Writing.Com General Discussion

I never actually played D&D, but I played a similar system - GURPS (Generic Universal Role Playing System). Like the early D&D systems, it kept things simple and left much to the imagination and put the onus on the games master to keep things straight.

There were two nice things about it:
1) you could create any kind of world you wanted (fantasy, sci-fi, western, steam-punk etc)
2) your beloved character could play in all these worlds because the system had a way of translating skills.

For example, you have rolled a fantasy character and played several fantasies, now you need to play in a sci-fi world. Your weapon an skill spells can translate to to similar level skill in the new world. When you return to a fantasy world, your skills were as they were before, but if they had levelled up then you keep that benefit. If you had gained new skills, then they can be translated.

Lots of books came out defining worlds for you to play in - of course the GM would still have to come up with a story to play in a given world, but the so-called 'world books' were a fantastic boon to the game system.