Multi-genre Role-playing Games
A cross-genre or multi-genre role-playing game allows the exploration of different genres in their own settings with the same character, or different versions or incarnations of the same character. The character may go from the American Old West, to four-color superheroics, to a mystery, and back to an invasion of Earth by aliens. While fantasy and science fiction are usually the most common genres, others can include mystery, western, horror, historical, and espionage.
This doesn't strictly require generic rules; even first edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, clearly not a generic system, had rules for interacting with Boot Hill and Gamma World settings and characters. However, generic rules clearly make this crossover easier.
Taking a character from one world to another can be one of the strengths of a generic system and may be the point of the game. The default GURPS 4th Edition setting, for example, takes advantage of exactly that strength. However some otherwise generic games do not always allow for transferring the same character to different worlds with the same rules. The d20 system, for example, has special setting-specific rules that mean that you cannot take a character out of one world and put him in another without adding rules to the new world to accommodate him. FUDGE, because of the looseness of the rules system, GURPS and the Hero System, through design, do not need to have rules added for a world change - although a little character adjustment may be necessary because of the different way the new world sees the character (e.g., in a new world the fact that a character is an officer of the law in the previous world may no longer be relevant except for character background).
On the other hand, a multi-genre or cross-genre role-playing game does not have to be the same as a generic game system, since it does not have to have rules for all possible genres, just those for the specific settings or worlds it covers. The below are examples of multi-genre, but not completely generic, role-playing games.
Read more about this topic: Generic Role-playing Game System
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“Intelligence and war are games, perhaps the only meaningful games left. If any player becomes too proficient, the game is threatened with termination.”
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