Really? I mean, you can go with the Takers (or the Bleak Cabal, per wikipedia) as Nietzschean but having read Beyond Good and Evil isn't really necessary. I don't think most people got really into the philosophy, it was just more fun window-dressing for some people than the standard LOTR/Dragonlance/Conan things people were playing at the time in Forgotten Realms or Greyhawk. If you tell me you played a Transcendent Order monk who actually practiced Zen Buddhism I'll believe you, but I think most people just enjoyed playing characters with piercings and mohawks and travelling to the Abyss to fight demons.
My experience was that most people who chose to be members of the Factions
did actually role-play being members of the Factions.
Now, whether were "deep into the philosophy" is obviously questionable, but it's the same with literally any RPG where your characters are members of organisations with philosophies or goals or the like. How many Clerics and Paladins actually go into depth about their religion, in D&D? I'd say a lot
fewer than people who were members of Factions did, because a lot of people want to play Clerics or Paladins for what the class can do, whereas with Factions that was rarely the case - instead people who weren't "into" the Faction stuff chose to be Indeps or Outsiders the like.
Plus it was the '90s, and most of us were teenagers or early twenties, and this sort of stuff, back then, was I'm sorry to say "cool". It was. It was happening. It was zeitgeist-y. People were into it. I suspect in this era people might easily get into it again, actually, because I think people are bored of cynicism re: ideas and philosophies.
But not everyone likes "generic". A generic setting is not "for anyone". Which is why we need settings like Ravenloft, Planescape and Spelljammer.
Precisely. I've always found the idea that generic settings appealed to everyone to be utterly bizarre, all the way back to being a kid. More specific settings appealed to a lot of groups, and it's notable that a lot of homebrew settings are anything but generic.
Forgotten Realms works as a pretty good generic setting where you can be a generic version of Gandalf, Frodo, Conan, Aragorn, Drizzt, or Raistlin; if you've seen or read Lord of the Rings or one of its many knockoffs (Shannara, Belgariad) you have a vague idea of what's there.
This is kind of a good example, because I can honestly say in 33 years of reading fantasy and playing fantasy RPGs I have never, ever, not even once wanted to make a "knock-off" version of any of the characters listed, let alone of the boring-but-nice people of Shannara, or "bag full of total wankers" of the Belgariad (seriously what a bunch of jerks! Way to make the Olympian pantheon look good!).
The Realms actually got lucky for me and provided character examples I might want to emulate just in time before I basically dumped the setting entirely - but most of those were rather peculiar Realms-specific people. I've always enjoyed playing characters from a very specific time and place, not generic or vague characters (and particularly not "me but an elf" unlike some people!).
