Next Gen Games?

[pemerton]

A little bit off-topic but related: there are some games which seem like they should have had a big impact/influence but seem not to have.

One from the late 80s is Prince Valiant. One from the late 90s is Maelstrom Storytelling.

These make me think of two questions:

(1) Why does the impact not happen that seems like it should have done;

(2) What are the current games that aren't having the impact/influence that they should? (This one is a bit harder of course from our current vantage point!)

 

[hawkeyefan]

A little bit off-topic but related: there are some games which seem like they should have had a big impact/influence but seem not to have.

One from the late 80s is Prince Valiant. One from the late 90s is Maelstrom Storytelling.

These make me think of two questions:

(1) Why does the impact not happen that seems like it should have done;

(2) What are the current games that aren't having the impact/influence that they should? (This one is a bit harder of course from our current vantage point!)

How would you answer question 1 for the two examples you’ve given?

I admit to only being passingly familiar with Prince Valiant, and only many years after its release, and I don’t recall Maelstrom Storytelling at all. That would indicate that a game’s reach is a factor, but I expect there must be other reasons.

 

[pemerton]

How would you answer question 1 for the two examples you’ve given?

Not really sure!

I think Prince Valiant may have been hampered by tying an amazing mediaeval/low-fantasy resolution framework to a property that was not very popular among RPGers. Thematically it lives in a similar space to Pendragon, which has had much more impact but in my view is the weaker of the two systems - Pendragon's extra fiddliness doesn't (to my mind) really contribute to its ability to support Arthurian romance.

(I know the above paragraph is heretical, and rates the two games differently from how Greg Stafford himself did. But I call it how I see it!)

Maelstrom Storytelling has an attached setting that may also have limited impact, but you can get a version of the rules framework for free as Story Bones: Story Bones Plus PDF - Precis Intermedia | Story Engine | Dungeon Masters Guild.

I've never run it - I learned of it from the Forge and picked up a copy second hand when I saw it on sale at my local RPG shop. It has a scene-resolution system based on a single roll of a dice pool (I think it's evens-as-successes) against a target number of successes, with the pool built out of PC descriptors and rules for "burning" descriptors (ie using them up for the session) to manipulate the pool or to manage consequences and fall-out. I drew on its approach quite a bit for my 4e GMing, especially of skill challenges.

It predates HeroWars/Quest, and Fate, but whereas the former is moderately known about (maybe due to Robin Laws's profile) and the latter is widely known about, I think Maelstrom Storytelling remains pretty obscure.

 

[Aldarc]

A little bit off-topic but related: there are some games which seem like they should have had a big impact/influence but seem not to have.

One from the late 80s is Prince Valiant. One from the late 90s is Maelstrom Storytelling.

These make me think of two questions:

(1) Why does the impact not happen that seems like it should have done;

(2) What are the current games that aren't having the impact/influence that they should? (This one is a bit harder of course from our current vantage point!)

I don't have much of answer for either of these, as they lie outside of my hobby experiences.

You are right, because it is difficult to say why some games achieved influence and some games didn't or maybe even not as great as anticipated. As a general preface, I'm not sure that a game's influence can be reduced to whether a designer made a good game or not, because sometimes mediocre games have a strong influence and sometimes well-designed/novel games have minimal influence. So it may be helpful to answer your question by looking at what games in our hobby achieved influence and why/how they did, though maybe apart from the 800 lb. gorilla with market inertia.

Jonathan Tweet's Over the Edge (1992) never really achieved mainstream success the way that his associate Mark Rein-Hagen's Vampire the Masquerade (1991) did, but it was highly instrumental for the indie TTRPG scene, influencing Ron Edwards's Sorcerer (2001), Evil Hat Production's Fate (2003), and Margaret Weis Production's Cortex (2004). Its use of freeform fiction-based traits was highly influential, but it only really became obvious with some hindsight. And while many today think of traits/aspects as Fate/Cortex-like mechanics, a number of the designers have flat out pointed to Over the Edge's direct influence. But that took roughly a decade to get to the first iterations in the early '00s, and then another ~10 years past that (at least for Cortex & Fate) to really get to their present shape.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I had never been aware of most games beyond D&D early on in my gaming life. The TSR slate was popular with my group, especially Marvel, but also Gamma World and Star Frontiers and so on. Beyond that, a little MERP, DC Heroes, and Star Wars. A brief bit with Vampire when it came out, but it was quickly abandoned, and a pretty long stretch with Rifts despite its abysmal system.

There were so many games that my group simply was not aware of in those days.

Over the Edge is one of them. I picked up the recent second edition, and it’s easy to imagine how the first edition would have influenced many people who’d played it.

I wish I had known about Over the Edge back then.

 

[pemerton]

Jonathan Tweet's Over the Edge (1992) never really achieved mainstream success the way that his associate Mark Rein-Hagen's Vampire the Masquerade (1991) did, but it was highly instrumental for the indie TTRPG scene, influencing Ron Edwards's Sorcerer (2001), Evil Hat Production's Fate (2003), and Margaret Weis Production's Cortex (2004). Its use of freeform fiction-based traits was highly influential, but it only really became obvious with some hindsight. And while many today think of traits/aspects as Fate/Cortex-like mechanics, a number of the designers have flat out pointed to Over the Edge's direct influence. But that took roughly a decade to get to the first iterations in the early '00s, and then another ~10 years past that (at least for Cortex & Fate) to really get to their present shape.

Like @hawkeyefan, I didn't know this system (other than maybe as a name heard mentioned at the University club) until ten years after it came out, when I read Edwards's analysis/critique of it on the Forge. I picked up a 20th anniversary edition.

