Quote from: yosemitemike on May 12, 2024, 11:09:06 AMAfter a bit of discussion, it comes out that the person saying that X game can totally do Y thing is either ignoring great chunks of the game or has house ruled it to the point where it is only nominally the same game.  Exalted works for low-powered fantasy if you take the basic resolution mechanic and the scant rules for playing mortals and discard the entire rest of the game.  In other words, if you don't actually play Exalted.  People seem to think that this is actually a sensible suggestion instead of using a system that was actually made to do that.  Every time I mention this, someone will pop up to make a case for why suggesting Exalted for a gritty cold war spy thriller totally makes sense and isn't an incredibly idiotic suggestion.  I could use the core resolution mechanic and build my own spy game around it.  On the other hand, I could not be an idiot and stupidly waste my time doing that when there are several games designed to do what I want to do. 

If you dig a little deeper, what inevitably emerges is that the person claiming X can do Y is already ignoring many of the rules and actively fudging the ones used.  Of course if you do that, you can use almost any system to run almost anything.  I mean, Paranoia for a Three Musketeers game probably doesn't work, because the fluff is too disjointed.  But as long as the fluff is remotely in the vicinity and can be twisted all out of recognition, then you can do it.  Because you aren't really playing X, but some patina of X.

This trend is part of what I mean when I sometimes mention that I'd run Star Wars as a parody game using Toon rules.  Because it's the same kind of disjointed nonsense, while at the same time as a parody I could certainly do it. (And most of why I couldn't run it as a serious game is that I can no longer take anything in the Star Wars universe even remotely in the spirit intended, not because of any deficit in the Toon rules for pulling off that gambit.)

Not coincidentally, this is also why some game "designers" aren't.  Not in the sense of Gygax avoiding the AD&D rules, but in the sense of the so called designer not even using the rules they are purportedly running, whatever those might be.

Quote from: Anon Adderlan on May 12, 2024, 06:40:08 PM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 12, 2024, 09:45:32 AMYou could introduce a flashback mechanic where characters remember living through various historical eras a la Highlander: The Series, allowing you to invent pretentious lore and make it personally relevant to the PCs.

Honestly surprised this hasn't already happened.

There's an obscure dead French ttrpg that did it a couple decades ago. It didn't get any traction because this hobby is dominated by an obscene first mover advantage.

I am so exasperated with the sheer fucking stupidity of this hobby.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on May 12, 2024, 06:58:08 PM

Quote from: yosemitemike on May 12, 2024, 11:09:06 AMAfter a bit of discussion, it comes out that the person saying that X game can totally do Y thing is either ignoring great chunks of the game or has house ruled it to the point where it is only nominally the same game.  Exalted works for low-powered fantasy if you take the basic resolution mechanic and the scant rules for playing mortals and discard the entire rest of the game.  In other words, if you don't actually play Exalted.  People seem to think that this is actually a sensible suggestion instead of using a system that was actually made to do that.  Every time I mention this, someone will pop up to make a case for why suggesting Exalted for a gritty cold war spy thriller totally makes sense and isn't an incredibly idiotic suggestion.  I could use the core resolution mechanic and build my own spy game around it.  On the other hand, I could not be an idiot and stupidly waste my time doing that when there are several games designed to do what I want to do. 

If you dig a little deeper, what inevitably emerges is that the person claiming X can do Y is already ignoring many of the rules and actively fudging the ones used.  Of course if you do that, you can use almost any system to run almost anything.  I mean, Paranoia for a Three Musketeers game probably doesn't work, because the fluff is too disjointed.  But as long as the fluff is remotely in the vicinity and can be twisted all out of recognition, then you can do it.  Because you aren't really playing X, but some patina of X.

This trend is part of what I mean when I sometimes mention that I'd run Star Wars as a parody game using Toon rules.  Because it's the same kind of disjointed nonsense, while at the same time as a parody I could certainly do it. (And most of why I couldn't run it as a serious game is that I can no longer take anything in the Star Wars universe even remotely in the spirit intended, not because of any deficit in the Toon rules for pulling off that gambit.)

Not coincidentally, this is also why some game "designers" aren't.  Not in the sense of Gygax avoiding the AD&D rules, but in the sense of the so called designer not even using the rules they are purportedly running, whatever those might be.

This explains so much of the stupidity in this hobby and is a key reason why I keep giving up on my ideas to make my own. If most "gamers" ignore the rules anyway or buy the books to read shitty microfiction instead of playing, then why should I spend any effort to write functional games or coherent settings? They're brand loyalty cultists who won't buy my work anyway.

