Tight focus versus a sprawling playground

[Mailanka]

I offer for your consideration two very different books: GURPS Dungeon Fantasy and GURPS Fantasy. In the former, we have a tight mechanical focus: You go into dungeons, kill things, and take their stuff. I'm sure people who have played DF extensively often get into other things such as romance and intrigue, but the actual mechanics of the game doesn't revolve around this. In the latter, we have a set of templates and mechanics that assume very little about the game. The templates found in GURPS Fantasy will explicitly support anything from dungeon crawls to romance to intrigue and everything in between.

In your opinion, in your experience, which is superior?

It seems to me that the former's tighter focus makes the game simpler. The players know what to expect when it comes to building and advancing their characters, and they know what to expect. You can stray from that path, but when you do, everyone is equally ill-equipped to deal with the new situation. That is, everyone is equally well-equipped to kill monsters and take their stuff, and to deal with the politics at a king's court, therefore, everyone can participate equally in the current story. On the other hand, you risk the game falling into a rut as everything becomes so much fluff around the "real purpose" of the game (ie Dungeon Crawling).

The latter explicitly supports greater flexibility. One player might be a great warrior, another a great politician, a third a master of mysteries. This allows the players to explore the elements they find more interesting and ensures that each player can shine during "his scene," but it also means that players who aren't equipped for the current scenario can barely participate.

I've run GURPS games both ways, with one game centered entirely on soldiers (so every character could fight in a military scenario), and another where characters were scattered all over the spectrum from great warriors to great beauties to great politicians (though even here, I do tend to find I pick at least a few things to focus on). I'm looking to start a new campaign, and I can't quite decide which it should be. On the one hand, my instincts tell me that focus is better, that I can build complexity atop a simplistic foundation. On the other hand, I like the rich sense of possibility that a more flexible set-up brings.

So I thought I'd ask the Hive Mind. Do you prefer tightly focused games like Monster Hunters, Action and Dungeon Fantasy, or do you prefer more broadly focused games, like Fantasy, Space and Horror?