What RPGs genres are lacking?

[JConstantine]

One premise I find lacking is for playing in a unified world of Fairy Tales in the vein of Fables, Shrek and Once Upon a Time. City of Mist sort of comes close, but it's not quite there.

 

[aramis erak]

I feel like that's is also a common issue with western gene. Lots of games but not a lot of campaigns. Maybe I'm just looking in the wrong place but outside of Boothill Modules I have stumbled across any western modules.

The majority of western setting adventures are for Deadlands... and that's a weird west. There's a few seeds in the Challenge article for Space 1889 in the US, there are some adventure ideas in Western Hero...

Most games that don't have compatibility with D&D lack adventures... at least ones other than the starter set and the corebook.

Free League, Mongoose, and Modiphius are big name exceptions to that.
Free League produces the Core and the first book of adventures together, in the KS or preorder.
Modiphius has LOADS of adventures for Trek, several books of them for Dune.
Mongoose has a notable number of campaigns published...

Cubicle 7 had 4 books of adventures for TOR 1e. I didn't like the FL 2e, so I've not kept up.
That and Symbaroum are the two FL games I've not liked. I liked the read of Mork Borg, but not enough to run it.

One odd eception is Jackals - released via Osprey. It got a setting details expansion, and a campaign adventure, but no bestiary expansion nor any adventures other than the campaign and corebooks.

Another noteworithy exception is MLP-TOE... now out of print... since I disliked Essence20 in its Transformers form, I skipped the Essence 20 MLP.. TOE could have used some more detail, but Essence 20 is just too much fiddly. Not quite Ponyfinder levels... but pushing it.

But most games produce only supplements, if they even get one out the door.
And most games go mostly unheard of.

 

[Jd Smith1]

I suspect that's related to Frank Gruber's assertion that there's only 7 plots for westerns.

I've run several long campaigns in the Old West. The key is a dash of Lovecraft.

 

[Thomas Shey]

One premise I find lacking is for playing in a unified world of Fairy Tales in the vein of Fables, Shrek and Once Upon a Time. City of Mist sort of comes close, but it's not quite there.

I think its a little hard to do unless you go for a deconstructionist approach (which arguably, most of the media you quote do).

 

[Kannik]

The spy genre for certain.

This is what first came to my mind as well, support for both the Spy and the Superspy genres feels thin right now. Spycraft was the last big player in this space, I think. Top Secret NWO hasn't made a splash (and has a lot of design issues). Something that can cover Bond and Bourne and M:I as well as more "hard" (same hard as meant in hard-SF) spy stories could be cool.

Also seconding including a system that involves interrogation that != torture. (That at least was one neat thing that was in Top Secret NWO: if you used torture/harm during questioning, you increased your chance to have the person say something, but it decreased the chance that what they said would be accurate/true/non-fabricated.)

I'd also love to see more hopepunk-style games, whether something like TOS/TNG Trek (where people are already acting together to find positive outcomes to new challenges) and/or something where the world's in a bad place but we're not and that is our pathway to the future.

 

[Jd Smith1]

Also seconding including a system that involves interrogation that != torture. (That at least was one neat thing that was in Top Secret NWO: if you used torture/harm during questioning, you increased your chance to have the person say something, but it decreased the chance that what they said would be accurate/true/non-fabricated.)

This is the problem with fictional depictions of torture: they treat torture as an end unto itself.

{Pedantic rant follows]
The point of 'extreme interrogation practices' is to get the subject talking. That's it. From that point, it is simply interrogation, and anything a subject says is valuable. Yes, they will lie, but the shape and substance of the lies are very valuable to a well-trained and supported interrogator. And once they have told a story, true or false, they have locked themself into a narrative.

Games tend to ape Hollywood, which has a hero or villain asking a few questions, and then rushing off, which is unavoidable due to time constraints of the medium, but in reality, even basic interviews will take hours, and serious stuff, such as spies or terrorists, will take days if not weeks.

You don't question during the 'extreme interrogation phase'. That is marked by a very simple situation: the bad feels stop the instant the subject starts talking, and begin again the instant the subject stops talking.

So in gaming, it would be three skill rolls:

#1, get him talking
#2 keep him talking
#3 analyze what he has said

If you wanted, you can produce a couple clues, and then re-do 1-3 again.

Annnnnddd, back to the thread topic.

 

[aramis erak]

I've run several long campaigns in the Old West. The key is a dash of Lovecraft.

Axiomatically, that takes them out of actual western and into weird west.

 

[Jd Smith1]

Axiomatically, that takes them out of actual western and into weird west.

True, but the key is just a dash. Not the steampunk nonsense of Deadlands, no magic, no spells, just bad people doing horrible things in a covert but organized fashion. No non-human creatures, no shamblers or Deep Ones.

That keeps it from being 'weird'. They didn't have a term for serial killers back then, but they did have serial killers.