Games That Required Too Much Buy-In: Forked Thread: Games that didn't survive...

[Fenes]

I use Shadowrun rules for any modern/SciFi game, and d20 for any medieval fantasy game. Converting stuff is usually easy, or done on the net already.

 

[Wednesday Boy]

There have been many games I've wanted to play but after reading them I was like 'I love this but how in God's name am I going to explain it to anyone?'. Tribe 8, Nephilim, Mage, Wraith, Providence, anything involving Tekumel, and others -- I felt that unless every player read the entire thing front to back and got 'into' the setting that it would fall flat on it's face.

Anyone else have examples?

It's not a problem in how to explain the setting to anyone and that they would need to learn the background in depth but I've found Midnight requires whole buy-in from the players. One of my friends said he wouldn't enjoy playing in it because the default assumption is that the big evil guy who rules the land cannot be defeated. While he liked the setting in some respects the inevitable inability of the PCs to save the day completely turned him off to it.

 

[Stormborn]

I really like Unknown Armies, but I think it requires a particular mindset to start off that many people just can't get into. And without the right tone and feel from both the players and the GM the game just wont work.

 

[Storminator]

Hopefully, as I get older, the chaos will subside and I'll find myself with more free time again.

You just keep telling yourself that...

PS

 

[John Q. Mayhem]

Unknown Armies all the way. Beautiful, beautiful system and setting; way too much buy-in for most folken.

 

[Xer0]

It's not a problem in how to explain the setting to anyone and that they would need to learn the background in depth but I've found Midnight requires whole buy-in from the players. One of my friends said he wouldn't enjoy playing in it because the default assumption is that the big evil guy who rules the land cannot be defeated. While he liked the setting in some respects the inevitable inability of the PCs to save the day completely turned him off to it.

Really? That's too bad. Of all the buy-in problems that could exist from RPGs, I really have a hard time seeing that Midnight is one of them.

 

[Dragonbait]

What about if the GM hime/herself likes some of the ideas, but can't even begin to grasp what is going on in the game?

I always had an issue with any of the White Wolf games. I had a lot of trouble understanding their settings (I think Vampire, while my least favorite of the games was the most straight foward and easiest to comprehend IMO) and couldn't really explain a lot of them to the players. I felt like they tried to use heavy-handed metaphores, flowery text, stories to avoid defining what things were, and apparently I was too dense to understand.

Wraith, I think, was the hardest to 'get' I couldn't even figure out what the characters looked like, let alone how the world worked.

I'm a visual person, too, and the art evokes the feel for the game. I couldn't get any feel from the abstract clip-art in a lot of the WW games.

 

[Dragonbait]

It's not a problem in how to explain the setting to anyone and that they would need to learn the background in depth but I've found Midnight requires whole buy-in from the players. One of my friends said he wouldn't enjoy playing in it because the default assumption is that the big evil guy who rules the land cannot be defeated. While he liked the setting in some respects the inevitable inability of the PCs to save the day completely turned him off to it.

I have a freind who sees things in a very black/white way. I talked about Call of Cthulhu, and he got frustrated with the idea because "You can't kill that monster, so what's the point?" He missed the idea that you can succeed on a different scale: You just stopped the Mi-Go from opening up a portal to summon an Outer God, congrats! You just rescued a whole family from being sacrificed, congrats! etc..
All he'll see is: the game has Cthulhu in the name, therefor he is the end-boss of the whole game. We can't beat him and therefor there is no way to win.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Too much buy-in? HERO System. Back in the day, when I wasn't working 40 hours a week and volunteering for various non-profit orgs, it wasn't an issue. Today, creating everything (including such mundane items as handguns and automobiles) from the ground up is a daunting prospect and, so far as I know, the only way around this pitfall is to throw hundreds of dollars at HERO supplements.

This killed my M&M game before it got started. All my players said "uh, we have to do how much work to just get started?" and balked. Everyone's married/kids/jobs and doesn't have the time for hours and hours of pre-prep, which is a shame, since M&M looks like it works well once everything is all set up.

 

[Timeboxer]

I love Nobilis, but it has exactly this problem. You kind of have to filter out players who can't think abstractly enough to understand the setting.