May I add two more systems to the list? The game I had fun playing is Mythic RPG. That is the system from which the famous GM Emulator is an excerpt. Mythic has some additional tools that the Emulator does not have to keep a basically random world consistent like Scaling Boxes or Question Resolution Charts. The second would be Tristat Dx. I have never played that game. It came on my radar as the basic system for BESM (Big Eyes Small Mouth), an anime RPG that I sadly could never convince anyone to play. Tristat Dx uses different dice for power scaling. The basic difficulty of things stays the same. If things should be easy for the characters you use D20. If everything is almost impossible, it's D4. BESM is Tristat D6.

Shout out to Whitehack, that game never gets enough love.

Hey, I am happy to see someone who also loves to compare universal systems! I did not really know Open Legend, and had only heard a bit about White Hack. Thanks for pointing me to them! 🙏 When I got the Cypher System, I was blown away by the list of more than a thousand abilities. Even if many of them are different levels of the same (or a similar) power, I found that quite inspiring. As the system is rooted in the Numenera rpg, it has its focus on exploring strange worlds and creatures, not so much on combat. I think that is one reason that different classes show very different ways of approaching situations. When I got Basic Roleplaying, I did not expect too much, as the system is literally more than forty years old. But it still works very well, and has so many small but concise special rules for just about any setting (rules for vehicles, flying, tactical combat, sanity, passions, personality traits, mutations, different magic systems, ...). It reflects the many years of rpg experience that went into the system. Although I am not so fond of the special dice, I like the Genesys magic system, that really lets you make your custom spell at exactly the level you need it at the moment. Thanks again for your great video and the graphic classification of all of the systems!

Amazing video, great review of game systems, congrats for the channel, I just subscribed 😊

I think it's really cool that you gave Cortex Prime a space in your video ^^ The Cortex Prime Core book is not very well built in terms of LEARNING FROM 0, but having someone explain the system to you makes all the concepts MUCH easier to learn. Not to mention that the difficulty of learning Cortex is not because of the mechanics, but rather how you interpret it or what mindset you have in mind when you think about ttrpgs! It's much easier for someone who has played Fate to understand because the mindset of the game is similar, now if you come from d&d and other more systematic games... you'll probably have a difficult start understanding the mechanics xD

Nice video with clear explanations and examples :) Thank you!

