So, I was just curious what the general consensus is regarding a Universal System compared to one built around a specific setting?

From looking at the existing RPGs, it seems that there are almost none that are Universal--most mechanics are coated in their settings flavor and while you can generally tweak things to work with another genre, it never completely meshes.

Do you all think that it is better for a system to be built around a specific setting/genre? Do you think there is going to be anything inherently lacking in an attempted Universal system?

Are there any distinct advantages to either approach that you're aware of?

What do you all prefer as players?

I like a universal system, but trying to tack down what that means exactly is difficult. In my opinion a universal system has to be very meta in its approach, distilling conflict of any sort down into as few rules and numbers as possible, and to be fairly uniform about it. There are plenty of systems which have core mechanics that can be considered universal by my deffenition, Dogs in the Vineyard, numerous Dice Pool system that crop up here on the forums, even D&D to a certain extent if the combat system was throw out in favor of story boarding would break down everthing into d20 + x vs 10+x and it doesn't get much simpler than that.

What are your definitions for Universal and Setting Specific systems? I see most as being a set of Universal conflict resolution rules with Setting Specific sub-rules tact on as needed.

I really prefer setting specific systems.  No one system captures all aspects of gaming well so I'd rather use one that models the primary focus of the game really well then one that tries to do a little of everything.

The disadvantage to setting specific systems is fairly obvious, you have to learn a new system.

horomancer wrote:
I like a universal system, but trying to tack down what that means exactly is difficult. In my opinion a universal system has to be very meta in its approach, distilling conflict of any sort down into as few rules and numbers as possible, and to be fairly uniform about it. There are plenty of systems which have core mechanics that can be considered universal by my deffenition, Dogs in the Vineyard, numerous Dice Pool system that crop up here on the forums, even D&D to a certain extent if the combat system was throw out in favor of story boarding would break down everthing into d20 + x vs 10+x and it doesn't get much simpler than that.

What are your definitions for Universal and Setting Specific systems? I see most as being a set of Universal conflict resolution rules with Setting Specific sub-rules tact on as needed.

Mobius wrote:
I really prefer setting specific systems.  No one system captures all aspects of gaming well so I'd rather use one that models the primary focus of the game really well then one that tries to do a little of everything.

The disadvantage to setting specific systems is fairly obvious, you have to learn a new system.

But yeah, aiming for Universal definitely means that something needs to be sacrificed. I'm running into that as I'm thinking over my own system-in-progress--by focusing on being Universal, what am I potentially forgetting? Its making me consider narrowing it down to a single setting to start and then crafting the system to facilitate that setting rather than the other way around.

When I think of a universal system, I think of something that can be adapted to every genre but not every style.  The latter seems impossible because the aesthetics of the system and setting would be incongruent.  For example, although my Nevercast system can be seamlessly adapted to a fantasy setting, if I transitioned it to my Dramo Worlmoro setting, it would be retarded.  This is because Nevercast is predicated on realism and Dramo Worlmoro on inanity; I don't need to determine the overpressure generated by the blast wind of a duck mine.

Ar wrote:
When I think of a universal system, I think of something that can be adapted to every genre but not every style.  The latter seems impossible because the aesthetics of the system and setting would be incongruent.  For example, although my Nevercast system can be seamlessly adapted to a fantasy setting, if I transitioned it to my Dramo Worlmoro setting, it would be retarded.  This is because Nevercast is predicated on realism and Dramo Worlmoro on inanity; I don't need to determine the overpressure generated by the blast wind of a duck mine.

so that begs the question, Why does one system handle something better than others? And if the mechanical reason can be identified, why can't it be extracted and and put into another system?

horomancer wrote:
so that begs the question, Why does one system handle something better than others? And if the mechanical reason can be identified, why can't it be extracted and and put into another system?

SAW,
  I think the "right" answer depends on what the game is about.
  In other words, ditv is about "how far are you willing to go to make others do what is right?" The mechanics are perfect for this. And while you could use D&D4e rules set to make Paladins in the wild west, it wouldn't be about seeing how far the PCs are willing to go, would it?
  Similarly, D&D is about solving interesting problems with the resources at hand. Because ditv lets you make up what resources you have, those rules would not be appropriate for that setting.

