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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tony Vargas" data-source="post: 6671135" data-attributes="member: 996">Considering the very common use of genre to mean genre of fiction, using to also group games by qualities of their system (like 'rules lite' or 'generic') was a little too ambiguous.  But, yes, if you want to pick the best game in a limited sub-set, you could, you'd just be picking from a smaller field.You could, at least, compare the generalist 'homeowners' toolbox to the plumber's toolkit or the computer technician's toolkit.  You couldn't find much comparison between, the plumber's kit and the tech's kit.  That's what I mean about the universal system at least being comparable, it never gets a free pass.[uoqte]It doesn't help when, to be honest, the "generic" games are usually not nearly so generic as they claim to be.  GURPS is a fine example here - "Generic" is part of the name.  But, in its design, it is fairly rules-heavy, and kind of gritty.  It does not do fast-moving, epic high-action very well.  I find its attempt at Supers... kind of laughable, I am afraid.</blockquote>To be fair, even though the 'U' in GURPS originally meant 'Universal,' it hasn't claimed to actually be universal in a very long time.  Since it's 3rd or 4th edition, IIRC, it's only claimed to be 'multi-genre.'  So if you manage to find a genre that GURPS doesn't have a worldbook for, it would be excused from comparison with games that exclusively handle that genre.That's part of why I gave the opinion I did.  I choose to hold up a game that claims to be 'best' against all other games.  Since there are games that handle any given genre, any game that doesn't handle every genre hard-fails against at least one genre-specific game, and all genre-specific games hard fail, because of all the genres they can't do at all.  Thus, only universal games are genuinely in the running.  There may multiple games that win a comparison with them in every single genre or every narrow classification of game someone wants to dream up, but those 'winners' can't be deemed a 'best' system, since they, also, loose in every comparison outside their specialty.  Just a way of looking at it that allows me to come up with an answer to the question of one 'best' system, rather than just denying the question.[/QUOTE]

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