Synnibarr vs WotC

[Mannahnin]

Definitely not ideal from a modern perspective, but my recollection of the Shaman class/culture in the game (both from the time and occasional revisits to the book in the subsequent years) are that it was intended to be respectful. Definitely a bit fetishized, romanticized and idealized, like you'd see in say a Marvel or independent comic of the period.

...and a FB conversation with Raven this week confirmed that it was directly inspired by a late 70s to 80s Marvel comics character. Shaman, from Alpha Flight.

 

[RuinousPowers]

The only RPG I've ever encountered that was more metal the Synnibarr was SenZar. These new pretenders to the throne like Mork Borg are weak by comparison. (I'm only kind of kidding. SenZar's one and only supplement was named after an actual Metallica song and included stats for gods that PCs were expressly intended to someday challenge for their domains.)

Yes, its a mystery why people continue to try to invent rpg games when the pinnacle of rpg design that is SenZar already exists.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

After looking into the history a bit more, I found myself nodding to myself because I've seen this type of "game designer" a few times before.

The one who thinks they are geniuses and no one else can remotely understand their superior level. Any rejection in the industry is met with vitriol at a hyperbolic level (like his statement about wanting to do everything within his power to ruin WoTC just because Peter didn't hire him)

They're not limited to gaming by any means. I won't make any statements about whom and where similar types might be found since it would wander outside the suitable topics of this board, but I've run into a number of them here and there. People who have so little ability to self-reflect that they lack any ability to look objectively or critically at themselves or their works. I guess the compensating benefit for them is being quite uninhibited in what they might do, like all the crazy stuff in the RPG here. Of course, really great game designers, or show runners, or whatever, have the best of both worlds. They can open their minds to all the craziness and then go back and actually make some sense out of it and winnow out the crap.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Some of his players from back when have shown up in the thread and I’m beginning to think they may have a point about it being the first cross genre game. I dint count the claim that he was distributing it locally for several years and chaosium beats them for a generic system regardless.

However it does appear it may be the first of its kind, sort of. Not that it makes his behavior any better or lend me to believe much of anything he says.

Nonsense, it was published in 1991, it isn't in any sense an early RPG. For instance you have fairly obvious games like Space 1889, which was published several years earlier and surely qualifies as a mixture of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Beyond that there are many other similar examples, going all the way back to Gamma World. I would point to much of the work of Kevin Siembieda (such as RIFTS, published in 1990) as also being in a very similar vein. I guess you could argue that 'platform systems' like GURPS don't directly and explicitly MIX genres, but they provide rules for many genres, and thus a commonality of rules platform in which such mixed genre play is easily facilitated.

I mean, in the early 1980s our 'D&D' campaign with one particular GM consisted of a mixture of 1e AD&D (with bits of B/X mixed in), Fight in the Skies, Boot Hill, Gamma World (the original one), Traveller, and various other RPGs simply mixed together in a huge mishmash of play. AD&D 1e DMG even provides rules for conversions of characters between D&D, Gamma World, and Boot Hill intended to allow them all to appear (with their various game subsystems) in the same adventure. If that isn't cross-genre play, what is? My understanding is that Blackmoor itself was a mashup of several different genres without any real sense of it being purely one or another.

So, no, Synnibarr is not 'breaking new ground' here. Not in any sense, not all the way out here in '91. If it had appeared 10 years earlier, the claim might be somewhat more credible, though I would still assert that there are pre-1980 RPGs which might even still beat it (but at least it would be arguable).

 

[darjr]

Nonsense, it was published in 1991, it isn't in any sense an early RPG. For instance you have fairly obvious games like Space 1889, which was published several years earlier and surely qualifies as a mixture of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Beyond that there are many other similar examples, going all the way back to Gamma World. I would point to much of the work of Kevin Siembieda (such as RIFTS, published in 1990) as also being in a very similar vein. I guess you could argue that 'platform systems' like GURPS don't directly and explicitly MIX genres, but they provide rules for many genres, and thus a commonality of rules platform in which such mixed genre play is easily facilitated.

I mean, in the early 1980s our 'D&D' campaign with one particular GM consisted of a mixture of 1e AD&D (with bits of B/X mixed in), Fight in the Skies, Boot Hill, Gamma World (the original one), Traveller, and various other RPGs simply mixed together in a huge mishmash of play. AD&D 1e DMG even provides rules for conversions of characters between D&D, Gamma World, and Boot Hill intended to allow them all to appear (with their various game subsystems) in the same adventure. If that isn't cross-genre play, what is? My understanding is that Blackmoor itself was a mashup of several different genres without any real sense of it being purely one or another.

So, no, Synnibarr is not 'breaking new ground' here. Not in any sense, not all the way out here in '91. If it had appeared 10 years earlier, the claim might be somewhat more credible, though I would still assert that there are pre-1980 RPGs which might even still beat it (but at least it would be arguable).

