How Much Do You Care About Novelty?

[Umbran]

Right, but -punk promises that you will.

"Promise" is a strong word.

Using the term for its cachet, but not delivering, is, to my mind, a valid basis for criticism.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

But your reply also begs the question: do you play in games in faux medieval/feudal settings that are commonplace in many FRPGs? What societies form the settings for the games you DO play in?

Like I said, the issue for me is when you whitewash real world settings, not when you have faux-[time/place] settings which don't have the same deep and horrific societal issues.

Like, if your characters are in a Victorian-ish, vibes-wise/aesthetics-wise but entirely fictional society/setting and it doesn't have child labour and truly horrific treatment of the poor and women and non-white people have rights, that's cool, I'm into it.

But if you set in the real world, or even approximately the real world (i.e. where there are actual historical figures, countries, etc.), and do all that, then you're getting into some really gross (to me) whitewashing territory (and also sometimes it doesn't even add up - a lot of societies were built on the back of horrific treatment of certain groups - not even minorities in many cases, just less-powerful groups, and shouldn't function without that). I think if a game does go out and say "This isn't realistic, this is romanticized and is mimicking a particular kind of fiction", like Pendragon does, then yeah, you cut it a lot of slack. But a lot of early "steampunk" and 1800s-set stuff stuff didn't do that, didn't acknowledge that things were effed up at all. Castle Falkenstein being a prime example - I'm never going to be able to play a game which thinks rich aristocrats and industrialists in the 1800s are "cool people".

And it's notable that most faux-[time/place] settings do dial back the horrors as it were - particularly faux-medieval ones! Those that don't tend to be kind of grimdark.

Re: medieval, if we had a game set in supposed "medieval England", where there was some vague pretense of realism, but it was incredibly sanitized and whitewashed, then yeah, I wouldn't be keen on that. You don't have to lean into the horrors (i.e. you don't have to have a GRRM attitude to sexual violence - that seems to be kind of ahistorical at most periods anyway), but if you're whitewashing, that's not my vibe, and I don't think it's cool. At least acknowledge how romanticized and silly your game is! I think that's much more common nowadays.

Also personally, I think we have a serious problem in the English-speaking West with romanticizing specifically the 1800s (and 1700s in certain circles) which is far less true of most other eras (except the Roman era), which makes this particularly questionable to me. This was specifically an notable issue in the UK in the 1990s, where one of the major parties was literally fetishizing and romanticizing the Victorian era as part of their platform, which made some steampunk fetishizing the same era quite uncomfortable to me.

 

[Autumnal]

This is where I do my usual thing. K.W. Jeter coined “steampunk” as a name for the Victorian fantasies he and his friends Tim Powers and James Blaylock were writing because he hates punk. Jeter is bourgeois through and through, the kind of person who subscribes to symphony and opera seasons and can discuss the performers the way baseball junkies can tell you about the 1962 American League season, who loves fine art and gourmet dining, who writes letters to the local paper decrying public rudeness. The name was a joke at the expense of the cyberpunks, whom he regards as poseurs assaulting culture for cheap buzz.

(What I find interesting is that none of the above is incompatible with him having a clear-eyed and extremely dark view of how human nature can go wrong, of how social institutions can and do suppress moral development, and great compassion for people in need and just trying to lead a reasonable life. Bourgeois does not mean complacency.)

Others went on to give the name their own meanings, which is what we do with language. But any attempt to claim it was originally anything but snark is simply wrong.

 

[Reynard]

We clearly value completely different things then. I don't see any of that in the areas that I personally care about.


They're not. WotC took the Alternity pdfs off drivethrurpg back in 2008 and never put them back.

Besides, just because the pdfs might be available on drivethru for some games doesn't translate to it having players. There are countless games on that site that nobody plays.

Nobody is even making spiritual successors either.


We clearly value completely different things then.

I myself have a bias for older ttrpgs, including ones from before I even got into ttrpgs and ones that I never played. Nightlife, Unisystem, Amazing Engine, Alternity, d20 Modern, Polyhedron magazine mini-settings, Chronicles of Darkness, etc. I have this feeling that current ttrpgs are overall less diverse, less creative, and lower budget than they were 20 or more years ago, in the areas that I personally care about. Often when a new ttrpg is genuinely inspired, and I've found a few, it often doesn't get the traction it deserves.

