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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 6256190" data-attributes="member: 42582">I think if you are designing a game that has, almost since its inception, been played using a wide variety of approaches of which "physics engine" is only one; and you begin from a fundamental precept that the rules should be a physics engine; then your are not being neutral!And I suspect any version of a physics-engine game is not going to be D&D either, given that D&D has never been an exclusively physics-engine game (and even 3E, the version that came closest, still had non-physics-engine elements such as XP and levels on the PC build side, hit points on the action resolution side, and challenge-based rather than fiction-based encounter design guidelines, on the GMing side).Fate playstyle neutral? I guess you could play narrativist LotR or narrativist Star Trek. But when the OP talked about playstyles I didn't get the sense that what was meant was genre. I thought that what was meant was things like the relationship between mechanical resolution and ingame events; the relationship beween mechanical resolution and pacing, and the effect of the first on the second; whether the game supports robust "win" and "loss" conditions, and how transparent these are to players, and how many workarounds there are when you're on the losing trajectory; etc.As always, given that there are approximately a billion RPGs out there that do what you want - GURPS, RQ, RM, HARP, C&S, HarnMaster, heck Burning Wheel with a bit of drifting aer just the ones I think of off the top of my head - I don't understand why you feel the need to lament that D&D hasn't become a clone of those games. I also don't understand how you reconcile your need to lament with your conviction that D&D, at its core, really is a "physics engine" game. At a certain point oughtn't we to conclude that a sheep is not a poorly-designed goat but it's own thing?</blockquote>

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