  So, the real answer to your question is, what is your game about, and how does your mechanics make it about that?

  I think...

Again, it comes down to style.  Without style in mind, a universal system must have rules-consistency together with logical, straightforward algorithms.  To handle various styles, however, the system would also need to be modular so that when you remove or add modules (i.e. segments, not D&D modules), the integrity of the core system doesn't break down.  These new modules would be setting-specific without violating the core rules.  Naturally, the rules would also accommodate a method of altering modules.

In general, I prefer Universal Systems.  The best Universal System, of course, is GURPS, by Steve Jackson Games.  Its primary problem is that the depth of the system is such that most people run screaming from it.  And, for the record, D&D 3rd and 4th, could not, and can not, effectively handle superheroes, modern settings or science fiction.

That being said, there are some awesome Setting Specific systems.  Shadowrun 4th edition, by Catalyst Labs, has solid game mechanics and works well in the setting.  Conan RPG, by Mongoose Games, was also a wonderful setting system.

I don't have any preference as a player, but one advantage I see in more universal systems like d20 or GURPS is that they encourage people (from GMs to players) to adopt them for their world/setting/game, which can lead to a lot of custom content.  I think that type of creativity involving mechanics is important and helps in turn encourage people to get into further game design, since satisfying in-playgroup custom content provides a real reward and helps get people used to giving and receiving design feedback, even if it's not the same kind as is traded about completely new designs.

D&D 4e can handle modern age / far future / sci-fi / superhero genres just as easily as it handles fantasy.  Remove the classes, remove the feats, and make new classes, new powers, new feats that fit the genre along with a new equipment list and boom, you have a system that can handle that genre.  Actually, Monsters & Mayhem, my 4e derivative is Universal & Setting Specific.  It is universal in that the game mechanics are adaptable enough to any setting and any genre with very limited effort and more importantly, will not include classes, powers, and feats in the main set of rules.  Those are setting specific gameplay elements that will be portioned off into different "books" you can use for creating a campaign for that style of game, be it fantasy, sci-fi, or superhero.

Which goes back to many games having a core resolution system that is Universal and various sub systems which are more setting specific. As i go through building my own system, my goal is to have the core mechanics be as vanilla and universal as possible, while making the traits and skills setting dependent. In fact i hope to really just have frames for the traits and skills that a GM could hang color on, making it so any trait mechanic could be slipped into a game without it being upsetting to the rest of the game.
I think the biggest draw back in Universal is the feel of the game as it accomplishes tasks. You can do ANYTHING with either DitV or D&D core rules, but the way DitV presents problems is a process you go through to reach a resolution, while D&D is a simple 'Did you do it? Yes/no'. For social challenges Ditv feels right, but it would feel awkward for something as simple as picking a lock. Visa versa D&D has rules for social encounters, whole classes built on being social, but makes social actions equivalent to hitting someone with your 'Charm Sword' and can be completely devoid of Player input to have actions occur. "I charm the Elven priest *roles d20* He is charmed..."

Luminous wrote:
D&D 4e can handle modern age / far future / sci-fi / superhero genres just as easily as it handles fantasy.  Remove the classes, remove the feats, and make new classes, new powers, new feats that fit the genre along with a new equipment list and boom, you have a system that can handle that genre.  Actually, Monsters & Mayhem, my 4e derivative is Universal & Setting Specific.  It is universal in that the game mechanics are adaptable enough to any setting and any genre with very limited effort and more importantly, will not include classes, powers, and feats in the main set of rules.  Those are setting specific gameplay elements that will be portioned off into different "books" you can use for creating a campaign for that style of game, be it fantasy, sci-fi, or superhero.

Isn't that how GURPS works? A core rule book that is Universal with a library of other books detailing setting specific powers skills and equipment? I only played GURPS once a decade or so ago so I don't remember to well. If that is the case, then by your logic there can be no Universal system unless the system includes rules that you don't even bother to use since they handle aspects that aren't in a particular setting.
I think it's best to agree that certain mechanics can be universal (like the dice used and how they are rolled) but other aspects can't be anything but setting specific (how magic works).

