RogerBW's Blog

The Goals of a Universal System 29 November 2024

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.

Tags: gurps rpgs

  1. 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?

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.)

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