Why the five games chosen for Violent Resolution?

Over on the GURPS Forums, someone wondered why I’d chosen the games I chose. Why those in particular?

Well . . .

If you’re doing gaming you HAVE to do D&D. Whether it’s D&D5 or Pathfinder is your call, but that was the first big popular system and more or less remains so. D&D is an outgrowth of the CHAINMAIL wargame, and the influence still shows in that it’s a tactical system based on HP ablation. D&D in various forms probably accounts for 8-9 out of 10 bucks of RPG sales.

And for me personally, choosing D&D5 was good because it helped me learn the rules.

So that’s one.

For other tactical systems, I chose GURPS because. I couldn’t not. But it would make a fine choice no matter what. It’s got the finest turn resolution and the least abstract rules equivalency in combat – a blow really IS a blow, facing really DOES matter, and if you get injured a few times, you go down. It’s a blatantly tactical game at the core, though of course you don’t have to play it that way. Again, it shows the ancestry to Man-to-Man and The Fantasy Trip.

That’s two.

Savage Worlds had been held up as “the system people are leaving GURPS to go play” in some prior discussions I’d had. I frankly wanted to see if the system was “all that.” It too was wargame-derived, I later found out. Deadlands, then something about a Train, and Savage Worlds came out of a simplification of the mass battle system. Anyway, so again, tactical combat. A system I’d never played, too. It also has the unusual mechanic of exploding polyhedral dice. I’ve seen “big dice are better!” before, but I wanted to see how much better.

That was three tactical systems, and I wanted to include a pair of narrative ones. The GUMSHOE system is the classic narrative system by design. Heck, the entire purpose of the system is to avoid rolling, in a way. I’d played Trail of Cthulhu and did NOT like its combat or general skills resolution system. Then Ken Hite graciously took me to school in my interview with him about the metagame currency of screen time, and that changed my perspective on how things play. It’s also crazy low-resolution – roll 1d6 for everything. The die is only there for the seeming of variability to force different uses of the screen time mechanic. And yet NBA has some very specific rules for chases, for martial arts, for explosives. It’s the latest in the GUMSHOE evolution, and had years of suggested improvements and tweaks. It’s also a great read, with a lot of advice for how to write a camaign. And I love Ken and his work. So that made four.

Finally, Fate Core, which is another narrative game, but a very, very crunchy one, in a way. Again, the metagame currency of screen time via a limited number of action points (Fate Points), but this one you have some basic skill levels. The low resolution (though higher than NBA) combat mechanics (Attack, Defend, Create an Advantage being the most frequently used) were interesting, and the probabilities of victory surprisingly stark (4dF-4dF doesn’t have that much spread).

I considered more, but as it turned out, five was more than enough to nearly overwhelm me. Other options might make an interesting follow-up, but I’m liking the “write what strikes my fancy” phase I’m in now.