Methinks y'all would benefit from reading some of the articles on this site.

First check out System Does Matter, written by Ron Edwards. It's extremely relevant to the topic at hand.

SAW wrote:

Luminous wrote:
D&D 4e can handle modern age / far future / sci-fi / superhero genres just as easily as it handles fantasy.  Remove the classes, remove the feats, and make new classes, new powers, new feats that fit the genre along with a new equipment list and boom, you have a system that can handle that genre.  Actually, Monsters & Mayhem, my 4e derivative is Universal & Setting Specific.  It is universal in that the game mechanics are adaptable enough to any setting and any genre with very limited effort and more importantly, will not include classes, powers, and feats in the main set of rules.  Those are setting specific gameplay elements that will be portioned off into different "books" you can use for creating a campaign for that style of game, be it fantasy, sci-fi, or superhero.

With your suggestion to 4e, that is absolutely not a Universal System. If you have to rip out everything and rebuild/balance it all from scratch, that is not user-friendly. A Universal System would provide a means for substitution that would allow the average group to play it in whatever setting they wanted--having to fully re-engineer 90% of the system pretty much disqualifies it from being "Universal".

:: reads article::

I think this article is poorly thought out. While a system does matter, it matters for reasons different than what he has listed. Either his point was not made clear or his logic is faulty. He starts by listing the player types from the GNS model, and games they would most likely enjoy based on the system they use. He then states that a system cannot make everyone happy do to it being to slow (for a narrative), to inaccurate (for a simulation), or to unfair (for a gamist).
The author then goes into the three main types of mechanics; Fortune, Karma, and Drama. He states quiet clearly that these mechanics can be used freely in combination with little bearing on the nature of the game. While it is true that certain mechanics would be more suited for one of the GNS groups, the majority of a mechanics influence comes from it's execution. He ends with stating that a system design should pick one of the GNS outlooks and not bother trying to do the rest since the dominate mechanic won't make the other two outlooks enjoy the system.
I call bullshit
The GNS model covers different aspects of a game but they are not exclusive. You can have a good story, with realistic results to various challenging situations that may arise in any game. The author states that the mechanics execution is the real rub of any system and he is right about this point. How a mechanic is constructed will largely dictate how fast, how accurate, and fair it is, with a good design on this level being a powerful tool that can be implemented into any playing style. The system only matters in how well it is built to handle the resolution of conflict which occurs in a game. The System Does Matter, but not for the reasons presented in this article.

How this applies to our conversation on Universal and Setting systems.
I contend that a conflict resolution mechanic is Universal when it is well built and can be broken free from the exact nature of a conflict. A badly built conflict resolution mechanic while not be able to cleanly break from Setting specific rules, but having setting specific rules does not lock a system into being a Setting system. How the conflict resolution mechanic's design and executed will largely dictate the feel (how it applies to a GNS group) but this differs from it being Universal or Setting specific.

One thing to keep in mind is that like video games, table top games are often built on an engine, a set of core mechanics that can be used to create multiple more specific implementations.  So no D&D isn't universal because it's rules are based around the world of D&D.  D20, D&D's core system, is universal.  You can reverse engineer a game and strip it down to it's core mechanics, but the doesn't make that implementation a universal game.  The big difference is what the majority of a book's content and rules focuses on.  Gurps is universal because it's multi-genre.  Fudge is even most universal because it's designed to help you build your own game from scratch.

Now on to the topic at hand.  I like setting specifics games.  I find having the game world as focus to be very helpful.  I also like having in depth mechanics, which universal systems tend to shy away from because they make the game more complicated.  Even if you have in depth mechanics in a universal system, it's either because you invented some, or because game already had a bunch, which usually means a lot of content you have to looks through just to play the game.  Either option makes in depth universal systems hard to use.

