Chamomile wrote:D&D manages to be a generic setting ...
Actually, no, it doesn't, and has been majorly sucking since first edition. I say that as an old Nehwon DM. Any attempt to push the setting beyond the basic vancian (until 4E) model is doomed to failure. There are a ton of fantasy settings you just can't do in D&D. They tried.
(They tried and failed?)
(No, they tried and died.)
Low magic worlds can't be done well in D&D; Fafhrd & Gray Mouser, Conan, Jason and the Argonauts, etc. Mild magic worlds are exceptionally difficult; Arthur and Merlin, Arabian nights, etc. Odd magic worlds are ... well odd; Dune (you could replace tech with magic easily, but you need a ton of swiss cheese in the magic to explain everything), Illearth, classic Norse legends, classic Gaelic legends, etc.
Tzor is... right? Feels weird to say that out loud, but in this case it's totally true. D&D is not a generic setting. It doesn't do all the sword and sorcery settings, it doesn't even come close. The settings it does even slightly OK are all really weird and specific and aren't very much like any setting you've ever read or heard about unless that setting is itself recursively based on D&D like Lodoss Wars.
And that is why people keep saying that D&D is "generic" even though it is nothing like it. D&D is the fantasy cooperative storytelling game trope namer. It is the default, not the generic. If you said you were going to play some Fantasy RPG, the assumption would be that the setting would be D&D-like. And that is totally different from D&D being useful or usable for every type of fantasy setting.
And for Urban Fantasy, there is no trope namer. There is no assumption that things work like Harry Potter rather than Percy Jackson or Buffy Summers.
All right, I'll try to redefine said imaginary setting better.
I'm saying that I think that the ideal setting would, in no particular order:
Fall about in the middle of the grimdark/four color supers scale, probably more to the four colors. This is because it's much harder to go from grimdark to lighthearted than the reverse. You can't really do idealism in Sin City, but you can have a Vice City district in Metropolis as long as it doesn't get out of hand.
Supports a wide range of urban fantasy archetypes. If a game will let Harry Potter, Sailor Moon, Static Shock, Yusuke Urameshi, Captain NES (with his powers somehow working in the 'real' world), and Castlevania Alucard version play together without on aggregate favoring one type of story over the other I'll be fine. I'm willing to fine-tune the allowed archetypes a bit, but if it doesn't support: Mid-Tier Four Color Superhero, Magical Girl, Anime Fighter, Gadgeteer Superhero, Magical Vampire, and Manhattan Magician working together the game is too narrow.
Monster phlebtonium affects their offense rather than defense. This is so that you don't arbitrarily cockblock Static and Robin from being able to get in a hit against Dracula. You can either make it so that universal anti-monster attacks are easy to get (magic swords and guns and wands for everyone!) or just make them non-existent within the confines of combat D&D troll-style (you can kill werewolves and vampires by hitting them with a stick, you just need to hit them a lot).
All myths are true at least to some degree and none are more prevalent than the others. You can't have a thing where the NWO are a bunch of Borg and are in control of the world, because that's declaring that Sailor Moon and Harry Potter's schticks aren't important. You can have individual cities that reflect a certain source material. For example, Chicago is run by vampires, Mexico City by the Negaverse Generals, Brasilia by Cthulhu cultists, etc.. Yet it's important for you to be able to totally go to London if you want to just play in a Magocracy Conspiracy campaign and not have to worry too much about having werewolves stick their dicks into the plot unless the plot is Shapeshifter / Mage team-up or civil war.
Society is somewhat stable at least in the short term. Meaning that you can have a homicide rate 10 or even 20 times as big as the U.S. Rates right now to reflect all of the Vampire Turf Warz and random monster attacks, but not 100 times as big. You can either do it DC Comics style where alien attacks and robot holocausts and cosmic horrors are just a way of life and the government seriously just sends in the army or you can have it Men in Black Masquerade style where people think that their world is non-supernatural (except for a few MiB/chosen ones) and you have outlandish explanations for supernatural events; the blood bank raids by vampires is actually terrorist infighting to infect the supply with HIV. That zombie Apocalypse in Dallas was actually mass rioting caused by a new strain of rabies. The Magocracy are a weird fusion of Wiccan/Christian Dominionists whose antics are handwaved and seen as Sherlock Holmesian coincidences.
