So an epiphany I ran into yesterday as I realized that Worlds Without Number is currently the best OSR game:
There's a reason D&D never satisfies. A reason I've been blocking out for years. The reason the edition treadmill keeps running for it, that it's the most houseruled game per capita. The reason people often eventually "grow out of it". And it is almost nonsensical.
There's no setting in D&D. There are inferences/tidbits of a setting. Otto's irresistible dance. Elves and Dwarves. Vancian magic. But there's no actual history, no meat to the setting.
Which means that like GURPS, D&D sucks because it's the second best game you could come to for playing the game you want to play. Without a world, a setting, there's nothing to hang any of these mechanics on. Just tropes and nostalgia.
Worlds Without Number is the best OSR because it's great rules attached to a great and malleable setting. You can use it like D&D where the setting is in the background or barely touched on, but there is weight there for a DM to stand on if they want.
I only had a notion of this until I looked over my shelf. Games I celebrate the most have evocative and rich baked in settings - Empire of the Petal Throne, Helveczia, The Nightmares Underneath, Prince Valiant, Talislanta, Warhammer, now Worlds Without Number, the list goes on. And after realizing that there's a fundamental incompleteness to even the best OSRs including Swords & Wizardry or Fantastic Heroes & Witchery. There's some great ideas in FH&W but without a setting collaborating all the various elements, it feels like a disjointed mess, a scattershot firing of tons of elements for reasons unknown.
But I must interject here that setting isn't everything. There are dozens of games with baked in settings that suck ass. All of the L5R games live there. Pretty much anything Palladium put out. You have to have both system and setting that sing and work well together. D&D is essentially cheating by not having a setting.
So the requirement is for _BOTH_ to be good. And it's a very tall order. People good with settings are bad with mechanics. People good at the art of games are bad and the design of games. And somethimes bad at the business of games. Kevin Crawford is the king of the OSR because he's good at what he's good at, and what he's bad at he knows how to pay for getting people who are better at it involved. He runs his company like a business. And that's why he succeeds while others fail. That's why Jim Raggi can have more followers and excitement/publicity in/for his games, and still fail horribly in comparison, his company on death's door. But that's warping into another discussion entirely.
This is also low key why I've never finished creating a game. I hit a wall of fruitlessness at one point. I never could put my finger on why, but there it is. I've never been interested in designing a setting.
