NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 9605546" data-attributes="member: 18">This is pretty much how I feel too. And yes that's a cool game, whereas for whatever reasons, Paranoia just makes me cringe, like cringe so hard I can't even engage with it.The biggest "nope" for me, though, ignoring games which are obviously problematic (of which there are more than a few) has to have been Castle Falkenstein. Going from Cyberpunk 2020, which at least superficially, was aggressive anti-capitalist, anti-elite, pro-"just living your life" and so on, to Castle Falkenstein is like, impossible whiplash for me - it's truly shocking both were designed by Mike Pondsmith.Castle Falkenstein basically worships most of what Cyberpunk 2020 holds in contempt. Like, maybe it's 15 degrees off because oligarchs and aristocrats aren't quite the same as corpos, but they're bloody similar! And there's no way the massively capitalist and elitist system they describe could operate without being incredibly oppressive to and exploitative of the working classes and indeed the majority of humanity. And we're supposed to be friends with these people? To engage in their bogus and twisted societal rituals designed to reinforce the system oppression that they call "etiquette"? To bloody kiss the ring?I've rarely wanted to burn a setting down that much!I get that a lot of people could just look past all that and see "harmless fun", but frankly, that's exactly how those echelons of hateful Victorian society operated, so that just didn't work for me! I honestly felt like an all-corpos pro-corpo campaign in 2020 would at least be more honest.Any game where the PCs are reporting to/working for an evil or dubious-seeming authority and the setting doesn't get it, like it thinks "actually these are the good guys!", is pretty much a nope for me. That's surprisingly few games though - there are a lot of games where you work for the bad guys or dubious people, but the vast majority acknowledge and understand that.I'd love to play an extremely well-executed campaign of the former, but it's close to impossible, because LeCarre-style stuff is full of reveals and the like that may well just read as cheesy adversarial DM nonsense, which works in fiction, but much less so when you have players with PCs who have free will and so on. I think you could construct a game so it worked (like the players kind of wanted that to happen), but it would need very specialized rules like MASKS. Whereas I think if you played it really straight down the line, unless you were so good you should basically be writing that kind of novel, there's be a lot of anti-climaxes where the PCs worked out the evil plan 13 seconds into the adventure and dealt with it 5 minutes later by shooting the right person in alleyway, and also lot of "Well there was literally nothing we could possibly have done about that and now we're screwed".I think it's fair to say the level of dungeon design in newer OSR dungeon-crawlers is vastly higher than it was in say, the 1980s. Good DMs or bad DMs, we've had over 30 years of practice and learning at this.</blockquote>

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