Great GMs are great (and awful ones can make anything suck) but supportive systems are still better than unsupportive ones, if only because they make the GM do less mechanical thinking and free them up for more fun-focused stuff.

It’s not the rules, it’s the GM.

So in in the context of this blog post: if someone wants to evolve a “theory” of RPGs, they need to study people not rules, and educate GMs not design new rules.

First there was that obtuse dice mechanic that I’m sure was never properly playtested because it threw up way too many extreme results. Then there was ridiculously cumbersome combat initiative system that really bogged down fight scenes if you had a large group.

I remember one day-long convention-style one shot game where we never actually got to the end of the adventure because an incidental fight scene ended up taking more than three hours to resolve, and ate up too much of the session.

The fashion then was to release a “core rulebook” that didn’t include important bits of the rules and setting you needed to actually play, which were then dribbled out over multiple sourcebooks, all of which you needed for a coherent game. Then there were the dreaded “metaplots”, where there was a storyline dribbled out over the same sourcebooks which people’s campaigns had to follow if they wanted to avoid being contradicted by the next supplement. And some of the systems were baroque to the point of unplayable (several elements of Deadlands still bring me out in hives!)

Burning Wheel is one of those games I own but have never played; It’s a bit of a hybrid; it’s got a lot of elements of a tradiional game, along with some stranger things like the explicit scene-framing mechanic and the scripted combat system. Since I’ve never actually played I have no idea how well it worls.

That said, you’re right that the coherent bits of Forge-ism seem to boil down to “have a really clear idea of what your game’s about and try to make everything come into line with that” – which was probably a necessary thing to say post D&D-fading-into-Storyteller in the 90s, but does seem kind of obvious in hindsight.

I fell out of love with GURPS when it went from 3e to 4e. It had reached the stage where the amount of accumulated cruft from myriad supplements was making it creak, and it didn’t scale well enough to be a good fit for higher-powered games. But 4e seemed to lose too much.

SJG has always had management problems, largely to do with maintaining a consistent editorial vision. (What, me bitter over the demise of In Nomine? Nah…)

I do think Ron Edwards’ Sorcerer was rather inspired and I’d still like to run another game someday. But I never got into FATE. And if I run a game nowadays, I’d be unlikely to use something like GURPS, despite my several shelves full of GURPS supplements, unless my group consists entirely of gaming grognards.