SBRPG: A Generic System?

George and I had this discussion in our local breakfast place yesterday morning, "Was SBRPG a generic system?" George said yes, it was generic. I said no, it wasn't.

George countered by saying, "A generic system can be used for any situation, any time period, and genre. SBRPG supports everything, so it is a generic system."

By now, the people around us thought we were probably crazy or very strange, but hey, we are big-time game designers, so we can talk shop in public like rock stars.

I countered, "A generic system implies that it is a cookie-cutter, handle-everything system. SBRPG wasn't written that way, it supports playing in worlds designed within itself. You can call it generic, but the intent was to support a specific game world written by the gaming group."

Melissa, the coffee-shop gal, must have endured a half-hour of our silly argument, and in the end, we agreed both points were valid. George was right in a way, SBRPG handles anything you can throw at it, so it is technically a generic system. I'm writing the blog, so naturally, I get the last word (unless George jumps on here). My view was a little more broad, SBRPG was written to support creating worlds and situations first, then playing in them. In that view, it is less a generic system, and more a RPG simulator.

A generic system supports roleplaying within an established idea or volume of intellectual property. SBRPG takes a step back, and forces you to create that idea or property first, then lays out rules of play within it. It is a sandbox RPG in its heart, where creating the sandbox is as important as playing the game. You could create a perfectly-photocopied sandbox out of someone else's IP, use SBRPG as the ruleset, and then say, "there, generic system," but that is not the point, nor the focus of the game.

Our players picked up on that, with one of them commenting, "This is truly a unique game that has its own approach." People enjoyed being able to build game worlds together, the players and the referee all contribute equally to the process - more on that in future posts. Everyone contributing, laying out pieces, and sharing ideas to create a unique world needed a generic system to handle resolution, which we provided - so there is a generic system in there. In the larger view, SBRPG did one thing, shared world creation and play, very well, which breaks the definition of what a generic system should be.