The universal system, the one RPG that could handle any setting you
could throw at it, was a popular idea in the 1980s. Why then, and
where has it gone since?
To understand the aspirations, I think it's helpful to remember
the common style of games then; my experience is from the UK, but I
get similar impressions from elsewhere. Typically one GM would run one
game, with players coming and going, until he (usually he) got bored
with it, or moved away; then he might start another one, perhaps in a
different system. Campaigns were expected to be long, but very often
not to have a defined goal or ending: you'd go down tougher and
weirder dungeons, or make increasing amounts of money with your tramp
starship, until the game stopped for some external reason.
And while only Dungeons & Dragons and its imitators have stuck with
it as a core requirement, rules knowledge was important. A player was
generally expected to know how to generate a character and at least
how to play their part in a fight without needing any assistance from
the GM or other players.
To my mind those two ideas inform the desire for universal games: you
don't want to have to learn a whole new system as complex as D&D
when it comes time to change campaign. Wouldn't it be great to have
one system that could handle everything? And if campaigns are long
(and relatively non-lethal) you won't be generating characters very
often, so it's fine if that takes a while.
Another point that was often brought up was character portability:
wouldn't it be great if you could take your character from one game to
another, not just from one dungeon-bash to someone else's (which was
often contentious in itself), but from one setting to another? People
(including me) enthused about this a great deal, but it didn't seem to
happen very often, even once universal games became available. An
imported character has no backstory in the setting, no social network,
no motivations beyond the purely internal. And if it's "heroes from
across the universes go out and fight evil", well, how do you make
sure that each PC can contribute something?
This is where I think GURPS suffers rather: it's very clear that
points cannot provide anything like game balance outside a single
setting, and often not even there. What is game balance when one
character can be a commando-trained security chief and another is an
expert spaceship pilot? They won't be doing their things in the same
scene. At best, one can argue that every deviation from the mean
standard human is a way of calling for spotlight time: "I can do that,
I'm an expert marksman". Even the negative ones: "I can't do that,
it's against my code of honour" in game terms is still a way of making
your character stand out.
But GURPS (and every other point-buy game too, Champions
certainly, even something like Savage Worlds where the "points" are
whole advantages) has to pretend that an extra level of strength is
worth the same to the axe-wielding barbarian as to the power-armoured
drone jockey.
Meanwhile in forty years the overall complexity of systems that
players are prepared to accept has dropped. You may still need to
"learn a whole new system" to join that new campaign, but it'll take
you half an hour at most. Character generation is quick and easy, and
if it leans into cliché at times, there's no harm in that.
Meanwhile any universal system that keeps producing expansions suffers
from combinatorial explosion: when book B comes out, it has to work
with the core rules alone, or with book A. When C comes out, it has to
be tested with core, core+A, core+B, and core+A+B. And so on. Saying
"this book depends on this other book" only helps for a little while
(and hurts sales).
But I think there's a hybrid that hasn't been widely analysed: the
modifiable core. I'm thinking here of systems like Gumshoe, Powered
by the Apocalypse and its derivative Blades in the Dark, where what
the players buy isn't a core book plus a genre supplement but a single
all-in-one book for that setting. The rules for setting A won't be
exactly the same as for setting B, and that's just fine; they're still
broadly familiar to players who've played the other game, so there's
less learning effort, but at the same time anything can be tweaked if
needed to fit the setting. Sanity rules don't need to be in the
hypothetical Gumshoe Core, they're in Trail of Cthulhu, and if a
different Gumshoe game took a different approach to mental health it
could have an entirely different set of rules without anyone worrying
about how they interacted. And for this reason you don't need to worry
about combinatorial explosion either: even if "this book" is
effectively core + A, it doesn't have to be compatible with core+B,
core+C, etc.
I think this is what designers who forty years ago would have tried to
build another universal system are now doing instead.
- Posted by J Michael Cule at
11:35am on
29 November 2024
I think that the movement to 'one core system: many manifestations' was already there when Chaosium took RQ and made CoC and then a dozen others. Some were more complex, some less but if you knew one you were well on the way to knowing the others.
Looking back on it, I have never seen much call for 'take my character to another campaign' though I have done a lot of 'dump the characters from one world into another temporarily',
The weirdest manifestation of the generic system I think was now what was it called.... The one where you had a minimal core character that didn't even have stats but you could in some unclear way transfer their experience between different universes?
- Posted by RogerBW at
01:54pm on
29 November 2024
Yes, particularly Worlds of Wonder (1982; Magic World, Super World, Future World, all in one box with a common BRP core) seems as though it's going in this direction. I've never seen it, only read the WD34 review, but I gather one could port characters between the three settings, even though each setting had its own skill list.
I think a game in which you can travel between worlds is probably a game about travelling between worlds if it's any good. Economy of miracles, and all that. And as we've said on [IRTD]{https://tekeli.li/podcast/) I'm always wary of the bait-and-switch where the players have generated characters for world A and suddenly find themselves having to survive in world B with no hope of return.
Aha, Amazing Engine, TSR's ill-fated venture into the big bucks of the generic system (1993-1994). I think that's a really interesting idea, if absolutely not one I want to play; the character you played in an individual setting would have a full set of stats and skills and things specific to that setting, but it was derived at campaign start from a "character core", so basically you'd always be playing the strong guy, or the smart guy, or the charismatic guy, of the group, whatever setting you were playing in. You could add experience points either to your character in the world or (at a lower efficiency) to your character core… but there was nothing to suggest what the character core might represent in the game world; it was entirely an artefact of the rules.
Another example of a generic system, though it wasn't marketed that way: Torg. Several of the original worlds are clearly meant to represent popular role-playing genres (fantasy, cyberpunk, pulp (super)heroes, horror), but they're all on one planet and you can travel between them without needing spaceships or gates or whatever.
- Posted by John P at
11:03pm on
29 November 2024
IIRC wasn't the idea of a common core with extensions for various settings what R Talsorian were trying to do with Fuzion back in whenever (late 90's/early 2K I think)?
I thought Torg was just aimed at trying to cash in on as many genres as possible at the time. The relationship between the areas seemed very superficial - although I admit I didn't play it very much.
- Posted by Fuzzy at
08:21pm on
06 December 2024
Universal systems are definitely a mixed bag. As someone who's spent years on-and-off tilting at this particular windmill, it's always tough trying to balance flexibility and user-friendliness. Plenty of games get so bogged down in detail that there's little incentive to just "try out" a system; that's a big reason I don't run Pathfinder 1e any more.
It's also a reason that the recent re-release of The Fantasy Trip is bittersweet. Seeing something that's fairly straightforward and systematic, but that evolved inexorably into the infamously fiddly GURPS, makes me wish there had been simply a revision of TFT that retained its speed.
In my (limited) experience, Savage Worlds is great for action-oriented games, but I'm not at all sure how well it would do with more cerebral or social stuff. I need to explore that one a bit more, I think.
- Posted by RogerBW at
05:16pm on
08 December 2024
Welcome Fuzzy! (Sorry, been away over the weekend and not approving new posters.)
The GURPS I actually use at the table is far simpler than the 500+ pages of the Basic Set, never mind all the rest. More on that in The Path of Cunning #5, recently released.
My experience of Savage Worlds is that it's very easy to become a charisma monster compared with the effort needed to be a superlative fighter. (Also since much of my gaming is online these days the initiative system is really too much work.)