "universal" for their purposes. [/QUOTE]

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