Why System Matters

A Suggested Paradigm for Understanding The Game:

At the far extremes of the roleplaying game's PC power continuum there resides at one end the idea that the player characters are society's dispossessed who are trying to carve out a place for themselves in a hostile world; and at the other end of the continuum are the PCs who are played as gifted heroes seeking to save the world from the forces of evil. As with most continuums, the nature of any specific roleplaying game will usually fall someplace in between the extreme ends, offering players a little of this, and a bit of that. Making the game fit the players' expectations regarding the power level and role PCs will play is a significant part of taking on the responsibility of setting up the game.

A published game system often supports one of these extremes, but not the other - at least to the extent that it comes ready to run out of the box. One way to look at the current division in tabletop roleplaying schools of thought is to examine the preferences for where the game falls on this continuum. Games dedicated to roleplaying comic book supers can be viewed as an obvious example of the "gifted heroes saving the world" style. The "supers" genre typifies a game style that is near the powerful from the start end of the continuum. At the opposite end may be games that pit "normal" human PC types against supernatural monsters or alien beings of god-like power. Thwarting their evil designs while retaining a sliver of the PC's sanity may be the only successful outcome in this style of play. 

The popular fantasy RPG genre includes titles which are clearly aimed toward one extreme or the other, either super-heroics or a fight for survival, but the majority seem to fall some place in the middle on this continuum. Individual players may push a system in their preferred direction, heroic or just barely above normal, and usually can do so without resorting to a major modification of the system rules. So-called generic systems have greater flexibility built into their game design, including power scale, but even they tend to favor play at one end or the other of the power continuum. One easy way to shift the focus in a game without much attention to mechanics is to address the role the PCs play in the game's society. Are they the local heroes or are they outcasts, mercenaries and traveling opportunists?  

With its roots in wargaming and Outdoor Survival, the original fantasy role-playing game rules started player characters at a power level ranked just above normal humans. Veterans are what the level one fighting men are called. They roll melee dice as a normal man plus one pip - just a slight improvement over the combat capabilities of a normal soldier. Combat effectiveness and the ability to survive encounters with deadly enemies increased\s as the player character advanced in level. By the fourth level, the original edition fighting man has earned the title Hero and has increased in melee power to fighting as effectively as four normal soldiers - rolling four melee dice and possibly scoring a hit or "kill" on each die. In return, a monster must score four hits in one turn against the Hero in order to effectively "kill" that fourth level "Hero" character.

Comparing the modern game to computer and console roleplaying games, the starting character is already heroic in ability and PC "death" is not a permanent condition as your "killed" character will typically respawn alive and well after a short pause in gameplay. Progress in the game is barely interrupted and all that is usually lost if the last encounter. All presumably because the market research has indicted that players having to re-start the game after losing your character is "not fun". 

This attitude toward character death, together with the starting power level of the player characters constitute two of the often cited reasons explaining why a player may prefer one style of tabletop roleplaying game over another. To be fair, there are many factors that influence why we choose any particular game system over its competitors, and the availability of ready players for that system is often chief among the reasons, but the power paradigm and preferences for where a system falls along the continuum has some face validity in understanding our preferences in my experience.