I'd like to run a game in which the players enter and engage with late 80s and 90s media - movies, television, games.

Premise: The players inherit a collection of media from someone they used to hang out with in highschool but haven't really thought about in years. All the movies, shows, and games you used to get together and enjoy before you grew up, grew apart, went away to school, started careers, started families.

Only, thing is, get this... when you press play/turn on the power, you physically enter the world of the media.

Key to the experience is the fact that the players are relatively ordinary people from an ordinary world, transformed by the fantastic adventures and experiences they encounter. An additional dimension would be the contrast between the adventures the group has and the ordinary careers and familial obligation... the potential for addictive behavior leading to work/familial/social problems, and what kind of balance the characters seek.

Accordingly, systems I'm considering are GURPS (for its fidelity in power levels and growth) or a simplified version of Fate (for its ability to contextualize challenges).

Nice, this looks like a "rad" idea! ^_^

Sounds like my kind of story. I never played Fate, but I'm quite familiar with GURPS.

I'm holding off to hear people's opinions on which system to go with, but generally speaking the game will be open to players who don't have the books or are unfamiliar with the system.

To break it down:

GURPS has a high fidelity and is good at simulating reality in a consistent manner. Character creation can be complicated, but there's a free GURPS Lite PDF from the publisher, and I'm happy to guide people through translating their ideas into game mechanics with a few simple questions. After that, it's "3d6 roll under your skill" to accomplish tasks.

As the game goes on players will accrue skill points, and the opportunity to learn skills they'd otherwise never use in normal life.

Fate is even simpler; I'd probably go with Aspects-Only fate, meaning you just need to come up with three traits. It's a bit closer to freeform as an option, but still relies on GM resolution. Fate Accelerated is also an option; with the understanding that degree of challenge is interpreted compared to the capabilities of normal ordinary people.

As the game goes on, character growth comes in the form of replacing normal mundane aspects with ones representing the adventures you've had.

Interested! :)

Fate Accelerated is my system of choice.

I have all of the GURPS 4th ed books but I've always wanted to try FATE too. This would be a good excuse.

I'm interested.

I prefer Fate; while I like GURPS too, I think the system gets a bit underwhelming below the standard 150-point level.

Going with an Aspects-Only version of FATE. Here's the game:

link to another game

Back in high school in the 90s you were friends with one Bernard Robinson. He was a geek's geek - well versed in movies, video games, tv shows, anime - a geek-of-all-trades, if you will. Obsessed with it, maybe, obsessed with pop culture. Most of the time he was fun to hang out with, generous to a fault, accepting of others maybe because he was bullied so often, and he had one of the midwest's premier collections of nerd media.

Eventually you grew up. He didn't, never moving out of his parents' basement, never going away to college, never really moving on with life. If anything, he became more and more obsessive as you fell out of touch - you eventually had a family or a career, something bigger in life than cartoons and games.
Bernie did not.

As your memories of the 90s faded so did your contact with Bernie, until one day you were surprisingly reminded of who he was when you received notice of his death - and that you'd been named in his will.

90s Kidz is a FATE game about discovering that the things you'd thought you'd left behind are never that far away. Players will travel into alternate realities drawn from 1980s and 90s movies, tv shows, anime, and video games. What they do with this ability is up to them.

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This message was last edited by the user at 13:14, Tue 28 Sept 2021.