PDA

View Full Version : Discussion: New VS Old



brujon
2011-05-11, 10:10 PM
I've done my fair share of roleplaying... Using various different systems, Storyteller, D&D, others more obscure, and even had the guts to read FATAL in it's (disgusting entirety). As such, i've seen some flaws and some advantages to every(the one's i did play for a bit) system, (except FATAL, it's 900+ pages of garbage, really).

Many of you have probably had some crazy-good ideas that you just could not fit well to D&D 3.5. Or to any other system for that matter. Many of you have not been satisfied with aspects of one system, and been tempted to either re-invent the wheel with radical changes about the rules of the game, or been somewhat inclined to design a new roleplaying system altogheter.

Some systems lack modularity, some systems have too much of it. Some systems do not fit very well to more "real" games, other's are too real to be of any use to fantasy at all.

My question to the playground is twofold:

First, i'd like to hear you all on the opinions you have of the flaws of roleplaying game systems, be whatever systems they may (If i don't know it, i'll try and have a look to see what you're talking about).

Second, i'd like to hear you out on the opinion you have of *new* roleplaying game systems. Would you actually take a read on a never-before seen roleplaying system? Would you be willing to switch from (insert system here) to that new system, if you thought it was better? Or you think tradition and homebrewing work better than switching entirely to a new sysmte?

Actually, these were a lot of questions. And here's one more: If you did indeed were willing to switch to a new roleplaying system, what is that you wanted it to have that no other system has (or doesn't do well enough)?

I ask of you to please don't discuss the merits and flaws of each system with each other on this thread, but simply state your personal beliefs. I'm asking this because the playground has consistently shown that it is much knowledgeable on the field of roleplaying games, and to have your thoughts would matter to me very much.

I am thinking of building a new roleplaying system (as i'm sure most of you have, at some point) and, although i have my own opinion of the matter, as a human being, i cannot possibly conceive of the wants and needs of every roleplayer out there. All i can do is make it so that the system looks good and works well to me.

I have not yet started the project formally, because indeed, i'm not really sure that the need for a new system does exists, outside of myself, that is. What i do have, is a clean idea of what my thoughts are on game systems as a whole. So i'll start the thread by answering my own questions, and wait to see your answers to those same questions.

1) The flaws of gaming systems. I'll start with the one that's more familiar to me, that is, D&D 3.5. D&D has the problem of feat-dependency. There are, literally, thousands of feats, spread throughout thousands of splatbooks. And even more if you count base classes. That means that power, mechanically speaking, is proportional to how much books you/your group own(s)(if you don't count homebrew). That, for me, is the critical flaw in D&D. The system doesn't have much modularity, it insteads go for templates(classes), with a tiny bit of customization(feats, skills), that can either be game-shattering or meh. Again, the players won't know the better until they're more experienced. The problem is minimized with experienced groups, because they're more willing to accept homebrew, and because they more than often have a veritable library between them all. Then there's the problem where some classes are inherently (much)better than the others, which is somewhat exacerbated in D&D.
Then there is Storyteller, of which i've played quite a bit. The system is pretty easy to master, because basically, more points in something equals more power in it. Pretty straightforward. But it's also pretty abusable. It's oversimplification is one of it's flaws. It's pretty versatile, though, and combining scores of different abilities, you can pretty much cover any action. But it doesn't really lend itself to every single type of game, though. And the templates are still there, just they are more customizable, and apply to an entire race(Werewolfs, Mages, Humans, Hunters... etc...). And these templates are only balanced against themselves, which is kind of the goal of the system. The level of power between the varied races is vastly different, and combining them in the same game can lead to headaches for the DM. It also really doesn't lend itself to much homebrewing outside of the confines of new disciplines for vampires/new tribes for werewolfs, etc... It's good for what it was meant to do, but doesn't do well outside that. It's scope is very narrow.
Could speak some more, but i think that's enough for one question...

Would you actually take a read on a never-before seen roleplaying system?
I would and i did, at various times, with some friends. Nothing they cooked up really took off, though, and they mostly ended up going back to playing D&D and just homebrewing and house-ruling some things.

Would you be willing to switch from (insert system here) to that new system, if you thought it was better?

I definitely would. If the system is really better than the other, what reason is there not to switch? Admittedly, it can be hard to convince others into joining a game with a new system, but, if i could convince others, then, sure, let's play New System X.

brujon
2011-05-11, 10:28 PM
Or you think tradition and homebrewing work better than switching entirely to a new system?

