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Message: <blockquote data-quote="dbm" data-source="post: 8401878" data-attributes="member: 8014">For context, I am a huge fan of generic systems.I think if you were to ask their authors they were say that that designed to be great, rather than OK. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />It’s more that they are not tied to one explicit or implicit world. Every generic game with longevity is designed, in my experience, to support a style of gaming. GURPS is designed with a very strong verisimilitude against a real-world base line. Fate is designed to model narrative beats and so deliver an experience similar to a typical novel structure (fun fact - the writers of Fate are friends with Jim Butcher and so emulating the Dresden Files was a key design goal for Fate). Savage Worlds is designed to deliver pulp adventure. HERO is designed to model highly varied, robust characters, like you would find in super hero stories.All these games have expanded from their initial focus and can now support a broader range of games / campaigns. They can struggle when you try to get them to run a game very far from their core; running a tactical combat focused game is right in GURPS wheel house but not really something that Fate would support in my experience.Generic games can deliver a better experience than targeted games in many cases, especially if you find the attached system limiting in some way. Classic example - want to play a Gish in D&D? Until you get to level 3-6 your options are almost non-existent. In a generic system there is nothing hard-coded to stop you being a Gish from ‘level 1‘. Your character will start off weaker than a specialist, naturally, but you can have a character that fits your desired archetype from the first moment, rather than having to wait for specific sub-class features or multi-classing.I’ve been a GURPS player and GM for about 30 years; at one time it was the only system I played or ran. More recently I have gotten into Savage Worlds which is a lighter system but still really good at delivering a satisfying pulp / action game (which is my default style of game regardless of genre - modern, fantasy or sci-if). I’ve also run a short test campaign for Genesys, Fate and another using the Cypher system (by Monte Cooke).I’ve been a GURPS player and GM for so long that I have internalised the core of the system and can read a book or watch a film / TV show and broadly interpret what I am seeing into GURPS terms. Having that background in adaption has made it very easy to do the same in Savage Worlds, which has far fewer moving parts. That is the key benefit from running generic systems - when you fancy running something new and a bit niche you have the support to do that rather than seeking a system which supports a campaign concept like (e.g.) incorporeal aliens being encountered for the first time in an otherwise hard sci-if world. If you are a GM who likes running a broad range of shorter games with different themes and foci then mastery of a generic system is a god-send.Genesys was an interesting system. We tried it out running a game set in Eberron and it worked well for a short run but it doesn’t have the vertical scaling to support a D&D-style game. For example, the highest strength available is 5 whether you are a human or a dragon. Contrast that agains the first iteration of the Narrative Dice System, Warhammer Fantasy Role Playing 3e, where humans still top-out at 5 but dragons and major demons can go up to 10.</blockquote>

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