I don't believe in the true universal system, simply because (as others have mentioned) mechanics have inherent "tone compliance" and some genres or milieus will just not work with some rule sets. However, I do think you can make a very broad game, that can do a lot of things where the venn...
Some games do a better job than others of being both setting agnostic and having an identity. Savage Worlds is the best popular example, especially SWADE which icorporates a bunch of dials to help focus the game to meet the tone of the given genre.
I am not sure I understand. The generic system is whatever it is (SWADE, say) but if it can do Star Wars (IMO) it can do any kind of pulpy space opera, and probably most other kinds of pulp adventure.
Maybe I was unclear: I am not saying use a Star Wars game as a generic system, I was saying that when I want to make sure a generic system will work for me, my go to milieu to test it is Star Wars. If I can't successfully do Star Wars with it, it doesn't have the right tools and levelers and...
I was talking with a friend about what sort of setting or milieu I should use to test the early version of the rules for my homegrown RPG, and after mulling it for a while I realized that Star Wars was my general "litmus test" setting for any set of generic or broadly applicable rules. Without...
As both a convention GM and a creator, I think that data would have at least some value. You don't even necessarily to follow the data, but having it helps.
It's like designing for Shadowdark: having design data is nice, but in the end, does it matter?
We very much enjoy playing Daggerheart in person, and I enjoy running it at cons, but I am very happy that it has official FG support now so i can run it more often and for folks who don't like within 45 minutes drive.
It just feels like something that would benefit everyone in the space. But then, i don't actually know anything about the logistics of doing such a thing, or if businesses would even be interested enough to help fund it.