It really depends on what you're trying to achieve. D&D has done the fantasy thing very well, and it's very established, with a lot of homebrewers and fixes to everything. It even has a "spin-off" system called Pathfinder, which addresses some of the concerns people had with 3.5. But even Wizards didn't think 3.5 was enough, and they launched 4.0, and probably will continue to relaunch D&D in new incarnations... D20 Modern did low-magic(or no-magic) + some tech pretty well, but the two systems really are very different. You can't have a D20 Modern character and a D&D 3.5 character in the same game, the power levels are different, the intent is different. Some people say that the best roleplaying is the one people do with no dices, and i'm inclined to agree, at least somewhat. The one thing roleplaying without rules or dices don't really do for you is creating that element of uncertainty and luck. You're really just making stuff up, not really playing a game. But then, you start adding rules and the scope starts to shrink and shrink. Can you make a game of D&D where real-world soldiers are transferred to the Forgotten Realms and make it work without having to invent a whole lot of new classes, new skills, new talents, and new items? No, because D&D was made for fantasy, not real-world warfare, and such has no rules for automatic firearms and no classes for people who use them, also probably a lot of the things these people know are better off on their own skills... If you want, say, to make a true generic system, then you're better off making a new system than homebrewing.

If you did indeed were willing to switch to a new roleplaying system, what is that you wanted it to have that no other system has (or doesn't do well enough)?

Three things: Simplicity, modularity, and for it to be generic. I also tend to, more or less, stay on the "Normal" side of things, and as such, that the power level doesn't go out of the roof(but with support for when it does). What i mean is, it assumes physics are as they are on the real world. Not wacky-crazy, but not crazy-normal, either. I like to think rather logically. If magic was as common as it is in D&D, and as powerful as it is there, then probably the whole civilization would be so advanced it wouldn't be D&D anymore. I mean, if you compare magic to technology, it's bound to have at least the same impact. So, if magic is common, the world has to conform to that reality. You can think it this way: If magic equals technology, than D&D should look more like star wars than to what it looks today. Really. Unless all mages only care about themselves and don't make the lives of everybody better. But that doesn't really cover the system part of the thing, just illustrates some of the views i have on things.

So, now that i answered some of my own questions, i'd like to hear you out :)

rayne_dragon
2011-05-11, 11:50 PM
Personally, my biggest issue with systems is playability - can I find enough people and get them to sit down long enough to learn and play this game? I'm not the biggest fan of D&D 3.x, or - originally - 4e for that matter, but I've played both because those were the systems that I could find a group to play with. I think that overall, new systems that are quick to learn are better than systems with heavier rules since it'll be faster for people to pick up on them and get gaming groups going. The thing is, I'm not likely to invest in a new system until I have a group of people to play with, so I'm rather reluctant to do anything with a new system right off the bat, even though I like trying new systems.

brujon
2011-05-12, 12:26 AM
Personally, my biggest issue with systems is playability - can I find enough people and get them to sit down long enough to learn and play this game? I'm not the biggest fan of D&D 3.x, or - originally - 4e for that matter, but I've played both because those were the systems that I could find a group to play with. I think that overall, new systems that are quick to learn are better than systems with heavier rules since it'll be faster for people to pick up on them and get gaming groups going. The thing is, I'm not likely to invest in a new system until I have a group of people to play with, so I'm rather reluctant to do anything with a new system right off the bat, even though I like trying new systems.

Appreciate your opinion. It's rather similar to mine, really. As much as i want to start a project and like to think that i may have some pretty nifty ideas no-one has thought of before, or that i can do it better... The reality of the situation is that, in the eyes of the world, it'll probably not be so. And, even if it is, finding people that really do like this sort of thing may not be the easiest of tasks. At least, within geographical proximity. Making a system easy enough for people to actually want to learn is possibly more difficult than creating an overly complicated system. (assuming both of them actually have rules for the type of situations one is to encounter within the game-world). I'll keep waiting for more responses for my inquiry.

Jude_H
2011-05-12, 01:31 AM
I'm having a hard time telling what in your post is rhetorical and what is actually a question. I mean, you asked a bunch of things, then answered them in about the exact opposite way that I would respond. So I'm confused.

As to whether I'd read/play a new roleplaying game, I read one or two a week and try to try one or two new ones a month. It doesn't take much for me to read a book, beyond a fresh and clever idea or two.

