Interesting post by Bill Stoddart on generic roleplaying systems, in particular which ones to choose when setting games in a specific fictional setting. Read the whole thing to find out which fictional world he set his game in and why he chose the system he did. It’s very much about Simulationist systems, an area of gaming that seems to be neglected by the post-Forgeite RPG theory crowd.
BESM has what might be called a core model of what’s going on: If you’re trying to decide whether a rule or a game mechanic makes sense, you can try to visualize the game events as a series of pictorial images that you might see in anime, and ask if the game rules produce the outcome and the flow of cause and effect that you would expect in anime. GURPS, in contrast, isn’t designed around that core model. In GURPS, what you try to do is decide how things would happen in the real world, or in the-real-world-if-people-had-superpowers or the-real-world-if-magic-worked or whatever. GURPS reinforces this with the concept of “reality testing” and with the use of real units such as pounds, yards, and seconds, eschewing all game units such as game inches or encumbrance points. The reality testing of GURPS is testing against, well, physical reality; the “reality testing” of BESM is testing against anime reality.
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It strikes me that other games might be looked at in similar terms, as each having a core model of how things work, that specific rules can be compared to to see how well they work. For example, the core model of Hero System is not a physical one but a tactical one: characters are tactical units that are supposed to be balanced against each other in tactical terms, to produce as even a match between opposing forces as possible and thus best allow players to test their skill in handling those forces. The core model of FUDGE is a narrative one: characters are defined in terms that could be used in a story, and the outcomes of their actions are supposed to be plausible elements in a narrative. The core model of Toon is of course classic Warner Brothers cartoons, a visual reality somewhat different from that of anime.
Perhaps that explains why I’ve had such bad experiences with Deadlands; that system’s incoherent mishmash of mechanics completely lacks any identifiable core model, which is probably why the game simply doesn’t work, at least for me.
I agree with Bill about FUDGE, which is why I find FUDGE the most appropriate system to simulate the conventions of much written adventure fiction, especially through the medium of PBeM. Note that FUDGE isn’t really Narrativist in the Forgeite sense; the core mechanics are still pretty Simulationist, even though it’s simulating fictional conventions rather than the real world.
