I pinged her about it for the first time today (it was kind of a crazy weekend), once the survey came out. I wouldn’t expect any focus on it until tonight at the earliest.
There’s a survey? Are you talking about Bill’s spreadsheet or is there something else I missed?
Yes.
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“You [me] and Doyce should know me well enough to predict what kind of game I’d enjoy.”
and
“I want to have fun and not kill each other.” Which is akin to:
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Someone I know shared this stream of Session Zero of Henshin, if people are curious
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Good to see that other groups are as idiosyncratic and digressive … 
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I will note, btw, that we actually have a copy of Henshin at the Consortium (I think someone mentioned it during its Kickstarter or something; regardless, it sounded fun, so I picked it up). In case that nudges conversation in any particular direction.
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I’d do my best to make sure everyone had a copy of whatever the group ended up with, but this is good 
With one day left, are there other systems that people wanted me to look into, or chase down?
Thank you all for the hard work of creating an extensive game menu!
Some stray thought:
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I have found that I don’t like games that require background knowledge of the setting. I struggled some with Star Wars because of that.
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I like rewards for roll playing and character progress, but it often feels forced when that is the only XP.
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As always, I prefer a game where team is more important than the individual.
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So notes on the Margie’s comments, based on follow-up discussion with her.
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The second bullet refers to places where the experience mechanism encourages certain checkboxes of drama (e.g., this character gets progress for picking a fight, and therefore there’s a pressure to pick a fight every session).
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She opined that one of the things she’s actually enjoying with the D&D 5e we’ve been playing are campaigns structured with milestone leveling. I.e., we’re not all getting XP-per-dead-body (“oh, sorry, you split the party, so part of you get this much, and you folk that that much less”), but “Hey, you finished this dungeon, ding, everyone levels before we move to the next part of the saga.” (I concur.)
I don’t know if that has any applicability to any of the games in question, but as it came out in discussion, I wanted to transcribe it. 
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Just ran across this, and, without giving it a lot of serious thinking, sounds like potential, future fun. There’s definitely some overlap with Masks (though it’s not true PbtA) but with 80s magic vibe.
I finally cracked open the shiny Cortex Prime book I got via Kickstarter. I don’t grok it all just yet, but it’s another generic toolkit system that can be tailored for your genre and world.
It feels like a good fit for system hackers and people who like rolling and picking dice, and the characters can be fine-tuned for narrative focus vs. explicitly expressed competence in an area.
It’s not a game to play by itself; like Genesys, you do some work up front to tune it for your thing. It feels like most of the weight there is on the GM, other players should have it easy.
My biggest experience with Cortex (other than that same book that just came in the mail) is the Leverage RPG (which was my first introduction to skill challenges and progression tracks), the Firefly RPG (which while I didn’t play did show a lot of what the system could do by breaking down each episode of the show into game terms and sample play) and the Marvel Heroic RPG (which I only played two years ago at NewMexicon with the folks from Magpie Games and it was cool doing a big cosmic crossover between like 30 people playing the Avengers, the Guardian of the Galaxy, the X-Men, and the Heroes for Hire).
Definitely a game I wouldn’t mind giving a test run of.
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If I was to put a Cortex hack together, do we have any favorite genre or theme to start from? I’ve got a fantasy world I can cook up, but I’m happy to work on anything
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I’m kinda getting both my SF and Fantasy itches scratched right now. Without dealing with other actual source books, as referenced above, wondering if there’s a common setting/show/franchise that would be suited (a) for something relatively contained that (b) wouldn’t require big worldbuilding exercises, esp. for the GM. (E.g., a big MCU cosmic cross-over could be fun because “we” “know” the characters and universe already. That is just an example, though one I would totally play.)
Well you’re in luck there because Marvel Heroic Roleplaying is literally just Cortex with the Marvel characters (although they’re the comic incarnations)
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I have many fond memories of playing Marvel Heroic at my last gaming con before the pandemic happened, so I wouldn’t be disappointed with anything having to do with that.
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