I'll list a few comparisons I'm personally familiar with:

All Flesh Must Be Eaten is a universal zombie ttrpg. Rather than being restricted to a single setting, it gives you rules to create your own zombies and multiple books of pre-written "deadworlds" to get you started. This is awesome and how I think all ttrpgs should be written. After Eden Studio shuttered a decade or so ago, AFMBE and other Unisystem games have faded into obscurity. The community forums are long gone. Pity, because I think they're awesome.

Night's Black Agents is a universal vampire hunter conspiracy thriller ttrpg. Like AFMBE, it doesn't have a single setting but gives you the tools to create your own take on vampire conspiracies. One online article even gives provisional rules for applying this formula to werewolves! There's an official discord which is still active as of this writing. It's fun.

Feed is an obscure kickstarter game about playing vampires. Like AFMBE and NBA, it's a toolkit that gives you tools for creating your own rules for vampirism from scratch. By far the most interesting mechanic is its humanity mechanic. Rather than subtracting points for breaking arbitrary rules and going arbitrarily crazy, it uses a mechanic similar to lightside/darkside from Star Wars and the dual character sheets from City of Mists. Characters are created in an abstract manner with freeform traits, and characters start with mostly human traits describing their human life. As a vampire alienates their human traits in play while pursuing their addiction to blood, they can sever human traits entirely and at this point the trait is replaced with a vampiric trait representing a vampire power, connection or possession. Very cool, but unfortunately it never got any further supplements and there's no community I could find.

Alternity Star*Drive is my favorite space opera setting. It feels distinct from Star Trek, Star Wars and Traveller because it was written in the 90s and with the intent to showcase as many scifi tropes as possible. WotC cancelled it after two years to get the Star Wars license. Describing SD succinctly is hard because the setting is a pastiche of as many scifi tropes as the writers could fit, but imagine if Babylon 5, Halo, Andromeda, Alpha Centauri, Schismatrix, Robocop, X-Files, Farscape, The Dead Zone, and various other scifi classics from 1980 onward were thrown into a blender. It has been 25 years and I haven't found a comparable setting. I've checked out Traveller and Stars Without Number, but they don't compare. No offense.

The biopunk genre is a niche within a niche. It's similar to cyberpunk, but with a focus on biotech over cybertech. Genetic engineering, wetware implants, etc. There's like two or three ttrpg settings I'm aware of that focus on it, Kromosome, GeneTech and GURPS Bio-Tech, and two old tv shows: Mutant X and Dark Angel. GeneTech is probably what I would consider the simplest take on the genre: it takes place in then-contemporary times (the late 90s/early 2000s) and focuses on the lives of genemods created for black ops operations in poorer countries, such as animal-human hybrids and slightly modified humans. Those who have broken away from their handlers have to deal with racism from the muggles. It's pretty hard to find biopunk settings and they always have various complications added that limit their applicability.

The psipunk genre suffers similar problems to biopunk. There's WotC's old Agents of PSI in the d20 Modern rulebook, there's I Psi for QAGs, but otherwise the genre is ignored.

Conspiracy thriller? Same boat. Classics of the genre like Bureau 13, Conspiracy X and Dark•Matter haven't received new editions in decades and the fandoms have evaporated beyond a couple of die hards. Meanwhile, Delta Green somehow survives due to its usage of oversaturated Cthulhu tropes. I don't like Delta Green's take on ufology tropes because they're perfunctory and play fourth fiddle to the cthulhu tropes. E.g. In those other games Roswell grays are their own civilization with their own mysterious goals, in DG the grays are a psi-op manufactured by Yuggoth to distract humans from their activities.

I've checked out The Magnus Archives ttrpg due to the positive reviews of the anthology. The chapter on monsters is serviceable and the stripped down archetypal nature of the monster writeups makes it easy to slot them into a variety of different times and places. Unfortunately, the rest of it just doesn't inspire me like, say, Chill, Dark•Matter, Hunter: The Vigil, or the Chronicles of Darkness bluebooks from the 2000s. It just comes across as excessively generic.

Monster of the Week definitely feels like one of those games I wish had come out 20 years ago, but in other ways it feels lacking. While it makes copious reference to various tv shows when designing its classes, the class-based nature of the rules and the large number of classes means that about half of them feel redundant or overlap the others. It doesn't have the plethora of organizations and conspiracies that games like Dark•Matter or Hunter: The Vigil had. One supplement tries to write a conspiracy thriller setting, but it's about playing as a mysterious evil organization that arbitrarily keeps magic secret from muggles. That premise is oversaturated and just doesn't appeal to me. DM and Vigil had a variety of organizations with a variety of goals that spanned the moral gamut.

