I've recently had a revelation about Torg that I wanted to share: it doesn't play like an RPG, but like a board game or card game.

One of the defining features of RPGs, particularly those like Dungeons and Dragons or Pathfinder, is the fluid start and stop positions, and preserving your state from game to game. Say you finish killing a bunch of kobolds in the Caves of Chaos and you know there's a minotaur in the caverns up ahead. You look at the clock, realize it's past 11 pm, and everyone decides to call it a night. You write down your current hit points and the spells you've cast for the day. Perhaps the DM gives sort of a hand-wave of "you retreat and rest up," and you recover your current hit points and spells; in any case, you're preserving your current state so the next session of play picks up from the same state.

Torg: Eternity isn't like that. You get 3 Possibilities and a hand of cards at the start of each session. They don't carry over, so there's no incentive to preserve cards or Possibilities during a session. Those reset when next you get together, regardless of where you are or what you're doing. This wasn't always the case; in original Torg, we'd write down our card numbers--or even paper-clip them to our character sheets--between sessions. There was also a spot on the character sheets to track Possibilities from session to session. 

Furthermore, the structure of "scenes" and "Acts" seems carefully designed so that a single Act takes about one evening of play. That's one "game" of Torg: one Act. Some adventures are multiple Acts, many are only one Act long. Some are only one scene long, but those tend to be very robust, and designed for an evening play session at a leisurely pace. This is actually something Torg: Eternity and the original Torg game had in common, and it provides a good narrative break for the action.

Possibilities hold a different function: in original Torg, they served as both your mechanism for improving your odds during play as well as advancing your character. Now they only work as the former, and the latter is "XP" doled out at a consistent rate of 3 per session. Play a session, get 3 XP, regardless of whether you used all, some, or none of your Possibilities.

With these points in mind, you can see how I reach the conclusion that Torg: Eternity is very much like evolving card or board games. It's like the Pathfinder Adventure Card Game, or Seafall, or Apocrypha. When you get together, you're set for an initial play experience and you get your resources to use (your cards, your tokens, or whatever). Those are the same each time you start. While you play, you're spending resources to accomplish your goals, but those resources don't persist from game to game--that incentivizes you to spend them. At the end of the game, you make some minor improvements to your character going forward, and reset for the next initial play state.

For Seafall, you get your enmity tokens and two fully-functional ships at the start of each game. You may unlock secrets, earn gold, build buildings, and so on throughout the game, but those are reset at the end of each game: only your total glory persists (and hopefully, increases by a lot each game) as well as a few limited resources (relics and tablets, for example). The next game resets it all to your token, ships, and a limited number of other items. Plus one of your two ships gets better each game, no matter how well or poorly you performed.

For the Pathfinder Card Game, you have your starting deck of a set number of cards. Throughout the game, you may gain lots of other cards, but at the end you must winnow your deck down to the original number. Hopefully the cards you end with are better than the ones you started with. You'll also track improvements to your skills and other abilities that will persist indefinitely.

For Torg, it's the cards and Possibilities that reset at the start, and are used through the game. XP persists and is used to improve your numbers (like ship improvements in Seafall or skill or power feats in PACG), as does any equipment you happened across that was worth keeping (like tablets or relics in Seafall, or fleeting fragments in Apocrypha).

All of my examples also have narrative elements, and some are very strong (Apocrypha's is pretty clear; Seafall's narrative is strong, although presented sporadically). Unfolding narratives aren't the purview of RPGs any longer. In my examples, you're playing a character or nation that is distinct from the other players', and that guides how you react to difficulties and overcome obstacles (or don't!). 

So now when I prepare a session of Torg, I think of the Act I'm going to present as a single game to put before my players: they have resources to throw at the obstacles I present, and my ability to create a tense game is derived from how I can exhaust those resource--not permanently, but to enliven the action in front of us at the table. Just like a game of Seafall, PACG, and so on..