TTRPG Genres You Just Can't Get Into -and- Tell Me Why I'm Wrong About X Genre I Don't Like

[Duke_]

I think that a big issue with a lot of "slice of life" RPGs is that GMs and players may have a hard time imagining the risks or stakes of the game. It doesn't mean that there aren't any risks or stakes, but many people aren't primed to think of what sort of risks or stakes would like in the way that they are for adventure games.

Oh yeah, I'm not saying that there's no conflict possible in the genre. I'm just saying that the type of day-to-day mundane conflicts I understand them to involve isn't something I want to game out. I feel like I've already had plenty in real life.

 

[John Dallman]

It depends whose life you're dealing with slices of. There's a character of mine who once got duplicated. After some argument, the duplicate went off to be a Pirate Queen in a Spelljammer universe, something the original would be fully capable of but didn't want to do.

Some years later, she showed up at the house saying "I got into a bit too much trouble. Can I hide here for a while?" We had the sense to look outside first and saw the fleet of spelljammers hovering overhead. Then we said "no," and started trying to find somewhere else for the fleet to hide because they were a bit conspicuous where we lived.

 

[Celebrim]

I will admit to having very little breadth to my RPG experiences.

I have only played various types of fantasy - generic fantasy, horror fantasy, and science fantasy. I have very little idea how to run or tell stories in other genres for an RPG and indeed, can't imagine how they would work from either a system or narrative perspective.

I can imagine a fantasy supers game, but can't imagine particularly compelling stories within it, and well, it would still be a genre of fantasy. I understand some people like supers, but don't have a particularly good understanding of what they actually do when playing it.

I really can't imagine hard science fiction. I find it interesting that Traveller, which seems to be the best of the bunch, almost seems to actively avoid narratives set in the primary universe in comparison to crash landing the players on a primitive planet or finding a derelict spaceship or finding some super science mystery and then running some other genre.

I've been playing Minecraft on a server with other adults for the first time, and I've noticed and marveled at how differently everyone is playing the game. I had thought the way I was playing was intuitive and obvious and fun, but I notice everyone else is doing different things and finding fun in different ways some of which make me scratch my head ("Why don't you light up your base so creepers don't appear randomly?" or "Why don't you build stairs so you don't have to jump around your base?"). I suspect that actually sitting in on really different groups would be just as informative and inspirational (and infuriating?), and I have long tried to broaden my horizons by going to cons and such, but still haven't yet had that "Eureka" moment where I sit at a table doing wildly different things that I'm used to where what they are doing feels like a new form of fun I hadn't considered.

 

[Celebrim]

Whereas superhero comics have always have. The fight of the superhero versus the supervillain is always the climax. 9 out of 10 issues of any comic book will involve Supers combat. It's entirely a genre focused about this premise and promise... Supers characters using their super-powers to fight against other people with different super-powers. Yes, there will of course be other things that happen in any Supers book-- romance, communication, mystery, espionage, science, etc... but Supers books aren't about those things, those things merely are the ways that build towards that final fight.

My wife hates watching MCU movies because there are invariably multiple 10 minute fist fights in the movie and she gets bored in them. Fight choreography has no interest to her. Combat isn't an interesting spectacle for her.

 

[Celebrim]

I tried Paranoia.... I can't find the fun in genre of making everyone else miserable, frustrated, and back stabbed pointlessly. Paranoia is not fun for me.

I can enjoy being a player but I can't run it because I'm not particularly witty or funny and as a GM I tend to take things very seriously. As a result, me running Paranoia turns the game into a Horror genre, which, if you think about it, it is.

 

[Celebrim]

And unfortunately, it often requires everyone agreeing to a real horror vibe to make a horror vibe; but it only takes one person being silly to make the whole thing silly.

This was the problem with the last Ravenloft campaign my group tried. We had most of the group leaning into the serious stuff, but one player wanted to be funny bard. You can guess how that went.

There are a lot of genres that I think can only come off successfully if you have a group of thespian minded people who want to just act together and do improv theater and play make believe like a bunch of kids. That's I think a relatively rare sort of group of players to get together.

