Poll
Question:
Do you prefer Crunchy or Light-Hearted Mechanics?
Option 1: Lots of Crunch with lots of Maths
Option 2: Lots of Crunch but using Tables for Simplification
Option 3: Some Crunch, Rules are Open and can be Fudged
Option 4: More Light-hearted rules that allow for more of a Narrative story
Option 5: Complete and Total Anarchy! We're telling a story after all!
Option 6: Other (Please describe down below)
What kinds of system mechanics do you prefer? Do you like to use a lot of math, and the dice rule over if your characters succeed or not? Or do you prefer a system that uses more innovation and tends to lean more towards story development? Tell us about a time where this was beneficial, or may have backfired! I'll go ahead and start...
The first role playing game that I purchased was RoleMaster RMSS. If anybody knows anything about this game, it uses a d100 (percentile) system, and makes use of pages upon pages of tables and charts to tell you what the outcome of your roll is. Since this was the first system I made an investment in, it holds a special place in my heart.
Character creation often took a day to perfect, and we ultimately scrapped the Character Sheet for an Excel Spreadsheet to keep track of the monster listing of Skills. I can only imagine playing this game system today with the advent of Smartphones, where I could have my Excel Spreadsheet on my phone, and the PDFs of the game book handy. It would make traveling to a friend's house to play much easier!!
However, since I've played about half a dozen different game systems, my favorite style seems to be the more light-hearted variety. I like a lot of technical customization for character creation, but when I'm playing, I like to be able to bend and flex the rules a bit so that the story is the focus.
This is probably why so far, my favorite game system is Big Eyes Small Mouth. It has a fairly easy Stat Block to manage, uses a Point Build system for character development, and has a wide range of narrative/effects based abilities/skills that allow me not to get bogged down in the mechanics of the rules, and just play the game based on what I want to have happen... the effect. Is it a perfect gaming system? Probably not, but since version 4 came out, and there are a number of expansion books available that tweak the guidelines, I'm fairly invested in this system, and I believe that Mark is trying to make amends for what happened with the 3rd edition.