System Free Scenarios and Settings: Curse or Cure?

[nedjer]

I read this thread and it was most interesting, as I've been working on something that I considered making "systemless", as it is more of a description of some locations, some NPCs and a bunch of hooks.

Reading this thread made me rethink. I think I should go for systemless design, but then release, for free, stats for at least one system, as a separate download to circumvent the problems with any licenses.


Any thought on that?

P.S. 4EYes – Roleplaying is down as someone with an excavator ate the cable that feed my servers the internet. They will be back online someday after february 12.

I'd clean forgotten this thread. Loads of helpful posts. Plugin stats for systemless scenarios/ settings seems to be an acceptable compromise/ way of getting more return from a single product. Rogue Trader and Traveller maybe?

 

[Beginning of the End]

Better than "generic fantasy", I should think, would be "generic modern world".

That becomes iffy for scenarios because a scenario generally depends on an assumption of who the PCs are and what they do: A guy running a campaign featuring PCs who belong to an inner city gang dedicated to hunting down evil faeries will need a very different scenario from the guy running a campaign for international secret agents, even if both campaigns ostensibly take place in a "generic modern world".

This is actually why lots of non-D&D games have problems selling scenarios: Their potential market is fractured between people playing different types of campaigns in the game's setting.

Full campaigns have a better shot at finding a market, but if you're going to do that then you'd probably still be better off finding some simple generic system that you can bolt onto it.