A flashback system was also essential to Fireborn, only there the flashbacks were to an ancient time where the PCs play dragons. I've long thought about trying to do a Fireborn game using a different system, but I've just never found the time. It's an intriguing game but the combo mechanics used for combat are way too involved for most of the people I play with.

Quote from: yosemitemike on May 12, 2024, 11:09:06 AMThis reminds me of an odd sort of conversation I have seen and been involved in many time over the years.  I have seen it it in every venue I have been a part of where ttrpgs are discussed but it as most common at TBP and usually involved whatever the current darling was.

Someone will post and ask for a system to do some specific thing.  What's a good system for gritty, low-powered fantasy.

Several people would pop up to suggest the current darling no matter how poorly suited it was to what the person wanted to do.  "Have you considered Exalted?" as a suggestion for everything was so common that it became a meme.  I want to do a gritty spy thriller set during the Col War.  Have you considered Exalted?  That was a real suggestion.

Someone with an ounce of sense chimes in to say that the darling isn't really made to do what the OP wants and suggest something else.  Maybe WFRP for that gritty fantasy game or maybe an OSR title.

People start defending the nonsensical suggestion.  Exalted can totally do low-powered fantasy/gritty cold war spies/fucking everything.  Usually, what they say if self-evidentially true.  That's not what Exalted is written to do.  It says so right in the fucking book. 

After a bit of discussion, it comes out that the person saying that X game can totally do Y thing is either ignoring great chunks of the game or has house ruled it to the point where it is only nominally the same game.  Exalted works for low-powered fantasy if you take the basic resolution mechanic and the scant rules for playing mortals and discard the entire rest of the game.  In other words, if you don't actually play Exalted.  People seem to think that this is actually a sensible suggestion instead of using a system that was actually made to do that.  Every time I mention this, someone will pop up to make a case for why suggesting Exalted for a gritty cold war spy thriller totally makes sense and isn't an incredibly idiotic suggestion.  I could use the core resolution mechanic and build my own spy game around it.  On the other hand, I could not be an idiot and stupidly waste my time doing that when there are several games designed to do what I want to do. 

So no one can play gurps?

Quote from: yosemitemike on May 12, 2024, 11:09:06 AMThis reminds me of an odd sort of conversation I have seen and been involved in many time over the years.  I have seen it it in every venue I have been a part of where ttrpgs are discussed but it as most common at TBP and usually involved whatever the current darling was.

Someone will post and ask for a system to do some specific thing.  What's a good system for gritty, low-powered fantasy.

Several people would pop up to suggest the current darling no matter how poorly suited it was to what the person wanted to do.  "Have you considered Exalted?" as a suggestion for everything was so common that it became a meme.  I want to do a gritty spy thriller set during the Col War.  Have you considered Exalted?  That was a real suggestion.

Someone with an ounce of sense chimes in to say that the darling isn't really made to do what the OP wants and suggest something else.  Maybe WFRP for that gritty fantasy game or maybe an OSR title.

People start defending the nonsensical suggestion.  Exalted can totally do low-powered fantasy/gritty cold war spies/fucking everything.  Usually, what they say if self-evidentially true.  That's not what Exalted is written to do.  It says so right in the fucking book. 

After a bit of discussion, it comes out that the person saying that X game can totally do Y thing is either ignoring great chunks of the game or has house ruled it to the point where it is only nominally the same game.  Exalted works for low-powered fantasy if you take the basic resolution mechanic and the scant rules for playing mortals and discard the entire rest of the game.  In other words, if you don't actually play Exalted.  People seem to think that this is actually a sensible suggestion instead of using a system that was actually made to do that.  Every time I mention this, someone will pop up to make a case for why suggesting Exalted for a gritty cold war spy thriller totally makes sense and isn't an incredibly idiotic suggestion.  I could use the core resolution mechanic and build my own spy game around it.  On the other hand, I could not be an idiot and stupidly waste my time doing that when there are several games designed to do what I want to do. 

When I see this sort of things happen I usually come to one of two different conclusions, which one depends on what faith in the human species I have at the moment:

• The guy making the suggestion is a fucking idiot devoid of even basic reading comprehension and/or a drooling fanboy of some kind
• The guy making the suggestion directly or indirectly works for the company that makes the suggested game and the suggestion itself comes as part of a marketing campaign

On rare occasions both points are true at the same time.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 12, 2024, 01:19:25 PMI mean in the sense of "why has nobody made a replacement game like how One Page Rules is replacing Games Workshop?" Not literally using D&D rules.

They have.  There are a shitload of these that have come out.  The Everlasting is one of the better known examples but there are lots more.  None of them have ever really gotten much traction.  Most of them, like After Sundown, came out and then sank without a trace and were forgotten.   