I got into rpgs during the Cortex Plus era (when Hastings Bookstore was still around and purchased Smallville rpg and Marvel Heroic Roleplaying and 4e's Redbox all in the same purchase order!) Super hard to get a copy (200 is usually the going price on EBAY) but another Cortex+ era game was Leverage. If I recall, some Leverage designers were also Fate designers? I also recall early blogs comparing Fate vs Leverage/Cortex and determining that Leverage was the better roleplay experience and game. I have both and Fate just didn't do it for me, whereas, Leverage opens up my creativity and easily imagines swapping out the "heist+thieves+oceans11" aesthetic for something akin to a DC Suicide Squad or First Class X-MEN academy game with ease. After Dragon Brigade, Leverage, Smallville, Firefly, Marvel were all published, MW produced a Cortex+ tool-kit called The Hackers Guide (still reasonable on ebay and of the C+ era games, Marvel Heroic is still reasonable on there, too). Hackers Guide basically took all Cortex+ era games and divided them into three categories: Is you narrative more focused on Actions and is team overcoming an objective (usually non-combative, like steal deathstar plans) then go with Cortex Action (Hackers vanilla version of Leverage), is your game more focused on narrative based on dramatic situations and social interactions, where its possible where all the PC's are against each other and could backstab the other at any moment, then go with Cortex Drama (based off Smallville). Or is your narrative more focused on giant set pieces where big action and combat is going to be driving most of the narrative, then go with Cortex Heroic (which in HG was a re-flavoring of Marvel Heroic reskinned as Heroic Fantasy-- the Hackers guide also provided guidelines on how to use Leverage to create your classic D&D-esque game, too). Cortex Prime, in my opinion, was perhaps originally intended as a companion piece to those who already purchased Hackers Guide, whereas HG was mods on Cortex+ games- Action/Drama/Heroic, Prime was conceived to take Plus and boil it down to its nuts and bolts and create your own Cortex game. Then MW sold Cortex to Cortex+'s creator, who then KS it to be its own universal toolkit, because now all C+ era games would be oop and obsolete. The "problem" was three-fold: Cortex is a narrative "role"playing game, not a "roll"playing game, like 5e. In the game engine, you aren't persay roleplaying a character, you're roleplaying narrative structures (in Smallville, as a player, you were just as much a super-powered teen with high school problems, just as much as you were a tv writer in a writer's room working out the season's arc-- ie, winning in Smallville wasn't as much as getting what your character "wants", that's usually "boring" in the land of televised drama, the overall "team-goal" is making the narrative sell well, ie, story not the player's own personal goals- if Clark Kent became Superman in S1, there'd be no show). So there is a learning curve for those playing more traditional rpgs because it requires "rethinking" everything you've ever thought of an rpg, wait, what, mechanically speaking, its actually more "beneficial" for my character to get "hit" in this scene? Wait, What!! Problem 2, as noted above, as originally conceived, Prime was probably originally intended to be sold to those who have already played some of Leverage/Smallville/MHR and own Hackers Guide, as it was meant to "compliment" those games, NOT to teach you a whole new system, whole-cloth, for those new to Cortex. But with the loss of IP and licenses, NOW those almost "required" systems for the sake "familiarity" of "how it's done folks", are now out of the public domain! And this isn't persay a problem depending on how you look at it, but in my opinion, Prime leans heavily on Cortex+'s Firefly engine and not Action/Drama/Heroic, a lot of the examples given more align with how Firefly did it (which was probably the closest mechanics Cortex got with D&D, ie, Attributes + Skills, and was the "example" and vanilla system "missing" in Hacker's Guide, ie, Prime is in some respects vanilla Firefly, therefore completing the triage of vanilla options presented in HG). THEREFORE for Cortex Prime to really be marketable to mass appeal, it would "require" a new Cortex Game, ie, Tales of Xadia and Masters of Universe/Greyskull. Problem 3, developmental HELL. Cortex might just be my favorite RPG system EVER--- I LOVE LOVE LOVE all my Cortex + stuff--- speaks SOOO much to my creative mind ---- but the tribulations of the "story" behind Prime's Kickstarter Campaign added with the CONSTANT switching to who owns the damn game produced SOOO much baggage with the game. This developmental Hell Backstory most likely lost the game a lot of pervious fans of C+, and in the end produced a fine game and great product, Prime, BUT as stated, to really "get" the game, it demands EXAMPLES, sure Xadia eventually did come out, which is GREAT, but where is love for this game? Direwolf hardly ever advertises it and there are "crickets" on any plans to add supplements. Nuts! Then most devastatingly, the license deal with Netflix fell through on Greyskull, which the early draft previews and examples seemed, to me at least, to be exactly the direction I would want Cortex to go into next, and not just reimplementation's of Firefly redone. In a word, Cortex, KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE, and KNOW WHO YOU ARE SELLING TO. In better news, however, someone took Prime and made an easier version of it called "Cortex Lite", that's free on the web and worth looking into. Also someone took Prime and made a Fantasy-skinned version of it akin to D&D and that's called Keystone I believe, early drafts of that is still free on the internet, I believe.

To understand Cortex Prime, it really helps to have familiarity with the systems it was based on. In Serenity, you assigned dice values to attributes and skills and then rolled the dice pool you had created. Cortex Plus tweaked this a bit by turning some traits into a die value as well, so your dice pool was an attribute, maybe a skill and maybe a trait. I'm doing this from memory, so pardon me whilst I get the details wrong, But this gist is, Leverage used roles instead of attributes and Smallville used values and relationships instead of attributes and skills. I believe Smallville also introduced the concept of distinctions, so your dice pool consisted of a value, a relationship (if one applied) and a distinction, if it applied. Marvel Heroic was a similar system in that it assigned dice to various things, like whether you worked in team, solo, or with one other super (or something like that). Generally, all these systems created a dice pool, but the pools might be created from attributes, skills, roles, values, relationships, distinctions, etc. You usually want to use two concepts plus distinctions to create a dice pool of at least three dice (with concepts like plot points potentially changing this number of dice). The concepts you chose were based on the type of game you wanted to play. For example, values and relationships are best for games that emphasise character interaction and drama, attributes and skills for games that focus on tasks and obstacles, etc. I would recommend reading some of the prior Margaret Weis books in order to understand Cortex Prime, but you can only have my books when you can prise them from my cold, dead fingers and I don't think I'm alone in that. It's not easy to find any of those books at a reasonable price. Having said all this, I have run and/or played most of the generic systems you've discussed and Cortex Prime/Serenity is far and away my favourite, Btw, there's also EN publishing's WOIN. I would like to try that out, but my group is narrowly focussed on DnD and I'm having a hard time broadening their horizons. It's intriguing, but I need to play it to determine how playable it is and I haven't done that yet.

