Platform Systems

Matt Miller

GURPS, FATE, ORE, BRP, Hero System, and Savage Worlds are all 'systems', in the sense that they provide a resolution mechanic that can be applied in a wide variety of contexts. They also have the 'core' elements of a system: Primary Attributes, some way of using skills, and some way of dealing with abilities. But while they provide the skeleton, it's a skeleton that requires a lot of fleshing out by the GM. I call these 'Platform' systems.
I contrast this with other games where there is a substantial amount of game content tied to a specific implementation of a game, and is often closely coupled with a specific setting. Examples of which being Monte Cook's '9th World', or the '13th Age' system or Dresden Files.
Examining DnD 5E, with its extensive lists of overlapping classes, lack of specific geography and early release of OGL/SRD, I begin to wonder if WotC/Hasbro isn't trying to make DnD into a 'platform' system.

Keith J Davies

And contrariwise, 13th Age can be played with other than their published setting -- it's more work, because they've hung so much off the icons. You'll want to replace the icons, but once you've done that you're most of the way there.

Marco Subias

...GURPS, FATE, ORE, BRP, Hero, are all at least somewhat generic systems with supplements that support campaign specialization. I can use any of those systems right out of the box to run all sorts of campaigns involving all sorts of time periods, tech levels, genres, and settings. DnD? Not so much. 

 Travis Casey

A few thoughts here:
      First, how RPGs advertise themselves doesn't always match their reality. Hypothetically, for example, The Dresden Files RPG is setting-specific... but it's flexible enough that it works quite well as a generic urban fantasy RPG. As a more extreme version, The Fantasy Trip is supposedly set in the world of Cidri... but we're told very little about Cidri, and it's explicitly made to be a huge world where "every GM's campaign setting can fit". Thus, TFT is really a fairly generic fantasy game.
      Games that actually tie the setting and mechanics strongly together are really fairly rare. Nobilis comes to mind as one, as do Everway and A Dirty World. Most games become "setting specific" not because of the actual mechanics of play, but because of the built-in details about the game world. D&D is a classic example: what's ostensibly a generic fantasy game comes hard-wired with a huge number of assumptions about the game world built into its classes, races, and monsters.
      Second, "universal" vs "setting specific" isn't a binary switch; it's a continuum. Even ostensibly "universal" games tend to have certain things they handle better than others. For GURPS, it's fairly low-powered, high-realism worlds. HERO does well in genres where its power-building system can shine, such as superheroes and fantasy. On the opposite end of things, we can say, for example, that 'Chivalry and Sorcery' is much more specific in the range of game worlds that it's designed for than The Fantasy Trip is, even though both are meant for "medieval fantasy"
     Third, people have differing ideas of what "game system" means. For example, A Dirty World is hypothetically an ORE system game, but it actually shares almost nothing but the die mechanic it uses with the other ORE games. D&D 3E and d20 Modern are both "d20 System" games, but they have completely different class setups. Going further, Mutants & Masterminds is also based on the d20 System... but it completely drops the idea of classes, and uses levels simply as a convenient measure of power (using them to set standard power point totals and power limits).
     In the last year, there's been a lot of "White Box" based systems released - White Star for SF, Warriors of the Red Planet for sword-and-planet science fantasy, White Lies for espionage. They all share the class/level paradigm and the same core mechanics, but they each have their own set of classes, races, and other supporting rules for their genres. This is really just a commercializing of something people have been doing since RPGs were new - taking whatever system they had or liked, and adapting it to the genre(s) they wanted to play in.