Because of the fourth caveat, there needs to be a limit on personal power the PCs can obtain. As soon as you get more power than, say, Iron Man the campaign just ends. When you get past the level where you can take on society and win you're playing SimCity3000: Halloweenteen Edition. This makes the top end of personal power you can get is about Magneto level. This also means that muggles still matter. Instead of the D&D thing where muggles can't do a goddamn thing to a power-tripping high level wizard, if you push hard enough the MiB start sending stronger and stronger troops/weapons and ending with nukes if need-be.
Because of caveat five, people have a need to interact with society on some level. You're allowed to live in safehouses Punisher or Batman style, but unless you want to cripple your character you're still reliant on society to some extent, to get your food and cell phones if nothing else. The Underground Vampire Society can't just magic-up blood, they need to trick muggles into donating it or feed on them. The Unethical Super Scientist Committee still need to visit Staples and Wal-Mart for supplies. You don't need to actually show these cutscenes because it looks ridiculous when you see Lex Luthor complain about the rising price of gasoline, but there needs to be an understanding that even he occasionally needs to call for pizza so his board room meeting on how to turn everyone to apes can go into the wee hours.
There's more than that but I thought it'd be a good starting point.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
Two more caveats that I just realized are important:
Mixing your phlebtonium, at least for heroes, is more powerful than keeping them separate. Sailor Moon + Static Shock + Harry Potter HAS to be a generically more powerful team than Sailor Moon + Sailor Mars + Sailor Venus. When a Spirit Detective or a Teen Titan shows up at Hogwarts, the expected reaction needs to be 'oh shit, it's on now, they're bringing out the big guns' rather than 'what the hell is that non-spellcaster doing here, they won't do anything'.
Because of the previous bullet point, mixing themes and phlebtonium is something that the good guys generally do. You can have a Legion of Doom now and then composed of a Destroy All Humans! scout, Dunkelzahn, Lex Luthor, and Dracula but for the most part villainous supernatural themes stick to themselves. Vampire Cyclops might occasionally show up when you're trying to see how far the Vampire Conspiracy goes in Chicago, but for the most part you're fighting vampires. When you're trying to dislodge Shinigami from Hawaii, you MIGHT come across one of the ghosts possessing a power suit, but for the most part you're fighting monster ghost swordsmen until the adventure ends.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
OK, After Sundown has been mentioned as a way to fulfill Lago's demands, and it does do most of them. The only real challenge is that it doesn't do the Gadgeteer hero in the way Lago probably wants. In After Sundown, a Fallen or Icarid character powers themselves up with their artifact or super serum and then uses their powers personally. If you wanted a Castlevania style hero who literally got their action mojo by using devices, you'd be really underpowered because that would probably be a mortal with a bunch of magic items - which would in all ways be weaker than a Reborn or Icarid who had the same magic items.
But sure, let's go through the list:
Harry Potter - any of the three Witch types honestly. He works pretty good as a Baali, including the hurting people to get more power points. But if you wanted a kinder gentler Witch, the Dryad is available.
Sailor Moon - Sailor Moon is probably best done as a Fallen who happens to be a member of the Stellar Oracles. Because there's already a narrow rip of her in the setting as exactly that.
Static Shock - Icarid Storm Lord with Telekinesis. Done.
Yusuke Urameshi - his backstory is pretty much what you'd get by being a Reborn or a Khaibit. Totally workable in any case.
I can't remember what Captain NES did, so I coudn't tell you
But yeah. Sounds like After Sundown does most of what you want. It also costs a dollar, so go for it.
FrankTrollman wrote:I can't remember what Captain NES did, so I coudn't tell you
He's the Gadgeteer hero in that list. He had a Zapper that shot things and made icy tetris blocks, and a control pad that does time and speed shenanigans. You could basically account for all his powers with Prison of Ice, Nimble Feet, Shifting Sands, and having a laser gun.
Edit: Actually, his backstory seems PERFECTLY suited to being a Fallen with those powers added on. He got summoned/abducted through a - mirrorlike - television screen, has the ability to travel between videogame worlds, and has probably been somehow removed from the memories of everyone who knew him. Fallen automagically get Presence, so as an In Media Res character he could just have all those abilities off the bat.
