Long, long ago (fado, fado in Eireann) myself and 3 of my primary school buddies cooked up our own story game and I wanted to talk about this as I think it roots my play style since.
Broadly speaking, there was a disc-shaped world (guess what we had been reading) held up by wasps on the back of a giant dolphin. Not sure it would get us around IP infringement today but it served for then. Each of us had a continent on this world of Ping - Pong, Zip, Stink and Kongk - that filled out a copy-book, each of us appeared as a character in the others continent.
Our characters ran about on each others continents doing stuff, mostly putting odd plans in motion, chasing after story hooks and resolving conflicts through argument or essentially a loudly contested GM-fiat system. The fact that each of us ran and played simulutaneously kept things fairly on the level though not without some lumps and bumps.
This would have been ~1990 and at the time we were reading Fighting Fantasy books and White Dwarf and playing Heroquest and Space Crusade. We were way out in the west of Ireland, very little made its way out that far (our original White Dwarf was snatched off a shelf by one of us on a trip to the North), so all of this developed more or less in isolation from any other live gaming inputs. Having figured out there were things out there, we got subscriptions to White Dwarf (1991) then Dragon Magazine (1993). We more or less simultaneously got our hands on some Advanced Fighting Fantasy material and Black Box D&D which told us there were ways to do what we had been doing, but with systems! Dice rolling! Wierd dice! This found an easy welcome.
From there, there was an attempted launch of a AFF game that did not take off. A year or two later I ran a first D&D game which ran for a fair few sessions. At this point there were groups of friends (all boys) who had more or less moved from boardgames onto RPGs, which then got super-charged when Magic: the gathering hit town. The local book store held Friday open table sessions, this allowed like-minded folk to congregate and from there a whole bunch of different games took off - AD&D, World of Darkness, Conspiracy X, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay.
I think the early system-less experiences drilled in a sense of the activity being seperate from the particular system which made the statement 'for a specific setting, use system X' non-controversial for me. Always we had a DM who owned those books, knew the given system and the rest of us sat to table and played.
All this is sparked from a twitter thread I saw saying kids today find the demands of a game having a big-S story, as they have learned from watching streamed games, intimidating and a barrier to entry. While I agree with that specific point, I think the broad point of 'come for the story' refreshing as it implies there is hope that a broad ecosystem of games can flourish, each supporting different styles.
Seperately a lot of the responses to that thread saying 'story driven is bad' I think miss a distinction where people equate 'story driven' with 'rail-road' which is to chop a pretty subtle continuum into just two chunks. I fully agree with the point that if you have a story to tell and you do not want the players to interfere probably you should go write a book instead. If you have some big story hooks to drop and then you are willing to run with what the table does with those hooks - that is going to be a game. Maybe it will be a simple 'players flee the consequence of their actions' monster of the week type thing - thats fine, so long as it all makes sense.
To sum up - we got years of fun out of system-less rule-of-cool and I think that grounding in 'we come together to tell some sort of story' makes for a good foundation to then pick up a variety of systems and settings and enjoy the best of what is out there.
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