Of Mooks, Plot Armor, and ttRPGs

[Micah Sweet]

Notably, I think some people would absolutely eat up a Stardew Valley esque farming simulator TTRPG if someone did a decent job writing one (and they may have, I can't think of any, but they might be out there.)

I love that world so much. Would be happy to live there, actually.

 

[Pedantic]

"Deconstruction of X" is itself a genre, so I don't find this to be at odds with what I said.

The point I'm making of that genre isn't generally a yardstick of design quality in the kind of design that's interesting here, and fidelity to genre or lack thereof isn't an interesting endpoint for criticism, but a marker of something else.

 

[pemerton]

I don't think this gives enough credit to the malleability of the fictional setting. Look at something like Andrew Rowe's books, which pretty clearly wear their influences on their sleeves and reify a bunch of weird class/level things to functional parts of the setting's reality. It's a disservice to insist simulation must refer to some actual process of the actual world

I think you're correct that I'm probably less into "outre" settings/fictions than some others might be.

I do tend to think that consistency is easier to maintain when the fiction is closer to "normal", but again maybe that's just me.

 

[Aldarc]

Notably, I think some people would absolutely eat up a Stardew Valley esque farming simulator TTRPG if someone did a decent job writing one (and they may have, I can't think of any, but they might be out there.)

I would potentially work from Ironsworn. Instead of fulfilling oaths, you work towards various farm projects or wooing romantic partners. Can be played solo or without a GM.

The only "problem" is that Ironsworn one of those nasty "narrative" games.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

I would potentially work from Ironsworn. Instead of fulfilling oaths, you work towards various farm projects or wooing romantic partners. Can be played solo or without a GM.

The only "problem" is that Ironsworn one of those nasty "narrative" games.

I don't think you should call narrative games nasty, plenty of people like them.

 

[Aldarc]

I don't think you should call narrative games nasty, plenty of people like them.

Myself included.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

I think you're correct that I'm probably less into "outre" settings/fictions than some others might be.

I do tend to think that consistency is easier to maintain when the fiction is closer to "normal", but again maybe that's just me.

LitRPG is a really interesting thing to watch happen. The way this describes it undersells it a bit too, there's plenty of it that is adopting game elements while playing coy about being a game, and just making things like level or class a part of the world's physical laws.

 

[The-Magic-Sword]

Myself included.

whaaaaat i had no idea ; )

edit: though I will say, Stardew Valley could be fairly interpreted in different ways, one of those is narrative, but another is very simulation since its actual game play is very much in the vein of a survival crafting game, where you move down a line of advancements through layers of infrastructure that let you do something new, that then makes you want to work towards something else. That part of the game (which boils down to an ongoing optimization puzzle) is fun, even though the cute romances and idyllic vibes are more discussed.

 

[hawkeyefan]

A consistent, PC-independent setting. I know I'll never get all the way there, but that's my goal, and I'll never stop trying for it.

So I have a question. I can understand you being annoyed at the magical elves argument, and how annoying it may be if it seems like people are telling you that you don’t know what you want.

But I don’t really know what the above quote means. I would see a world independent of the PCs as not being anything. The players, via their characters, are what make the setting work.

So I think the confusion here is mostly terminology. And I want to actually understand your game and what you’re going for. But a “pc-independent setting” seems like a contradiction to me.

Do you mean you want a setting with consistent mechanics that work the same for PCs and NPCs? I feel like that’s part of it, but not all. What more is there to it?

 

[Micah Sweet]

So I have a question. I can understand you being annoyed at the magical elves argument, and how annoying it may be if it seems like people are telling you that you don’t know what you want.

But I don’t really know what the above quote means. I would see a world independent of the PCs as not being anything. The players, via their characters, are what make the setting work.

So I think the confusion here is mostly terminology. And I want to actually understand your game and what you’re going for. But a “pc-independent setting” seems like a contradiction to me.

Do you mean you want a setting with consistent mechanics that work the same for PCs and NPCs? I feel like that’s part of it, but not all. What more is there to it?

Every setting product ever created does not assume the existence of any particular PCs. They instead describe themselves and offer ways to insert the PCs i to the world. The world as described is independent of the PCs.

Our base assumptions here are, I think, simply too different for us to understand each other.