D&D (2024) I think we are on the cusp of a sea change.

[Staffan]

EDIT - In fact apart from Apocalypse World, which is absolutely 100% "about those things" (talking and problem solving over fighting, particularly), and "major RPG" because of it's insane influence, has a major new post-apocalyptic RPG been published after 1990? Not an update, a new IP. Gamma World was 1978. Twilight 2000 was 1984. After The Bomb was 1986. I can't think of any major other ones. Legacy: Life Among The Ruins is lovely, but it's not major.

Depending on your perspective, Mutant Year Zero. Technically, MYZ builds on the Swedish game Mutant from the early 80s (which in turn was a Gamma World ripoff with BRP-like rules, though MYZ uses a completely different system), but they really have very little in common other than post-apocalypse and mutants.

MYZ takes a different approach because of its intense local focus. The PCs come from an Ark, making them part of a settlement of 200 or so mutants whose society starts on the brink of collapse because their old resources are being depleted, and the Old One who previously guided and supported them is on the verge of death. Oh, and the mutants of the Ark are unable to reproduce. Adventures tend to either be about internal Ark stuff or exploring the outside world, and part of the game is deciding how to develop the Ark by building either specific places (like a pig farm to provide more food) or concepts (different forms of government are among the late-game things to "build"). PCs are built with a number of connections to other people in the Ark, and they are also bound to it because most of the surrounding area is filled with Rot (an abstraction of radioactivity as well as biochemical agents and other badness) that will accumulate if you're away too long, so you need to return to a safe area in order to get rid of it).

 

[Ruin Explorer]

So for instance, when "grimdark" became the thing, it wasn't like all of a sudden all other tones of fantasy stopped being published.

It was like new authors who didn't write in the grimdark style basically stopped being published for several years, though.

I remember it pretty distinctly. And the authors which were grimdark were promoted and marketed vastly more aggressively than older authors who weren't, for that period. It definitely had a significant and long-term impact on the fantasy landscape. There are authors successful today, who had the whole "grimdark" thing not happened and been pushed by publishers, might never have been successful. There are others who it impacted the career of.

And saying that "the old stuff doesn't go away" is totally wrong with fantasy particularly. Some stuff which was absolutely huge, earth-shatteringly influential, in the 1970s and earlier 1980s was basically close to forgotten by the 1990s, and is nearly completely forgotten now. Case in point, Michael Moorcock. He was a goddamn titan up into the early '80s, even non-fantasy critics and stuff were talking about him. Today? Most fantasy readers have never even heard of him, let alone read one of his books. He's a large part of the reason D&D and Warhammer are the way they are, but you'll hear 30-somethings who've never heard of him blithely asserting both were influenced more or less solely by Tolkien (which with Warhammer particularly is just completely insane nonsense of the most ignorant kind - but then other 20-something and 30-something people slap each other on the back and all agree about about). It's a travesty but it's a thing that's already happened.

Some fantasy stuff survives better (it's hard to predict which, it's certainly not related to how influential it is), but an awful lot of it absolutely does "go away". Hell, hardly anyone under about 35 seems to have actually read any pulp fantasy at all apart from maybe a few Conan short stories if you're very lucky.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Depending on your perspective, Mutant Year Zero. Technically, MYZ builds on the Swedish game Mutant from the early 80s (which in turn was a Gamma World ripoff with BRP-like rules, though MYZ uses a completely different system), but they really have very little in common other than post-apocalypse and mutants.

MYZ takes a different approach because of its intense local focus. The PCs come from an Ark, making them part of a settlement of 200 or so mutants whose society starts on the brink of collapse because their old resources are being depleted, and the Old One who previously guided and supported them is on the verge of death. Oh, and the mutants of the Ark are unable to reproduce. Adventures tend to either be about internal Ark stuff or exploring the outside world, and part of the game is deciding how to develop the Ark by building either specific places (like a pig farm to provide more food) or concepts (different forms of government are among the late-game things to "build"). PCs are built with a number of connections to other people in the Ark, and they are also bound to it because most of the surrounding area is filled with Rot (an abstraction of radioactivity as well as biochemical agents and other badness) that will accumulate if you're away too long, so you need to return to a safe area in order to get rid of it).

That sounds like it fits the "less combat, more problem-solving and negotiation" model though, no?

 

[Staffan]

That sounds like it fits the "less combat, more problem-solving and negotiation" model though, no?

Well, there's certainly combat in it. The Zone is a dangerous place.

But I mainly meant it as an example of a fairly major game that's both post-apocalyptic and post-1990.