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 12, 2024, 05:00:24 PM

Quote from: Corolinth on May 12, 2024, 04:51:45 PMThat's fine, but it doesn't change the facts on the ground. As a general rule, OSR people aren't into Vampire, and aren't interested in recreating Vampire. The people who are into Vampire are still doing Vampire.

If there was going to be a replacement game that didn't use nu-WW's nu-WoD rules, it would probably be fueled by the end times, and you still wouldn't want to play it.

I just want urban fantasy. No end times bullshit, no leftoid bullshit, no failed novelists tricking me into reading their shitty microfiction, no faux-gamer cultists worshiping said shitty microfiction, none of that. Is there really nobody alive who would be interested in an actual game, intended to be played, that features magical creatures living on a modernish Earth?

You want Sigil & Shadow from Osprey Publishing.

Quote from: yosemitemike on May 13, 2024, 03:52:38 AM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 12, 2024, 01:19:25 PMI mean in the sense of "why has nobody made a replacement game like how One Page Rules is replacing Games Workshop?" Not literally using D&D rules.

They have.  There are a shitload of these that have come out.  The Everlasting is one of the better known examples but there are lots more.  None of them have ever really gotten much traction.  Most of them, like After Sundown, came out and then sank without a trace and were forgotten.   

I heard from a guy who was trying to a do a 2nd edition of everlasting, but the copyright owner is apparently dead and his family cannot be found. So the IP is in copyright limbo.

WitchCraft is in the same boat because the owner has severe health problems.

Right now is probably the perfect time to make an urban fantasy game because Paradox has alienated basically everyone who bought their IPs. But nobody's trying. The fanboys would rather buy the old dead editions on drivethru than make their own. I actually asked some CoD fans if they'd like me to write a spiritual successor to their canceled darling and they just told me to fuck off.

I really don't like interacting with these people. I don't think they even play the actual rules, they just like reading lore and imagining what it would be like to play.

I want urban fantasy written for normal people, not them.

Quote from: NotFromAroundHere on May 13, 2024, 04:05:18 AM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 12, 2024, 05:00:24 PM

Quote from: Corolinth on May 12, 2024, 04:51:45 PMThat's fine, but it doesn't change the facts on the ground. As a general rule, OSR people aren't into Vampire, and aren't interested in recreating Vampire. The people who are into Vampire are still doing Vampire.

If there was going to be a replacement game that didn't use nu-WW's nu-WoD rules, it would probably be fueled by the end times, and you still wouldn't want to play it.

I just want urban fantasy. No end times bullshit, no leftoid bullshit, no failed novelists tricking me into reading their shitty microfiction, no faux-gamer cultists worshiping said shitty microfiction, none of that. Is there really nobody alive who would be interested in an actual game, intended to be played, that features magical creatures living on a modernish Earth?

You want Sigil & Shadow from Osprey Publishing.

Hmm... I've checked that out, but it still has the emogoth aesthetic that turned me off from WoD/CoD. I'm not an angsty teenager anymore.

I'm basically looking for a superhero/supervillain game with halloween monsters. Not horror, faux horror, or whatever the fuck personal horror is. D&D Modern or something.

At this point I'm just writing prose fiction to get my thoughts out. Original fiction doesn't get any views on ao3 unless you add porn scenes, unfortunately. I'm interested in the philosophical, occult and ethical implications, so I'm stuck between a rock and a hard place. All the options are garbage

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 13, 2024, 08:50:58 AMI want urban fantasy written for normal people, not them.

People are still coming out with them but they are mostly PbtA games like Urban Shadows or Undying. 

Quote from: Brand55 on May 12, 2024, 10:34:00 PMA flashback system was also essential to Fireborn, only there the flashbacks were to an ancient time where the PCs play dragons. I've long thought about trying to do a Fireborn game using a different system, but I've just never found the time. It's an intriguing game but the combo mechanics used for combat are way too involved for most of the people I play with.

Fireborn looks really interesting, so I'm disappointed that it died. Aside from FantasyCraft, there's really no game that actually lets you play a dragon.

Urban Shadows 1e apparently had a dragon playbook, but I cannot find it in the online store or in the 2e quickstart.

Quote from: yosemitemike on May 13, 2024, 09:15:51 AM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 13, 2024, 08:50:58 AMI want urban fantasy written for normal people, not them.

People are still coming out with them but they are mostly PbtA games like Urban Shadows or Undying. 

Urban Shadows looks the most interesting to me out of the options with communities still behind them. It's actually written to be a real game and doesn't restrict itself to dogmatic lore, so I've found the community very welcoming and open-minded. Not only that, but they hate the Storyteller games too!

