White Knights.
A game set in a near future dystopia in which tech savant Jack "Musky" Zuckerbeez has succeeded in hooking the majority of mankind up to the Ultranet using his patented NeuraLeash technology, promising to harness the power of big data in a desperate bid to discover meaningful ways to combat the terrifying Rocona-91 virus which ravages the planet.
In a world in which human interaction is almost entirely virtual, pop stars are supported by GoPayMe accounts and governments and massive corporations engage in a war of information, competing for the only resource of value; the attention of the zombified masses, you, the player, are one of the 'Woke', those who have shed their NeuraLeash and joined the fight against the Capitechocracy as a member of the White Knights, led by the shadowy Natoshi Sakamoto;
"It's hard to organize a global clandestine resistance movement when you have to fight Musky's armies of weaponized RealDolls and all you have for communcation are reconstructed telegraph towers"
Full Character Generation System including a wide range of interesting classes!
Mechanics!
Rich setting materials!
Expensive Artwork!
Probably not.
Take this from someone who mostly agrees with your sentiments on what Big Tech's dreams are (but disagree they'll succeed... every dictator has thought they finally had the means of ensuring their eternal rule... they've always been wrong);
A) It's going to feel really dated really quickly.
B) I game to escape real life, not engage in political satire of real life.
C) There are much more effective ways to push back in terms of a game's setting and themes than just "the thing I dislike is the Big Bad."
In short, your cyberdystopia needs more nuance and less satire... because, and here's the saddest part of the modern age, satire is dead. There is literally no extreme position you can give an SJW/Leftist that isn't just something they've not yet gotten around to being insane about.
A few years back someone joked that D&D 6e would be a game with no races and 57 genders... and now WotC's released supplements that completely erase all racial distinctions and have added magically nonbinary gender swapping elves to 5e.
If anything, the satire is on us that we keep foolishly underestimating the level of insanity they can reach and how quickly they'll get there.
At this point I'd say I expect 6e to be a critical race theory word salad whose art depicts nothing but fat androgynous lesbians with rainbow colored hair and piercings... but I'm probably underestimating them.
Quote from: BlackHarbour on November 28, 2020, 06:42:07 AM
White Knights.
A game set in a near future dystopia in which tech savant Jack "Musky" Zuckerbeez has succeeded in hooking the majority of mankind up to the Ultranet using his patented NeuraLeash technology, promising to harness the power of big data in a desperate bid to discover meaningful ways to combat the terrifying Rocona-91 virus which ravages the planet.
In a world in which human interaction is almost entirely virtual, pop stars are supported by GoPayMe accounts and governments and massive corporations engage in a war of information, competing for the only resource of value; the attention of the zombified masses, you, the player, are one of the 'Woke', those who have shed their NeuraLeash and joined the fight against the Capitechocracy as a member of the White Knights, led by the shadowy Natoshi Sakamoto;
"It's hard to organize a global clandestine resistance movement when you have to fight Musky's armies of weaponized RealDolls and all you have for communcation are reconstructed telegraph towers"
Full Character Generation System including a wide range of interesting classes!
Mechanics!
Rich setting materials!
Expensive Artwork!
No.
We are living this right now, why would I want to use it for escapism if it is the same shit on a different day?
You lost me as soon as I read "future dystopia". If it is done poorly, then no interest. If it is done well, negative interest. :)
You probably lost most people here with "woke".
I like the idea of being the good-guy rebel. I like the rebels being low tech, fighting a high-tech adversary. But as others have said, this is too close to real world for me to enjoy. No, I wouldn't buy it or play it.