Last edited by Quantumboost on Tue Jun 21, 2011 8:51 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Count Arioch the 28th wrote:I'm not going to go full-asshole, but I'm turning up the dial about 50 millikaeliks.
Yeah, one thing After Sundown doesn't do is personal powers that are expressed through items. If After Sundown had a disadvantage that made you need a handheld item to do sorcery, you could get Potter's wang and Captain N's ice gun in there.
I'm not asking for a game that already does that. I don't even really care. I'm sure you could find a TTRPG out there that fulfills someone's desire to play a Furry Mad Max with, I dunno, rusty junkyard mecha.
I'm asking you if such a game or games similar to it could fill a hole in the TTRPG market and attract new customers. My opinion is that if heroic fantasy is about played out and that the next new game will look something similar to my criteria because Urban Fantasy seems to be the hot new non-TTRPG speculative fiction subgenre.
Josh Kablack wrote:Your freedom to make rulings up on the fly is in direct conflict with my freedom to interact with an internally consistent narrative. Your freedom to run/play a game without needing to understand a complex rule system is in direct conflict with my freedom to play a character whose abilities and flaws function as I intended within that ruleset. Your freedom to add and change rules in the middle of the game is in direct conflict with my ability to understand that rules system before I decided whether or not to join your game.
In short, your entire post is dismissive of not merely my intelligence, but my agency. And I don't mean agency as a player within one of your games, I mean my agency as a person. You do not want me to be informed when I make the fundamental decisions of deciding whether to join your game or buying your rules system.
But it needs Hot Coyote Shifter babes, and kissing.
Oooh, and if at all possible, hot werewolf on werewolf sex.
At least that's what spending 10 minutes in the Urban Fantasy section told me. There are very few Urban Fantasy Authors that aren't really writing romance novels.
Lago PARANOIA wrote:I'm not asking for a game that already does that. I don't even really care. I'm sure you could find a TTRPG out there that fulfills someone's desire to play a Furry Mad Max with, I dunno, rusty junkyard mecha.
I'm asking you if such a game or games similar to it could fill a hole in the TTRPG market and attract new customers. My opinion is that if heroic fantasy is about played out and that the next new game will look something similar to my criteria because Urban Fantasy seems to be the hot new non-TTRPG speculative fiction subgenre.
I'm going to say no, there isn't a market slavering for such a bland setting.
The New Hotness right now is Game of Thrones, to the point where I'm seeing 30 year old women who would not touch an RPG with a pointed stick sitting down to play the CCG/LCG just to get more Game of Thrones.
And that being said, the AGOT RPG is still languishing in anonymity despite having some really cool ideas in it.
The RPG market is fizzling out. It's not evolving at all and is now facing not only the behemoth that is Magic, but a surge in board game variety and popularity. Something like several thousand board games were released in 2010, which is insane.
Anything which wants to carve out a place in this sputtering niche needs to set it apart from the competition. So I ask... how does being generic set it aside from more focused settings? Toolkit games as a whole don't seem to fly off the shelves as well as tightly focused game settings.
TheFlatline wrote:
The New Hotness right now is Game of Thrones, to the point where I'm seeing 30 year old women who would not touch an RPG with a pointed stick sitting down to play the CCG/LCG just to get more Game of Thrones.
Speaking of, did that game get unbrokened? The first couple releases were fun, but bad.
Lago PARANOIA wrote:I'm asking you if such a game or games similar to it could fill a hole in the TTRPG market and attract new customers.
Suppose I asked you if a new type of attractive, comfortable athletic shoes would fill a hole in the shoe market and attract new customers who don't usually buy sneakers. Is that possible? Sure, but who really gives a shit about a vaguely defined hypothetical like that? You need something more specific to discuss before there's any point in speculating about popularity.
The only way a TTRPG can fill the hole in the market and attract new customers is if a TTRPG was created and marketed in such a way that it can attract new customers and existing ones. You really can't talk about this in the abstract, since the marketing is vital and a lot of marketing is timing. One thing is certain, it won't be generic; that's much more difficult to market than something tied to the fad of the moment.