 

[darjr]

Yep. Which is why targeting for any specific set of "values" or trying to capture the "latest trends" leads to problems.

Latest trends to whom?

Corollary, just because it’s giving people future shock doesn’t mean it’s new or out of the blue, it might mean they are a tad bit lost.

 

[Parmandur]

I don't watch a lot of streams. Are people streaming WotC adventures, and if so how do those streams differ from homered streams?

They are, that's actually one of the major audiences for the Beadle & Grimm box sets, because the big advantage of streaming the official books is lots of art to use (which WotC likes, because it's advertising).

 

[Thomas Shey]

How so?

I'd also point out "ignoring the whole post-apocalyptic genre" in TT RPGs is um, pretty funny, because there have been remarkably few successful post-apocalyptic RPGs, much less influential ones. We're basically talking Apocalypse World, where the system was influential not the content, Gamma World, Twilight 2000 (kinda) and After The Bomb. Maybe RIFTS? But that's really something else.

If you take that argument far enough, there's been few games outside of D&D that are successful or influential at all. It doesn't change the fact that you still have to ignore the whole genre for the most part for your statement to be true.

EDIT - In fact apart from Apocalypse World, which is absolutely 100% "about those things" (talking and problem solving over fighting, particularly), and "major RPG" because of it's insane influence, has a major new post-apocalyptic RPG been published after 1990? Not an update, a new IP. Gamma World was 1978. Twilight 2000 was 1984. After The Bomb was 1986. I can't think of any major other ones. Legacy: Life Among The Ruins is lovely, but it's not major.

How am I to answer that? What's your definition of major? No offense, but I'm really not interested in getting into a "no true Scotsman" argument here. Frankly, for a lot of people I don't think any of the PbtA games would be classed as "major", so its going to be a term that's fraught.

Because I'd argue at least Mutant Year Zero applies, and it came out in the early 2000's.

EDIT EDIT - I guess we could try Tribe 8 as major and post-apocalyptic? But again that's absolutely about what has been described. Indeed it's a particularly good exemplar.

Am I missing the point? Were you saying post-apocalyptic supported my point? Because it seemed not. What games are you thinking of?

And even those seem to fit the model you're saying they don't. They're typically more about problem-solving than combat. They don't typically feature dungeons. They often feature negotiation.

How narrowly do you define "dungeon"? They certainly often involve exploring ruins, and they don't intrinsically involve negotiation any more than D&D does. They certainly aren't "urban" which was part of your original post (neither, far as that goes is a lot of exploratory SF).

 

[Mordhau]

I think modern culture is weird.

We have a game with a fanbase that really wants to play a game that was made in the 70s and prefers to play that game instead of newer games but really wants that game to reflect the current times.

I think this means that the game can only really change radically as long as either everyone pretends not to notice, or everyone pretends it was ever thus.

So the majority of the fanbase may not play classical dungeoun based games, but it's unlikely the game will change much to reflect that because games that do reflect other play styles already exist and the fanbase has already rejected them.

Of course in a sense we already went through something similar in 2nd edition.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Not really.

D&D did become far less successful in the 1990s, kind of tired of this new thing where people pretend the 1990s didn't happen. Classes were absolutely part of that problem.

What standard are you using for "a lot less successful"? There have been two times since the onset of D&D it wasn't the top dog (both of them arguable) and during both of those periods some of their competitors were class and level systems, too.

Again, some of that is market inertia and some of that is networking effect, but it still doesn't suggest more than a minority of the hobby had a significant issue with classes/races/levels as a model.

And in the early 2000s, with 3.XE, it took a very different approach to classes, one which made classes very simplistic in a way that 4E and 5E didn't. It really felt like if Tweet had been completely off the leash we'd have seen the classes collapsed down and several deleted outright.

Possibly, though I'm not sure 13th Age supports that. 3e era classes were certainly less rigid than earlier ones had been, but there was still a lot of hard lines drawn, especially as soon as you got to magic. The really free and easy multiclassing might have confused this, but it still for the most part added up to a lot of special abilities and almost all spellcasting gated behind classes.

What people like now seems to be different - they come to TT RPGs with existing expectations about classes, which wasn't really the case in earlier eras. It makes narrow and specific classes and subclasses perhaps more palatable than in any previous era.

Eh. Still not sure I buy it. People have been fed into the hobby with that expectation the moment MMOs became a significant thing.

 

[MGibster]

Eh. Still not sure I buy it. People have been fed into the hobby with that expectation the moment MMOs became a significant thing.

I think it's been longer than that. Classes have been a part of the game for more than 40 years and even before MMORPGs were around plenty of video games were influenced by D&D.