The Non-Euclidian Staircase

I am personally very affected by system. In some ways, I see the game mechanics are the "rules of physics" the character's world follows, so some things follow from that.

In some games, this affects very basic things about my character... Some games require characters to fall into certain broad stereotypes by their role in the story (D&D prior to 3E was very much this way, as is Cyberpunk; D&D 3E and 3.5 are only slightly more flexible), others are more subtle about it (GURPS or Tri-Stat, which make it look like you can generalize, but can render you unable to do much effectively unless you specialize), while others can present a truly blank page (Everway, Over the Edge, Nobilis, or Hero Wars, for example) to the point that you may even be creatively paralyzed by the wealth of choices. If I know an idea won't work in a certain game, I put that concept on hold and use it later, in a game where it won't conflict with the rules of the world. Which is just what I'll do if my idea conflicts with the GM's presented setting. In that way, system is an extension of the setting, so the same setting in different systems will not produce the same game.

For example, Vampire and GURPS Vampire are remarkably different... Vampire characters have a certain distribution of attributes and skills that prevent them from being hyper-specialized or incredibly broad, while the GURPS version has no such limit. Thus, if I have an idea for a Vampire character who has just one power, but is amazingly good at it, to the detriment of all other, I can do reproduce my idea in a game character better in the GURPS version; meanwhile, if I want to play a character who fits well into the "chinese menu" approach of Vampire (pick one ability from list A, two from list B, a personality template from list X, etc.), I don't want to go to the work GURPS would require (or be presented with all the temptations to stray from my concept the flexibility of GURPS presents).

For another example, I have a standard character for two-fisted explorer action games. He started in Space 1889 and has cropped up in Dream Park (as a PC for the Dreamsmith's tournaments) and in Feng Shui (when the characters went back to 1850). He's big, charming, and dumb as a rock. He actually has few skills except his charm, which he uses to convince others that he's a hero; a pure Flashman-esque fraud. And that was easy to do in all of those system. But when I tried to do him in White Wolf's excellent Adventure! game, I found it impossible to make him anything except hyper-competent. There just isn't an option to do a PC who isn't pretty darn good at even what they're worst at in that system; well-rounded, highly-skilled characters are an assumption around which it is designed.

But most system effects are much subtler. Look at Champions characters versus GURPS characters. In early editions of Champions, players had 100 points to build their character, but could take up to 150 points of disadvantages. Three-fifths of your character was from disadvantages, so the cost of taking, say, half the maximum disadvantages was a character built to a scale 30% below all the others in the game. GURPS, meanwhile, had 100 point characters with 45 points of disads (including quirks), so less than one-third of your character was from disads and the cost of taking only half the maximum was a much smaller bite (around 15%). Silver Age Sentinels takes this even further, with 150 point characters and rarely over 25 points of defects. This inevitably distorts player decisions. If the only way to be sufficiently effective is to have a ton of disadvantages, I will take those disadvantages. And then I will do my best to make them limit me as little as possible, since I did not take them because they were character-appropriate, I took them because the system "made me". System distortion.

Of course these things influence what characters get played... If you play a character that doesn't work in the system, you'll probably become disappointed as the game goes on. You may not know why. You may just think the GM isn't giving you enough attention, or that you've squandered your opportunities, or that your luck has been bad, or you may blame another player for hogging the limelight. You may go to the GM and complain, or the GM may notice on their own and make changes to try to bring things around. But, all too often, it isn't because of anything you can put your finger on in how play has proceeded, it will be because your character idea conflicts with the mechanics, and so you will never be as effective as someone whose character does not. No matter how well the GM tries to patch things up.

And so, since I hate getting into that situation, I try to find an idea that works as well as one that tempts me to play it. In fact, I often find myself needing to curb my own munchkin-like instincts to find something that works better-than-average (and there is almost always such a thing, in even the best designed systems). It's also why I'm rather attracted to system-light or system-less games, which allow for more open and freeform character decisions without having to worry about accidentally picking one that doesn't work.