As I’ve mentioned here before, I have been playing tabletop roleplaying games for a very, very long time now. Almost 50 years, actually. And there’s one thing I’ve been thinking about lately regarding the hobby, which I’d like to discuss today. Specifically…
The particular game system you choose to play doesn’t matter. I mean, not at all.
What do I mean by that? Well, in the simplest terms, all TTRPG systems are just a means to the same end, which is to help you and your group craft an epic story together. It honestly doesn’t matter what ruleset you are using, because whether you are rolling a D20, or percentile dice, or Fate/FUDGE dice, or no dice at all, you end up at the same place.
“But Scormey!” you exclaim. “Isn’t [Insert TTRPG here] better at running [Insert genre here] games than [Insert other TTRPG here]?”
No. The only thing that matters is what works best for your group. And even that is only mildly important.
Look, it all comes down to Homebrew, which we all use in one manner or another. If someone says they play ‘Rules as Written’ (RAW) through every game, I’ll call them fools or liars. TTRPGs are meant to be story engines, not Dictators of Fun. Anyone who thinks otherwise hasn’t played very long, or hasn’t played enough different systems in their lives. Just saying.
But I digress.
The point here is, rules don’t matter. You can play “Dungeons & Dragons” or “Daggerheart”, “Cyberpunk” or “CY_BORG”, or what ever else you like. The rules are simply a framework to support storytelling and play. That’s it. Maybe your group enjoys the tactical D20-based D&D rules, and maybe you prefer something more story-focused like “Daggerheart”. In the end, you can tell the same stories in either system. Hell, you can use those two, or any other ruleset to play in any genre you like. Horror, fantasy, old West, sci-fi, and so forth.
Like I said, it comes down to homebrew. Which is to say, it doesn’t matter what the books say, in the end, it is how the group using those books choose to play them that matters.
Recently I was chatting with a co-worker about “Rifts”. This was a game my old group and I played extensively back in the 90’s and 2000’s, and his group played for a while, as well. The difference is that we were playing two entirely different games.
Our group stuck to the setting set forth in the books, and mostly stuck to the rules (I don’t know anyone who plays the Palladium books RAW, that just seems like torture). Meanwhile, the game my co-worker played followed the Palladium rules (again, mostly), but their setting only vaguely resembled that in the official books. What he described was more “Urban Fantasy”, with the adventurers being effectively superpowered characters in a modern setting, who seek out and fight monsters that enter the world through transdimensional Rifts.
When you come right down to it, we were playing the same game, and effectively playing completely different games, all at the same time. But it really doesn’t matter, because when you come right down to it, both groups were playing the game correctly. They were telling the story they wanted to tell at their table, with the rules they chose to use.
We’ve all seen the many, many different games that have used D&D as the bones for their own, unique TTRPG, across a wide variety of game genres. My point is that this isn’t unique to D&D, you can do the same with any game ruleset, and many of these games are specifically built for this purpose (GURPS, Fate, Savage Worlds, and many more). But even if they aren’t, you can use any ruleset to play any type of TTRPG, if you are simply willing to put in the work.
That’s where the Homebrew comes in.
Personally, I prefer to kitbash games together, if I’m looking to use ruleset A to play different genre B. Or simply create a basic set or rules to use with any particular game genre. That’s how I got started in TTRPGs, actually. My older brother was learning to play the original version of D&D in high school, but we didn’t have any books or dice, and he had no one but my friend and I to play with when Summer break started. So he made up some basic rules, we stole d6’s out of a variety of board games we had, and started exploring dungeons and haunted houses together.
In the end, it was just as D&D as any fantasy game was, and just as spooky as any horror game was (other than “Call of Cthulhu”… we weren’t reading Lovecraft quite yet). We played that way until 1982, when we finally got our hands on 1st edition AD&D and a proper set of dice, and frankly, I thought our original rules were better. But that’s just me.
Anyway, my point is that you can play any sort of game genre, with any set of rules you prefer. Sure, that may not work at every table, but what works at your table is all that matters.
