What Makes a Good System Neutral Product?

[Grumpy RPG Reviews]

What makes a system neutral product good?

For example, the new Menzoberanzan supplement is system neutral. There are others out there. What, to your mind, makes a good system neutral product?

 

[RangerWickett]

Make a great product, and then don't add any stats. Try to be fairly agnostic when it comes to specific magic types. Figure out who you want to sell to, and throw them bones for their favorite settings/systems, even if you're not mechanically tying in.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Basically right. Realize, of course, that it will be the magic (or psi or tech) descriptions that will winnow out the systems a product like that can be used with.

For example, if you describe an important foe using magic to "hypnotize" someone into obeying them as a major recurring theme, it will mean that RPGs with no magic capable of that can use it.* if, OTOH, he uses magic to directly attack his enemies, you'll eliminate other RPGs.**





* They exist.

** They also exist.

 

[Treebore]

Anything that is unique and does a good job of conveying that uniqueness. At the same time you need to watch what things you present, because it has to be things that are relatively simple to convert into the respective system mechanics your customers are using.

Like I do not use Dragonborn or teiflings, etc... so the more prominant those are in a setting product, the less likely I am to use it.

Or when Eberron was first presented, it pretty much had to have mechanics, so a system it was based on had to be used.

 

[Treebore]

Now a lot of mechanics can be strongly implied, or even out right stated. Like you can say what kind of benefits being a teifling or dragonborn gives you versus being a human.

Or if your describing a golem like "race" you can describe it in ways that clue a person in on how to adapt it mechanically to their system, such as they are immune to being stunned/paralyzed, or are "substantially stronger than humans", and maybe even provide a glossary that states when the word "substantially" is used think around a +/-4 or 20% modifier, "Moderately" implies around a +/-2 or 10% modifier, etc...

 

[Dioltach]

There should probably also some sort of reference for relative power. If you don't want to specify that a particular NPC is 17th level, you'd probably have to predefine what you mean by low-level, mid-level and high-level characters.

 

[Treebore]

There should probably also some sort of reference for relative power. If you don't want to specify that a particular NPC is 17th level, you'd probably have to predefine what you mean by low-level, mid-level and high-level characters.

Indeed. There are plenty of attempts at "system neutral" dating all the way back to Judges Guild with their "universal" system that can be looked at for ideas on how to convey all this information.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Judge's Guild was the bomb...but a lot of their stuff DID contain AD&D-style statblocks.

 

[Treebore]

Judge's Guild was the bomb...but a lot of their stuff DID contain AD&D-style statblocks.

And? The idea was to give indications to the end user as to what the creatures and NPC's were capable of in a given system. WOTC is probably going for "edition neutral D&D" more than "system neutral" for everyone's favorite RPG. So it isn't like they can give such info for every system out there, but by giving some kind of numerical values those of us familiar with our respective systems that we do want to use can make versions much closer to what was envisioned.

Thats the end goal, making it usable in as many systems as possible. If no guidelines are given, sure, some people will happily build the concept from the ground up, but I suspect far more people would be much happier with concrete information that they can use as directly as possible.

But that is a decision for WOTC to make. I'm just throwing ideas out there that I would like to see.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

And?

Just that, awesome as they were, JG wasn't so much system neutral as being an early example of how the OGL could work (they had a license which expired in 1982). Those adventures were designed to be used with AD&D, not T&T, RuneQuest, Stormbringer, TFT:ITL, etc., and actually produced OTHER products to go with some of those FRPGs.

OTOH, Palladium released a few system neutral weapon & armor books in which the gear had RW stats and relative damage or protecrion ratings with "conversion guides" for various systems. WotC's Primal Order and Task Force Games's Central Casting products were also system neutral. HERO 4th also included some products that had conversion guides for a variety of systems.

Then there are the GURPS supplements, which (partly because of the way GURPS does things with RW units of measurements) are damn near system neutral from the get-go.