Generic RPG’s are a terrific way to enter the TTRPG hobby, but they can also be a bit of a double edged sword.
One one hand you have the world (universe, alternate reality) at your finger tips, on the other hand you have to colour in the world picture yourself, sometimes even draw the lines.
I have found that quite often, generic games draw me in for their flexibility, their promise and their lack of constraints (hate constraints, but like guide lines and flexibility). I think that free-form structureless structure is my ideal.
The problem is, I usually stall at the creative bit, not because I am lazy (well, not only), not because I do not have any decent ideas, but because I often do not know where to start, where the lines need to be drawn. The BRP UGE is a prime example. It even has tools to help, but I find it hard to commit.
A themed game saves you much of the creative brain work, but paints you into the corner of having to learn its lore, adhere (mostly) to it’s requirements and tell your stories against a fleshed out backdrop made from another’s imagination.
Ironically I often come up with ideas when reading other peoples works. I find alternate roads, ones that better suit me, but rarely find a perfect “as written” work. This is often rule zero of a game, the reality that players and GM’s will stray, so no issue really, I guess it is just a matter of where do you accept and where do you create.
Do I need to remake structure rather than build from the ground up to be truly free?
This tends to work best when you already like the theme, such as Tales from the Loop or Tolkien, but it can be a compromise in the worst way if the theme jangles and the mechanics are not worth the effort or worse, you break what you like.
My advice to myself, and to others if it helps, is to start small. Everything great started small by the very nature of things.
This is how we used to play. Small adventures with small characters that explored their world as it and they evolved into larger entities.
This is how Forgotten Realms or Runequest started, with a village, then a nearby forrest or row of hills housing a temple or ruin, then maybe a nearby city, a kingdom, then a continent or even another time or dimension and so on.
Savage Worlds is ideal here.
This system allows the players to start creating the feel of the game they want to play from minute one, the GM guiding and learning from them equally. The world, it’s parameters, its limitations will set themselves as they go, the massive depth of loosely themed companions are just there to draw from.
I have looked at several of the more themed sets like Deadlands and chosen against going into them, because apart from the price (hard to get in Australia and quite expensive, especially if you get drawn into all the fluff), the baked in theme does not hold me. I like SW for it’s “write it as you go” generic nature.
Sometimes though, worlds collide in the best way.
Haunted West popped onto my radar today, while circling Scum and Villainy and Electric State on a local website (Campaign Supplies), two game styles I know I can do with systems I have (Traveller, SW or M-Space), simply by adopting the theme and going from there.
Some games, as lovely and polished as they are, are really only a one-shot engine or short campaign at best. Other systems can mimic their domain without such constraints.
Anyway, back to Haunted West.
It is a D100 game, with the system modernised in the ways I like. It is much like Deadlands, but without the supernatural baked in so heavily to the theme (it tackles everything from ancient European Horrors to Aliens, but all are optional and their level of influence is up to the GM).
It also tackles a lot of mature themes maturely and it has a ton of background. Finally it also allows several play styles from crunchy miniatures and measurements to mostly narrative play.
It was a reflex buy and I anticipate its arrival immensely.
A little of this and a little bit of that, but nothing too heavy handed, almost a themed generic game.
The secret sauce was a generic enough game with a not overly opinionated theme, well produced and deep (800+ pages), well priced at less than twice the price of your average book (or as it goes, a single SW companion in Aus.) with more than twice the content, and an improved version of a system I like with play style options.
It is all in the mind I guess.
I tend to stumble with generic games through analysis paralysis and grind to a halt with themed ones faced with a wall of pre-made stuff I want to do differently or were simply insurmountable walls of text like the Iron Kingdoms RPG (with 100 pages of history up front). The trick is of course, to just play and let it work itself out.
Commitment to creativity is the key, setting boundaries and focussing on them is the lock.