Neonchameleon
Legend
In another thread @Reynard talked about Generic vs Bespoke systems, and I thought I'd spin that off onto what makes a system "bespoke" and ensures that you can only play a game in that style and can't drift it. Now clearly most games can be drifted and some games have a design that works against their intended playstyle; one famous game of katanas, trenchcoats, and fangs was intended to be "a game of personal horror"
The archetypal "bespoke" system was My Life With Master - the game that the term Storygames was created for because it deliberately and intentionally only lasted a short time (three or four sessions) and always told the same basic story of master repeatedly abuses minions until one minion snaps and tries to kill the master - after which the game ends. PCs (i.e. minions) are only mechanically measured on three things; their stats of weariness and self-loathing, and the little snippets of love they've picked up on their way. Pretty clearly you couldn't run many things with those stats.
Another way of making a non-generic game is to deliberately break the actions to reflect how the characters are broken in the genre. To illustrate this I can think of no better game than Monsterhearts, about the Teen Horror genre (filtered through an HBO lens). Monsterhearts is a hack of Apocalypse World in which there are five stats; Hot (for seduction or manipulation), Cool (for holding steady and doing things under pressure), Hard (for intimidation or violence), Sharp (for reading a person or a situation), and Weird (for psychic stuff). By contrast Monsterhearts has four; Hot (for seduction or manipulation), Cool (for holding steady or shutting people down), Violent (for lashing out or running away), and Dark (for weird magic). There seems to be something missing there. There is no Sharp stat equivalent in Monsterhearts. This is because these screwed up teenagers do not know how to understand people or situations (unless they get way down the XP track when they can learn). Also although both games have a Hot stat Apocalypse World has two; one to seduce people and a second to manipulate them. Monsterhearts deliberately just has Turn Someone On to try to do either or both at once - or you can bully people by Shut Someone Down. These kids really are not all right and are entirely not ready for adulthood. And having such broken moves pushes play hard into the bounds of the genre.
This all overlaps with the concept Vincent Baker calls the Fruitful Void; there is no Defiance stat in My Life With Master in part because the game is all about defiance. Leaving things like Defiance out of MLWM or Sharp out of Monsterhearts creates a void that the game as a whole points to and that the players need to fill in themselves in play; this is not just leaving them out because they are irrelevant but creating a need to work through things.
But most games, even fairly thematically tight ones don't do that. They have a wide range of skills modelled so the characters can do most things that are appropriate for the setting. It's IMO something that should be done a whole lot more, especially by home game designers because, although it's harder to do, it means that your game won't play like related ones with slightly different subsystems.
The archetypal "bespoke" system was My Life With Master - the game that the term Storygames was created for because it deliberately and intentionally only lasted a short time (three or four sessions) and always told the same basic story of master repeatedly abuses minions until one minion snaps and tries to kill the master - after which the game ends. PCs (i.e. minions) are only mechanically measured on three things; their stats of weariness and self-loathing, and the little snippets of love they've picked up on their way. Pretty clearly you couldn't run many things with those stats.
Another way of making a non-generic game is to deliberately break the actions to reflect how the characters are broken in the genre. To illustrate this I can think of no better game than Monsterhearts, about the Teen Horror genre (filtered through an HBO lens). Monsterhearts is a hack of Apocalypse World in which there are five stats; Hot (for seduction or manipulation), Cool (for holding steady and doing things under pressure), Hard (for intimidation or violence), Sharp (for reading a person or a situation), and Weird (for psychic stuff). By contrast Monsterhearts has four; Hot (for seduction or manipulation), Cool (for holding steady or shutting people down), Violent (for lashing out or running away), and Dark (for weird magic). There seems to be something missing there. There is no Sharp stat equivalent in Monsterhearts. This is because these screwed up teenagers do not know how to understand people or situations (unless they get way down the XP track when they can learn). Also although both games have a Hot stat Apocalypse World has two; one to seduce people and a second to manipulate them. Monsterhearts deliberately just has Turn Someone On to try to do either or both at once - or you can bully people by Shut Someone Down. These kids really are not all right and are entirely not ready for adulthood. And having such broken moves pushes play hard into the bounds of the genre.
This all overlaps with the concept Vincent Baker calls the Fruitful Void; there is no Defiance stat in My Life With Master in part because the game is all about defiance. Leaving things like Defiance out of MLWM or Sharp out of Monsterhearts creates a void that the game as a whole points to and that the players need to fill in themselves in play; this is not just leaving them out because they are irrelevant but creating a need to work through things.
But most games, even fairly thematically tight ones don't do that. They have a wide range of skills modelled so the characters can do most things that are appropriate for the setting. It's IMO something that should be done a whole lot more, especially by home game designers because, although it's harder to do, it means that your game won't play like related ones with slightly different subsystems.