Does Anyone Care? (Cosmere RPG)

[Ruin Explorer]

I really liked the 1st one, but good grief you are so correct about the rest of the series.

I feel like my RED FLAG sensor was just working really well when I read the first one, because the combination of both glorified and exploited sexual violence (in various configurations) with certain other factors (attitudes of characters, terrible names) told me the writer and any further books in the series would be absolutely cooked (though we didn't use that term back then).

Admitting this may be damaging to my rep...but I made it to book four before i popped smoke, jumped out of the airplane, threw away my chute, and flapped my arms to gain acceleration towards ground impact.

Let he who is without sin...

I made through FOUR, count 'em, four Prince of Nothing books (i.e. into first book of the second trilogy) before I realized Bakker just didn't have any ideas at all, and was fully doing "LotR but grimdark, with lots of 700 AD Near East vibes (but nothing deeper than vibes) and with just increasingly non-stop (mostly offscreen but still) rape". By book 4 he's literally ripping off entire sequences from Tolkien, just crudely grimdarking them up. I was just really hoping someone would either get out the laser cannons (which the first book immediately says exist, and that the main bad guys are aliens) and really start blastin' or at least kill bloody Anasurimbor Kellhus (a character who had outlived any kind of value by early in book 3, when it became entirely clear he was just a monster himself, but the author inexplicably continued to act as if he was cool). Instead the other """"hero"""" of first trilogy bangs his daughter and cries a lot. Classy! Makes you think! Think about whether the author actually believes any of this drivel particularly...

(Today I occasionally throw a book in the (metaphorical) trash on the basis of the first chapter. Or paragraph.)

Wizard's First Rule was the first book I literally got so mad with I tried to throw it out the window after I finished it. Luckily I missed because I was four stories up and then just put it in the bin. It was the first book I ever binned though.

I did abandon one of the Shannara novels in an airport in the 1990s because it was so nothing, so weak, but I was confident someone else might enjoy it so just left it on a bench and walked away.

 

[Cordwainer Fish]

I made through FOUR, count 'em, four Prince of Nothing books (i.e. into first book of the second trilogy) before I realized Bakker just didn't have any ideas at all

Oh, his books are deeply grounded in philosophy, as in the kind of philosophy you get a degree in at university.

I am absolutely convinced that philosophy is utter crap, of much less than zero worth, and that the world would be a far better place if every single philosopher from Plato to today had dug ditches instead.

 

[Autumnal]

I am absolutely convinced that philosophy is utter crap, of much less than zero worth, and that the world would be a far better place if every single philosopher from Plato to today had dug ditches instead.

As someone who literally owes my life to what I learned from Camus’ The Myth Of Sisyphus and The Rebel and Franks’s Man’s Search For Meaning, I very strenuously disagree. I won’t pursue the digression, because every noun and adjective that I think of to use in response violates site norms, and I respect them. But wow. You are very wrong.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Oh, his books are deeply grounded in philosophy, as in the kind of philosophy you get a degree in at university.

I am absolutely convinced that philosophy is utter crap, of much less than zero worth, and that the world would be a far better place if every single philosopher from Plato to today had dug ditches instead.

I disagree quite strongly.

He's an apparent nihilist and a "neuroscience" bollocks artist. His most recent deal is he's obsessed with nearly conspiracy-theory level absolute nonsense stuff he's made up in "neuroscience" - all unprovable, unfalsifiable stuff with no apparent basis in existing science. He actually seems to have somewhat contemptuous opinions re: philosophy (despite being published in minor philosophy journals), in his case it's pretty clearly from a combination of him clearly not really understanding a lot of the philosophical concepts on a basic level, together with them not fitting with his conspiracy theory-style (rather than scientific) approach to "neuroscience" and how the brain works. This also ties into a lot of stuff in the Prince of Nothing books (esp. Kellhus).

I use hate quotes around "neuroscience" note, because AFAICT, he is not applying the scientific method, nor creating theories the scientific method could be applied to, nor really interested in actual neuroscience.

NB he stopped writing in 2017 and his brother says he's "done" for now at least and is "focused on his family", read that as you will, but I will point out there are similarities between his "neuroscience" stuff and what you might see with a smart person having a mental health crisis (indeed, we've seen this with authors before, they suddenly develop "important theories" in a field they're not really qualified in). Or maybe he was just like "Well this ain't paying the bills!" (because the second series of books sold very poorly), so who knows?

Characters in PoN do yammer back and forth a lot in a way that could be described as "philosophizing", but to call it sophomoric would be to insult sophomores, and it's not actually engaging with actual philosophers or concepts, just engaging in teenage nihilism (it was very unsurprising to learn he came up with most of the PoN setting when he was a teenager).

 

[Thomas Shey]

I suspect very strongly that, were someone sufficiently motivated, they could compare the amounts of money/numbers of backers IP-focused games made/had in their KS-type campaigns, and then look at where those RPGs were now, and look at non-IP-focused RPGs in the same ballpark, and see how many of them had just vanished into the mists of time.

