komradebob wrote: A group of players takes a product (adventure/module) for a game, but instead of playing it with an old school players + GM setup with pre-set linear story flow, decides to let all players read through the product, then play out some sort of story based on it (using Uni as the system).

It'd be news to me. Lots of people include commonly known elements - Ralph, myself and a friend of mine did D&D once as a whole as the background element. But no reference was made to any materials on hand. Could easily have done it, I suppose (got lots of old modules hanging around). Just didn't occur at the time.

I think anything can work as a resource. It's just a matter of how you incorporate it. Basically, if it's anything more than color and inspiration, if you want to enumerate things from the module, then you're on your own. The thing is that, given that you might not encounter some of the elements, it makes sense just to make it up as you go (the mechanical parts, traits, etc). Otherwise you're potentially doing more work than you need.

The one thing that I do remember is a group that said that level translated directly into traits of the same level. That is, if you came across a third level fighter, that character got "Fighter 3" as a trait automatically. I don't remember that being particularly successful. I think they also proposed converting any attribute bonuses into an equal amount of levels of the same trait. All resulted in too many dice. Universalis works when people are just attaching dice based on their own appreciation of something in the story. When you try to assign abilities based on "actual abilities" or something, you find that things have way more abilities than are pertinent to a story.

Mike