As for what I've personally been looking for in an RPG, I've yet to find a system that does spaghetti westerns well. I'd like a game that somehow weaves staredowns, flashback narratives and larger-than-life antiheroes into a conflict resolution procedure. Something between Deadlands, 3:16, Awesome! and Dust Devils.

In general, what I want is a roleplaying game that makes the interesting parts of the genre interesting in the game. D&D, for instance, is very good at fantasy dungeon crawls in every edition to date. Its rules don't make moral conflicts a very interesting metagame, but that's okay because it's not a game you play to model romantic character-driven conflicts. I like that. InSpectres is fantastic at modeling zany adventures where the twists are unpredictable and everybody's got a 'gotcha' up their sleeve.

I don't like d20 modern, because it uses a wargame engine to try to act as an open-ended rpg platform. It is terrible at certain things (investigation and intrigue games have to fight against the system to work at all), but it doesn't acknowledge them in its design. Because it's not specifically tailored to any purpose, I have never thought "I want to play a game and d20 modern is the system to model it"; it just doesn't have have any draws compared to games built for a given purpose.

It's not the depth of the rules or the rules stripped of context that bothers me. It's the applicability to a given job. I mentioned that I like InSpectres. There's another system using a nearly identical ruleset called octaNe. Even though it uses the same rules and has the same general feel, its rules and its premise don't match up; it's a post-apocalyptic romp that's supposed to feel like a mix between Mad Max and Hunter Thompson, but its rules just don't work outside of investigative games: if a player decides to narrate something screwy, it doesn't feel like the punchline to a joke or the big twist reveal to a mystery. It feels like a nonsensical story a six-year-old would tell. The system and the themes just don't match.

So yeah, that's the big broad-stroke guideline to what makes me like/dislike a game. It's hard to get more specific without specific context.

Jay R
2011-05-12, 10:27 AM
I started with OD&D - just the first three books, with no expansions. Then we got The Strategic Review issues, Greyhawk, Blackmoor, Eldritch Wizardry, etc.

My basic view is that it started with a worthless system surrounding a wonderful new idea - roleplaying in a classic fantasy world. All character classes, monsters, and options were based on fantasy literature.

The system became playable with the new combat system in Greyhawk, and Blackmoor added new ideas. But they also started including some D&D-specific ideas, like the Beholder and the Deck of Many Things.

Eldritch Wizardry added druids, but also continued on the path away from roleplaying in a classic fantasy world with its psionics.

The additional stuff in the Dragon added more ideas, some useful, most unnecessary, and continued the move away from traditional fantasy.

The addition of the 2-axis alignment system was a strong element of anti-fantasy and anti-simulation, since it is inconsistent with the moral system in any fantasy or any human culture. The alignment square automatically made D&D games unique to D&D, but it was still possible to somewhat ignore it and try to simulate a non-D&D-unique fantasy setting.

Through 2E, the major changes were improved writing and more well-defined system, and a slow move further from traditional fantasy settings and characters.

Spelljammer, of course, blew away the idea of a traditional fantasy setting.

3E charged away from traditional fantasy, until now it's common to have parties none of whom could have ever been seen in Middle-Earth, Camelot, Erewhon, Faerie, Midgard, or any other fantasy realm.

These days I'm playing 2E, as the best compromise between my goal of playing a traditional fantasy character in a traditional fantasy setting, and my desire for well-defined rules.

Oracle_Hunter
2011-05-12, 11:05 AM
First, i'd like to hear you all on the opinions you have of the flaws of roleplaying game systems, be whatever systems they may (If i don't know it, i'll try and have a look to see what you're talking about).
Most "big" RPG franchises (e.g. D&D, WW, SR) don't have enough focus on what their systems are supposed to do. Shadowrun, for example, is supposed to be a game of cloak & daggers in which violent criminals work the shadowy underworld of a dystopian future. The rules are mostly about shooting people and blowing stuff up - with no more than a few pages devoted to contacts, how you work them, and what it means to gather information.

Many of the smaller RPGs out there are simply poorly designed. They have simple rules, but the rules are little more than coin-flips for resolving conflicts in narration. There is very little "game" in them.

This is just broad strokes, because details only matter when you are looking at a particular system.


Second, i'd like to hear you out on the opinion you have of *new* roleplaying game systems. Would you actually take a read on a never-before seen roleplaying system? Would you be willing to switch from (insert system here) to that new system, if you thought it was better? Or you think tradition and homebrewing work better than switching entirely to a new sysmte?
If a new system looks interesting, I'll try it. If someone is willing to run a game of a system I've never played, I'll play it to see how it is. This is how we learn about what makes a good RPG.

