While not everybody's cup of tea, I really enjoy and prefer "Everything in a Box" / "Kitchen Sink" settings. Perhaps it's simply due to being raised on comics, but I want settings where just about anything can happen.

And that's an important point in itself, as well as an important point of divergence from most EiaB settings. I don't necessarily want to play in / run / create a setting where everything does happen, just one where it seems anything can happen.

One thing I've always loved about the comics is that you can have supernatural monster hunters team up with aliens, mutants, and Arthurian knights, and all of them could go out and slay chupacabras, and it doesn't seem out of place.

I prefer genre blends to playing genres "straight," for lack of a better term. I have always loved pulp stories with their blends of adventure, fantasy, horror, and science fiction, narratives with porous membranes that are made of a bit of everything, difficult to classify but delightful to read.

I want settings that allow for just about any character a player can imagine, so long as the PC can work well with the group.

I want to work with an entire world over the course of a long campaign, moving from place to place, time to time, even planet to planet and dimension to dimension, with the players trying out a variety of characters, allowing for a variety of play styles, tones, and adventures in what is ostensibly the same setting, the same gaming "universe."

Thoughts?

~Roman

I like kitchen sink settings, but here's the catch: I want to see the author's/GM's imprint on them clear as a bell.  Hopping between or mashing together other people's universes doesn't do anything for me.  I don't want to play straight-up Boromir and James Bond on the USS Enterprise.

It depends on what I want.
Strongly thematic/single-genre settings are something I prefer for one-shots or short campaigns as it adds a coherent theme to the whole game, and it can lead to interesting results when you have to stay inside the genre/theme to accomplish what you want to throw in (like the exotic conversions and cyber-enhanced animals in CP2020 when you want fantastical monsters).

For longer play though I prefer the kitchen-sink that allows me to throw in what I want without any headache. Shadowrun with it's blend of cyberpunk and fantasy, together with its partially bizarre gangs is a fine example for this.

Completely gonzo settings like Rifts however leave me completely confused. I need a clear central point on that I can rely as a default theme. The Marvel universe is a good example of this: The default is contemporary super-heroes, but there can be aliens, vampires, magical dimensions, SF laboratories and whatever be added whenever they are needed, and you can rely on the fact that plot/story/situation usually evolves from the schemes of a villainous blackhat with cool powers that get thwarted by whitehats with cool powers.

I've found the only true mishmash settings that work for me are dream-based games.  I love the concept of Sliders (and even Dr. Who, to some degree), but the problem I've found is that some characters are absolutely useless on some worlds, and while this might make for a great TV show, it sucks at the table.  

IMO Star Wars comes closest to being a playable "reality-based" mishmash.  The vast range of cultures and tech levels means you can basically run any type of game you want, with some minor mods--land on a "fantasy" world and fight dragons, visit a remote industrialized world where you have to infiltrate a corporation to rescue an ally, travel to an ancient prehistoric world in order to locate a rare mineral, etc.   I like it because if I get an idea for a horror or WWII adventure I can run a game deep in the bowels of a pseudogothic fortress or on some war-torn planet--the trappings might be a bit different (the soldiers might be genocidal lizardmen instead of Nazis), but the core idea is still the same.  

Pete

Quote from: jrientsI like kitchen sink settings, but here's the catch: I want to see the author's/GM's imprint on them clear as a bell.  Hopping between or mashing together other people's universes doesn't do anything for me.  I don't want to play straight-up Boromir and James Bond on the USS Enterprise.

That's pretty much how I feel too. A setting has to layer it's own identity over the various influences in order for it to be credible to me. Exalted managed to do this extremely well, as did Rifts.