System Neutral?

By Kirk Kahoe

Many will ask “why?” Why suffer in this way and condemn yourself to the never-ending hell of confusion and statistical non-conformity? The answer is, I like a lot of game systems and prefer to be able to add my adventures to any system campaign that I happen to be running in whatever system they are running in. I have done this for over 30 years, with several groups running the same adventure in different systems and with similar statistical outcomes.

The trick to this lies in having an accurate system-to-system conversion process and aiming for the specific target audience’s success percentage. In the former case, this became terribly easy when Excel became easy to use, and for the latter, it is totally based on the type of campaign played. For high fantasy with godlike intervention and more wizards on the corner than coffee houses in an artists’ district, the target is usually 65%. For grim and dark fantasy with realistic outcomes, 50% is a good starting target. For horror, things take a turn for the worse, and I tend to aim for 45% at the beginning and then 35% toward the end to cause “proxy horror,” or the angst that your character is going to die, and stress with every roll.

Added to the above is the fact that many of the mechanisms in my adventures replace those in the native system or add something that the system never had to begin with. This makes System Neutrality almost as easy as having a universal role-playing system. We add, take away, and ensure that the goal is the story, not the math…by doing the math in advance.