Does System Matter?

The big RPG Twitter discussion at the moment is 'does system matter?' so I'm going to weigh in on that one.

In short, yes.  Of course system matters.

D&D 4e was very unpopular with fans of D&D 3.5, to the point where a bunch of us jumped ship to Pathfinder because we liked the system better.  In my group at least, it wasn't because we liked Golarian better than the Forgotten Realms because we didn't use either setting.

The reason the only White Wolf game I've run is Scion is because it's the only one with a setting I like enough to overcome my hatred of the Storyteller System.  And even then I'd far rather have been running it with Fate.

I think my 'two games, one genre' posts illustrate this pretty well.  Taking my favourite, cyberpunk, as an example, Cyberpunk 2020 and The Sprawl are pretty much identical, setting-wise, with the only difference being that the former includes large amounts of setting detail while the latter assumes you already know what cyberpunk looks like.  You can play either of them in the same setting.

But you can't run a Cyberpunk 2020 campaign in The Sprawl, because the two systems promote radically different styles of play.  Cyberpunk 2020 is all about the numbers, as you track your stats, skills, armour ratings, money, humanity loss and damn near anything else that could possibly be abstracted to a number.  The Sprawl sits at the other end of the scale as a Powered By The Apocalypse game, where it's all about the fictional positioning and moves.

So perhaps what matters most is whether the system supports the play style.  You can run an investigative horror game with Call of Cthulhu or Trail of Cthulhu, but while you can run heroic fantasy using BRP, I can't imagine it working quite so well using Gumshoe because that's not what Gumshoe does.

If system didn't matter, people wouldn't keep coming up with new ones.  We'd all still be playing original red box D&D regardless of setting and I wouldn't get a thrill each time I discover a new system that better supports a specific style of play.  I barely know the setting of Blades In The Dark, as for some reason our GM wanted to keep us in the, ahem, dark.  But the system was so innovative and exciting that it made me want to play more Forged In The Dark games, regardless of setting.

System matters.  It's not the only thing that matters, or even the most important thing, but it's absolutely on the list.  And in a future post, I will doubtless write that list.