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Message: <blockquote data-quote="niklinna" data-source="post: 8935548" data-attributes="member: 71235">If you want to consider the actual meaning of "bespoke"—made specifically for and to the specifications of a particular client (singular)—I'd say there are almost no such roleplaying games at all. A game designed for a narrow or niche audience is just that, and is not bespoke. A game with very particular, idiomatic subsystems (such as Vancian magic and pass/fail task resolution extrapolated from hit/miss combat mechanics) or setting features/elements (such as high fantasy centered around violence, or young super heroes struggling with adolescence) is just that, and is not bespoke. (There are other aspects and connotations of "bespoke" that simply do not apply to activities as opposed to physical objects or that point to socioeconomic factors that generally don't apply to roleplaying games—but see below!)You could say that the Wendy's Hamburger roleplaying game, Feast of Legends, is bespoke, since a Hamburger chain is not in the business of designing roleplaying games, and so hired a designer to develop a game to their very particular and tongue-in-cheek specifications. The execs who drove that project may have even played it, although personally using the product one has spent lavishly on is not a requirement for something to be bespoke. So, that's one bespoke roleplaying game.You might think of the Beadle and Grimm's products as bespoke, but no, they are simply luxury versions, carrying some of the socioieconomic connotations of bespoke products but not fitting the core definition of the word. If they customized each such product to include fancy character sheets of the purchaser's group of player characters, with portraits drawn according to the wishes of the players of those characters, that would technically be bespoke (though marginally, since character sheets are pretty easy to customize compared to the contents of multipage bound books or elaborate props).The in-game story of the creation of Castle Falkenstein, being designed by someone transported to a world of high magic and adventure for a small group of social elites—actual nobility—and tailored to their quaint ideas of propriety and etiquette, also marginally fits the idea of "bespoke". But of course it is a fiction and the game was in reality simply designed to the creator's own particular (and highly highly entertaining, if I may say so) desires.So really, with regard to roleplaying games, "bespoke" is just a terribly poor choice of jargon on just about every count.I leave consideration of the term "generic" in this context as an exercise for the reader.(Seriously, give Castle Falkenstein a read sometime. I would love to give that game a spin some day. You can play an actual dragon! Not some simpy humanoid with scales and a breath weapon, but an actual flying dragon. Well it's an evolved pterodactyl, but effectively a dragon: flying, reptilian, magic.)</blockquote>

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