Tight focus versus a sprawling playground

[Mailanka]

Originally Posted by Ulzgoroth

I think it's confused to relate the focused vs. less focused game to the books. It's true that DF, MH, and Action are about relatively focused games, but Fantasy, Space and Horror aren't in any way opposed to that.

I don't want to interfere with people posting their experiences, because I'm just looking for input here, not really angling for one direction or the other, but I thought it might be useful for me to clarify my thoughts on the above matter because, as Ulzgoroth points out, it is confusing.

Compare and contrast the templates found in GURPS DF and GURPS Fantasy. Look first at GURPS Fantasy. If you handed that book to players and said "You can pick any template in this book, but you all have to work together to protect a kingdom from the evils that beset it," nothing would prevent one player from choosing to play as the True King, while another chose to play as an Assassin. Mechanically, they have almost nothing in common: the True King is almost entirely politically focused, while the Assassin is a combat character with great stealth ability. The True King isn't going to be very useful in storylines that focus on the Assassin, and vice versa. On the other hand, that doesn't mean they can't work together (the Assassin works to protect the True King from unseen threats and quietly eliminates his rivals while the True King works directly to improve the kingdom), and their two different focuses will add different dimensions to the game. A "sprawling playground."

On the other hand, if I handed people DF and said much the same thing, no matter what template the players chose, you'd get combat-capable dungeon delvers. No True Kings, unless someone figures out how to make a D&D-inspired Warlord type, because True Kings don't go dungeon delving. Every character will be able to contribute more or less equally to all the plots: In dungeon crawls, they're all optimized to kick butt, and they're all equally unconcerned with politics, romance or murder mysteries (which means the GM will improvise a lot if he wants to add any of those to the game).

You can really see this when you look at the racial templates: in Fantasy, elves have Unaging because elves are traditionally seen as immortal. In DF, they do not, because nobody cares about Unaging in a dungeon crawling game. It's just fluff.

That's why I chose to contrast the tightly focuses genre-emulation books with the more generic genre books. I want to get a sense for what people prefer and what they think of the two approaches.