Does Anyone Care? (Cosmere RPG)

[Elvish Lore]

I don't understand people (not necessarily on this thread) who are saying having to learn the Cosmere IP in order to play this game is a huge impediment to play.

I mean... learning a world setting has been an impediment to play for every rpg with a setting, ever. I don't think that's a big deal.

I do think, though, that famous IP tends to involve obsessive fans who tend to make running the setting a lot more difficult than it needs to be. These people love pointing out setting and continuity errors because they have such an intimate knowledge of the setting. I comment upon this with love, though, as I'm a fan-boy of the Tolkien legendarium and the Arthurian Mythos who has to bite their tongue whenever someone gets a setting detail wrong.

 

[Parmandur]

I don't understand people (not necessarily on this thread) who are saying having to learn the Cosmere IP in order to play this game is a huge impediment to play.

I mean... learning a world setting has been an impediment to play for every rpg with a setting, ever. I don't think that's a big deal.

I do think, though, that famous IP tends to involve obsessive fans who tend to make running the setting a lot more difficult than it needs to be. These people love pointing out setting and continuity errors because they have such an intimate knowledge of the setting. I comment upon this with love, though, as I'm a fan-boy of the Tolkien legendarium and the Arthurian Mythos who has to bite their tongue whenever someone gets a setting detail wrong.

On one hand, as someone who intends to run non-Stormlight fans through thos, I agree with you.

But, ot must be admitted that thr Stormlight Archives is some intense and in-drpth worldbuilding, being way far out there compared to other fantasy Settings. Mistborn, IMO, is going to be way more approachable just because the world looks amlnd works way more like ours, especially Era 2.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I don't understand people (not necessarily on this thread) who are saying having to learn the Cosmere IP in order to play this game is a huge impediment to play.

I mean... learning a world setting has been an impediment to play for every rpg with a setting, ever. I don't think that's a big deal.

There's an argument here, but I do think there are problems for a lot of people the more well developed a given setting is (and its even worse if the setting is off the beaten path). I've seen people talking about this regard game like RuneQuest and Glorantha or the various incarnations of Tekumel for a very long time.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I mean... learning a world setting has been an impediment to play for every rpg with a setting, ever. I don't think that's a big deal.

< insane person laughter > BWHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHA

I read 3600+ words of Stormlight Archives and there was about 3x as much exposition/world-building (albeit often a bit repetitive) in those, than like, 3 normal setting books!!! I couldn't even remember or keep track of most of it, and that's just the Stormlight stuff! Seems like an "in-depth" setting book for just Stormlight would be heavy enough you could use it block bullets and knock people unconscious with ease!

By book 3, in order to understand what was actually going on, I had to be familiar with two, count 'em, two other entire book series, completely separate from Stormlight Archives, and not surface-level familiar either. And I tried with Wiki-type assistance but bloody hell I'm generally a lore-sponge (as people may have noticed with various franchises), but I was struggling, struggling I tell you! Not with complexity but with sheer amount, especially sheer amount of Capitalized Nouns and Damn Silly Names.

My loyal book-shieldmate, who often reads the same books as me, and who managed to get to like book 5 or 6 of Terry Goodkind (a horrifying feat no man should attempt, I couldn't get past the first one), has read all of WoT multiple times, and so on got just destroyed by the sheer number of Capitalized Nouns (particularly Lashings lol) and didn't survive book 2 of Stormlight.

I do think, though, that famous IP tends to involve obsessive fans who tend to make running the setting a lot more difficult than it needs to be. These people love pointing out setting and continuity errors because they have such an intimate knowledge of the setting.

Yup. And it's worse here than with any other IP, I would suggest, because part of the Cosmere-fan deal is you're supposed to cross-read and cross-understand and buy all of Taylor's albums and merch buy all of Sanderson's books, and then you have these special insights into all sorts of frankly stupid and annoying connections between the settings and UNDERLYING SETTING (god help us).

 

[Parmandur]

So, Brotherwise Games just announced that the physical rewards are going to start shipping shortly, and should be fulfilled over the next ten weeks or so. That means Backers should all have their physical goods before this hits retail shelves.

 

[RenleyRenfield]

I personally call BS on all claims to people being scared off by IP or lore or metaplot.

Warhammer does fine, there are good sales, and plenty of indication that new players are joining all the time. Even those who have never seen, let alone played the wargame.

Cthulhu is a classic example of nearly nobody I have ever met (or very few) having ready any H.P. Lovecraft, let alone the titular "The Call of Cthulhu" story. And its a huge selling game, embraced by a vast majority of people who have no clue about the mythos and the staggering amount of lore, books, and novels around it.

RuneQuest has low market growth because its system is painfully antiquated and its mechanics appeals only to a smaller and smaller subset of gamers as the years go by. We joke at Chaosium that the average RuneQuest player age is able to get retirement benefits.

Start Trek, Fallout, Dune, and other series see players despite no-read.

It much more often comes down to marketing.

I had no idea how little (absolutely nothing) you need to know about Sanderson's novels to play Cosmere. There is about the same amount of lore and metaplot as there is in most RPGs, and none of it was confusing or missing context.

I mean, Daggerheart has no meaningful lore at all, and we find players are not enjoying that. They read it, try it, then go back to 5E where they came from. What we do see is people buy Warhammer Fantasy, get into the lore and stick with the game to explore that lore. Much better retention of players!

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I had no idea how little (absolutely nothing) you need to know about Sanderson's novels to play Cosmere. There is about the same amount of lore and metaplot as there is in most RPGs, and none of it was confusing or missing context.

