John Dallman
Hero
Writing one that doesn't upset part of the American public would be quite challenging.
What dead game would you resurrect?
Also, is that a thing that would be popular with people? Civil War wargames are popular because it is a pivot point in American history, but I can't say I know anyone (besides a few re-enactors) that would want to RPG the civil war.
John Dallman
Hero
I wouldn't be seriously interested - but I'm not American.
Thomas Shey
Legend
Well, again, at some point you need to scoop out anything from TSR or nothing counts.
Thomas Shey
Legend
Honestly, its hard to picture that much of the gaming populace even in the U.S. wanting to do that. The great truth is that RPGs without fantastic elements are a niche within a niche.
Autumnal
Bruce Baugh, Writer of Fortune
The point about the amount of research required for normal-people play is right on. It’s very easy to distinguish members of the Fantastic Four and Avengers from all the other supers likewise with a dungeon-crawling team of four to a dozen characters - classes and subclasses are clearly distinct from each other. You can easily distinguish the members of Leverage or James Bond’s part of the agency, but both crowd reality - in terms of their actions even when their asserted base stats are within the human range.
But take my current roster of doctors: primary care physician (from India), endocrinologist nurse practitioner, cardiologist, neurological physical therapist, dentist, oral surgeon, podiatrist, and some secondary ones. In terms of personality and background, they are all very distinctive, but to distinguish their skills requires some very finely grained categories indeed. At least one level of subskill or specialization is just about necessary. Probably more. (The Ringworld RPG has the best system for this I know of.) the same would be true for any other group of similarly related folks. Fate Accelerated solves the problem by focusing on personality factors, but its coarse scale also quickly zooms into the transhuman.
It’s just really hard to do in a way that doesn’t end up either with way more data points than many people want to play with or so little distinction between characters and others that everyone feels the same. Hence, as @Thomas Shey said, a niche within a niche.
But take my current roster of doctors: primary care physician (from India), endocrinologist nurse practitioner, cardiologist, neurological physical therapist, dentist, oral surgeon, podiatrist, and some secondary ones. In terms of personality and background, they are all very distinctive, but to distinguish their skills requires some very finely grained categories indeed. At least one level of subskill or specialization is just about necessary. Probably more. (The Ringworld RPG has the best system for this I know of.) the same would be true for any other group of similarly related folks. Fate Accelerated solves the problem by focusing on personality factors, but its coarse scale also quickly zooms into the transhuman.
It’s just really hard to do in a way that doesn’t end up either with way more data points than many people want to play with or so little distinction between characters and others that everyone feels the same. Hence, as @Thomas Shey said, a niche within a niche.
I don't know Ringworld (other than by general reputation). Of the RPGs I know, none even attempts to deal with this issue. Eg Traveller has an EDU skill, but has no mechanical framework to distinguish -for instance - between EDU 15 (Einstein) and EDU 15 (AJ Ayer). In our campaign we use player-authored backstory to introduce those distinctions in an informal way.
It comes up in the skill system too, which takes great care to distinguish between being (say) a crack shot with a rifle and a crack shot with a pistol, but has just a single category of surgeon (Medical-3+ together with DEX 8+).
Burning Wheel has a skill list that is longer than Travellers, and comparable to RM's. The way it treats knowledge skills - particularly if one allows for the FoRKing in of applicable Wises - is perhaps defensible for a certain conception of pseudo-mediaeval levels of knowledge. But will certain break down, with no obvious way of being extended, for any setting with technical specialisation approaching the sort that you (@Autumnal) refer to.
The inference I draw from this is that most RPGers, in their game play, simply don't find technical specialisation as exciting as distinguishing rifles from pistols!
Thomas Shey
Legend
Of course they don't even always do that in a skill system. Savage Worlds has a single Shooting skill (and as far as that goes, a single Drive skill). I sometimes find that a bit broad (but understand why it is) but it apparently doesn't bother a great degree of people given the success of that system.
Sure. Plenty of RPGs have a single "fight" skill, eg Torchbearer; Prince Valiant (mostly); B/X D&D (no weapon proficiency system).
But I don't know of any RPG that treats surgical and medical specialisations, or academic specialisations, with the same sort of detail that plenty of RPGs seem to treat weapons and weapon training.
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