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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8269781" data-attributes="member: 18">I'm just not sure I entirely buy that the success is actually due to people wanting X and not wanting Y. That's not how things work in the real world. It's never that pure, never that clean, never that neat.I agree that what people want varies, but I would strongly disagree with any suggestion that people even slightly reliably play the RPGs that reflect what they actually want. There are so many other factors in play, not least people simply not knowing about a lot of games.Icons is a good example. I just looked at Icons right now, and it is absolutely not even similar to how people online described it to me - including reviews (which had given me the incredible impression that it was some sort of grim supers game, leading me to ignore it). If I'd heard about truthfully and accurately from people back then, I'd have bought it for sure, but I'd never even seen the cover before (unless it had a really different cover at one point). I'm probably going to go and get it from DriveThru shortly, and this is really, hilariously enough, illustrating what I'm saying - it's not a matter of "don't want", and claiming that's the driver is misunderstanding what's going on.M&M being so successful was because it was originally a slightly-compromised game at exactly the right time, which gave it a huge reputation, and made it the "go-to" RPG for Supers, not because it was best, but because it was most well-known. And retained that dominance because a whole "generation" of TT RPG players saw it as the "go-to" Supers RPG, just as HERO/Champions was a generation or so before. Neither might have been perfect, but people played them, because they were what they knew. Not what they wanted, what they knew.I'm sure it's true that Icons isn't what some people want, but based on my experience right here, I'm telling you that marketing and people knowing about things are huge factors here, that you are seemingly almost totally discounting in favour of this idea that people all play what they actually want to.Whoa, so you were around in 1981 when all this was developed? Or when the HERO transition was made in 1990?Really? I'm skeptical there are "a lot" of such people.I know people who like really detailed heists, sure, who like the procedure and preparation and so on. I also know people who want cinematic heists, without much procedure or precision prep, and BitD exists primarily to support those cinematic heists (and is clearly popular), and who love the drama of them. I think some like both. I've never come people who don't like the procedure, and don't the drama, and just want points to allow them to "cheat" at heists as it were. In my experience people like that aren't interested in heists as a game element at all. They'd rather skip the heist entirely. I mean, sure someone like that technically exists, but what leads you to the conclusion that there are "a lot" of such people playing TT RPGs?I mean, with BitD part of the deal is that you can retroactively establish stuff as having happened without having specifically planned it. And the Blood Money adventure I noted did the same. But in both cases you sort of earn the ability to do this by working up the heist to some extent.I'm unconvinced by this analogy. Certainly people don't necessarily find the procedural approach to dungeoneering interesting today, it's more of a niche thing with Torchbearer etc. But I think extending that to saying people want like "heist magic" without anything at all around it is a bit of an overreach, or if not your intention, I don't think this analogy is clarifying anything. It may even be muddying it.Completely agree, yeah.This seems to be based on the frankly erratic notion that "planning isn't inherently fun for anyone". I would argue that for a lot of groups, planning is extremely fun, and that very much includes factoring in that it's all likely to go to hell. Saying it's "wasted time" and "useless naughty word" is exactly the same underlying attitude as people who say RP is "wasted time" and "naughty word".Also, re: the "uncannily smart", I don't think many RL or even movie heists have actually involved any "uncanny smarts", and even movie heists that aren't called "Ocean's X" only sometimes involve "uncanny smarts", they often just have a series of fallback plans. It's obviously not a fact that a heist and a robbery are separated in the way you describe. It's your opinion, sure, but it's not a commonly-held opinion. A heist is, I would suggest, for most people, any fancy, complex, pre-arranged robbery, especially it involves a lot of wealth, and a planned getaway. You seem to think it's only Ocean's 11/Mission Impossible-type stuff. Whereas, for example, I'd say HEAT was absolutely a heist movie and pretty much everyone would agree with me (if you look it up). HEAT doesn't feature any "uncanny smarts" - quite the contrary!I mean, I think we could probably go through heist movies and novels, from the 1930s onwards, and separate them into two piles - one, slightly smaller pile, would be the Ocean's 11-style stuff, where it's all perfectly planned in a way that isn't really humanly possible to execute, or only barely, and requires Holmes/Moriarty levels of brilliance, and a larger pile, where expensive stuff is stolen by people with a plan, and where things probably go pretty badly wrong, but someone likely still gets away with the money in the end.If you want to give the illusion of Ocean's X-style stuff, you do need something like BitD for most groups, but if you want just general fantasy heists, more like say, Locke Lamora, Six of Crows/Crooked Kingdom, Mistborn (parts of it), Foundryside, and so on, I really do not believe that you the kind of Ocean's X approach BitD provides.Maybe this is a cultural divide? People like me grew up on British heist movies which traditionally don't go great and usually aren't super well-planned. The classic being The Italian Job, where quite a number of things go extremely badly wrong ("You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!" or rely on a lot of luck rather than judgement, but if I'd been raised on Ocean's X and modern Mission Impossible I might have a very different idea re: heists.TLDR for [USER=7027139]@loverdrive[/USER] You seem to be working on the notion that everyone who likes heists wants Ocean's 11, not HEAT, which is very wrong.(And I would point out that Locke Lamora is a lot closer to HEAT in a lot of ways, than Ocean's 11 - even Six of Crows/Crooked Kingdom is, ultimately.)</blockquote>

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