Games and metaphors

My players certainly are aware, and some other people may be as well, that I run games in a variety of different systems. My choices of which system to use for which game aren't always the obvious ones, and I've puzzled from time to time over what guides them. The way the choice immediately presents itself to me is that I often have an intuitive sense of "rightness" of the choice of a particular system for a particular setting and theme, which is hard to pin down to explicit criteria.

For example, I've tried three different universal engines that I find fairly reliable: Big Eyes Small Mouth, FUDGE, and GURPS. When I wanted to run a Tolkienian campaign in my last cycle, I picked BESM rather than either of the other two. In thinking about why, I got a more explicit idea that may be useful in thinking about games in general.

BESM has what might be called a core model of what's going on: If you're trying to decide whether a rule or a game mechanic makes sense, you can try to visualize the game events as a series of pictorial images that you might see in anime, and ask if the game rules produce the outcome and the flow of cause and effect that you would expect in anime. GURPS, in contrast, isn't designed around that core model. In GURPS, what you try to do is decide how things would happen in the real world, or in the-real-world-if-people-had-superpowers or the-real-world-if-magic-worked or whatever. GURPS reinforces this with the concept of "reality testing" and with the use of real units such as pounds, yards, and seconds, eschewing all game units such as game inches or encumbrance points. The reality testing of GURPS is testing against, well, physical reality; the "reality testing" of BESM is testing against anime reality.

Now, Tolkien was not an anime creator, of course; even Peter Jackson isn't an anime creator. But Tolkien was a very visual thinker, who liked to draw sketches of the landscapes and architecture of his world, and Jackson carried the same tendency even further. Tolkien's art often has tiny human (or elf, dwarf, or hobbit) figures tucked into corners in rather the style of East Asian landscapes. And even though he pays attention to things like food and baggage, Karen Wynn Fonstad had a hard time turning his statements into coherent distances and maps based on them. So the visual reality of BESM is a better fit to Middle-Earth than the strongly physical reality of GURPS.

It strikes me that other games might be looked at in similar terms, as each having a core model of how things work, that specific rules can be compared to to see how well they work. For example, the core model of Hero System is not a physical one but a tactical one: characters are tactical units that are supposed to be balanced against each other in tactical terms, to produce as even a match between opposing forces as possible and thus best allow players to test their skill in handling those forces. The core model of FUDGE is a narrative one: characters are defined in terms that could be used in a story, and the outcomes of their actions are supposed to be plausible elements in a narrative. The core model of Toon is of course classic Warner Brothers cartoons, a visual reality somewhat different from that of anime.

All of these are good fits to the things their core models are taken from. And if you're trying to run a game with that core model, the respective game will serve you well. But if you try to use a game for a fictional setting to which a different core model is a better fit, you can expect to be frustrated.

I don't know how universal an approach this is; I haven't tried it out on all the game engines I've used. But it interests me and it seems to give me a bit more of a handle on experiences I've had in picking the systems for various games.