Sorry, I adore that game more than any other.

I’ve long recognised that there’s no one perfect system, and there are plenty of good systems with different different strengths and weaknesses. Even those systems marketed as universal generic systems tend to have a lot of genre assumptions built into the rules at a fundamental level, something that fans of the systems tend of overlook.

I strongly suspect most of those people who always convert everything they play to Hero, or GURPS, or Fudge, or (shudder) d20 end up playing the same effective genre all the time, only with different scenery and props.

The dice can provide moments of inspriation that change the game world – for example using TORG die rolls to determine the skill of an NPC in the Ancient Greek an unexpected result of 87 (where a score of 15 or so would have indicated fluency) revealed there was a good reason why she used the name “Medusa” when out on the net.

The dice should never be used to govern character development. I gave up on the RQ system when I failed to make a POW gain roll in a campaign playing alternate Sundays for 2 years.

The quest for the one perfect RPG system is doomed becasue no generic system can beat a system explictly designed to support a genre.

I think your 80s DnD games were a good example of what Ron Edwards of The Forge calls ‘Dysfunctional Gaming’. The system didn’t support the narrative structure the group wanted, so the GM ended up patching the system with unofficial house rules, which it appears he didn’t even tell the players about. That approach tends to lead to player dissatisfaction, as you found.

I think explicit mechanics like Fudge Points or Torg’s Possiblities are always preferable to consistantly fudging dice rolls.

Personally I always think it’s a good idea to structure games so that one freak die roll doesn’t ruin things.

When I used to play D&D back in the early 1980s my spell casters gave up casting any spells which had a saving throw because they never worked. I did not understand then that the DM was fixing the rolls because the big fight at the end had to last a certain amount of time. When I did realise what was going on I changed my playing style: since the bad guy could not be defeated in the first few rounds of combat I ignored them.

Now if the GM had said “Your spell struck home, but a talisman hanging round the villan’s neck absorbed it and has crmubled to dust” I would have been much happier!

Aside from that little “Whuh?” moment, I mostly agree. The problem I have is that “fixing” the dysfunctional dice issue (mentioned off in Carl’s blog, and in our proto-podcast that he hasn’t edited yet so no one has heard it) is difficult without stepping on the GM’s role. And yeah, I don’t like that, as a GM *or* player.

Basically, I want my games to work the way the plot coupons and whatnot do only without being so crass as to actually use, you know, plot coupons and whatnot. Heck, we can’t even manage to use Fudge Points.