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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6500612" data-attributes="member: 4937">BRP has the most elegant character advancement of any game, IMO.The SAN mechanics for CoC are also amazingly elegant in the context of a game that is not supposed to 'end well'.Burning Wheel's character burner is one of the most elegant character creation systems ever, if not the most elegant.  (I wish I felt the rest of the game was equally elegant.)   Chill 2e also had really elegant character generation.HERO's speed chart, and similar implementations of time tracking like in Advanced Hackmaster, are really cool in concept albeit on the scale of complexity that I feel they'd be most ideally captured in a video game to handle the overhead.  HERO also has really elegant generic mechanics - much better in my opinion than GURPS.GURPS/GULLIVER had really elegant methods for dealing with differences of scale, by leveraging what was probably GURPS's single best mechanic - the non-linear table for dealing with varying distance.   I noticed a similar table showing up in M&M, which was also elegant.WW's 'Storyteller' system for the original Vampire had a number of really elegant mechanics that were killed by its otherwise poor mechanical implementation.  Tracking humanity could have been really cool though, and the never quite realized idea of combining skills and attributes on the fly to deal with propositions could have been cool had the system been crafted better.WEG's D6 Star Wars was just filled with system elegance, from its 'd6 dice poll vs. difficulty', to it's 'force point = moment of shining awesomeness' to 'alignment tracked concretely through dark side points' to it's use of a 'wound track' to its elegant handling of scale.  On the other hand, chargen was uninspired (particularly it's racial mechanics were poorly thought out), and it didn't scale well (among other things, it's jedi problem  - however true to the source material - makes D&D's similar wizard problem look tame).  Overall though, one of the most elegant systems ever. I loved the level of refinement you could give magic items in MERPS and Rolemaster.  The amount of flavor you could put in it was amazing.  Sadly, that degree of versatility was largely tied to the fact that the underlying system was filled with an equivalent amount of complexity.  I've tried on several occasions to import that level of mechanics = flavor to magic items, and learned the valuable lesson that large numbers of fiddly modifiers are just too complex to track outside of a computer game (where they are awesome).  The original Fallout video game, with its D&D like level mechanics, concept of 'Feats', and BRP like skill system has to be listed as one of the most elegant RPG systems ever.My short list of most elegant PnP systems ever would be BRP, D6, and D20.</blockquote>

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