To some extent it has the same "problem" as Prince Valiant and even moresoe Maelstrom Storytelling - a very heavily-embedded setting.

I think its PC build is clearly its strength. Compared to those other two systems, its actual action resolution is less impressive.

 

[Campbell]

Often great games are unfortunately mostly influential in superficial rather than substantive ways. People often look at games like early D&D, Apocalypse World and Blades in the Dark and transcribe their superficial structures instead of looking critically at why the games were structured the way they were. A lot of things that were accidents of design or have a very specific purpose are carried over thoughtlessly.

• Mainstream games carrying over turn by turn initiative, movement rates, hit points, highly detailed inventory lists, and managing resources over a daily time period without regard if it serves their game while ignoring things like having tightly tuned reward systems and features like wandering monsters, reaction rolls, and other exploration rules that made decision making consequential.
• Powered By The Apocalypse games that design moves in too general a fashion or without a coherent view of how they should fit together. What makes Apocalypse World a great game is that it is constantly forcing players to make decisions about escalating force versus backing down for social cohesion. It's designed in a particular way because of the experience it is trying to provide or sometimes due to things that are mostly an accident of design.
• Forged in the Dark games are often painfully locked to the specific structure of Blades in the Dark when they are not heist/caper fiction or particularly tied to a group structure. They also tend to not have a strong understanding of the interlocking currencies and consequences that make Blades such a compelling game. Many lack consistent pressure as a result.

 

[Aldarc]

Like @hawkeyefan, I didn't know this system (other than maybe as a name heard mentioned at the University club) until ten years after it came out, when I read Edwards's analysis/critique of it on the Forge. I picked up a 20th anniversary edition.

To some extent it has the same "problem" as Prince Valiant and even moresoe Maelstrom Storytelling - a very heavily-embedded setting.

I think its PC build is clearly its strength. Compared to those other two systems, its actual action resolution is less impressive.

Often great games are unfortunately mostly influential in superficial rather than substantive ways. People often look at games like early D&D, Apocalypse World and Blades in the Dark and transcribe their superficial structures instead of looking critically at why the games were structured the way they were. A lot of things that were accidents of design or have a very specific purpose are carried over thoughtlessly.

I'm not necessarily saying that Over the Edge should have been more popular or that it's a great game, but, rather, that some games can be quiet burners that take awhile for their influence to really hit its stride. In the case of Over the Edge, a big part of that influence was through its use of self-written, interpretative traits. Over the Edge's fictional tags made it useful for more open-ended toolkit game systems: e.g., Fate, Cortex, Risus. So while Risus, Fate, and Cortex all have different resolution systems, the reliance on fictional tags puts these games into a common family, though the first iteration of Risus actually predates OtE.

As to why Prince Valiant hasn't had the influence you believe it deserves, I'm not sure as I am not terribly familiar with the mechanics of the game. Also, sometimes it is difficult to imagine why/how a particular game should influence other games, but sometimes it's pretty easy. With Apocalypse World or Blades in the Dark - even if the influence is superficial much as @Campbell says - it's often a shift of genre: "It would be fun to run AW/BitD but with this other backdrop/aesthetic instead." Even if the influence is, again, mostly superficial, we can see how the games inspire other games, even if other games don't necessarily fully understand the design intent, purpose, or how the system matters for the play experience.

Edit: Finished an incomplete sentence that I thought I had written. I don't know why it seems that happens.

 

[hawkeyefan]

The last couple of posts seem really relevant to me right now because my group is playing a Forged in the Dark superhero game, Galaxies in Peril. It’s a retooling of the game Worlds in Peril, which was a PbtA game.

In some ways, the FitD system lends itself well to the genre. The more narrative approach to powers and abilities seems very suitable, and the Stress mechanic and Pushing and other game elements seem to fit the idea of supers well.

But the Faction elements seem to be lacking a bit. Not so much the Team, but things like Heat and Entanglements seem to lose some bite. Also, the setting details don’t really push things the way those of Doskvol do. In Blades proper, you can’t really leave town to avoid fallout, it’s a big deal to kill, and so on....these concepts are designed to create mounting pressure on the Crew. These setting elements aren’t present under Galaxies as presented (at least not in the advance playtest material) and they may nit even matter to a Team of superheroes anyway.

I’m dealing with this by crafting my own setting elements and kind of refiguring the Faction and Claim area of the game. But I agree that sometimes the influence a game can have can be....incomplete? As if the new game hasn’t fully considered the one its drawing inspiration from.

 

[Aldarc]

This is likely why Band of Blades re-writes BitD to (1) have pressure on the characters in the form of an army retreating from a vastly superior army back to your stronghold, which (2) creates a win/loss condition for the game.

I’m dealing with this by crafting my own setting elements and kind of refiguring the Faction and Claim area of the game. But I agree that sometimes the influence a game can have can be....incomplete? As if the new game hasn’t fully considered the one its drawing inspiration from.

It's much as Campbell says, BitD was written to cultivate a particular style of play. Simply changing what the game is about without considering how the game is built to cultivate that purpose does not always work without first making additional adjustments. That's why some of the best games for systems like AW, FitD, D&D, etc. are those that retool the game for what they intended to do or strongly pick up on the original beat of the game. This does not mean taking, for example, BitD's resolution system is an inherently flawed enterprise - as I do think that it's combination of a dice pool and AW complication system is quite elegantly brilliant - but yeah it helps to know the purpose behind the architecture.

From what you tell me (and what little I've read), it sounds like Free League does this for their own games as well.