Is there any genre or theme that the TTRPG medium does not work for?

[SableWyvern]

I legitimately don't understand your problem with this. If it was just a fictional murder mystery, it would play out exactly the same way. It being true crime has no bearing on how the investigators would explore it versus if it were fiction. You are asserting a distinction with no difference.

As best I can tell, the assertion is that in order to qualify as a True Crime RPG, the game would have to exactly follow the historical events, with no allowance for dramatisation, alternative theories or anything that diverges in any way from the known events. Assuming such a narrow definition, it is certainly true an RPG wouldn't be possible, because you are completely disallowing anything other than a series of predetermined actions.

Why True Crime gets this special treatment, but other historical settings and games are OK (or movie, book or TV adaptions for that matter), I have no idea, but if you do define a genre so narrowly that it is not possible to do anything but follow a predetermined script of events, they're certainly correct that it won't work as an RPG.

I find this line of reasoning similar to suggesting that the RPG medium is not really suitable alternative to instructional videos. "The RPG in which you learn how to draw horse (now with the "Advanced Aquatic Mammals in Watercolours" expansion)," would probably not work any better than "The RPG where everything you do or say is determined in advance so that a historical crime plays out exactly as it happened in history."

 

[Committed Hero]

I legitimately don't understand your problem with this. If it was just a fictional murder mystery, it would play out exactly the same way. It being true crime has no bearing on how the investigators would explore it versus if it were fiction. You are asserting a distinction with no difference.

I suppose an issue is that players might know the identity of the murderer from the outset? Yet this is essentially the same setup as a game set on the Titanic.

 

[Faolyn]

I legitimately don't understand your problem with this. If it was just a fictional murder mystery, it would play out exactly the same way. It being true crime has no bearing on how the investigators would explore it versus if it were fiction. You are asserting a distinction with no difference.

I think that the difference is the same one that has people saying you can't play real history in an RPG--the PCs are going to change things simply by existing, even if they only play minor roles. As soon as you bring the PCs in, it because alternate history. True crime is a simply very specialized type of real history. As soon as the PCs enter, it stops being real crime history and becomes alternate crime history.

True crime also has the problem in that a lot of cases, the actual perpetrator is unknown. If you were doing a game that focused on a certain historical event, you already know the outcome of that event. But with true crime, there's a good chance that you (the GM) would have to decide who the perpetrator is--meaning that it's no longer true crime but your own interpretation of history.

So you can definitely base a game on a true crime event, but by doing so, it will usually stop being true crime.

 

[Laurefindel]

I’ve been thinking about this for a couple days and honestly, I can’t think of any genre that cannot be done in RPG. I can think of a couple genres where I don’t really see the interest of making a RPG about it, but imagining somebody who would, I don’t see why it couldn’t be recreated in RPG.

Now there are a few narrative styles that are more difficult to convey but they aren’t tied to a genre in particular. I’m mostly thinking of stories where the entire plot revolves around something the main character(s) know or knowingly did but the audience doesnt. Or plots solely based on non-linear narratives. I saw Denis Villeneuve’s ‘Arrival’ again lately and that’s a movie that would be hard to translate in RPG, but that’s besides the genre…

Besides, I’m sure that someone with a minimum of design genius giving it enough thoughts would come up with something close enough to emulate that style too.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I legitimately don't understand your problem with this. If it was just a fictional murder mystery, it would play out exactly the same way. It being true crime has no bearing on how the investigators would explore it versus if it were fiction. You are asserting a distinction with no difference.

I think the key word here is "true". As I said, yes, its not exactly easy to get an RPG out of nonfiction. I just don't see why you should try and lump a variety of documentary in with fiction in the first place.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I think that the difference is the same one that has people saying you can't play real history in an RPG--the PCs are going to change things simply by existing, even if they only play minor roles. As soon as you bring the PCs in, it because alternate history. True crime is a simply very specialized type of real history. As soon as the PCs enter, it stops being real crime history and becomes alternate crime history.

I still maintain that this is bogus too, honestly. The whole genre called historical fiction wouldn't be called that if this distinction was legitimate. Its entirely possible to have historical fiction because the specific events that take place in it are irrelevant to the historical context; whether they occurred or not doesn't matter.

It strains the usage of alternate history as a term out of any functional shape.

 

[TheSword]

I think the key word here is "true". As I said, yes, its not exactly easy to get an RPG out of nonfiction. I just don't see why you should try and lump a variety of documentary in with fiction in the first place.

I think this is fair. Perhaps is unreasonable for me to have included non-fiction in the discussion. I did because it’s such a popular genre of storytelling at the moment.

I do think historical fiction has more space for TTRPG because the events are bigger and less integral to individual stories. If you could could find space in a Jeffrey Dahmer RPG for the people tangential to the main events and it still remain interesting and relevant maybe it would be possible. I doubt there is room though.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I think this is fair. Perhaps is unreasonable for me to have included non-fiction in the discussion. I did because it’s such a popular genre of storytelling at the moment.

You can run into some muddy cases as "docudramas" are a thing, and some true crime material slides into that (which is to say, playing fast and loose with the truth). I still think fiction "based on" nonfiction is different from the nonfiction itself.

I do think historical fiction has more space for TTRPG because the events are bigger and less integral to individual stories. If you could could find space in a Jeffrey Dahmer RPG for the people tangential to the main events and it still remain interesting and relevant maybe it would be possible. I doubt there is room though.

Yeah, honestly, what we think of as history is full of stories that no one knows about and thus could absorb fictionalized plotlines in games without meaningfully becoming not-historical. That's usually what historical fiction is, in practice, filling in the always present cracks in our knowledge.

When the focus starts to zoom down, its trickier, though you could still set those narrower events as a backdrop if you worked at it hard in most cases.

 

[MichaelSomething]

Due to licensing, I'm never gonna see an Atlus Shurgged TTRPG or a "A Libertarian Walks into a Bear" Faisco deck.

 

[Faolyn]

I still maintain that this is bogus too, honestly. The whole genre called historical fiction wouldn't be called that if this distinction was legitimate. Its entirely possible to have historical fiction because the specific events that take place in it are irrelevant to the historical context; whether they occurred or not doesn't matter.

It strains the usage of alternate history as a term out of any functional shape.

But historical fiction is not historical fact. If you want historical fact, you would read a history textbook, not a novel.