Quote Originally Posted by HidesHisEyes View Post
PheonixPhyre, yep good points.

Although Dungeon World is not really like you describe. It’s wedded to the fantasy genre broadly, but it’s by no means a pure dungeon-crawler (despite the name). As it happens its mechanics actually suit swashbuckling and pulp adventure perfectly. I’d put it maybe just slightly higher up the scale than D&D.
(Honest question, never really having delved into it): But would it work for a comedy game? One where the "action" component is basically background? Or a cosmic-level (like Exalted) game? From what I understand, it's fairly "grounded" and low power, and assumes that most of what you're doing is "adventuring".

Quote Originally Posted by Satinavian View Post
Yes, but you have paladins and they do get spells and you have clerics and they do get channel and so on. While D&D is not married to a single setting, all D&D settings are pretty similar.

If you put D&D at 20, where is GURPS ? Or even GURPS with only the fantasy-appropriate books ?

Also while Pathfinder only has one setting, it is not mechanically closer to it than D&D (what surprise, considering it is the same system at its core). It is not as if D&D doesn't have exactly as many setting specific rules even outside of setting books (Red Wizards, Suel Arcanamachs). I have to do exactly tthe same work to port a setting to Pathfinder as i have to do to port it to 3.5. I don't think it is particularly useful to put them at different points on the scale when you can effortlessly use Pathfinder for every D&D setting and D&D for Galorion.

Generally my experience is that D&D does Fantasy settings that are not specifically made for it or inspired by it pretty poorly. I have found it way easer to apply other fantasy systems, even those that were not made to be universal. I mean, decades ago i have seen a group that found it easier to convert to Shadowrun of all things for some fantasy setting after having tried and failed to run it with AD&D2. (Nowaday with the internet, they would probably find something more fitting more easily)
GURPS is one I only have the most passing familiarity with, but I'd probably put it down lower. Somewhere in the 10s or 20s. There are feel constraints (you'll always, from what I understand, end up somewhere on the grittier, death-is-easy end of the spectrum), but there are even fewer genre constraints than D&D. I'd also put the HERO-type systems down there and other "purely generic" games. Ones that are very explicitly "batteries very much not included".

D&D isn't generic. D&D is constrained in genre (and that genre is not "all fantasy"). It explicitly does D&D worlds, not "any fantasy world"--it's not an emulator, nor is it trying to be one. Maybe to make the difference, D&D should get moved up the scale to the 30s, with PF being removed from 40 as an example and being lumped in with D&D. Maybe (?) replace it with Starfinder, which is more setting tied. I think.