How'd you split up the categories of rpgs?

[Kymme]

Now I feel a need to write a quick beer & pretzels game.

Ok, you need beers, packets of pretzels (small snack size ones are best), a reasonably sized table, and a bowl. The characters have infinite lives but every time your character dies you have to drink a beer. The characters are represented by packets of pretzels. Any time something would hurt the character, eat a pretzel. Any time your character would fail and you want them to succeed try to throw a pretzel from the end of the table, if you get it in the bowl your character succeeds. Any time you want to screw up another character trying to do something, bowl a pretzel. When your bag is empty the next bad thing that happens to the character kills them. Each resurrection of the character (after drinking the beer) requires a new bag of pretzels.

The DM runs the bowl and uses it as their "bag" of npcs. If they want an npc to succeed at something they have to eat a pretzel or drink a beer. If they want to screw up a pc action or a monster attacks a character they throw a pretzel at the player (hits are successes) or take a drink. The DM starts with one bag of pretzels in the bowl. The party starts in a tavern where they have a quest to kill some rats, and they are attacked by goblins. Begin.

Something tells me you'd probably love All Outta Bubblegum.

[Jay R]

We enjoyed quite a bit of that one in college, but yeah, complicated ...
By genre, do you mean swords and sorcery, or something else in terms of supporting the genre that the game is trying to present?

I mean it supports the feelings and approach I came to the game for. This generally means covering some specific aspect of some genre that the writers are aiming for, or (far more importantly) than the players are seeking.

TOON is great to represent Warner Brothers or Tex Avery cartoons; it fails to simulate a Disney movie. Original D&D was pretty good for the oeuvre of exploring an uninhabited wilderness or long-abandoned castle ruin, but little else in fantasy literature. It sort of feels like the Fellowship traveling through Moria, but is nothing like Helm's Deep or Pelennor Fields. It could handle the Odyssey, but not the Iliad.

Do you mean fantasy, swords and sorcery, or both? (And in time those have certainly fused).

You seem to believe that these terms have, or used to have, clear, unambiguous definitions. On that assumption, it could be some aspect of either, both, or something entirely different.

My examples included the Arthurian mythos, but also cartoons, musketeers, and comic books. Paranoia creates its own dysfunctional SF society, which is fine because I love the creation. D&D creates its own kind of world which I don't really like, because (among many other things) the nine-way alignment system adds no particular value and is inconsistent with any psychological, sociological, political, ethical, moral, philosophical or religious view of human behavior in history or fiction. A modern D&D world -- any D&D world -- is basically just a place to play D&D in.

One great aspect of Flashing Blades is its ability to simulate musketeer-era novels and movies. I would never use it for a historical 17th century Paris game.

likewise. Your point on D&D's recursion is well taken, and video games/CRPGS/MMORPGs have only amplified that.

Thank you. Good point about the D&D-spinoff games.

[SimonMoon6]

Since I can easily re-fluff games to do whatever I want them to do, I don't worry too much about fluff when looking at a game. I pretty much look at the rules, the crunch as some would say.

And from there I look at how flexible the game is. Can it be used for other things? Like, any decent superhero game should really be able to handle *any* genre, whether fantasy swords-n-sorcery, space opera, noir detective, or even just simple pre-Crisis Superman. I rate games on that kind of standard. For example, D&D (any edition) does only one thing: it can do D&D. It can't do much of anything else very well. Yeah, you can try to force it to do something else, but it can't do anything else well (and sometimes (like at high levels) it doesn't even do D&D well). Other games try to be versatile from the beginning (like Champions or GURPS) but often they don't handle superheroes very well oddly enough.

After flexibility, I look at how much ease of character creation the game system has. Sure, you *can* make a planet-pushing Superman, but is it easy? Do you have to do more than just say "Superman has STR 50"? If you have to jump through hoops (like Superman has to take "Lifts a Lot" a hundred times), then the game has a severe flaw. Likewise, can the game easily handle things like "turning into another person", "stealing ALL of the powers of another person", "turning into ANY mechanical device", "turning into ANY animal", etc., without having to spend half an hour working out the arithmetic first (looking at you, Champions)? If so, the game seems quite good in my eyes; if not, the game will seem quite poor. This can be really important for a GM who has to make a lot of characters, sometimes on the spur of the moment. If you can't just write down some stats to make any character you can think of, the game is too difficult to run well.

And a third characteristic that I judge games by (one where D&D 3.x at least does well) is: How fun is the character creation sub-game? For some games, the best part of the game is making a character (and in D&D, planning out the character's 20-level path of development). Sometimes, it's a character that you'll never play. And even if it is a character that you'll play, you may never get to see their maximum development (D&D games don't typically last long enough to play a 20th level character for very long if at all). It's the fun of creating a character that you theoretically could play and could theoretically develop into an even more fun character.

Not all games have a very fun character creation sub-game. AD&D 1st edition was pretty bland, for example, and Pathfinder 2e is pretty bland as well. But a game where you have lots of options, all of which are significantly different... that's a game where making a character can be fun.