The End of a Long Fantastical Journey

[Clint_L]

D&D has come and gone and now come back over the decades, and I have gone years at a time without playing it. I had a huge Rolemaster period in the 80s and early 90s but haven't played since. But the biggest, by far, in terms of hours and investment, has to be Warhammer, mostly Fantasy Battle but also 40k, Bloodbowl, and most other GW games to some degree. I haven't played one in over 20 years, and for a good decade they were most of my gaming.

Oh, and Magic the Gathering, but that was a brief, intense addiction when it first launched (I'm a West Coaster so it erupted early here), and then I quit completely when I sold my cards to help pay for grad school. I've played maybe three games of it since. Still a great game, but I think I'm scarred by knowing what the cards I sold would be worth now. I thought I was being so smart and cashing out before the fad was over.

 

[Elvish Lore]

For me it was Call of Cthulhu. I'd been playing it on and off since 1981. I've done campaigns of it but I had huge success with it for one shots over the years and certainly convention play.

But several years ago, I put it away. I was done with the vibe, with the ideas, and didn't care about its structure anymore. I walked away and don't miss it.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Solo D&D and its modern variants, New School or Old School Revival, are over for me. The fun is gone. I was playing out of nostalgic reflex. It had become like an old pair of jeans so full of holes that there are more holes than fabric! I had already stopped playing D&D with a group. I packed all my books into boxes and put them in the closet of my game room. I'm not sad. It was time to take action. Forty-six years is quite a fantastic journey! And then there are other role-playing games like Dragonbane, Fantasy Age, and Numenera, among others, that fulfill me both solo and in groups.

And you? Have you put aside a game that was super important to you for years, decades, but that has become uninteresting?

Its usually been less about it becoming uninteresting, than I can now see flaws (usually in system but often in output from that too) that I simply didn't notice or could shrug off for a long time. And in some cases systems where I think I could still get value out of it but there would be more heavy lifting than is warranted since I don't think my player group wants what it has to bring anymore.

The first includes Mutants and Masterminds and most of the BRP sphere; the latter the Hero System.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

And you? Have you put aside a game that was super important to you for years, decades, but that has become uninteresting?

I think I might distinguish between games that have become uninteresting because I've changed in my interests and feelings about games, and games that have kind of decided to make themselves obsolete or uninteresting. It is very much a judgement call and there's some overlap for sure, but I feel like a distinction exists.

Like D&D seems to have become uninteresting to me and most of the people I play with (after playing a fair bit in the pandemic), and I don't think that's wholly D&D's fault. I think it's more that we changed, and other games appeared, not that D&D decided to become obsolete. I do think 2024 missed a trick here by basically doing few meaningful updates and being more of a curate's egg than it had to be, but it's clearly not suicidal or anything (indeed, not changing probably helped in a lot of ways). So that's the first kind imho.

But Shadowrun we kept going back to every few years from 1990 until maybe 2016 until it became obvious that it just didn't have the juice anymore, and I don't think that's because of our change as much as two things:

1) The modernizations of the game were not making it better, just changing it almost for the sake of change (and to a curiously... Teutonic... vision imho).

2) The society it portrayed was weirdly irrelevant-seeming (where Cyberpunk 2020 almost seemed more relevant in some ways), with a lot of concerns and ideas that that could be relevant, but were set up in such a way that they were not. This was actually an issue in the 1990s even, but time passing made it worse. This is a hard one to express exactly because on paper, SR should be more relevant than ever. But it just isn't, because the on paper concerns are not really what the game focuses on in mechanical ways, in terms of what the setting details, and in terms of what the adventures are about. Like being SINless in a society like that should be a much bigger deal than any version of SR portrays it.

I'm just not into it anymore, and unless they rebuilt Shadowrun from the ground up rules-wise and frankly rebooted the setting back to something more like the 1E/2E-era version (but updated and re-envisioned, I'd hope), I don't think that's going to change.

I used to care deeply about it, so kinda hate to say it but I think the entire oWoD finally hit this wall too, if I'm honest. 10 years ago I would have still absolutely played in or ran-if-requested any oWoD game pretty much, albeit it would have been kind of retro/nostalgia in some ways (and I'd 100% have set it in the 1990s). This includes the "new oWoD" or whatever we want to call it, which seems like it's tried to modernize the oWoD but singularly failed to do so successfully for me, leaving it in this weird juiceless (to me) state where it doesn't have the fire or passion or sheer 1990s insanity of the actual oWoD (including the 20th anniversary versions), but also has failed to create something new and exciting and 2020s-feeling.

Oddly I would say the nWoD has not been as badly impacted. I would still play Vampire: The Requiem, for example. It honestly feels more modern and interesting to me than a lot of the 5th edition stuff.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Its usually been less about it becoming uninteresting, than I can now see flaws (usually in system but often in output from that too) that I simply didn't notice or could shrug off for a long time. And in some cases systems where I think I could still get value out of it but there would be more heavy lifting than is warranted since I don't think my player group wants what it has to bring anymore.

I think this is very true with a lot of games we've moved on from. Too much heavy lifting, excessively clunky systems, mechanical focus in completely the wrong place and so on. It's much easier to notice that now, with RPG design having moved on so much, and with so much experience, now, than it was 15+ years ago.

SR for me gets double-tapped by this and the weird irrelevance of its setting.

