Generic Systems

What are you favorite generic systems and what do you like about them? I know GURPS and like it a lot but my players refuse to learn it because they're afraid of its size.

Fate, Fate Accel,, D6. Free, easy, flexible.

If you strip away the superhero trappings, Mutants & Masterminds makes for a decent generic system.

Savage worlds.

Quick and easy combat. Pulpy feel.

Barbarians of Lemuria. Yeah, I know, but hear me out here. The system is so light and takes so little tweaking to get it to work for most any genre that it might as well be universal.

I second and third this.

I love GURPS as a resource but avoid it as a rpg.

M&M is flexible, streamlined, and elegant. They should pay me for how much I shill their product.
Too bad they don't.

Genesys just came out and I've had a great time with the few sessions I've run. It's the polar opposite of GURPS, though, as it's almost all storytelling with very little simulation in its mechanics. That being said, I think its mechanics are really engaging and fun, especially if you have a group of players who are decent at improv. Having a little bit of GM power distributed to the dice and the players explicitly is refreshing and keeps me on my toes as a GM.

Can you give a quick rundown of how it works?

It's the experience I wanted out of the Cortex system but sadly didn't get. Genesys is a great system but it requires a bit of legwork since the book is more of a toolkit than a complete gaming module out of the box.

GURPS for things that need detailed rules
for simple and lightweight shit I usually just hack something together from BRP rules

It's the generic version of the FFG Star Wars narrative dice system.

I looked into FATE, but I don't really like how it seems to require players to bake in big ideas about their characters. The game I want to run right now would specifically have their characters start as blank slates without even having any skills, so that wouldn't work. D6 seems like it would, but I'm not a big fan of how it handles combat and the pick-and-choose game building feels easy to fuck up as well.
Also, M&M is an interesting idea. I'll have to look into it more.

>Also, M&M is an interesting idea. I'll have to look into it more.
I'll put it this way: a group converted their high-level D&D campaign into M&M. The characters were all well-balanced, and the fighter actually felt like a god of war.

Yeah, I've played M&M before and I thought it was... ok. I mostly wasn't a big fan of the damage system, but I've only ever really experienced it in the context of high power superhero combat sims, so I'll have to do some experimenting to see how it feels with lower power level "normal" people as the characters.

at least it isn't the Big Black GURPS, that's even scarier

tell me about M&M, specifically how combat works. Deadly? armor as Damage reduction?

Not really. Basically, raw "damage" dealt comes across as penalties to future damage resistance tests. Fail a test badly enough, and you'll get knocked out. It's meant to mimic the swingy back-and-forth of comic book fights.

That said, the game does have alternate rules for a more typical HP system, but the aforementioned is the default.

This. The most fun combat I've DM'd and played have been from Savage Worlds.

Also, I wouldn't really call M&M deadly. You can get floored pretty easily if you're outclassed or hit somewhere you don't expect to be, but by default, death is not meant to come up often. You have to go out of your way to kill someone.

Yes, Savage Worlds combat is a great mix of narrative and crunch with plenty of tactics and tricks you can pull to spice things up. Enough options to let you try crazy action hero moves left and right without punishing penalties too.

Just play HERO you dumb fucks

Seconding this. Ive hacked barbs into like four different games: a space opera, an age of discovery adventure, a desilpunk pulp extravaganza, and a ton of other homebrew besides. The system is light but systematic, making it REALLY easy to workshop as a generic system.

>Cortex
WAW. Ive only played cortex once, but it was so bad I actually forgot.

Ive heard a lot about Gensys but my go to is the Cypher System

Yeah... I ran a small campaign using 1e Firefly rules. It was serviceable, but not what I wanted. Genesys, on the other hand is almost exactly what I want. And since it's a tool kit, I'll just fudge it for the few things that aren't exactly on the nose.

Does HERO work as a generic system?

I've only heard about Genesys fairly recently. What's the central mechanic(s) of the system?

In no particular order
1. Microlite Storyteller
2. FU (the Free Universal Roleplaying Game)
3. Wushu
4. Pace
5. ...IN SPAAACE!

Yeah I'd back genesys it's super smooth

You have a dicepool made of stat+skill
There is 6 special dice to worry about, with a load of symbols. The symbols are Super success, success, positive addition, negative addition, failure, super failure.
Proficiency die are the best die, they're the only ones with the super success symbol. When you make your dicepool, you get a number of these equal to whichever is lower, stat or skill.
Ability die have success and positive addition like the proficiency die, but no super success.
Boost die are circumstantial additions and have a lot fewer success and positive addition than the ability die.
You roll this dice pool against the dicepool set by the gm
The gm makes a dicepool out of at least some difficulty die
They have failure and negative addition symbols on them. If there's circumstantial reasons for this check to be more difficult, the gm can add setback die, which are essentially negative boost die. If the test is really difficult, they add Challenge die which are essentially proficiency die, and have the super failure symbol on them.
You then compare your numbers of failures and success and they cancel each other out. If you any successes left, you succeed. You then compare negative addition and positive addition, cancelling out again. If there are more negative side effect symbols, the GM can spend these on a bunch of effects from a big table to do things like jam a weapon or give a mook an extra die next turn. Conversely, if you have more positive effect symbols, you can spend them on a bunch of effects from a table, like activating a weapon effect, or activating a talent, etc.
The triumph and despair symbols can be spent on particularly potent effects, and also count as success or failures.
As long as the GM has a printout of the negative effect tables and the players have a printout of the positive effect table (and remember their special abilities, it's pretty smooth.