However... the gameplay is very improv. I'm not asking for another bloated mess of bad lore, but I do like setting books, splat books, monster manuals and that sort of thing. I'd think Urban Shadows would lend itself to that like D&D does, but there's only a handful of books for the first edition and the second edition has been in development hell for years. It's not a deal breaker, but it is still disappointing.

The writers are very liberal urbanites and it shows in their writing. There's a sidebar in the quickstart that states how pro-minority they are, that all cities were created by minorities, and that the magical creatures are all metaphors for minority groups. (The playbooks are not actually written to be 1:1 metaphors btw. This isn't Monsterhearts.)

I'm not comfortable with associating vampires with gay people. It just reeks of blood libel.

I would guess that, since WoD/CoD is mostly moribund now, people don't have the motivation to publish that WoD Heartbreaker that they did when it was big.  WoD-alikes just aren't really the thing any more.  A company called Fen Orc makes a series of Black Hack hacks along these lines but I don't know much about them.  They have some silver and electrum sellers so they have gotten some traction anyway.

Quote from: yosemitemike on May 13, 2024, 10:59:31 AMI would guess that, since WoD/CoD is mostly moribund now, people don't have the motivation to publish that WoD Heartbreaker that they did when it was big.  WoD-alikes just aren't really the thing any more.  A company called Fen Orc makes a series of Black Hack hacks along these lines but I don't know much about them.  They have some silver and electrum sellers so they have gotten some traction anyway.

I'm not looking for a heartbreaker, I'm looking for games in the urban fantasy genre. I don't actually like WoD/CoD because they're bad microfiction pretending to be games, which the fans don't actually play anyway.

Urban fantasy is still a thriving literary genre. It's oversaturated. I'm really surprised there's zero spillover into ttrpgs.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 13, 2024, 11:34:57 AM

Quote from: yosemitemike on May 13, 2024, 10:59:31 AMI would guess that, since WoD/CoD is mostly moribund now, people don't have the motivation to publish that WoD Heartbreaker that they did when it was big.  WoD-alikes just aren't really the thing any more.  A company called Fen Orc makes a series of Black Hack hacks along these lines but I don't know much about them.  They have some silver and electrum sellers so they have gotten some traction anyway.

I'm not looking for a heartbreaker, I'm looking for games in the urban fantasy genre. I don't actually like WoD/CoD because they're bad microfiction pretending to be games, which the fans don't actually play anyway.

Urban fantasy is still a thriving literary genre. It's oversaturated. I'm really surprised there's zero spillover into ttrpgs.

Because they don't want to play TTRPGs, they want to write fanfiction about vampires and werewolves. They want melodrama. They want powered by the apocalypse or something like that. Repeating the term "microfiction" over and over again on an OSR forum doesn't change that. They want to imagine themselves writing microfiction that everyone else at the table gushes over. Their fantasy isn't being a vampire and doing vampire things in 21st century London, their fantasy is being that gal who started writing bad Twilight fanfiction and ended up with a movie deal for softcore BDSM pornography that every middle-aged white woman in North America saw in the theater, but pretends not to like in public.

You're the one who's different.

Well, I've already given my pitch a few times, so no point in repeating that.

What I will say new is I think it's a mistake to think anything the WoD/CoD fans want is even remotely for normal people.

Normal people read Dresdan Files, Anita Blake, Monster Hunter International and watch stuff like Vampire Dairies, Being Human, Magicians or the like... basically, the supernatural is mostly just a way to crank up the ordinary drama of another genre.

The idea that Urban Fantasy is a single genre is the biggest obstacle to doing it well. The vampire you want for a detective thriller and the one you want for a teen romance are completely different beasts.

WoD vampires (and all their other splats) exist in the genre of Marxist social commentary (and lost its dark satirical edge once that started getting in the way of The Message) and only appealed to the normals to the extent it maintained its satire.

These days the only people still actively playing the new stuff are there for the ideological message first and a game second. You can't recruit them to a different system because they aren't there for the system.

Those playing the older stuff are the same types who are still using their AD&D 1e and Rules Compendiums books. You can't recruit them for the same reason you can't get an OSR to play 4E.

Best bet to go after normies is either license an existing series labeled Urban Fantasy -or- pick a genre with a modern setting (spy, crime, procedural, action) that works well for RPGs in general, figure out how to "supernatural it up" and market that to people who've never touched WoD/CoD before (so probably newish players whose experience is mostly 5e).

Yeah.

At this point I'm more inclined to just give up on ttrpgs. The market is just not a growth sector. Even D&D is dying and it looks like nobody else is picking up the slack.