Presuming this a serious game pitch and not just a trolling attempt, here's a couple of suggestions to make it more generally appealing;
A) Remove all the satirical name use. Nothing says "the purpose of this is to push an agenda and not actually be a fun game" like using obvious analogs like Jack "Musky" Zuckerbeez, Rocona-91 virus, GoPayMe and calling the tech-zombies "the woke." Find fictional names that better evoke the concepts. In fact, file the names off entirely... the Ultranet is fine... but try monolithic names like just "The Corporation" or "the Exodyne Conglomerate" if you want a specific name (even better, do a random table akin to various Star Trek technobabble or fantasy random bar names charts... only for mega-corporation/government organizations).
B) Set it well beyond our lifetimes into the future and ideally not a date that evokes the present day... ex. 2147 or 2593 good, 2120 or 3030 bad. Then focus on the nature of the advanced technology and the issues it has; particularly the disparity between the elites and the everymen (and possibly an even further under/criminal class) because those particular issues are timeless.
C) Ditch the pet NPC leading the rebellion. No one likes to hear about how awesome Optimus Prime is when they're stuck playing Wheelie (i.e. not even one of the cool Lieutenants like Bumblebee or Grimlock; one of the lame ones). Put your resistance at the Cell level with each PC party not even sure there are other resistance cells out there.
D) Look at this picture... really look at it. This is an actually evocative image of the sort of setting you really want. The PCs, as always are in the foreground and the faceless villains dominate the background.
(https://theconservativetreehouse.files.wordpress.com/2011/05/utopia.jpg)
ETA: Looking at this image as inspiration a bit made me realize the fundamental issue with this pitch is that its soulless. There's nothing inspiring in the spite vented toward clearly real people. There's no "here's the better world we're fighting for" aspect to it. Just rage at the machine and tearing it down.
Without something better offered by the setting to replace what's being torn down, this is just an exercise in nihilism and, as numerous studies have shown, nihilism is a dead turnoff for about 90% of the population... and when your audience is already as small as the RPG market, only interesting 10% of the market as POTENTIAL customers means this is DOA.
Full credit for trying, but yeah, this feels a little too close to reality these days.
I applaud your willingness to put it out there and let people pick at it though.
Never. Ever.
I feel like you'd have a lot better luck with this concept if you made the "good guys" also have to be from oppressed minorities of any group (pick one), and pitched it to the "woke" folx.
Either that, or rewrite a lot of it to focus less on current hot button issues in new clothing.
I can't be sure that I'd play it either way. Definitely not the first. But I'd need more information before I made any decisions for sure.
Sounds like a joke RPG to keep on the coffee table and never play.
Quote from: Ratman_tf on November 28, 2020, 08:57:43 PM
Sounds like a joke RPG to keep on the coffee table and never play.
I saw one of those on DriveThru recently. It was called Glitch. Here's what that one was about:
Glitch is the first modern installment in a long-running series of games (starting with the RPG "Nobilis") for people who like recreational philosophy and metaphysics and thinking about how their fundamental experience of the world works. These are games built, from the ground up, to take thought experiments and goofy arguments and self-expression on the core of one's meaning and identity and blend them in seamlessly with the banter, conflict, exploration, and (in this case) mystery solving that you'll find in a tabletop RPG.
Sound interesting?
So, this particular game is a game about living in a broken world. It's a game about hope and struggle.
It's a game about people who've found mistakes in the way the world's put together; seen that the world itself is wrong; and, therefore, of course, developed eldritch powers, gotten inducted into a mystical society, acquired a passel of enemies, frenemies, and dubious allies, and picked up a tragic backstory.
Oh, and, just possibly, a horse.
And/or ... a crown?
Anyway, though, the most important thing they got, the most key and the most critical, was the power to fight back, the power to make answer to this vale of suffering, this vast great hill of woe: a literal or metaphorical world-slaying weapon, just tossed into their hand, only, you know, the problem is, and they all do eventually figure this out---at least the player characters do---
World-slaying weaponry doesn't actually help.
Fixing things with a world-ending weapon, well ... that'd be like blowing your nose with a trout!
