I think that FATE does a pretty good job of modeling novel-style heroism (the hero defies the odds but generally wins anyway due to the players having partial narrative control).
I haven't played it yet, but I do have Spirit of the Century, and I remember FUDGE. FATE seems to be very much into modeling story (or 'narrativist') over modeling world (or 'simulationist') which is nice, though I see merit in both aproaches - from the exercise of creating inter-connected 'novels' for the PCs as part of character creation, to the Aspects, to the sort of 'plot coupon' mechanics.
For example, my character got a FATE point from my GM for not backing down when faced with a powerful NPC because of my “My Father Told Me to Duel Often” and then I spent that FATE point to help win the fight.
lol
D&D wasn't too firmly in either the 'story' or 'world' camp until 3e, when it got more consistent in it's world-modeling tendencies, with PCs, NPC and monsters using very nearly the same rules for character creation, for instance. 4e got more narrativist, with things like surges, dailies, and action points (all useable like 'plot coupons' to a small, specialized degree). Neither to as great a degree as games that really spcialize one way or the other, but each got some good (and not so good) results out of the subtle shift in emphasis.
An important asside about 'simulation.' Simulation, realism, and verisimilitude get thrown around a lot. 3.5 wasn't, I think, exactly any of those things, but it had qualities of them. What it really seemed like to me was a game in a simulationist mode that wasn't trying to simulate anything, it just had the internal consistency of a simulationist system, but rather than trying to simulate a world, it implied a world. There was never a world/system diconnect, because the world /was/ the system. For instance, in 3.5, craft let you make an item at 1/3rd cost, and you could sell items for half cost - so it was 'realistically' possible to live as a crafter. The existance of the expert class and the craft skill - not the need of a world to have people who make stuff as a backdrop for the heroes' story - fills the world with crafters. It's a subtle but profound characteristic of some games.
Some games, like Battletech, describe a world in rich detail, and model it with mechanics that often fail to model the world described. 3e vaguely described a world, and let the mechanics of the system imply the rich detail of that world as a consequence of how they worked. Of the two, I certainly prefer 3e.
Battletech was just a jarring waste of column inches. 3e gave you one sort of fantasy world/genre that it did very faithfully - itself. But, to run a different world than the one implied by the rules, you needed to change the rules - great fun, actually, if you're up to the challenge.
4e is not often considered realistic or simulationist, but it does try to simulate something: an heroic fantasy story. The 4e system does not imply a world, but a genre. Within that genre, you can concieve of a variety of charaters, worlds and stories and run them with little need to mod the system. If, OTOH, you wanted to run a different genre - specifically, not an heroic one, you could take just martial classes and run a magickless game - you'd have to overhaul them.
As a DM, I do have a certain weakness for the system-implying-world aproach. It's perfect for tinkering and customizing to create a campaign where rule- and power- consicous players will create the kinds of characters you're going for, seek the kinds of challenges you're going for, and overcome them with the kind of solutions you're going for. They're very channelizing, rather than rail-roading. You don't need a plot with rails, because there's one best path through the decicision tree, and skillful players will find it. It's a lot of fun to tinker with such a system, or to build characters for it (especially optimizaton exercises). It can, at times, be a little less fun to actually play, though, because the most important decisions and the actual victories often happen before you sit down and roll dice.
Difficulty has nothing to do with either style.
The implication certainly seemed to be that CaW = realy hard challenges for real gamers, and CaS = non-challenges for pansies. There's been a lot of arrogance and talking-down going on in this thread - and not
all by me, either. :hmph:
Yup, there’s a lot of indie games I love (especially FATE) that are built on concepts that didn’t exist until relatively recently, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t old games that blow just about every new game out of the water at the particular things that they focus on.
That's true of some games that 'capstoned' the style they were working in, I'm sure. The ultimate test of a game's quality is not apples
ranges comparisons with very different games, but internal. It the game consistent? Can you play it as-is without problems? Over it's full scope? (and how wide is it's scope?) Does it present myriad viable choices, or lack choice? or do 'obvious best' choices crowd out most others, or 'trap' choices make it treacherous for the uninitiatied?
As you reach back to the earliest days of the hobby, no game met all, or even many, of those criteria. The best might have hit one or two.
But, certainly you can make any game 'best in class' if you just define it into a class by itself.
What I’m talking about is that, for example, when I played a 3ed campaign in which CLW wands were readily available any fight that didn’t have a chance of killing us all was boring since we could just heal up right afterwards. In D&D I don’t want every fight to be dancing on the line of a TPK in order to be fun and the last few games of 3ed that I played were exactly that. I’ve got a lot of love for 3ed, but damn does it require some house ruling to be fun.
Sounds like not all our experiences are that different...