IMHO, people who find one edition of one system and play it (and nothing else) for the rest of their days are missing out big-time.


If you did indeed were willing to switch to a new roleplaying system, what is that you wanted it to have that no other system has (or doesn't do well enough)?
I don't know, because I haven't seen the new system yet :smalltongue:

That's the thing - until I play a new system, I don't know what my old favorite system was missing. For example, I never knew I wanted Roleplaying Mechanics until I played Bliss Stage and saw how they can actually provoke dyed-in-the-wool hack & slashers into dramatists.

* * * *


I am thinking of building a new roleplaying system (as i'm sure most of you have, at some point) and, although i have my own opinion of the matter, as a human being, i cannot possibly conceive of the wants and needs of every roleplayer out there. All i can do is make it so that the system looks good and works well to me.

I have not yet started the project formally, because indeed, i'm not really sure that the need for a new system does exists, outside of myself, that is. What i do have, is a clean idea of what my thoughts are on game systems as a whole.

You need to play a lot more systems - and a lot of different kinds of systems. The two you spoke about are practically in the same mold: rules-heavy games that do their best to simulate a world and then say "go play." Buy a copy of Burning Wheel and try running some games with it; download the rules to Mountain Witch and run that through a couple of times. Get a copy of Bliss Stage and see what it does for you.

The world has changed a lot since TSR and White Wolf. Go play :smallsmile:

Morghen
2011-05-12, 11:20 AM
These days I'm playing 2E, as the best compromise between my goal of playing a traditional fantasy character in a traditional fantasy setting, and my desire for well-defined rules.I know I'm WAY impartial, but I strongly recommend you take a look at Hack (http://www.amazon.com/Hackmaster-Official-Handbook-Development-Team/dp/1889182362/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1305214696&sr=8-2)Master (http://www.amazon.com/Hackmaster-Official-Game-Masters-Guide/dp/1889182370/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&qid=1305214696&sr=8-6). It's got more rules crunchiness than 2E (like a legitimate skill system!), but that same old-school "Heroes contending against dark forces" vibe instead of "My 20/19/1 half-dragon berzerker/sorcerer/ranger hits for 102 points and Zeus catches on fire."

It literally plays like TSR (NOT WotC) took everything they knew about 1, 2, and 3 and made a new update to 1st Edition. Assassins, thieves (NOT rogues but THIEVES), magic-users (NOT mages or wizards), barbarians, half-orcs...

I could seriously geek out for a while here. It's an amazing system if you're a fan of the old-school.

Anybody interested in a more in-depth geek-out can PM me.

valadil
2011-05-12, 11:47 AM
I like levels better than a la cart point spending. Getting a level feels a lot more meaningful than a handful of points. A mixture of the two, like in Dark Heresy, is cool because the level is still an achievement and a big step in power.

Wound penalties are cool, but all too often lead to a death spiral. My experience in systems with wounding is that whomever goes first almost always wins because their opponents will be injured at the beginning of the fight. This is realistic and it makes fights quick and dirty, but may not be appropriate for all games.

I would like to see more social subsystems. Granted I'd rather talk than roll dice, but when it comes to rolling dice I'd like the system to be more interesting than a single opposed roll. Game of Thrones d20 had rules for manipulating someone who was being influenced by a third party. It took into account your relation and rank with respect to those people. Those particular rules were too cumbersome, but I'd like to see something else done in that direction.

I want players to have narrative control, but not too much. When I've told my D&D group that other games allow players to impose facts on the world with a successful knowledge check, they express an interest in imposing fire vulnerabilities on every enemy they see. That just doesn't make sense to me. But letting the players impose a bridge being out, a contact lives around here, or crossbows are illegal in this city, will let them make creative assertions on the game. Maybe the limit should be to non-mechanical, in world assertions?

If combat has a heavy role in the game, I want everyone to have something to do in combat, even if they don't build for it. Dresden Files/FATE lets you make assertions (see above) that can give allies bonuses on their checks. Noticing a sprinkler system is a big deal in a world where water grounds out magic.

I don't like rules lookups. They slow things down. Rules should be short enough to be memorable. If you absolutely must have a chart for critical hits, arrange the charts in such a way that each PC can have a chart for his own attacks and pass those out along with the character sheets.

If you do need lookups, please include a clickable index in your PDF and make sure it's searchable. More and more of us use electronic resources at game. I'll be damned if I'm scrolling 200 pages on my iPhone, but if I can search for "underwater combat" and end up on the right page in 2 or 3 clicks, I'm happy.

