IMHO, the Daggerheart core "engine" has a lot of potential as a basis for other games (see PbtA, FitD, etc.), but I'm not necessarily sure if that means it would make for a good singular generic system.
I certainly understand your point regarding multiple domain card sets, but I also think that you have to do more work to make it work for these other settings or genre types. There is a range of settings/genres where it would take minimal work due to things like tone, content, the normalization of combat, etc.
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I am personally at the point of my hobby journey where I prefer my TTRPGs to be opinionated.
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FWIW, I do think that Daggerheart has opinions. It just also has to be somewhat careful because I think the designers are aware that a sizeable chunk of its incoming playerbase is coming from a relatively (IMHO) unopinionated game: i.e., 5e D&D. It's more opinionated than D&D but it's less opinionated IMHO than games like Apocalypse World, Stonetop, Fabula Ultima (as previously mentioned), or even some OSR games.
Honestly, a discussion of Opinionated vs. Unopinionated Games (and all between) would make for an interesting discussion.
I think the idea of this thread was "mechanics". So I think it's a very strong argument that has not yet been refuted, that rules will greatly aid a game in the way it plays, the way players can and cannot interact with it. And the types of plots or events that work very well in it, and ones that don't.
D&D does not do gunplay well at all, so it was never made with the intent of having guns feel like anything at all. It's an extreme example, but it is a way to describe how - when a game does not have rules which are designed with intent towards some gameplay or thematic goal, the game won't do it at all or very well.
So intent makes sense here, and it informs the player/GM what the overall goals were of the mechanics.
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Games whose intent was just to have a unified mechanic to make a ruling, such as GURPS states as its intent, tend to not do well when folks look for highly themed games.
To me, it seems that a RPG can have an opinion, or an intent, even though it doesn't set out to have one. I say this not to disagree with the two quoted posts, but to elaborate upon the perspective from which I agree with them.
Upthread I said that GURPS has a theme/goal: "to express a certain way of thinking about the world, and how action within the world produces results". I could equally have called that an
opinion. And it colours what sort of play is possible with GURPS. Just as one example, I think GURPS will not provide a play experience in which providence, or divine purpose, is an essential part of the fiction, because it brings with it the idea that events unfold through impersonal, "merely" causal processes. Even if the participants decide to suspend the rules to permit a "miracle" to occur, that is the intervention of a miracle from
outside the normal way the world works; it doesn't make the miraculous a
part of the everyday workings of the world.
@Aldarc gives the example of
normalised combat in Daggerheart; and
@RenleyRenfield the example of
normalised melee (vis-a-vis gunfire or even, to be honest, bow shots) in D&D. These are ways those games have opinions (in this case, about the significance and the nature of violent confrontation) that colour the experience they are able to provide.
@loverdrive gave another example upthread, of how ignoring these sorts of implicit opinions can lead to games that don't deliver what they purport to deliver:
It's very, very rarely I see a PbtA game that seems to understand how the engine works, and what it's good at.
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Most of the time I see games about slow tense investigations or cute fluffy friendship is magic adventures or deep character explorations being built on top of a resolution system specifically geared towards making sure that everything will always go downhill and all and any situation can instantly break out in violence.
And probably the most famous example of a game that contained an implicit opinion that contradicted its purported design goal was V:tM (which has also been discussed in this thread).
One thing that "modern" RPG design involves, when done well, is being highly sensitive to these "opinions" that are implicit in a system, and (to mix my metaphors) going with the grain rather than against it. The game is coherently designed so that (to further mix the metaphors) everything about it pushes in the same direction.
The typically-offered solution to a game that is not designed so that everything pushes the same way is
the GM: the GM will make the game their own, by picking and choosing, by foregrounding some bits and backgrounding others. But this doesn't avoid opinion: it just offers another, particular, type of play experience - the GM-driven story or the GM-mediated world. Which is neither the pinnacle nor the totality of what RPGing can be.
Action Adventure is still a theme, but it is a wider scope than Lara Croft. The narrower your scope, the more the mechanics can hone in on that theme, the more generic, the less they can.
So saying that ‘intent’ only means covering a narrow scope in the mechanics, but supporting that scope well to me is wrong. I can very well intend to cover a wider scope and the resulting design still is intentional
What I've written above in this post explains why I'm reasonably sceptical about this idea that some intents are wider in scope. I mean, they can vary in the range of fictional situations they will support (Burning Wheel is probably a bit less narrow than Agon 2e in this respect, though the latter can be and has been adapted to other sorts of fictional situation than Homeric Greece). But their implicit opinions/intents will still tend to produce a particular sort of experience.