Nice video, thanks! Regarding Freeform Universal, it's 2e in beta for more than 3 years now lol. Mechanically it still the same as 1e, but got much more of really nice crunch, while still being all about narrative. And although system itself isn't updated anymore, it's author already made a few games based on Freeform Universal, from which most notable is Neon City Overdrive, cyberpunk mix of Freeform Universal and Blades in the Dark.

Mini-six is more simulation than narrative. As it is a modified Open D6. The original game mechanic for West End Games and Star Wars.

Mini Six looks very interesting and I've never even heard of it before. I will give it a read. Thanks for the great list!

For anyone who might say GURPS came first. Several of the GURPS devs were people who had previously worked for the developers of Champions System which later became Hero System. You can quite literally see how they lifted much of Champions into GURPS.

Really good list! I need to try Tricube Tales. I would also recommend some “toolbox” games like Risus and Kismet. Both are simple games that can be learned in 15min and are great for beginners 🙂 I wish there was an universal PbtA games out there since I don’t like binary resolution mechanics.

I’d put forged in the dark (FiTD) in here (blades in the dark, scum and Villainy, candela Obscura) shows how flexible; year zero as well (lots of free league systems from aliens to forbidden lands to Vaesan , and pbtA - dcc, Kult, monster of the week … These system are more narrative, but handle multi genre with ease

Looking forward to your thoughts on these systems, but missing ICRPG is a massive miss IMO.

I got into Cortex through the Marvel Heroic Roleplay, but there are other concrete settings that use cortex too. And thus learning on a clear example is helpfully to get into Cortex. Regarding the Cypher system, I think you are not wrong about the flaw of the system, it can create very unbalanced characters. Personally, I don't think Genesys is that narrative, it sure calls the dice narrative, but I would put it more on the simulation and gaming tropes side, since it seems to be concerned mostly with emulating the fictional worlds and not so much about on creating narratives. I have played GURPS, quite a lot actually for how little I like it. My two main issues with it are that even with lots of tinkering the character options feel too slippery to carry any world ambiance, and annoying during play is that the dice rolls are all off centre, meaning the GM has to give bonuses to just normal every day tasks so that the players do not ail all the time. Which means the GM has to remain in rules mode during play and cannot simply slip into a more creative flow. Overall, solid video I would say. I working on my own universal system, which is absolute and only about narrative, especially more drama based fiction. Thus no simulation or gaming tropes, and probably exactly on the line between toolbox and whole game, since I think it should be possible to run all kinds of contemporary drama out of the box, but if only wants to do that in some genre then some tinkering might be necessary, for which I try to provide all the tools needed. The working title is Heartbleed.

Cortex Prime certainly pique my interest, will have to take a look at it in the future! Has anyone tried soloing an scenario/adventure book? There's several out there from different systems that I'm fond of but I can't really get my head around on how to solo them. Not sure how should I convert its encounters to a system I'm using and prevent my solo game from diverting too far from the more static nature of a scenario book.

I would've loved to put the Drama System from Hillfolk.

Thks & pls try the CataclysmDDA computer game

I found out this new generic ttrpg that nobody's talking about, it's called heroes and hardship, it seems like a more narrative almost forge in the dark generic toolkit

Wow you don't like crunchy game systems, you like the crispy systems. You forgot about the best generic system out there "Rolemaster".

HERO SYSTEM 5 edition is better than 6th.