????

It seems like you're saying you're unfamiliar with the Cosmere but want to make some extreme claims on how much lore there is and so on?

I mean, Daggerheart has no meaningful lore at all, and we find players are not enjoying that.

What are you talking about? That is a wild thing to say. Especially when you're praising 5E, which has the same basic setup - i.e. no specific built-in setting.

I personally call BS on all claims to people being scared off by IP or lore or metaplot.

If only you'd followed this up by actually supporting the point instead of making strange unsupported claims.

 

[Parmandur]

I personally call BS on all claims to people being scared off by IP or lore or metaplot.

Warhammer does fine, there are good sales, and plenty of indication that new players are joining all the time. Even those who have never seen, let alone played the wargame.

Cthulhu is a classic example of nearly nobody I have ever met (or very few) having ready any H.P. Lovecraft, let alone the titular "The Call of Cthulhu" story. And its a huge selling game, embraced by a vast majority of people who have no clue about the mythos and the staggering amount of lore, books, and novels around it.

RuneQuest has low market growth because its system is painfully antiquated and its mechanics appeals only to a smaller and smaller subset of gamers as the years go by. We joke at Chaosium that the average RuneQuest player age is able to get retirement benefits.

Start Trek, Fallout, Dune, and other series see players despite no-read.

It much more often comes down to marketing.

I had no idea how little (absolutely nothing) you need to know about Sanderson's novels to play Cosmere. There is about the same amount of lore and metaplot as there is in most RPGs, and none of it was confusing or missing context.

I mean, Daggerheart has no meaningful lore at all, and we find players are not enjoying that. They read it, try it, then go back to 5E where they came from. What we do see is people buy Warhammer Fantasy, get into the lore and stick with the game to explore that lore. Much better retention of players!

Excellent points, I have a hard time judging how a non-reader might perceive Stormlight at this point, given that I am several million words into the lore now. But the books are not so popular without reason, it goes pretty far out but is also frankly juat kind of cool. I am hopeful my non-book reader friends can get into it, and I think Brothwe5has done a great job providing aome introductory material. I'd give the Welcome to Roshar booklet to someone haunted by the novels to help ease into the transition, even.

 

[Hermes_Alexandria]

I personally call BS on all claims to people being scared off by IP or lore or metaplot.

Warhammer does fine, there are good sales, and plenty of indication that new players are joining all the time. Even those who have never seen, let alone played the wargame.

Cthulhu is a classic example of nearly nobody I have ever met (or very few) having ready any H.P. Lovecraft, let alone the titular "The Call of Cthulhu" story. And its a huge selling game, embraced by a vast majority of people who have no clue about the mythos and the staggering amount of lore, books, and novels around it.

RuneQuest has low market growth because its system is painfully antiquated and its mechanics appeals only to a smaller and smaller subset of gamers as the years go by. We joke at Chaosium that the average RuneQuest player age is able to get retirement benefits.

Start Trek, Fallout, Dune, and other series see players despite no-read.

It much more often comes down to marketing.

I had no idea how little (absolutely nothing) you need to know about Sanderson's novels to play Cosmere. There is about the same amount of lore and metaplot as there is in most RPGs, and none of it was confusing or missing context.

I mean, Daggerheart has no meaningful lore at all, and we find players are not enjoying that. They read it, try it, then go back to 5E where they came from. What we do see is people buy Warhammer Fantasy, get into the lore and stick with the game to explore that lore. Much better retention of players!

I agree with most of the points, however for me when introducing a complex setting, the adventures and supporting materials have to be well layered and ramped up slowly at the table. For example, I -love- D&D's Eberron setting. However it is extremely lore heavy (12+1 moons, houses, planes, states, dragonmarks, ect.) and runs-against-the-tropes of historical D&D (orcs were the heroes all along!). There's no way I could possibly feed all that to any group. Even the core designer, Keith Baker, recommends only putting 2-3 elements to focus on in any campaign.

So the extemely deep Cosmere and all of its settings has to maintain a balance between on-boarding new players and entertaining hard core fans. I think all the support materials are going to help with that. I haven't seen a non-Sanderson fan want to play in my games yet, but I feel that the Bridge 9 starter adventure, which starts in the largely non-Radiant era, is an excellent way of slowly feeding the lore the new players.

 

[Parmandur]

I agree with most of the points, however for me when introducing a complex setting, the adventures and supporting materials have to be well layered and ramped up slowly at the table. For example, I -love- D&D's Eberron setting. However it is extremely lore heavy (12+1 moons, houses, planes, states, dragonmarks, ect.) and runs-against-the-tropes of historical D&D (orcs were the heroes all along!). There's no way I could possibly feed all that to any group. Even the core designer, Keith Baker, recommends only putting 2-3 elements to focus on in any campaign.

So the extemely deep Cosmere and all of its settings has to maintain a balance between on-boarding new players and entertaining hard core fans. I think all the support materials are going to help with that. I haven't seen a non-Sanderson fan want to play in my games yet, but I feel that the Bridge 9 starter adventure, which starts in the largely non-Radiant era, is an excellent way of slowly feeding the lore the new players.

I really like the First Steps 0-Level Adventure: I think that provides a good starting point for non-readers as well, particularly if they read the "Welcome to Roshar" booklet. The big Stonewalkers Adventure also seems a solid next step.

There is an awful lot going on in Roshar that is different and out there, but I'm optimistic.