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<blockquote data-quote="Lylandra" data-source="post: 7708987" data-attributes="member: 6816692">The stunning similarity in the &quot;core basis&quot; of many many RPG settings (ranging from skeletal structures like what classes does a system have to which kind of races we want to represent to the political/historical/technological details of a game world) has always astounded me. I know that offering players a certain kind of familiarity (say, medieval europe style landscapes, structures plus elves and dwarves for fantasy and a multitude of humanoid races with planetary governments and FTL spaceships for advanced sci-fi) is playing it safe, but playing it safe easily leads to boring, uninspired copycat designs (oh and don't get me started on the nonsensical approach that every race needs males and females and Dragonboobs.) . Some developers went the easy, yet elegant way out of this trap to introduce a multitude of other options (races, cultures, classes...) so that both the traditional players and those who wish to play something different can coexist in the same system or &quot;reality&quot;. But offering too broad of a spectrum can lead to a blended mish-mash feeling thar utterly lacks any kind of distinction. I guess starting with different source materials than Gary would be a good first step. Nowadays, we have, for example, fantasy shows like the &quot;Avatar&quot;-verse where you got anything but medieval european fantasy, including a laid out progression from a magical, pre-industrial world to the kind of steampunk/industrial revolution that culminates in the fusion of spirit magic and technology. (hmm, where have I seen this recently? <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin&nbsp; &nbsp; :D"&nbsp; data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /> ) You have sci-fi games and worlds like Mass Effect where humans didn't come first and FTL travel is an ancient technology. And we see themes like this appear in more recent settings, as, for example, in Numenera. And I hope to see this kind of creative play, moving away from what has been known for years and reimagining worlds and core assumptions more often in the future.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Lylandra, post: 7708987, member: 6816692"] The stunning similarity in the "core basis" of many many RPG settings (ranging from skeletal structures like what classes does a system have to which kind of races we want to represent to the political/historical/technological details of a game world) has always astounded me. I know that offering players a certain kind of familiarity (say, medieval europe style landscapes, structures plus elves and dwarves for fantasy and a multitude of humanoid races with planetary governments and FTL spaceships for advanced sci-fi) is playing it safe, but playing it safe easily leads to boring, uninspired copycat designs (oh and don't get me started on the nonsensical approach that every race needs males and females and Dragonboobs.) . Some developers went the easy, yet elegant way out of this trap to introduce a multitude of other options (races, cultures, classes...) so that both the traditional players and those who wish to play something different can coexist in the same system or "reality". But offering too broad of a spectrum can lead to a blended mish-mash feeling thar utterly lacks any kind of distinction. I guess starting with different source materials than Gary would be a good first step. Nowadays, we have, for example, fantasy shows like the "Avatar"-verse where you got anything but medieval european fantasy, including a laid out progression from a magical, pre-industrial world to the kind of steampunk/industrial revolution that culminates in the fusion of spirit magic and technology. (hmm, where have I seen this recently? :D ) You have sci-fi games and worlds like Mass Effect where humans didn't come first and FTL travel is an ancient technology. And we see themes like this appear in more recent settings, as, for example, in Numenera. And I hope to see this kind of creative play, moving away from what has been known for years and reimagining worlds and core assumptions more often in the future. [/QUOTE]

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