1.2 A word from the author
What made me spend a lot of work making Generica?
There are many reasons.
The reason that triggered the idea is a discrepancy between how roleplaying games are used and how they are constructed and licensed. When I get a new game, I read it, and then I do a Monster Garage on it. I tear out everything I don?t like, add some stuff I like and customise it to suit my taste. Most games today are not built with this use in mind; in fact, often they are built to make it more difficult to lock the user into the producers? concept. They contain weird units, messy interdependencies and so on. Even if you go through the work of modifying your freshly bought game, it often has a license that prevents you from sharing your work with others. I don?t mind the author of a game having his own view on how it should be played. In fact, even when I wrote Generica I had such a view. The difference is that I and Generica do not try to enforce that view on the players, people are actually encouraged to do their own take on things, do it their way.
Inspired by the open source and GPL movements, I saw a better way of doing it. I saw a modular game with many pre-installed tweaking knobs, designed from the ground up to be easy to modify. I saw a ?share and share alike?-license which allowed modifications to be made and shared freely, and which allowed others to use the modifications as a stepping-stone to modify even further. I saw the possibility of a strong community of gamers working together to make the game system a living and evolving entity, with new rules and worlds added and expanded continually. I saw a game developed by the gamers themselves, not by corporations whose prime concern are profit margins. Generica is the result of these visions.
Another reason is that I consider most games to have rules that are unnecessarily messy and complicated. I wanted a cleaner, more streamlined system, without losing detail. It should be fast and easy to explain and play, so easy that an experienced roleplayer should be able to understand what is going on just from looking at a premade character. I have tried to make Generica as streamlined and clean as possible. The basic mechanisms are simple to use and understand, and each part of the rules has few or none hidden dependencies on other rules.
I also wanted to make a combat system that is more realistic without bogging it down in tables and rules. After some discussions with experts in the area (although I probably misrepresented their expertise grossly in the rules), I decided to drop the traditional wearing down of hitpoints in favour of a system where you outmanoeuvre your opponent to get in a position to attack and where the actual injuries are serious.
Something I also feel about most existing games is that things like magic and psionics feel too much like machinery, too much of ?aim the device at the target and push the button labelled fireball?. I wanted a magic that felt mystical and arcane and which tied into some of the historical themes. I did not want a system that was locked down into a limited selection of spells; I wanted something that hinted more at genuine knowledge and mastery. I wanted psionics that felt wild, uncontrollable and dangerous, much like it is treated in Carrie or Firestarter.
Most of all, being a gamer, I wanted a game that I would like to play. My philosophy is that if I make a good game that works for me, others will like it to. Also, being a lazy person, allowing others to make additions and modifications means that I will not have to do all the work and we will se a broader range of ideas. A game made for gamers, by gamers. Generica.
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