 

[Celebrim]

Calling horror a single genre is a bit of a stretch.
You've got gore-horror...

Gore horror isn't even to me horror because the emotion it's tickling isn't fear but squeamishness. It's forcing disgust and not fear, and disgust is a very different thing than fear. Disgust tends to accompany either anger or pity, but fear really only gets involved with disgust if you are a child and inexperienced with things - like "I've never held a frog/worms/maggot before" sort of thing.

Once you've worked fast food, gutted your own animals, changed diapers, cleaned up your wife's vomit, then the association between fear and disgust goes away, and my response at least to "gore horror" starts to be less disgust at the fake blood on the screen but disgust at the meta level of the mindset that is producing or consuming such content willingly. And I imagine a professional nurse is way further along that scale than I am, having to dispense with squeamishness long time ago.

It's one of the real problems I have enjoying horror games is quite often the writer seems to not distinguish between invoking disgust and invoking fear, terror, or horror.

 

[aramis erak]

We tried scum and villainy, it is ok, though like you say it channels things towards a certain type of game, and w/o the buy in, players can chafe against it.

this is a common problem with the very focused games typical of the Storygames movement.

It's also common for narrow focused Trad games... especially mission based ones — Star Trek, Delta Force, most police procedurals (TFG's Crime Fighter is the one I've run), Recon, Chill, Bureau 13, ALIENS Adventure Game.
Also, any campaign premise based upon being part of an organization that has rules.

It is important to make the campaign premise clear at outset...
... I've run a few Traveller campaigns where the characters were still in service.

 

[Duke_]

this is a common problem with the very focused games typical of the Storygames movement.

It's also common for narrow focused Trad games... especially mission based ones — Star Trek, Delta Force, most police procedurals (TFG's Crime Fighter is the one I've run), Recon, Chill, Bureau 13, ALIENS Adventure Game.
Also, any campaign premise based upon being part of an organization that has rules.

It is important to make the campaign premise clear at outset...
... I've run a few Traveller campaigns where the characters were still in service.

On that note, there's an oft-repeated bit of inherited wisdom in the RPG community that systems narrowly focused on x genre are better at genre emulation than "universal" or "setting agnostic" games. But as always, inherited wisdom should always be questioned. And frankly, I don't buy this one. My experience says this is not always the case. It is possibly even rare that it's the case.

A dedicated and narrowly focused game can easily have incongruous rules for the genre, number one.

Number two, is a game that has 10 pages of content about running the game really automatically better at genre emulation than a "universal" system with a 100+ page supplement packed with solid rules and advice and mods about how to use the core resolution system for the genre at hand? In my experience, the answer is a resounding no. Not only have they given you more than adequate framework and advice, they are often better at handling the fringe cases than a game with a very narrow focus.

I know I'm about to be asked for an example, so I'll give one. I don't have to look any further than my Gamma World game I'm running with QuestWorlds.

 

[overgeeked]

On that note, there's an oft-repeated bit of inherited wisdom in the RPG community that systems narrowly focused on x genre are better at genre emulation than "universal" or "setting agnostic" games. But as always, inherited wisdom should always be questioned. And frankly, I don't buy this one. My experience says this is not always the case. It is possibly even rare that it's the case.

A dedicated and narrowly focused game can easily have incongruous rules for the genre, number one.

Number two, is a game that has 10 pages of content about running the game really automatically better at genre emulation than a "universal" system with a 100+ page supplement packed with solid rules and advice and mods about how to use the core resolution system for the genre at hand? In my experience, the answer is a resounding no. Not only have they given you more than adequate framework and advice, they are often better at handling the fringe cases than a game with a very narrow focus.

I know I'm about to be asked for an example, so I'll give one. I don't have to look any further than my Gamma World game I'm running with QuestWorlds.

Exactly. A good referee who knows the genre (or has a well-written book dedicated to the specific genre) will do wonders regardless of the system. Chunkier games will get in the way more than lighter systems.