Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Swanosaurus" data-source="post: 9867011" data-attributes="member: 7044220">I found myself rotating back to the more "open" games I was used to in the nineties, the ones that didn't got totally overboard with the rules, but strived to provide you with a reasonable list of tools to create all kind of characters and resolve all kinds of adventurous situations within the framework of a relatively grounded fictional plausibility. Basically, what GURPS does, but a little more focussed and boiled down. At the moment, I'm re-reading the relatively light Rolemaster-based RPGs HARP and Against the Darkmaster; while the latter is, on the page, quite opionated about its supposed playstyle, like Shadowdark, it is usually adapted to a lot of other things. (The joke being that MERP, which is it based on, was aggressively un-opinionated about playstyle even though it was the official LotR rpg; it just gave you stats and background for middle-earth and then let you decide what to do with it.) I'm also fiddling with the Spanish Tierras Quebradas/Broken Lands, which has a similar rules ethos.I realized how much I like the combination of presenting genre-tropes, but then opening them up wide by having the rules represent world plausibility instead of genre plausibility - both overlap, of course, but still, where genre plausibility might say "protagonist can't die at this point", world plausibility might disagree.While I think the whole idea to emulate genre instead of simulating fictional realities was and is an essential step, it has led to a lot of games that lost another thing that I love about RPGs: How they can break genre in unforeseen ways. The protagonist breaking a leg while falling from a cliff and being unable to proceed to the final fight or the final fight being anti-climatic because of a weird die roll was seen mostly as a problem and not as the story straying in occasionally delightful ways far off the beaten genre path. Basically, I realized that I'm less interested in RPGs that let me play stories like The Lord of the Rings or Ocean's Eleven and more in RPGs that start with similar assumptions, but then let me run free.I feel that some RPGs have become more convervative than mainstream adventure fiction in this regard: They suggest that if something happens that is not immediately recognizable as genre-appropriate comfort food, we should question it and find a way to return to the path of least resistance, guided by rules that are constructed to lead us this way. If that's what you want, these rules are a great tool, but they kind of leave me disinterested these days. Give me an imperfect, but manageable system of the size of HARP or vsD or, to have it a little lighter, Dragonbane that isn't really that adamant about the rules the stories should follow.</blockquote>

Verification