What’s the draw of licensed games?

[Laurefindel]

IP licences are popular because a studio/editor/media went through a lot of work and trouble to make a setting with (hopefully) inspiring themes, characters, and approach.

This is nice because I can tell my friends “Let’s play Aliens”, an I don’t have to explain much what it is; just how we will play it.

As for the official seal of approval, sometimes it’s done well, sometimes the complaints are justified…

 

[overgeeked]

I do prefer completely original works that had no outside influence of course. Like Warhammer 40k.

Only laughing at that bit.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

So, given the overwhelming amount of creativity in the hobby, and the mountains of wonderfully done “X with the serial numbers filed off” games, why is the official stamp of approval such a big deal to some?

TBH, it’s rarely the setting/game itself that gets me to buy. Instead, it’s usually more like purchasing a reference book or even a supplement to another game (if one using the same system exists).

 

[Benjamin Olson]

The main draw to me is a 1) setting people care about and 2) shared baseline expectations of how things work. I do think those are double-edged swords, that if anyone is not sufficiently familiar with the franchise you are playing a licensed game for they're in for a world of frustration.

One "licensed game" I've played a fair amount of is Star Trek Adventures. People who are excited to join a Star Trek group have probably seen a fair amount of Star Trek, know what a Klingon or a Warp Core is, and know basically how a Star Trek episode is supposed to go. They probably join with the intention of being Starfleet officers jetting around the galaxy solving science mysteries and facing moral conundra, and probably not with the intention of being some sort of murder hobos. A well-designed licensed game (which STA is for the most part, at least at its core) has rules which support the sort of gameplay people interested in the franchise are probably attracted to doing with it, and aren't saddled with too much rules bloat to cover situations players really aren't likely to get into in that franchise.

Now there's a variety of tremendous downsides. One that I've implicitly alluded to already is that you should generally organize the group around the game with fans of the licensed property. If you just have your existing group play the licensed game your heart is set on next you probably end up with people who don't know the lore, don't quite get the vibe of what the game is geared towards, and/or aren't particularly excited to do the things the game is built for. My D&D group is currently giving the Cosemere RPG a spin, and while I am digging some of the rules design choices I haven't read the books, probably won't read the books, and am basically just playing it like I would 5e D&D, and that's probably not a huge problem in this case (my character is happy to go along with the group, the game seems to assume pretty D&D-like activities, and it's just a short campaign), but for some licensed games it would be a problem. Another downside is that while some licensed properties (Star Trek, Star Wars) lend themselves to nigh limitless adventures not directly connected to the "main stories" of the franchise, other franchises are really just about one or several narratives. Did any event ever happen in Middle Earth not relating to Morgoth or Sauron and their magical trinkets? Don't players of Avatar all kind of wish their character could be the singular chosen one who can bend all four elements?

But the most obnoxious problem with licensed games is most licensors have no respect for the ttrpg craft and just pull licenses as soon as there's more money to be had licensing to someone else. Game companies replacing the game you know with a sequel game you don't want or need and calling it a "new edition" is obnoxious enough, but these days at least they are probably happy to keep selling digital copies of the old game. If the license gets pulled the game might just be disappeared.

 

[dbm]

As a person who is generally happy to play a genre-flexible system (Savage Worlds) and that system happens to have good support for action-adventure which helps with a bunch of popular IPs the advantage of licensed games isn’t really for me, it’s for the other members of the group.

What I mean by that is, if we are playing Savage Worlds in Star Wars or WH40K then I need to give my players a bunch of conversion information which they then need to refer back to at different times. With the official licensed game, things are clearly and unambiguously named what the players expect. That seems to be a barrier to smooth play in my experience, because my group aren’t as comfortable with the application of terms to mechanics as I am. Yes, I can produce a handout with the key information and these days I would do that since whipping up a decent looking doc for reference is quick and easy. But with a licensed game they can just buy a copy of the book / PDF and they are good to go.

It’s not ‘logical’ it’s just people’s preference and comfort for working with home brew stuff.

 

[delericho]

A good licensed game will construct the mechanics to suit the setting (rather than just shoe-horning the setting into an existing set of mechanics). I generally found that running Star Wars d6 or Firefly felt like those respective universes, in a way that other games tended not to. (In particular, I always found that Star Wars d20, and indeed anything d20, ended up feeling more like D&D in costume than anything else.)

But the very best licensed RPG not only provides a good model for the licensed property but actually manages to expand on it - again, the gold standard (IMO) is Star Wars d6, which came out at a time when Star Wars had largely fallen out of the zeitgeist, and was given access to a lot of stuff that wasn't available elsewhere - to the extent that Timothy Zahn, when writing "Heir to the Empire" was apparently given those rulebooks for his research materials. (That may, of course, be an apocryphal tale.)