For The Love of God, Play a Different RPG

I've been playing RPGs for almost half my life now. That's longer than some, and nowhere near as long as others. However, there is a very curious trend I've noticed among a lot of tabletop RPG players, and it's something that never ceases to confuse and fascinate me in equal measure.

Namely that they'll find a game they like, and then just stop. They don't want to hear about other editions, they don't want to try out other systems, they have this one thing, and they will not be moved from this hill. And this often leads to people turning themselves (and their games) inside out instead of just making their lives easier by playing a game that already does what they want (but which their current/favorite game doesn't do).

Please... on behalf of all designers out there... play something else.

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The Right Tool For The Right Job

If you were going to enter a drag race, you'd probably want to bring a muscle car to that event, right? Something that's got a lot of pick-up and go, that hits its speed fast, and that will send you rocketing over the finish line inches ahead of the other guy. Now, maybe you're not used to handling that kind of machine. However, bringing the dusty old VW bus you're used to driving to this kind of event basically guarantees you're not going to make it over the finish line at all. No matter how much you chop down, re-rig, or alter this machine, it's never going to perform as well at this task as a vehicle purpose-made for it. It's even possible that you could cut it down too much, and end up with the whole thing just dying right under you.

For those who aren't sure what this metaphor is talking about, keep reading. You're the ones who most need to hear this.

Because sometimes you just cannot make an X into a Y.

What I'm getting at is that RPGs are built and designed for a purpose. Even games that claim to be broad-reaching and genre-neutral still have limitations regarding what you can and cannot do with them, or alterations you can make to them.

But there are a lot of players (and a lot of GMs) out there, who want to take their game of choice, and twist it in an attempt to make it do something it was never designed or intended to do in the first place.

A perfect example is something I saw the other day. I love Pathfinder, as my regular readers know. I have an entire Character Conversion master list that covers concepts from the Death Korps of Krieg from Warhammer 40,000, to The Incredible Hulk from Marvel, to Sandor "The Hound" Clegane from Game of Thrones, because there's a lot you can do with this game. Something you really can't do with it, though? Run a modern fantasy game where the players are all vampires in a secret world, and who are differentiated into a bunch of different clans each with their own unique power sets and heritages.

Why would someone attempt to run Vampire: The Masquerade using Pathfinder rules? I don't know, but there was someone on a forum who seemed bound and determined to make it happen!

I hope they eventually stopped.

This is the clearest example of this kind of thinking. For one thing, Vampire is a classless system with no levels, and Pathfinder has classes AND levels. Beyond that basic issue, though, vampires are an extremely potent threat in Pathfinder, far beyond something that PCs are supposed to have access to. Not only that, the magic systems are completely different, with Pathfinder using Vancian magic and Vampire using trees of unique powers that cost blood to activate.

It may be the most extreme version of this, but it's certainly not the only one that just wasn't going to work. From trying to remove magic without a replacement from Dungeons and Dragons to make a gritty, "realistic" game (forgetting that high magic as a resource is a major pillar of the game's mechanics), to trying to twist a game as simple as FATE to run a full Werewolf: The Apocalypse campaign, you're just going to be better off choosing the right tool for the right job.

Mechanics Cause Ripples. Flavor Usually Doesn't

As someone who hasn't had the disposable income to purchase a new RPG of my own in most of a decade, I know the struggle when it comes to keeping things fresh around the table. Sometimes you really want to do something different, but you have to work with what you've got. And sometimes you want to change things up, but your group is really loyal to a particular system, and don't want to play anything different, even as a sampler. As someone who's sort of made converting content from one game into content for another my personal niche, let me offer a piece of advice that will save the GMs out there a lot of time, energy, and sweat.

Changing mechanics causes more issues that changing flavor. However, when mechanics and flavor are closely linked, you end up needing to change both of them.

Sand in the gears, and the whole thing falls apart.

Let's say, for example, you wanted to run a DND 5th Edition sci-fi game, but you didn't want to use the rules created by products like Ultramodern Redux. A simple change would be to re-write the classic fantasy species as genetically-engineered creatures, and aliens. Turning orcs into a gene-spliced species of super-soldiers, or making elves into highly-advanced aliens, would change none of the mechanics, but give you all of the flavor shift you want. Changing the species name would likely help, too.

Then there's simply shifting high magic to high tech. Now instead of wizards you have something like Ingeneurs, who use their unique tools and foci to create changes to the world around them. Each school becomes a unique discipline of the sciences, and their "spells" are now cast via implanted neuro devices, handheld computers, and even their familiars might be little more than intelligent, hard light projections. Sorcerers become psionic anomalies altered by a variety of cosmic events, gene-tampering, or alien influences, armor is given a clean up and a name change while the stats remain the same, and so on, and so forth.

That would be a lot of work, but it would be a functional change because the underlying mechanics of the game haven't really been touched.

Could you strip out all magic entirely? Sure, you could. Could you then replace it with a completely different system of high technology? Yep. But at that point, you'd basically be writing your own game, and having to re-balance some really big issues, and to make sure the rules and content you created kept things fair and balanced. And that is a lot harder, while also presenting the real potential for the whole thing to come apart at the seams in the way that flavor changes wouldn't.

So, if you feel you have to alter a system you have in order to run a game it wasn't meant for, keep this in mind. It's going to save you a lot of time, energy, and effort going forward.

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