Yes 91 was too late. But that was the version 1 print. It was his argument that it was released ten years earlier in a sort of beta that had me intrigued.

If you read later you’ll see others posted even better candidates for the first cross genre games that even beats that. Like Tekumel.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

He's not wrong that he was ahead of his time there: That's essentially the same way 4E or MMORPGs work: a special ability is a special ability, whatever you label it.

That and $5 will buy him a cup of coffee, though, and little more.

Well, its not THAT original. Champions has a very similar 'flat' structure, there is basically one kind of 'thing' you get, a super power. Obviously the difference is that Champions/Hero System works on a basis of letting the player design the power from a more basic set of elements vs trying to construct a vast all-inclusive list. Still, flat design goes back pretty far, and has its earliest expression in things like Bunnies & Burrows skill list, or MA/GW mutations (much more limited lists, but potentially open-ended).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I must admit that he was pioneering if not striking first. I do not give a lot of credit for the local distribution but it does seem as if it was really being sold early on.

Back in the '70s and '80s there was a lot of that sort of thing. Actually publishing a real book/game product was no easy feat! TSR and other early publishers, and even those up into the mid-80s had the virtue of there being very low production standards simply because it was a new sort of thing and there's not a lot of money in it, generally speaking. So, for instance, we had our own 'RPG' back around '75-77 or so because it was hard to get (as a younger person) the official books, and they were in short supply. So I had a notebook in which I either hand copied or sometimes photocopied bits and parts of various books, added my own stuff, and pasted it all together. Then I would make a copy and give it to someone maybe. It was certainly NOT a 'game', but there was a lot of stuff like that floating around. Arduin Grimoire was of this sort as well, though it rose up to being a bit more substantive.

Later in the late '80s my friends and I had a large Sci-Fi space battle game that we had developed. It got several editions in exactly the same way, we would update the rules and material, and then print it all out and photocopy it, maybe with a bit of paste up. Actual printing was a wildly impractical idea, my brother worked for a printer, it would have cost us months of salary at our, pretty good paying, jobs to make a viable print run, and we had no idea how to really sell it. Not an RPG exactly (although we did do some RP with hacks of various systems in the 'Universe' we invented for the game) but its pretty much the same kind of idea. Nothing we did was all that inventive in a rules or game design sense (though reading over my copy of 'Fleet Command' it was fairly solid work) but the milieu was kind of fun in a wonky sort of way (there were Dark 'Elf' space pirates, a race of constructed warriors, ancient ruins, etc. etc. etc.). Again, not very original, but kind of uniquely idiosyncratic.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I find the idea that wizards, pre TSR purchase, and post Magic, was hunting down RPGs to eliminate competition hilarious. Regardless of what the FTC may have been thinking, it’s really a strikingly profound misunderstanding of what was going on. They were not doing that.

More to the point, only an idiot would think such a thing was even remotely possible. Had WotC wanted to 'crush the competition' they sure as heck wouldn't have bought out companies like LUG, lol. You would by WEG, Games Workshop, whatever was left of GDW by that point, etc. I mean, with the money they had from M:tG they could easily have swallowed up pretty much every other major RPG publisher (maybe not GW) out there without even burping. I mean, by 2000 pretty much all of them were in a shambles. WW imploded, GDW was basically gone and its IP wandering the streets like a hobo, Chaosium wasn't exactly making money, etc. etc. etc. Name one financially solvent game company besides WotC at that time, its not easy!

No, I think the explanation for LUG that Peter himself gives is perfectly believable. It was owned by one of his friends, whom he bailed out by buying the company. Presumably they did believe that it could prove lucrative, but I think that's plenty of underlying motivation. Even the TSR purchase was probably more motivated by connections with people and products he knew and liked vs some grand business plan. I'm sure Peter is actually fairly competent in the business sense, by comparison to most people. He has an MBA after all. Basically he was a pretty successful Boeing guy, and he wanted to do game stuff, and then lucked into launching Richard Garfield's crazy unexpected gold mine of M:tG. I suspect there was some degree of shrewdness there in terms of knowing when a project was headed for success vs going down the tubes. IME (started 4 companies) this is a key success trait, being able to look at an investment and say "well, we tried that, avoid the mistake of going on down THAT road!" or vice versa (I myself at least one time clearly could have made a mint, was in the right place at the right time, but did not correctly judge which path to take).

 

[Blue Orange]

Last Orr Group report I can find has Q4 2021, where D&D 5e is 55%, Call of Cthulhu is 9%, Pathfinder is 5% of campaigns, and everything else is less than that, giving us a Herfindahl index (sum of squares of market shares) of .31, and the DOJ Antitrust division calls a market 'highly concentrated' above .25. Not that I think the DOJ is raring to bust the 'Dungeons and Dragons monopoly'.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

White Wolf pouring gasoline all over itself and setting itself on fire at the turn of the century is both very meta and incredibly weird. To this day, I'm not 100% sure what they were thinking.