thread: 2008-04-14 : Interchangeable?
On 2008-04-14, valamir wrote:
I think what your seeing is basically just an application of where the game's focus is.
If a person's focus is on thing B, but the game's focus is on thing A, then all games which focus on thing A are going to appear to be pretty interchangeable from the perspective of thing B.
Because the things that distinguish the way one game addresses thing A vs how another game addresses thing A are not going to look very different from each other relative to the difference between any of those approaches to A vs. thing B.
All of which is to say, that yes, I view a great many of the games on my books shelves to be pretty interchangeable with each other...namely all of those whose primary differences amount to:
1) the way initiative is determined (because the fact that initiative is important at all is a much bigger thing then the differences between how its determined).
2) the way who says what when is determined (because all games that operate from a "say anything anytime, but the GM acts as traffic cop and vets everything before its officially accepted" paradigm are pretty interchangeable in this regard)
3) tactical combat options like weapon and armor matchups, range and cover modifiers, rate of fire and ammo tracking and the like. Because while many games do the details differently, the fact that they care about such details at all makes them far more similar than any game which doesn't care about such things.