Include a consistent level of support for all your skills/abilities. I'm a little sick of athletics being vague and nebulous, but hundreds of pages are spent on combat options.

You should also give people a reason to have high skills. In my GURPS group, the GM complains constantly about how our combat skills are higher than the rest. GURPS is resolved by rolling 3d6 under a target score. Usually if you have a 13 or 14, that's easy to roll under. We keep our skills in that range. However, there are combat options. You can take a -4 penalty to hit someone in the hand. If I had a 14, now I have to hit a 10 which is much less likely. Ergo, we have high combat checks so that we can use those options. If no such options exist for non-combat skills, there's no incentive to go above a 14 or so.

I would rather have a few versatile skills than many specific skills. Why? It pisses me off when I try to use a radio and find that my computer skill doesn't apply and that I should have taken electronic communication instead. It makes me feel bad about my character. I'd rather use my technology skill to use any piece of tech. If you absolutely must differentiate between a radio and a computer, have a generic skill with specializations.

brujon
2011-05-12, 11:48 AM
I'm having a hard time telling what in your post is rhetorical and what is actually a question. I mean, you asked a bunch of things, then answered them in about the exact opposite way that I would respond. So I'm confused.

As to whether I'd read/play a new roleplaying game, I read one or two a week and try to try one or two new ones a month. It doesn't take much for me to read a book, beyond a fresh and clever idea or two.

As for what I've personally been looking for in an RPG, I've yet to find a system that does spaghetti westerns well. I'd like a game that somehow weaves staredowns, flashback narratives and larger-than-life antiheroes into a conflict resolution procedure. Something between Deadlands, 3:16, Awesome! and Dust Devils.

In general, what I want is a roleplaying game that makes the interesting parts of the genre interesting in the game. D&D, for instance, is very good at fantasy dungeon crawls in every edition to date. Its rules don't make moral conflicts a very interesting metagame, but that's okay because it's not a game you play to model romantic character-driven conflicts. I like that. InSpectres is fantastic at modeling zany adventures where the twists are unpredictable and everybody's got a 'gotcha' up their sleeve.

I don't like d20 modern, because it uses a wargame engine to try to act as an open-ended rpg platform. It is terrible at certain things (investigation and intrigue games have to fight against the system to work at all), but it doesn't acknowledge them in its design. Because it's not specifically tailored to any purpose, I have never thought "I want to play a game and d20 modern is the system to model it"; it just doesn't have have any draws compared to games built for a given purpose.

It's not the depth of the rules or the rules stripped of context that bothers me. It's the applicability to a given job. I mentioned that I like InSpectres. There's another system using a nearly identical ruleset called octaNe. Even though it uses the same rules and has the same general feel, its rules and its premise don't match up; it's a post-apocalyptic romp that's supposed to feel like a mix between Mad Max and Hunter Thompson, but its rules just don't work outside of investigative games: if a player decides to narrate something screwy, it doesn't feel like the punchline to a joke or the big twist reveal to a mystery. It feels like a nonsensical story a six-year-old would tell. The system and the themes just don't match.

So yeah, that's the big broad-stroke guideline to what makes me like/dislike a game. It's hard to get more specific without specific context.

None of it was actually rethorical, actually. I, like everyone else, have some preconceived notions about roleplaying systems and roleplaying in general... I just wanted to see other people's thoughts on that, and appreciate the input you gave :) Also, i'm not looking for any specific input, just some general thoughts on roleplaying and roleplaying systems in general, like what you like/dislike about current systems, or what you would want to see in a new system, or if you think homebrewing and house-ruling the system of choice is better, etc...

brujon
2011-05-12, 12:00 PM
Most "big" RPG franchises (e.g. D&D, WW, SR) don't have enough focus on what their systems are supposed to do. Shadowrun, for example, is supposed to be a game of cloak & daggers in which violent criminals work the shadowy underworld of a dystopian future. The rules are mostly about shooting people and blowing stuff up - with no more than a few pages devoted to contacts, how you work them, and what it means to gather information.

Many of the smaller RPGs out there are simply poorly designed. They have simple rules, but the rules are little more than coin-flips for resolving conflicts in narration. There is very little "game" in them.

This is just broad strokes, because details only matter when you are looking at a particular system.


If a new system looks interesting, I'll try it. If someone is willing to run a game of a system I've never played, I'll play it to see how it is. This is how we learn about what makes a good RPG.

