First, it's not how they advertise themselves. Outside of the relatively new and small indy games market, there isn't any advertising on "Experience of Play". the back cover text for GURPS doesn't discuss how players will find a game based on the "realistic" model of the world. Having been a playtester in whswhs' _GURPS Supers_ rulebook, that's not how he or his editors approached it, and a lot of time and effort was spent on building mechanics that would capture all apsects of the supers universe - from scaling power levels to de-empahsizing "realism". I argued at the time that I thought it would be better to focus the game as you're suggesting and build the best supers supplement we could for the type of play that GURPS empahsized, but that wasn't how it played out - in part because people with more experience than I with GURPS said that the system does natrually scale for various comic book realsim levels, and in part because it would have meant scrapping everything and starting over. I'm happy with the product that Mr. Stoddard produced and proud to have been involved, but I don't think it produced a book that was "how to do GURPS style supers", as you suggest.
Second, Fantasy games _do_ advertise themselves that way. D&D, at least in the 3E version thast I play, doesn't claim that you can build any character for any style of fantasy adventure story. It tells you that you're playing in the self defined world of D&D. Warhammer's cover text makes it clear from word one that this is not designed for everything from high tolkenesque adventure to dark street level fantasy. Fantasy games don't make the argument that they do everything equally well the way that major supers games do.
I'm curious as to why that is, and I want to see how much their claims of universaility really are accurate. This is one way to explore that.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2008-02-13 12:01 pm (UTC)First, it's not how they advertise themselves. Outside of the relatively new and small indy games market, there isn't any advertising on "Experience of Play". the back cover text for GURPS doesn't discuss how players will find a game based on the "realistic" model of the world. Having been a playtester in whswhs' _GURPS Supers_ rulebook, that's not how he or his editors approached it, and a lot of time and effort was spent on building mechanics that would capture all apsects of the supers universe - from scaling power levels to de-empahsizing "realism". I argued at the time that I thought it would be better to focus the game as you're suggesting and build the best supers supplement we could for the type of play that GURPS empahsized, but that wasn't how it played out - in part because people with more experience than I with GURPS said that the system does natrually scale for various comic book realsim levels, and in part because it would have meant scrapping everything and starting over. I'm happy with the product that Mr. Stoddard produced and proud to have been involved, but I don't think it produced a book that was "how to do GURPS style supers", as you suggest.
Second, Fantasy games _do_ advertise themselves that way. D&D, at least in the 3E version thast I play, doesn't claim that you can build any character for any style of fantasy adventure story. It tells you that you're playing in the self defined world of D&D. Warhammer's cover text makes it clear from word one that this is not designed for everything from high tolkenesque adventure to dark street level fantasy. Fantasy games don't make the argument that they do everything equally well the way that major supers games do.
I'm curious as to why that is, and I want to see how much their claims of universaility really are accurate. This is one way to explore that.