There’s an interesting DIY/”backyard wrestling” feel to it, too. Like, amongst a certain demographic, an RPG that is designed to “tell stories like Game of Thones” is actually an awful lot more appealing than a licenced Game of Thrones game.

Part of it, I think, is just counterculturalism: “that big licenced game is going to be designed to have mass appeal and probably be boring and miss the most essential parts of the experience.” Part of it is the fact that in a lot of cases that countercultural response to licenced games is extremely well-justified.

And part of it probably stems from the fact that we all do that thing where we watch or read something and say “wow, I’d really like to play a game in that setting” and we start to work isolating why we like the setting and we look at the licenced material and try not to barf at how generic and flavourless they are and we hack away at whatever our personal preference for hacking is or try to create some original mechanics.

Like, one of the reasons I enjoy TOR so much is that despite all its flaws, it was a big, fancy officially-licenced game that actually attempted to capture the feeling and themes of its property. Similarly the BSG board game. Compare the utterly-lifeless BSG roleplaying game, or the movie-licence Lord of the Rings RPG.

And then, of course, you’re absolutely right about original and idiosyncratic settings. I’ve been reading Symbaroum, and every time I turn the page and there’s more setting material, I’m left thinking “how do I communicate all this to my players?” I know for a fact they won’t read it; they might not even read a summary. So are we going to charge ahead and then have to stop every time someone makes a decision or assumption that conflicts? Do I just accept that that difference is idiosyncratic to “our” Symbaroum? Maybe, and again, that’s fine in a game where the themes and mechanics don’t interact much; Monsterhearts, for example, leaves lots of leeway for the group to develop how werewolves work in an individual game world, or how a vampire manages to attend classes. But if a game has a clearly-defined setting AND that setting is important to the themes, like Clay, and like Circle of Hands, you’re going to have some rough edges.

And of course, the closer you hew to an existing property, the more effort you have to put into calling out your differences. If SCUP ends up 90% GoT, but the Queen’s Unicorn Knights are somehow setting-essential, you’re going to have players settling comfortably into their assumptions, only to get regularly stabbed in the backside by unicorns.

Complicated!