Lots of games allow you to play anything, whether we're talking about generic systems like GURPS or chaotic freak-outs like Rifts. You really, truly can play a cyborg-ape ninja/pirate with no tweaking of the rules necessary. Then there's the fact that this game was kitchen sink before kitchen sink was cool. Yet designers Hank Riley and Jim Ireland have the balls of steel necessary to say in the introduction "If you are a newcomer, you can enjoy the assurance that this is the only game we know to include true scientific realism in every system." The random mutations table that can allows you to "ignore gravity" or gives you "edible excretions" stands as People's Exhibit Number One that Scientific Realism never met Encounter Critical. So what makes Encounter Critical so special? The first reason is the author's proclaimed devotion to "true scientific realism" in a roleplaying game that features apes and elves and "klengons" and robots and magic spells and anything else you want to include. Encounter Critical is old (the second revised edition was published in '79) and mind-numbingly obscure, perhaps not quite as obscure nowadays as Excursion into the Bizarre but pretty damn close. But EC manages to cram into its 32 digest-sized pages almost as much sheer loopiness as contained in Synnibarr's nearly indigestible 500 page girth. Don't get me wrong, I still like World of Synnibarr more than any sane RPG enthusiast should. I think it was back in September or October that I first mentioned the fact that Encounter Critical has stolen my heart from World of Synnibarr. Rotwang's contributions to the Overly Honest RPG Book Covers, an excellent thread at RPGnet inspired by SomethingAwful's photoshop-fueled hooliganisms. It is only right that I start this thread with one of Dr.
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