Is there any genre or theme that the TTRPG medium does not work for?

I think you and some others are effectively confusing LARPing and TT RPGs. This thread is about TT RPGs.

In TT RPGs you don't generally break into actual song when your Bard or whoever sings a song. Most groups don't RP literally every single sentence of every discussion or negotiation - indeed, my experience is that the majority of stuff you could potentially RP out isn't.

Why would it be different with musicals? Musicals are still a genre, and that genre has its own rules and tropes and so on, even if you have to be pretty into musicals to realize that.

So the real question is, would a "musical" genre TT RPG be about making a musical, and the tropes around that, or would it be about being a world governed by the rules of a musical? I think the latter seems more like as a TT RPG concept, and we've seen it done on TV before - in that case, it's very much about following the structure and concepts of a musical, and looking at what conflicts would be and how they'd be resolved and so on.

It would take someone extremely familiar with a wide variety of musicals to design such an RPG, and I wouldn't be the person to do it, but I'm pretty confident it could be done, and you could mimic the genre and the vibe pretty well. The singing? Not so much but that's like saying you can't do an action movie well because you can't see the action - I think people would be able to imagine it.

So you wouldn't need musical talent, and the players wouldn't necessarily need "exposure to musicals" any more than D&D players need "exposure to generic high fantasy", if they could parse the rules, setting, etc. - which is to say it's beneficial, but not vital. Nobody would need to make up entire songs at the table, you'd just want to be able to make up what your character was singing about and so on.

I think if you designed the structure right, it could be a lot of fun.
i mean, the problem there is that the music is still integral to the genre - i mean, it's literally the name. having a musical without actual music would kind of be like having a high fantasy game without magic. sure, you could probably hit most of the other tropes, but i'd argue it's a fundamentally different thing at that point.

bards aren't really a comparable thing because the bard's performance isn't the entire point of the genre. the music in a musical is. and i'm sure you could make a game about a "world governed by the rules of a musical", and that it'd be fun, but i wouldn't call that a musical if there's no actual music. it'd be musical themed, at best (which i guess might be good enough for at least some people).
A mechanic where if a player sings in character they get a bonus? I will quibble that "musical" isn't a genre on par with the ones mentioned here,
i mean, it is still a genre, so whether or not it's on par with other genres isn't particularly relevant.
because you could always associate the theme of a given musical with another genre. Little Shop of Horrors is science fiction, for instance. The Blues Brothers is a musical and would make a great game - you're fighting Nazis!
okay...but then it's not a musical.
People I respect have (partially jokingly) argued that Lord of the Rings is a musical. It has more songs than Star Wars.
are there any songs that are sung in lord of the rings? i genuinely don't remember.
 

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I can't think of a lot of movies or books about middle class white guys dealing with those sorts of issues
This is such a wild thing to say that I actually don't know how to respond to it.

You don't think middle-class white guys write books about grief or realistic-coming-of-age which don't involve wars or sports or the like? Because let me just point you to like, I dunno, literary fiction from 1950 through 2020, say?

All I can really say here is I feel like, you might genuinely benefit from broadening your horizons a little.
 

This is such a wild thing to say that I actually don't know how to respond to it.

You don't think middle-class white guys write books about grief or realistic-coming-of-age which don't involve wars or sports or the like? Because let me just point you to like, I dunno, literary fiction from 1950 through 2020, say?

All I can really say here is I feel like, you might genuinely benefit from broadening your horizons a little.
Right?

I mean, yeah, most white dudes could use some therapy, but it isn't like the Basketball Diaries doesn't exist.
 


Silents film was a dunk but I'll add a foul shot: P O E T R Y.

You just can't RP rhymes and stanzas and verses.

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I'd say that whither elf or man
Then in poetry you most certainly can
It's not really all that difficult
Depending on the cards your dealt
Just set a goal, a plot a quest
And let your imagination do the rest ...
 

I'd say that whither elf or man
Then in poetry you most certainly can
It's not really all that difficult
Depending on the cards your dealt
Just set a goal, a plot a quest
And let your imagination do the rest ...
you can hit them, you can fold them, stack the deck and weight the dice...
 



i guess that might work for a one shot. it'd be really weird for a full campaign though.

during my uni days a couple of my friends were/are music geeks and we use to play a game wherein we were only allowed to communicate via song lyrics, never did it in an RPG, but we would sing at each other while walking through town and roleplay the lyrics …
 

during my uni days a couple of my friends were/are music geeks and we use to play a game wherein we were only allowed to communicate via song lyrics, never did it in an RPG, but we would sing at each other while walking through town and roleplay the lyrics …
Sounds perfect for a kenku bard!
 

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