I think what you'd find (and you'd have literally pay me to actually do the research, because it would take hours to do right, maybe days, and be incredibly boring) is that actually, yeah, IP-focused games tended to have extremely successful KS-type campaigns, but then a few years later, there were basically forgotten, just not a game people were playing, and also most of them would have very few or no support products, probably only the ones created in the KS. And it's fine for a game to not have support, but that + no evidence of anyone playing it? Probably means no-one is playing it.

I don't doubt that's true, but I'll just note I've seen a number of non-IP based games that had pretty good kickstarters and then vanished without a trace. They were interesting enough to get a kickstarter through (sometimes a pretty successful one) but then just didn't propagate any further apparently.

There will be exceptions too, whilst I think Mothership is gradually supplanting it, the Alien RPG seemed to do pretty well for a while. And I don't think any Star Wars RPG has been a total flop or vanished without a trace (unlike certain Marvel ones!).

There was a period back in the Dim Times when the FASA Star Trek game wasn't exactly a failure either at the RPG player end. Sometimes there's also the problem of a game crashing because of problems between the producers and the IP holder more than the game not being appreciated.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I don't doubt that's true, but I'll just note I've seen a number of non-IP based games that had pretty good kickstarters and then vanished without a trace. They were interesting enough to get a kickstarter through (sometimes a pretty successful one) but then just didn't propagate any further apparently.

You say you've "seen a number", and my instinctive inclination was to agree, then I looked on Kickstarter just to find some funny examples to mock for us, and I'm not really seeing any actual examples! We look at the "pretty good Kickstarter" range (what, like north of $100k? higher?) that IP-based games operate in (often they're very far north of that), all the non-IP KS'd TTRPGs I can see have, in fact got support and people playing them and so on, even 7th Sea 2nd Edition (amazingly, I didn't think it would have).

Whereas like the Altered Carbon RPG, have you even ever heard of that? It made $370k. Even the people who like it say "Wow no-one plays this, huh?" I'd be extremely confident in claiming many times as many people are playing Forbidden Lands, which made $295k, and is original.

I guess there's Invisible Sun, which seems to be owned-but-not-played, but like, I kind of thought that was the point (and surely one of the maniacs on this board has made his group play it!).

I don't want to argue a point I'm too lazy to research too strongly, but lazy casual "looking at a big list of RPGs that made money on KS and having to scroll past all the videogames KS doesn't let you exclude" tends to support my position imho. Not exactly compelling evidence I admit!

 

[Parmandur]

As someone who literally owes my life to what I learned from Camus’ The Myth Of Sisyphus and The Rebel and Franks’s Man’s Search For Meaning, I very strenuously disagree. I won’t pursue the digression, because every noun and adjective that I think of to use in response violates site norms, and I respect them. But wow. You are very wrong.

Agreed, but to divert that back on to topic...
The Cosmere books do take philosophy quote seriously, in fact the central struggle of the Stormlight Archives so far is over whether the ends justify the means, if ethics is about results or about the process of trying to be a better person. Questions of ethics are basically Sanderson's obsession. And he actually portrays characters taking a variety of opinions and at different points in their journeys.

To bring that even further on topic to this rPG...there is no XP based system even though it is Level based. Leveling up is by Milestone, but instead of being just DM fiat based on vibes or because a module says it is time, each player is tasked with working out short-term narrative goals with the GM, and when one gets ticked off...Level up.

 

[zakael19]

I feel like my RED FLAG sensor was just working really well when I read the first one, because the combination of both glorified and exploited sexual violence (in various configurations) with certain other factors (attitudes of characters, terrible names) told me the writer and any further books in the series would be absolutely cooked (though we didn't use that term back then).


Let he who is without sin...

I made through FOUR, count 'em, four Prince of Nothing books (i.e. into first book of the second trilogy) before I realized Bakker just didn't have any ideas at all, and was fully doing "LotR but grimdark, with lots of 700 AD Near East vibes (but nothing deeper than vibes) and with just increasingly non-stop (mostly offscreen but still) rape". By book 4 he's literally ripping off entire sequences from Tolkien, just crudely grimdarking them up. I was just really hoping someone would either get out the laser cannons (which the first book immediately says exist, and that the main bad guys are aliens) and really start blastin' or at least kill bloody Anasurimbor Kellhus (a character who had outlived any kind of value by early in book 3, when it became entirely clear he was just a monster himself, but the author inexplicably continued to act as if he was cool). Instead the other """"hero"""" of first trilogy bangs his daughter and cries a lot. Classy! Makes you think! Think about whether the author actually believes any of this drivel particularly...


Wizard's First Rule was the first book I literally got so mad with I tried to throw it out the window after I finished it. Luckily I missed because I was four stories up and then just put it in the bin. It was the first book I ever binned though.

I did abandon one of the Shannara novels in an airport in the 1990s because it was so nothing, so weak, but I was confident someone else might enjoy it so just left it on a bench and walked away.

Ok, but my brain still goes to the geometric shields of the Gnosis (?) school & some of those scenes of magic as just plain awesome.

Definitely stopped after book 2 of Prince of Nothing though.

Alas, as a teen I read quite a bit of Goodkind before coming to the realization of what an absurd power fantasy (Gary Stu?) it was.