So, if you're more interested in finding hope and solving mysteries than in blowing your nose with, well, any kind of fish, really, just stick this game in your cart, read the note at the bottom of the page to make sure you know what you're getting into ... and buy!By the end of the first line, I was just shaking my head.
Trolling attempt 9/10.
Quote from: BlackHarbour on November 28, 2020, 06:42:07 AM
White Knights.
A game set in a near future dystopia in which tech savant Jack "Musky" Zuckerbeez has succeeded in hooking the majority of mankind up to the Ultranet using his patented NeuraLeash technology, promising to harness the power of big data in a desperate bid to discover meaningful ways to combat the terrifying Rocona-91 virus which ravages the planet.
In a world in which human interaction is almost entirely virtual, pop stars are supported by GoPayMe accounts and governments and massive corporations engage in a war of information, competing for the only resource of value; the attention of the zombified masses, you, the player, are one of the 'Woke', those who have shed their NeuraLeash and joined the fight against the Capitechocracy as a member of the White Knights, led by the shadowy Natoshi Sakamoto;
"It's hard to organize a global clandestine resistance movement when you have to fight Musky's armies of weaponized RealDolls and all you have for communcation are reconstructed telegraph towers"
Full Character Generation System including a wide range of interesting classes!
Mechanics!
Rich setting materials!
Expensive Artwork!
RIOT!
I'd buy that modern-day spin-off RPG. Probably wouldn't play it though, because being too similar to RL.
No, if I wanted to play someone's poorly considered cringe concept I could go to the local gamestore and ask anyone under the age of 20 to give me their homebrew documents.
Quote from: BlackHarbour on November 28, 2020, 06:42:07 AM
White Knights.
--snipp--
Full Character Generation System including a wide range of interesting classes!
Mechanics!
Rich setting materials!
Expensive Artwork!
Answer: no. I'd rather play something based on the movies 'They Live' and 'Ghosts Of Mars', since they are at least a little more subtle with the socio-poli settings. And the name, White Knights?... I take it your calling everyone out as a RAISEST*NAHTSEE. How naughty of you! 8)
Quote from: Chris24601 on November 28, 2020, 10:15:22 AMthe fundamental issue with this pitch is that its soulless.
As I have said before, this is the nature of artistic works produced primarily as ideological pieces. This applies whether the ideology is one we agree or disagree with. D&D5e's woke nonsense is soulless, and the OP's satirical vent is soulless.
Games, like all media, are there to entertain us - with a possible secondary goal of informing us. Ideology may
inform, but it should not
dictate the artistic work. If it does then it'll be boring, pretentious shite.
Pretty much. It's the reason a lot of fundamentalist Christian movies are crap; they're so into pushing their message that they fail to create a proper and engaging story. The same is true when they try to make RPGs. Their need for Christ to provide an auto-win button for believers and the desire to present Christianity Triumphant robs their settings of any conflicts worth exploring.
And given the OP hasn't given any reply in a couple days here I'm going to chalk this whole thing up to either;
A) trolling for any reaction (i.e. trolling for kicks).
B) trolling because they were hoping to prove non-Leftists are just as ideologically obsessed as they are (i.e. trolling for cause).
C) our massive rejection of their game premise so crushed their snowflake soul that they're crying in their bathtub in a fetal position right now.
If they'd actually replied to something I'd have been more than happy to help brainstorming because, as Kyle above me states, there are ways to have ideology inform rather than dictate and this particular setting could be a great instructional conversation on how to do such a setting right.
I think the general concept sounds a lot like the Matrix movies, and had the OP framed his concept in terms of this he might have gotten a better response.
Quote from: Chris24601 on November 30, 2020, 04:10:50 AM
Pretty much. It's the reason a lot of fundamentalist Christian movies are crap; they're so into pushing their message that they fail to create a proper and engaging story. The same is true when they try to make RPGs. Their need for Christ to provide an auto-win button for believers and the desire to present Christianity Triumphant robs their settings of any conflicts worth exploring.
