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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ovinomancer" data-source="post: 8420420" data-attributes="member: 16814">A complete game is one that tells you how it plays and doesn't leave bits out for your to have to invent yourself or guess.  It's not a high bar -- in an RPG is about who gets to say what and how conflicts are resolved.  This can be extremely simple -- the GM presents the scene, the players declare what their characters do, and if a consensus cannot be achieved on the outcome between all parties then a roll off of d6's occurs, with the highest getting the say.  Reroll ties as often as needed.  Bam, complete game.  Dark Empires doesn't even get this far.Now, if you're coming at this game from a particular viewpoint and expectation that the GM just does whatever they want to fill in the blanks -- ie, anything not detailed by the game is up to the GM and anything detailed by the game is also up to the GM, then the lack of a complete game is, as you note, trivial because the completeness is just the GM says.  That's complete already.  But, if I'm a new player and looking to understand how to play Dark Empires, I don't know how it works because the game as presented is incomplete.As for the amount of work genre does for Cthulhu Dark -- very little.  The system doesn't really care what scenario you put it up against, it will work to generate an answer.  If you play a game with CD with NO mythos, it still works, although I'd feel you'd be missing a good bit of fun.  Dark Empires doesn't even present a coherent set of genre inputs (some of the suggestions are not well aligned in tropes at all) AND the game isn't complete.  This makes it a game that only works via bringing in the understanding that the GM says is the final and only system needed.  It reads more like a set of suggestions and loose ideas for a game rather than a game -- it's more of a setting supplement than a distinct game because it does so heavily rely on the unspoken system of GM says.  And, even there, as I noted above, it's not very coherent in what's it's about.</blockquote>

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