IMHO, people who find one edition of one system and play it (and nothing else) for the rest of their days are missing out big-time.


I don't know, because I haven't seen the new system yet :smalltongue:

That's the thing - until I play a new system, I don't know what my old favorite system was missing. For example, I never knew I wanted Roleplaying Mechanics until I played Bliss Stage and saw how they can actually provoke dyed-in-the-wool hack & slashers into dramatists.

* * * *



You need to play a lot more systems - and a lot of different kinds of systems. The two you spoke about are practically in the same mold: rules-heavy games that do their best to simulate a world and then say "go play." Buy a copy of Burning Wheel and try running some games with it; download the rules to Mountain Witch and run that through a couple of times. Get a copy of Bliss Stage and see what it does for you.

The world has changed a lot since TSR and White Wolf. Go play :smallsmile:

Going to check out those roleplaying systems you mentioned. I didn't know them. I didn't mention in my first post, but i also played a bit of GURPS (not enough to know the system really well, though), Star Wars D20(quite a bit), Paranoia, 3D&T, and old edition D&D. But, i'll give it to you that all of those systems i've cited are rules-heavy and try to emulate a world as best as they can, except Paranoia, which is a bit more specific, but still crunch heavy. I like having rules that cover a variety of situations, i think that it adds to the element of luck vs skill, which to me is kind of the point to using a system. As much as the DM influences the story, the success or failure depends in your characters abilities, and the luck of the dice. (More on abilities, less on luck.)

Oracle_Hunter
2011-05-12, 12:33 PM
Going to check out those roleplaying systems you mentioned. I didn't know them. I didn't mention in my first post, but i also played a bit of GURPS (not enough to know the system really well, though), Star Wars D20(quite a bit), Paranoia, 3D&T, and old edition D&D. But, i'll give it to you that all of those systems i've cited are rules-heavy and try to emulate a world as best as they can, except Paranoia, which is a bit more specific, but still crunch heavy. I like having rules that cover a variety of situations, i think that it adds to the element of luck vs skill, which to me is kind of the point to using a system. As much as the DM influences the story, the success or failure depends in your characters abilities, and the luck of the dice. (More on abilities, less on luck.)
"Luck vs. Skill" is the point of any system in which dice are modified by skills or attributes on a character sheet; it has nothing to do with whether the game seeks to simulate a world.

I think you'll find Burning Wheel a real eye-opener in this regard, but it can be a bit dense to work through on your own. In the alternative, flip through the various Indie Games of the Year (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indie_RPG_Awards) and see whichever one sounds most interesting to you. They should all teach basically the same lesson.

Good luck!

Lord Vampyre
2011-05-12, 01:12 PM
Here is what I don't want in a system: I don't want a system that is going to stifle my creativity. This is my biggest problem with D&D 4E.

Now, I'll give almost any system a go, if I find myself in a group that is willing to play it. However, I won't invest heavily into a game that I'm simply not running or playing.

I'm really not a fan of games that impose rules on the roleplaying aspect of RPGs, and prefer them to focus on what I see as the gaming aspect (for the most part combat) of the game. I also don't think one system should try and do everything.

Jay R
2011-05-12, 01:44 PM
Most "big" RPG franchises (e.g. D&D, WW, SR) don't have enough focus on what their systems are supposed to do.

Very cogent observation. The best systems I know for doing what they are supposed to do are:

Flashing Blades: Role-playing in the France of the musketeers and Richelieu. They are explicitly trying to re-create the movies, not the history, and it feels right. The politics, the rules, the different dueling styles, etc.

TOON: You are playing a cartoon character. If you lose all your hit points, you Fall Down with little Xs in your eyes, and walk back onscreen in 3 minutes. If you try to do something ridiculous, roll on your Smarts. If you *fail* you can do it.

Champions: A super-hero gaming system focused on creating precisely designed super powers. It's only weakness is that it requires a competent level of junior high school math (fractions and division) so it scares lots of people off.

Pendragon: Arthurian legends are about passions and morality tales, and that's the heart of this system. (And in a complete 75 year campaign, ending up playing the great-grandson of your original character, you will probably never see any gold.)

I should also mention Paranoia and Call of Cthulhu, which provide excellent simulations of worlds I have no interest in.

And no description of comparative role-playing systems can be complete without mentioning Chivalry and Sorcery -- the grandest, richest, most well-developed, most carefully detailed unplayable mess ever published.