And given the OP hasn't given any reply in a couple days here I'm going to chalk this whole thing up to either;
A) trolling for any reaction (i.e. trolling for kicks).
B) trolling because they were hoping to prove non-Leftists are just as ideologically obsessed as they are (i.e. trolling for cause).
C) our massive rejection of their game premise so crushed their snowflake soul that they're crying in their bathtub in a fetal position right now.
If they'd actually replied to something I'd have been more than happy to help brainstorming because, as Kyle above me states, there are ways to have ideology inform rather than dictate and this particular setting could be a great instructional conversation on how to do such a setting right.
I'm gonna go with B
Too close to reality for me.
I game for escapism. So I'm not interested.
Quote from: HappyDaze on November 28, 2020, 09:10:00 PM
Quote from: Ratman_tf on November 28, 2020, 08:57:43 PM
Sounds like a joke RPG to keep on the coffee table and never play.
I saw one of those on DriveThru recently. It was called Glitch. Here's what that one was about:
Glitch is the first modern installment in a long-running series of games (starting with the RPG "Nobilis") for people who like recreational philosophy and metaphysics and thinking about how their fundamental experience of the world works. These are games built, from the ground up, to take thought experiments and goofy arguments and self-expression on the core of one's meaning and identity and blend them in seamlessly with the banter, conflict, exploration, and (in this case) mystery solving that you'll find in a tabletop RPG.
Sound interesting?
So, this particular game is a game about living in a broken world. It's a game about hope and struggle.
It's a game about people who've found mistakes in the way the world's put together; seen that the world itself is wrong; and, therefore, of course, developed eldritch powers, gotten inducted into a mystical society, acquired a passel of enemies, frenemies, and dubious allies, and picked up a tragic backstory.
Oh, and, just possibly, a horse.
And/or ... a crown?
Anyway, though, the most important thing they got, the most key and the most critical, was the power to fight back, the power to make answer to this vale of suffering, this vast great hill of woe: a literal or metaphorical world-slaying weapon, just tossed into their hand, only, you know, the problem is, and they all do eventually figure this out---at least the player characters do---
World-slaying weaponry doesn't actually help.
Fixing things with a world-ending weapon, well ... that'd be like blowing your nose with a trout!
So, if you're more interested in finding hope and solving mysteries than in blowing your nose with, well, any kind of fish, really, just stick this game in your cart, read the note at the bottom of the page to make sure you know what you're getting into ... and buy!
By the end of the first line, I was just shaking my head.
Nah man Jenna Katerin Moran is a madwoman. She makes diceless RPGs that are all sorts of wonderful nonsense.
No reason we can't have different things, and her RPGs are their own genre that no one else emulates.
Quote from: BlackHarbour on November 28, 2020, 06:42:07 AM
White Knights.
A game set in a near future dystopia in which tech savant Jack "Musky" Zuckerbeez has succeeded in hooking the majority of mankind up to the Ultranet using his patented NeuraLeash technology, promising to harness the power of big data in a desperate bid to discover meaningful ways to combat the terrifying Rocona-91 virus which ravages the planet.
In a world in which human interaction is almost entirely virtual, pop stars are supported by GoPayMe accounts and governments and massive corporations engage in a war of information, competing for the only resource of value; the attention of the zombified masses, you, the player, are one of the 'Woke', those who have shed their NeuraLeash and joined the fight against the Capitechocracy as a member of the White Knights, led by the shadowy Natoshi Sakamoto;
"It's hard to organize a global clandestine resistance movement when you have to fight Musky's armies of weaponized RealDolls and all you have for communcation are reconstructed telegraph towers"
Full Character Generation System including a wide range of interesting classes!
Mechanics!
Rich setting materials!
Expensive Artwork!
You know if you changed all the fluff to following Morpheus into the Matrix then I would probably want to play the hell out of that game.
But fighting Musky as a White Knight? Meh.