I will admit I am a bit of hypocrite/cake-haver-and-eater on this, because I think a lot of modern cyberpunk-genre games fail to achieve a real cyberpunk vibe because they don't have the weird specificity of equipment and cyberware and so on (something oddly always absent from the netrunning/decking/hacking, even back in the day, but that's a separate discussion) in old genre games, but I'm not sure how to achieve that well without annoying mechanical complexity. Maybe careful "fictional positioning" (if I'm using that term right) where we just list peculiarities of certain equipment, which don't necessarily have consistent mechanical impact, but may well play into things which can happen.

 

[payn]

I think I might distinguish between games that have become uninteresting because I've changed in my interests and feelings about games, and games that have kind of decided to make themselves obsolete or uninteresting. It is very much a judgement call and there's some overlap for sure, but I feel like a distinction exists.

Like D&D seems to have become uninteresting to me and most of the people I play with (after playing a fair bit in the pandemic), and I don't think that's wholly D&D's fault. I think it's more that we changed, and other games appeared, not that D&D decided to become obsolete. I do think 2024 missed a trick here by basically doing few meaningful updates and being more of a curate's egg than it had to be, but it's clearly not suicidal or anything (indeed, not changing probably helped in a lot of ways). So that's the first kind imho.

But Shadowrun we kept going back to every few years from 1990 until maybe 2016 until it became obvious that it just didn't have the juice anymore, and I don't think that's because of our change as much as two things:

1) The modernizations of the game were not making it better, just changing it almost for the sake of change (and to a curiously... Teutonic... vision imho).

2) The society it portrayed was weirdly irrelevant-seeming (where Cyberpunk 2020 almost seemed more relevant in some ways), with a lot of concerns and ideas that that could be relevant, but were set up in such a way that they were not. This was actually an issue in the 1990s even, but time passing made it worse. This is a hard one to express exactly because on paper, SR should be more relevant than ever. But it just isn't, because the on paper concerns are not really what the game focuses on in mechanical ways, in terms of what the setting details, and in terms of what the adventures are about. Like being SINless in a society like that should be a much bigger deal than any version of SR portrays it.

I'm just not into it anymore, and unless they rebuilt Shadowrun from the ground up rules-wise and frankly rebooted the setting back to something more like the 1E/2E-era version (but updated and re-envisioned, I'd hope), I don't think that's going to change.

I’ll admit I don’t know much about SR but I know plenty about Catalyst Game Labs. CGL is like a blind man without a cane when it comes to being a good steward of a game. I mean Adepticon added RPGs this year… not one single SR game. Can you believe it?

 

[Micah Sweet]

I think this is very true with a lot of games we've moved on from. Too much heavy lifting, excessively clunky systems, mechanical focus in completely the wrong place and so on. It's much easier to notice that now, with RPG design having moved on so much, and with so much experience, now, than it was 15+ years ago.

SR for me gets double-tapped by this and the weird irrelevance of its setting.

I will admit I am a bit of hypocrite/cake-haver-and-eater on this, because I think a lot of modern cyberpunk-genre games fail to achieve a real cyberpunk vibe because they don't have the weird specificity of equipment and cyberware and so on (something oddly always absent from the netrunning/decking/hacking, even back in the day, but that's a separate discussion) in old genre games, but I'm not sure how to achieve that well without annoying mechanical complexity. Maybe careful "fictional positioning" (if I'm using that term right) where we just list peculiarities of certain equipment, which don't necessarily have consistent mechanical impact, but may well play into things which can happen.

My answer to that is to just lean into the mechanical complexity. Accept it as the cost of doing business. The Chromebooks from Cyberpunk 2020 are some of my favorite RPG supplements ever. Still have the entire 2020 run on my shelf.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

My answer to that is to just lean into the mechanical complexity. Accept it as the cost of doing business. The Chromebooks from Cyberpunk 2020 are some of my favorite RPG supplements ever. Still have the entire 2020 run on my shelf.

I mean, I think ultimately that is probably the way to go, but I would like to see is "modern" mechanical complexity, because a lot of 1990s-style mechanical complexity, only a small % of it is actually helping, most of it is just jank. I'm kind of hoping after the era of really good mechanically mid-crunch and low-crunch RPGs we might see a few mechanically sound high-crunch RPGs in the next decade that aren't just 5E variants going forwards (5E being at the shallow end of high-crunch imho).

I'm not enthusiastic and visionary enough about the cyberpunk genre to write one of my own, or I'd consider it, but I hope someone else does.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I think this is very true with a lot of games we've moved on from. Too much heavy lifting, excessively clunky systems, mechanical focus in completely the wrong place and so on. It's much easier to notice that now, with RPG design having moved on so much, and with so much experience, now, than it was 15+ years ago.

With me its not so much having moved on in any real sense than I've just, well, got old, and while that hasn't had the strong impact it obviously does with some older people, I can't say its had none, just that the low-crunch games a lot of people my age seem to want have no interest for me. So this leaves me threading-the-needle in terms of game systems I want to bother with, and its not trivial. That's part of the reason I don't have a superhero game I consider really satisfactory at this point.

 

[Thomas Shey]

My answer to that is to just lean into the mechanical complexity. Accept it as the cost of doing business. The Chromebooks from Cyberpunk 2020 are some of my favorite RPG supplements ever. Still have the entire 2020 run on my shelf.

Yeah, but that's the problem; sometimes the squeeze just doesn't seem worth the juice anymore. And like I said, its not like I'm a low-crunch guy.