Of course, you needn’t limit yourself to the historical place/period.
There’s no reason why you couldn’t be air pirates in the Skies Of Arcadia universe.
Or space pirates — galaxy-roaming, acquisitive souls, whose motto is “If it ain’t nailed down it’s ours.”
Or you could take it a bit more steam-punk … … less outright piracy and more ‘legitimate colonialism <nudge, nudge>,<wink, wink>’, as it were.
Or you could do a meta-pirates type game, incorporating all possible realms, eras, dimensions, etc. … the common themes to all of them being pirates and piracy, swashbuckling, etc — pan-dimensional, acquisitive souls, whose motto is “If we can pry, blast or laser it free, it ain’t nailed down.”
…
Having played all sorts of games, I have to say that the ones that were the most fun were the ones in which the mechanics didn’t get in the way and the characters and stories were to the fore: an attempt to woo my party’s way out of certain death by seducing the gaoler’s daughter resulted in a critical fumble and my tongue in her ear rather than the chastely stolen kiss I fancied would enhance the rather subtler approach I had hitherto been taking … likewise, it was much more fun playing the aged, failed thespian with an opium addiction and a ‘carpet bag’ full of said substance that needed guarding at all times (in a Cthulhoid universe already given to mind bending visions even without the aid of mind altering substances) than a strapping, musclebound hero with ‘level twelvety-billion-and-nine’ abilities and no chance to fail against anything less than godlike beings.
The constant arms-race of D&D like games … ever greater powers requiring ever greater opponents against which to pitch them … gets boring quickly — once you’ve fought one or two gods, they’re all pretty much of a muchness and the only difference between them and your average werewolf/vampire is that they take a tediously long time … and a lot of dully repetitive mechanics … to defeat.
I’d much rather measure my success against goals achieved, lives saved, throats cut and plots thwarted than some arbitrary set of numbers that I need to attend to and/or an increasingly preposterous pile of gold, gems and other valuables that would soon see me subject to constant attempts at theft by others of my own kind, rendering my adventuring days a thing of the Past.
Otherwise, give me a good tabletopper like 40K and to Hell with the RP element.
