One distinction for roleplaying games I don’t hear discussed is toolbox games vs. focused games. There is so little discussion that I had to invent the terms to discuss them with my friends. Most games are focused games. They have one setting detailed in the rule book where the game’s designers assume you’ll base your games. The rules are written to accommodate activities and a style of play that are appropriate for that setting. Toolbox games focus on game rules and either don’t mention a setting or briefly detail several settings.
An example of a focused game would be Call of Cthulhu. Most everyone who plays it understands that the game (barring special supplements) is set in our world in the 1920s and should detail exploration of mysterious and dangerous supernatural elements. The themes and moods the game tries to elicit have been well understood by gamers for decades and the rules are custom written to take things in those directions.
GURPS is an example of a toolbox game. It offers rules for many situations and activities and assumes the players will create their own campaign setting. Rules that aren’t needed are stripped away and what’s left is used to run the game that is desired. The designers had no time or place, mood or theme in mind when writing the rules.
Both types of games are a lot of fun but they have different strengths. Focused games help people get their game started quickly and don’t require effort spent on customizing rules. The problem is, if the setting doesn’t appeal to people, the game will be avoided. Toolbox games require more time and effort but allow people to run exactly the game they want. Most roleplaying games fit into one of the two catagories without much debate. The notable exception is the oldest roleplaying game of them all: Dungeons & Dragons.
When Original D&D came out in the mid 70s it was a toolbox game. There weren’t any settings and the authors of the seven or so books made it clear that players were supposed to create their own settings. The spells, magic items and monsters were supposed to be a grab bag that provided the key ingredients needed for running the fantasy campaigns that Gary Gygax assumed people would want to run. Gary Gygax read western history and fantasy fiction and assumed his customers were reading the same (or very similar) books. His assumptions were mostly sound. History wasn’t as much of a battleground then and there was a general consensus on which fantasy stories were the “good stuff”.
As the years went by D&D fell into a groove and slowly grew into its own setting in a way. I say “in a way” because it wasn’t explicitly clear what was developing. The worlds of Greyhawk, Mystara and others were offered to the public but they had to be made compatible with material from whatever was the current edition of the game. The current edition kept most of what was offered in previous editions and most people assumed that everything offered had to be present in the same game world. A meta setting resulted. A kind of template that every D&D world had to accommodate. Dragons that were red could breath fire. Dragons that were green never breathed fire. Gods invented for D&D showed up in multiple settings. Elven boots were among the magic items so elves had to be in every world.
A list of different settings were available for players to choose from. The trouble is, they all had such strong similarities that I felt boxed in regardless which the gamemaster chose. I called this meta setting “D&D Land” and had trouble getting excited about it. To this day I have no fondness for any published D&D setting.
I like D&D most when it’s approached as a toolbox. I take what I want from it, change what I want and exclude what I don’t want. I like a world with “dragons” in it. When my players meet a dragon it has two colors on its hide in blotches and I’ll use any dragon from the monster manual I like for stats. I strip out the races I don’t want to deal with and limit the classes and races available to my players (although I’m usually not too strict if they really want something).
In a sense I’m a D&D traditionalist. I approach the adventures I run in a way that Gary Gygax would have expected (at least in the early days of TSR). The trouble comes when I talk to other D&D fans. Most gamers I meet are attached to the D&D meta setting that has built up over years. Being an iconoclast has its drawbacks.
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