The Sci Fi Game

While Houses of Stone is on hiatus and I am a bit burned out on its creative flow, I have decided to run at least one game of Savage Worlds in a sci fi setting. It'll last 5 sessions.
I already have players lined up (in excess, surprisingly) for this game but I need to iron out world details.

The plan is to have one game session for world description from me and group character creation. Savage Worlds is fairly lightweight but has more to it than OD&D or B/X, and those are the only systems I've done character creation on G+ with. At a real table, it's fairly easy to talk to three or four people at once, pass around books, notes, and sheets of paper, and so on. I'm hoping that, with good people and patience, we'll be able to create characters as a group and establish the world properly on a G+ Hangout.

Right now I'm debating and designing the world. It's not going to be fantasy in space (i.e. Star Wars), but it definitely won't be hard sci fi, either. I tend to lean a bit toward the Mass Effect style--it's not about inter-ship combat, it's about people, doing stuff, on stations, planets, and ships. Interactions and shootouts.

Today's idea is that in the late 21st century, humanity is visited by a dying race, on their last pilgrimage across the universe before evolving into non-corporeal beings. Some handful of millions of them travel in convoy/flotilla. They were visited by a race from our solar system 50,000 years before, and that is how they gained the ability to travel the stars.
I'm also thinking that not long after this visit, humans realise they need to leave Earth, and are planning for the fact that a few hundred years later they will need a planet to settle. Perhaps the players will take on the role of a party scouting the galaxy for a New Earth. Or maybe they finished scouting and have been in stasis for the journey home--arriving on Earth 200 years or more later.

The thoughts... they drown out everything else in my brain. It's a good thing.

I'm in a 3e State of Mind

Yes, I'm using Billy Joel lyrics. You wanna fight about it?

I have, several times, recently found myself in a particular mindset or frame of mind about things related to gaming, putting together games, and so on. In fact, I've eaten my own words recently in a G+ discussion about FLAILSNAILS because I interpreted it from what I call a "3rd edition point of view" rather than reading it without preconceptions.

Let me 'splain... I began my delve into the realms of D&D and other pen and paper games in the year 2000--I never picked up an AD&D 2e book, as my library had several shiny new copies of the 3rd Edition Player's Handbook. In fact, nearly twelve years later, I've never even played AD&D 1e or 2e, though I've played in games that borrowed some of their concepts.

I have a friend, whom I game with quite often in person, who started playing in the days of 2e, but has spent most of his time, like me, playing and GMing 3e, 3.5e, and Pathfinder. I don't think this is bad at all--in fact, both of us agree that rules systems matter very little at the table, as long as you have a core mechanic to fall back on and agree that the GM has the final say over rules decisions and tries to keep it as simple as possible.

Now, flash forward to today. I was fascinated when I first heard of the "FLAILSNAILS" concept, but since I haven't had much free time on my hands, hadn't dug into very deeply. (I've played a handful of OD&D / Swords & Wizardry games and loved them, and it's at the top of my gaming priority list to get in on a G+ Hangout game using some form of those rules.)

FLAILSNAILS is, apparently, a super simple concept: GMs advertise their games as FLAILSNAILS friendly and as long as the character being imported is compatible (in the GM's view) it can be used. Easy, right?

Not according to my frame of reference, apparently. I read it as "FLAILSNAILS is a set of guidelines by which you can create a character that can then be imported into a game and then on to another later, as long as the GM running each game is using the compatible rules system." This misinterpretation of a simple way to allow players to play more often stems from a tradition in the 3e (and even 4e) era of D&D gaming that says "Here's the master list of all splatbooks I will allow automatically. Anything not on here must be approved by me."

Oddly enough, that's not how I like to run games. I usually say "Whatever's in the core book(s) is fine; anything beyond that...  just show me your concept and we'll find something mechanically that fits." This is readily evident in the Savage Worlds game I'm getting ready to launch in a custom setting. There's no prewritten "splatbook" or "campaign setting guide" that I wanted to use so I told my players to write character concepts based on their understanding of the world and anything not covered in the core Savage Worlds book would be house-ruled in as simple a way as possible.

I love the simplicity of this type of game creation. So why oh why is it so hard for me to let go of 10+ years of the splatbook-heavy mindset?