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<blockquote data-quote="Aldarc" data-source="post: 8117790" data-attributes="member: 5142">I don't have much of answer for either of these, as they lie outside of my hobby experiences.You are right, because it is difficult to say why some games achieved influence and some games didn't or maybe even not as great as anticipated. As a general preface, I'm not sure that a game's influence can be reduced to whether a designer made a good game or not, because sometimes mediocre games have a strong influence and sometimes well-designed/novel games have minimal influence. So it may be helpful to answer your question by looking at what games in our hobby achieved influence and why/how they did, though maybe apart from the 800 lb. gorilla with market inertia.Jonathan Tweet's Over the Edge (1992) never really achieved mainstream success the way that his associate Mark Rein-Hagen's Vampire the Masquerade (1991) did, but it was highly instrumental for the indie TTRPG scene, influencing Ron Edwards's Sorcerer (2001), Evil Hat Production's Fate (2003), and Margaret Weis Production's Cortex (2004). Its use of freeform fiction-based traits was highly influential, but it only really became obvious with some hindsight. And while many today think of traits/aspects as Fate/Cortex-like mechanics, a number of the designers have flat out pointed to Over the Edge's direct influence. But that took roughly a decade to get to the first iterations in the early '00s, and then another ~10 years past that (at least for Cortex &amp; Fate) to really get to their present shape.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Aldarc, post: 8117790, member: 5142"] I don't have much of answer for either of these, as they lie outside of my hobby experiences. You are right, because it is difficult to say why some games achieved influence and some games didn't or maybe even not as great as anticipated. As a general preface, I'm not sure that a game's influence can be reduced to whether a designer made a good game or not, because sometimes mediocre games have a strong influence and sometimes well-designed/novel games have minimal influence. So it may be helpful to answer your question by looking at what games in our hobby achieved influence and why/how they did, though maybe apart from the 800 lb. gorilla with market inertia. Jonathan Tweet's Over the Edge (1992) never really achieved mainstream success the way that his associate Mark Rein-Hagen's Vampire the Masquerade (1991) did, but it was highly instrumental for the indie TTRPG scene, influencing Ron Edwards's Sorcerer (2001), Evil Hat Production's Fate (2003), and Margaret Weis Production's Cortex (2004). Its use of freeform fiction-based traits was highly influential, but it only really became obvious with some hindsight. And while many today think of traits/aspects as Fate/Cortex-like mechanics, a number of the designers have flat out pointed to Over the Edge's direct influence. But that took roughly a decade to get to the first iterations in the early '00s, and then another ~10 years past that (at least for Cortex & Fate) to really get to their present shape. [/QUOTE]

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