Quote from: swzl on Today at 08:08:07 AM

Quote from: yosemitemike on May 12, 2024, 08:30:40 PM

Quote from: Aglondir on May 12, 2024, 07:11:43 PMIs that a quote from G-troll? (starting with "I was looking...")

Yes.  It's from a topic he started on TBP.

I am sorry to see that. Dark Dungeon X is released under the OGL and Public Domain. I have looted, err, adapted parts of that for my home system. So I plan on separating the artist from the art. To bad. I really enjoyed his earlier work. See https://gurbintrollgames.wordpress.com/2023/10/01/light-fantasy-kickstarter-is-live/ from his website for the full, unvarnished version. So the decent into madness begins.

Is any of Dark Dungeons useful or did the rot set in back then? I was thinking of grabbing a copy.

https://9thlevel.com/pages/mazes-fantasy-roleplaying

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Log to be posted at https://gmshoe.wordpress.com/

Re: The players don't care about the lore...

There's so much wrong with this

The two "oldest" and biggest wargames today are WH40K & Battletech, what do they have in common? Deep lore.

The lore sells itself and the game and plastic, try introducing a new faction by just dropping the army books with pure stats.

Now even OPR Grimdark Future has it's first lore book. Guess they all failed market research.

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).

Quote from: Aglondir on May 12, 2024, 07:11:43 PM

Quote from: yosemitemike on May 12, 2024, 12:00:13 AMSo, Gurbintroll has decided that Dark Dungeons is regressive, problematic and in need of a sensitivity reading.

I was looking through Dark Dungeons today, and after having done Light Fantasy it is looking positively regressive.

It's not just the simple things like the race-as-class and the monsters, it's deeper things like the whole chapter on settling the wilderness and building a domain is pretty damn colonialist and there are things there like Raise Dead only working on humans and demihumans because other humanoids don't have souls (only spirits), and other humanoids not having proper clerics and magic-users, only lesser shamans and sorcerers (and of course that last one is a double-whammy in that not only are orcs and the like given shamans instead of clerics, those shamans are objectively inferior to clerics).

Now this is all stuff that the game inherited from its BECMI and RC roots, but that's not the point. It just makes me cringe when I read it now.

So, since next year is going to be the game's 15th anniversary, I thought I'd start a major overhaul of the game.

Some thoughts include:

1) Lose the race-as-class and convert those classes into Light Fantasy style classes, where ancestry has no mechanical effect on the game.

2) Lose all the monsters that are actually different ancestries of people.

3) It's not going to focus on the weird like Light Fantasy does. The feel will still be more traditional D&D (although it will still have immortals and flying ships and the like).

4) Give everything as good a sensitivity reading as I can, to see if anything else is problematic.

Hey Yosemitemike,

Is that a quote from G-troll? (starting with "I was looking...")

I'm not Mike, but it's a quote. I saw the same dumb fucking post.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on Today at 11:34:57 AM

Quote from: yosemitemike on Today at 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.

Quote from: yosemitemike on Today at 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.

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: hedgehobbit on Today at 10:24:48 AM

Quote from: HappyDaze on Today at 08:56:03 AMBattletech may attract its players with the big stompy robots, but what tends to keep (most of) them is the huge body of fiction. Not every piece may be a winner, but there is plenty to choose from between game books and pure fiction (novels, Shrapnel magazine, etc.). It would be crazy to think that a fan-made IP could even come close to this level of development without decades of work by a great many people.

What I've found over the years is that the people who read the lore books are not the same as the people who play the game. There is some crossover, sure, but the people who are mainly interested in the game want a good game, not expansive lore.

The biggest aspect of having large amount of lore is that there are more people familiar with the franchise so it is easier to attract new players. But, at the same time, the lore-readers are the main ones demanding that the lore be made more woke and inclusive with little concern for any established canon or how the changes affect game play. So it's a double-edge sword.

And now that free wikis and lore vids are a thing, most of them don't even buy the books anymore but still act entitled to the IP.

Quote from: HappyDaze on Today at 08:56:03 AMBattletech may attract its players with the big stompy robots, but what tends to keep (most of) them is the huge body of fiction. Not every piece may be a winner, but there is plenty to choose from between game books and pure fiction (novels, Shrapnel magazine, etc.). It would be crazy to think that a fan-made IP could even come close to this level of development without decades of work by a great many people.

What I've found over the years is that the people who read the lore books are not the same as the people who play the game. There is some crossover, sure, but the people who are mainly interested in the game want a good game, not expansive lore.

The biggest aspect of having large amount of lore is that there are more people familiar with the franchise so it is easier to attract new players. But, at the same time, the lore-readers are the main ones demanding that the lore be made more woke and inclusive with little concern for any established canon or how the changes affect game play. So it's a double-edge sword.