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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 4872625" data-attributes="member: 2067">Yeah, it's kind of like calling Bugs Bunny and the Herculoids and the new Transformers movie and Watchmen and Superman comics from the 50's and the BioShock videogame all the same genre. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> It's not even all "Animation," as far as that goes -- a popular Japanese series can get a work-over into a live-action rendition, too (not unlike Watchmen, really). It's like most genre distinctions -- it breaks down if you get specific about it. Discuss "Indie Music," and you're likely to get some of the same kinds of discussions.Ultimately, people mean different things when they talk about it. But where the rubber meets the road is essentially in an Archetype: a certain kind of character. This goes hand-in-hand with world design on the DM's side: certain kinds of worlds make certain kinds of characters. Fortunately, archetypes generally have almost nothing to do with rules or mechanics: I'm totally capable of playing a character who is like, say, Naruto, flavor-wise, in D&D, right now, and having a world that supports a character like that. It might not be entirely organic or reinforced, but it's totally possible, especially with some clever house rules. The dilemma is, of course, that what I want really is delicious IP-infringing solid rules for various tropes I see in Series X (Naruto or Avatar or Conan or LotR or whatever) so that I can get my homo habilis tool-using rush out of taking these elements and using them in a new way, with my buddies, doing something that none of us can entirely predict, taking them out of context, and putting them to new, re-mixed use. D&D, for most people, is kind of like one big fantasy mashup of their favorite magic & monster tropes, and giving support for that is rather difficult, especially while staying within one ruleset, given the diversity of the tropes that players want supported and the good chance that publishing something too close to those tropes is going to get you sued. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> The rules are perhaps the wonkier issue. Asking one ruleset to support survival horror alongside little-boy action anime is basically an impossible task, unless you're True 20 and you're noncommittal enough to be genre-neutral, but then you leave a big enough gap to the point where both of them feel the same when they really shouldn't. For example: I wouldn't be able to do something like recreate the Stanley expedition to find Livingstone very well in 4e. The tropes that made it interesting (disease, donkeys, wild animals, porters, tribute, racial tensions, supplies, water, the fact that everyone's human and mundane and prone to dying of mosquito bites) aren't very interesting in 4e D&D. To make something similar that would also be fun involves breaking a lot of 4e's fundamental rules (everyone's a big fat hero, you're a small team not a big expedition, you're supposed to get in big fights, not play it safe and avoid the hippos, etc.). If 4e were better at supporting that "wilderness expedition" style of game, it would be worse at supporting the big fat heroes on a small team getting in fights style of game. The two are incompatible within one ruleset. And if every ruleset has 300-900 pages of rules, well, who the heck wants to learn more than a ruleset or maybe two if you're into it?This is one of the Big Problems of Tabletop Gaming. It's getting worse as the fantasy genre expands and blurs and becomes new things, versus the relatively narrow selection back in the 70's. It's hard to solve because you can't just publish a new game and have it solve all your problems. You almost have to create a game that is different at every table -- and that is supported with individual tables in mind. That doesn't sound like anything you can hang a business model on. As the genre diversity increases, there is only two basic directions for D&D to go: More Inclusive (and more generic) or More Focused (and less useful for people who play in different ways). Neither one is really a direction that is going to increase your audience.</blockquote>

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