I have generally have lower expectations of licensed games based on my video game experience.  Licensed video games are generally of much lower quality than unlicensed ones because such a large part of their budget goes to licensing.  I avoid them for that reason.  The upsides are playing in that setting I always wanted to, less work for everyone getting up to speed on the setting, and new information or stories about a franchise I'm craving more of.  I was really excited to find GURPS Witch World for that last reason.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on March 05, 2023, 08:13:37 AM

Quote from: jhkim on March 05, 2023, 12:00:50 AM
For me, the top thing that I like about using an adapted setting is that the players can instantly know what the world is like and what their characters would know. To get that same background knowledge of an original world, the GM has to give hours-long narration or multi-page writeups. Mashups aren't much better, since there are a thousand questions about how those different pieces fit together. What's the geography like? If I'm a Newhon ghoul, what are relations like with the sylvan elves? etc.

Being able to jump over the background means that we can get right into what I usually find is the more interesting stuff -- the PCs and their adventures.

That's a place where your feature is my bug.  Because I'm focused on develop in play.  I don't want huge backgrounds from the players.  I don't want to give them all that narration or written background (though I do provide a little).  Background assumptions brought in from the license are just as bad or worse, because now I need to work to get those assumptions out.  Plus, almost everyone I run games for appreciates uncovering mysteries and secrets of the game world, with several different reasons why. 

The players learn what the world is like by playing in it, which is by far my preferred style.

I'm fine that we have different tastes, but I'm also concerned that we might be talking past each other. I also want the focus to be on uncovering mysteries and secrets in the game world. The stuff I want to skip past are things like "how does money work", "what religion do most people believe", "what sort of plants and animals would my character know about", etc. -- i.e. things that a character who grew up in the world and became a trained professional would know.

I often have games set in some version of the real world (modern or historical), which helps with this.

I typically want the PCs to feel like they are competent professionals who grew up in the game-world. I sometimes have run a game where the PCs are unwittingly transported into an alien environment that they know nothing about, like the children in the Chronicles of Narnia -- but that's not typical. My concern with running a game where everything is unknown to the players is that the PCs come across like the latter -- i.e. unwitting newcomers to their own world.

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To the extent that the license means that the players already pre-know secrets, I regard that as a flaw that I want to mitigate. The most common one that I've had is in Call of Cthulhu where players know what many Mythos creatures are like. In my CoC games, I've usually focused on unique creations for the game-world, not on standard Mythos monsters. Alternately, the monster is revealed early and the focus is on what the creatures are up to rather than what they are.