@horomancer

To summarize your response, you say that the article suggests a system must either be too slow, inaccurate, or unfair. You then suggest that these three qualities are not exclusive and therefore a mechanic can be built that is all of fast, accurate, and fair, so that everyone is happy and therefore the article is plum wrong. To some degree, you are correct: sometimes mechanics can be made faster, more accurate, and fairer all at the same time. However, when you start reaching the limits, these properties are *necessarily* exclusive, and compete with each other.

Let's take fast versus accurate: how quickly can I calculate the damage of a simple wooden club against a monster's face? D&D does it pretty quickly: roll 1d4. A faster method would be to just assign a simple number, say, 3. Is this accurate? Hell no. The ultimately accurate simulation of the damage caused by a club would be represented in a Holodeck, with fake cells rupturing, fake bones possibly breaking, fake blood spattering. This type of simulation is NOT FAST. Imagine the processing power that would be required to do this.

You can think of other examples for how G, N, and S are mutually exclusive at the limits. Therefore: for any given system, it's going to have it's GNS strengths and weaknesses. A "universal" system, too, will have such strengths and weaknesses and can really only be universal in terms of setting. I'm not arguing that universal systems shouldn't exist, just that they can't be "play-stylistically" universal.

@SAW (i.e. the original poster)

If you're referring to a "Setting Universal" system, I think you would be necessarily sucking some of the flavour out of the mechanics. This is both good and bad. It's good because, of course, the system gets to be universal so people using your game could make up their own settings, but it's bad because it would be difficult to make it capture peoples' attentions in the first place. This is the biggest reason I avoided playing "FUDGE" and "GURPS". Who the hell wants to play a game with a name like "Insert Generic Name Here, With Exclamation Point"

For the game I'm working on personally? The core system is universal but, for the reasons mentioned, I'm hiding it under a dressing of sweet, delicious setting.

I have a very strong bias towards setting-specific systems, and against generic ones, for two reasons:

1) They're not generic. More specifically, what they often are is "setting-independent", like, say, GURPS; you can run a GURPS game in any setting, and what you'll get is a game that has certain specific variances depending on the setting, but behaves like GURPS -- a point-based, overly-complicated-combat-weighted game. If that's what you like, go for it.  But it very clearly privileges (by weight of its rules and its systems) certain sorts of play over others. And usually not the sorts I want. ;)

DiTV, to use the other example batted around here, privileges "how much will you pay/risk" as the central question; which is often a more interesting question to me, and if I had to "run a game" in a world with no time to design specific rules, I'd probably pick DiTV; well, that, or Ars <insert latinate version of name here>, an Ars Magica variant. ;) But that's because I played so much AM that I *can* adapt it, much like "Herbie" in the essay's example.

2) A really big part of what I like about gaming in different environments is being presented with, in as similar a fashion as possible, the sorts of decisions/problems/etc that a person in that environment would face.  And any generic system, by its nature, is going to have to abstract those decisions to fit its system -- unless it is so modified that one might as well have started from scratch.  In "The Files", my most recent finished project, I don't have much of a combat system at all -- because in the Le Carre-influenced milieu, combat is often trivial -- while interrogation and confrontation on a psychological level is critical.  Deciding when you have enough information for the burn? That's a decision that's reinforced by having a game mechanic for it, rather than, say, GURPS.

I prefer universal systems as there are a lot of different settings I'd like to play in and explore and I'd rather not have to learn too many different RPG systems to do that. What if I want a game that straddles multiple settings or genres? That said, I'm not a fan of GURPS at all, I'll play it but that's about it. I'll play D20 and Pathfinder too, but they are far from my favourite system.

You do sacrifice certain things with a universal system but I've never really placed accuracy at the head of my list of reasons for playing a game. That said, I don't think most setting-specific systems are entirely specific either. It all has to do with how they are dressed and what people want. Some people would be happy with opposed skill checks and descriptive actions preceding each roll in a fencing scenario (to pull an example off the front page of the board) while others would prefer dice and modifiers to play a greater role in describing the action. In both cases the same basic mechanics could be used for grappling, or hand to hand combat. I count myself more in the first group as I don't like the rules telling me how my character can act, they just need to tell me whether or not they succeeded. It's a fine distinction but one I've run up against many times over the years while playing D20 games.