Franchise Play

A couple of years back I found myself excited about playing in various franchises (or IPs), and wanted to run games in about fifty different genres. I ended up running games in the universes of Tron, Judge Dredd, and Dune.

At the time Tron had no RPG, Dune was out of print and out of my price range, and Dredd was represented by an old Games Workshop game I disliked intensely, and a Mongoose version that I rejected because of the high cost of entry (you had to buy Traveller and their Dredd publication, and I just noted the Dredd book isn't for sale on DriveThru anymore).

What I did was to fall back on the FATE system. FATE is generic and generic systems usually lack all the flavour and weighting of odds to make a session feel like you are really in the universe of the IP you are playing. BUT! Fate overcame that problem for me. In each case I produced a bunch of IP-based skills and a small collection of IP-based feats and tags. I also produced themed character sheets with art that set the scene. 

The sessions were a success, and I think that's because the "taste" or "feel" of the world was modelled in the changes I'd applied to the core FATE system through skills sheets, and tags. I would generally suggest that you should go with a franchises actual rules if available as usually (we always hope) the author has put the flavour into the game mechanisms, but a generic system can work as a fall back.