StokerVerse looks totally awesome, but it seems to have slipped under the radar and been canceled. Ugh.

There are numerous experimental ttrpgs on itch.io, but the lack of any further attention for readily expandable concepts is why I find them forgettable or even aggravating. I buy game books because I'm too lazy to make my own, not because I want to do the author's work for them.

The development of ttrpgs just feels like a crapshoot to me. While there are undoubtedly good and useful innovations and advancements, these are canceled out by the loss of perfectly good ideas elsewhere. I can't go back to old games since I can see their flaws, but I can't move to new games because they lack everything I liked about old games.

I'm tired of it.


I'm not saying they're perfect, but nothing made after is even remotely similar or interesting to me. We also clearly value completely different things, since I love those games.


To be fair to the authors, most conspiracy theories at the time were invented and promoted by televangelists. I think it's fair to criticize this bias because it would alienate potential players. My suggestion is to balance out the bias by inserting more left-wing conspiracy theories, as well as spin doctoring some of the right-wing conspiracy theories to account for the various scandals.

Hide and Seek with Samara Weaving shows how you can take stuff like the Satanic conspiracy and spin it in new ways for new audiences. There's a lot of opportunity for satire.


Yeah, we totally disagree here. Star*Drive is the only space opera that I still find interesting anymore and I'm so disappointed that nothing made since comes close. I've checked out Traveller, Stars Without Number, etc and they just don't interest me.

Star*Drive is diverse, has aged so much better because it has smartphones, and did I mention it's diverse? The various stellar nations have inspired me way more than the bland sterile takes on human culture seen in games like Mass Effect. There's space cowboys, clones, mutant supremacists, etc. There's also aliens. There's lot of things to do, like politics, trading, frontier colonialism, netrunning, archaeology, fighting pirates, fighting bugs, using psychic powers to investigate crime scenes, etc.

If you think that's the most boring scifi setting you ever read, then I don't know what to tell you.

It's fine that you have preferences, but it is objectively and demonstrably wrong to say there were more game choices in the mid 90s than now.

 

[Thomas Shey]

There is a lot of gatekeeping about genre purity, yes, but also a lot of welcoming of new fans in general.

Well, like most things similar to this, usually performed by different people.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Gamma World for Alternity I can't comment on, I didn't read that version. Maybe it was good? But I don't hear it praised much (the 4E one, sure).

It had swung too far off the prior path for most of the fans of GW (the D20 Modern version suffered from this perhaps even more). My cynical reaction to the positive reaction the 4e version was that it was because it was the most D&D-like edition.

 

[Thomas Shey]

2e? Think Fallout with the 1e AD&D rules. It was okay. Only played a couple of times.

I believe they're referring to 5th Edition, which was the Alternity based one.

 

[VelvetViolet]

It's fine that you have preferences, but it is objectively and demonstrably wrong to say there were more game choices in the mid 90s than now.

Then I guess that it's a good thing that I never said that.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Also personally, I think we have a serious problem in the English-speaking West with romanticizing specifically the 1800s

In the 1800s Walter Scott was huge. From writing novels that massively romanticised the past.

So long as it’s long enough ago that there is no one left alive who remembers what it was really like people will romanticise it. These days there are people romanticising the 1940s for goodness sake!

This was specifically an notable issue in the UK in the 1990s, where one of the major parties was literally fetishizing and romanticizing the Victorian era as part of their platform, which made some steampunk fetishizing the same era quite uncomfortable to me.

I think you are making a false link between people saying “we hate sex”, whist at it like rabbits, and being ridiculed for it; and different people saying “we like wearing wing collars and top hats”, and being ridiculed for it.

 

[Theory of Games]

I care that the final product delivers a unique and cohesive experience. I don't require the components to be particularly innovative. Some of my favorite games include Into The Odd, Apocalypse Keys and Legend of the Five Rings Fifth Edition. None of these games have mechanics or play procedures they have invented, but they arrange them differently in a way that provides a cohesive play experience that is earnest.

Execution matters more to me than innovation, but a game needs to justify itself as something I could not experience otherwise.
A very good example of this in the video game space is Clair Obscur. It arranges familiar mechanics from different sorts of games but does not grab them at random - there's a vision behind it and presents a unique tone and perspective that meshes well with its systems.

How was Apocalypse Keys? I'm thinking of running it but I'm also concerned with PC power-levels. In your experience, were the PCs "forces of nature" or more like the Avengers?