Recon crunch day 1 of 2.5

clean mask, check filter
nails

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A week or two ago in my survey of RPGs with great vehicular / mounted combat rules, I stumbled across some info about an RPG family called the "Fate" system. Genre game instances of Fate include:
Diaspora, The Dresden Files, Atomic Robo, Kerberos Club, Jadepunk, Demon Hunters (a hybrid of Fate and Cortex+), Warsong, Ehdrighor, Age of Arthur, Crestfallen, Do: Fate of the Flying Temple, Tachyon Squadron, Aperita, Starblazers, Legends of Anglerre, Kaiju Inc., Venture City Stories, and more.

Diaspora was the game that connected my interest in vehicular subsystems with Fate. I don't think and Fate-based RPG is what I'm looking for though. Fate itself is more of a relativistic story engine, not a simulationist RPG engine.

I was going to examine what Cortex is about and how it might differ from Fate - but that got me thinking - from a game design standpoint, how do we characterize D+D itself?