No One True Game Engine

No, this isn't a No True Scotsman argument. This is mostly a self-directed rant.

I have this problem where I keep trying to find/invent the 'one true' game engine to play all the games/settings I want to experience or run. Sadly, this is a bad habit that I gotta kick myself off.

I wanted to find that mythical One Game Engine with TURK (True Universal Roll-and-Keep), and I eventually gave up on the project because Roll n Keep can't do everything I wanted. I've tried again and again to cherry-pick my favorite mechanics from various systems and Frankenstein them together into something that does everything I want and nothing I don't. What I left off with at TURK was a complex and incomplete 'framework' that would need interpreting with every setting I wanted to use it in. Not only would you need a 'CORE' book, but a 'WORLD' book to tell you how to apply the Core rules to each setting. It got crunchy, which was one of the things I was trying to avoid.

Oh hubris, your aftertaste is so bitter.

The humbling truth is: Game engines/systems are tailored to produce their desired effects (whelp, at least modern games systems do. There was a time when everything had six stats, XP and levels and you rolled a d20 in combat and usually percentile dice for everything else...)

In no particular order:

RISK, as in the 7th Sea 2nd Edition, and the forthcoming 7th Sea: Khitai game, has a mechanical focus on using Raises generated by dice rolls as your narrative currency. Players and GM's then spend this currency to decide what their focus on the story details will be. I love some of the ideas in this system; it's a streamlined and evolved version of the original Roll and Keep that inspired me to write TURK in the first place.

D&D, especially 5th Edition, is great at high fantasy storytelling with an emphasis on exploration, combat and character power growth from those activities. Yes, out of the box it doesn't support character emotional and relationship growth, but there's nothing stopping a good GM from making pathos an essential driving force of a story. You don't need mechanics to do that.

Mekton and the FUSION engine are great at the grognardy-number-crunching-mecha-design and smashing stories. The Mekton Technical System is still my favorite because it focused on relative design choices, very flexible scaling and adaptability with a focus on anime physics and storytelling. The only thing holding it back is just how crunchy it gets with character design and advancement (nine primary stats and a variable number of derived stats?!?) and actual mecha combat could get really slow as well.

GURPS started as a wonderfully 'universal' system and was heavily focused on character over everything else. It suffered, i think, from trying to point-balance and option everything possible in character creation. Some of the later editions had VOLUMES published about character options. And don't get me started about GURPS Vehicles.
Okay just one gripe and then moving on: do I really, REALLY need to worry about the weight of the fuzzy dice I hang in my tricked out muscle car? Not to mention calculating the square surface area of the radio so I can determine how much damage it can take? (Fire, Fusion and Steel for Traveller TNE had the same problem.)

Burning Wheel is all about character drama in a gritty and hard way. It encourages player buy-in and adding to the game world and supports that mechanically.

FATE is fantastically abstract, generic and diverse in all the settings it's been used in, but that's also it's weakness. It depends on players and GM's having a firm and agile grip on how to use FATE.

2d20, specifically Star Trek Adventures, does a fine job of capturing the feel of principle-driven science-fiction storytelling. the Momentum mechanic makes intra-character cooperation and collaboration easy. The Infinity setting is just bonkers with the crunchy details that STA lacks.

Eclipse Phase, while a percentile system, does a fabulous job of showing how a game engine can reflect the setting; the separation of ego and morph and how they work together is a wonderful metaphoric mirror to the ideas behind a transhuman/posthumanist setting.

Cypher is fascinating for both it's innovation and return to really old-school themes involving bizarre encounters and devices. It DOES do interesting things with putting all rolls on the player's side of the table and making the GM's management of other characters easier and nominally having an open system for any kind of world-building and setting-making. See here for a separate post about other things I've taken away from my reading of the Cypher system.

Blades in the Dark and Scum and Villainy -both Forged In The Dark games- focus on storytelling with imaginative yet open-to-interpretation universes. This system sets up mechanical frameworks that quickly establish qualitative results that imaginative GMs and Players can color however they wish.

I really do need to embrace the wonderful variety of game systems out there.
Hell, I spend enough on collecting new and interesting games, I should bloody well use them!

Except percentile systems. To hell with them. They're too granular and fiddly and imply arbitrary limitations of capacity and ability. That and I just have terrible luck with them. (Ask me about my RoleMaster experience sometime and buy me a beer, and I'll spin you a yarn about the root of my antagonism towards %-dice based engines.)