The Gaming Den

So if you want a good (or at least supported) TTRPG that you can play urban fantasy games in, you're pretty much limited to WoD and Shadowrun. It's not that they're bad settings, it's that they're specific settings that hinder adventures.

Considering the popularity of urban fantasy (various low-powered superhero books, those dumb monster mash books, Buffy and Angel, Charmed, various anime, the latter Harry Potter books) the fact that no one has tried to make a Generic Urban Fantasy setting in the style of D&D is to me very baffling. There's a lot of cross-market potential here and you also know that you already have interest in the sub-demographics. A game where you can convince a DC comics fan, a Heroes fan, a Harry Potter fan, and a Twilight fan to sit together at the table seems like money in the bank. So... what the hey?

Lago PARANOIA wrote: Considering the popularity of urban fantasy (various low-powered superhero books, those dumb monster mash books, Buffy and Angel, Charmed, various anime, the latter Harry Potter books) the fact that no one has tried to make a Generic Urban Fantasy setting in the style of D&D is to me very baffling.

Magic works differently in all of your examples, correct? So how would you try to simulate all of those types of stories using one system unless it's a generic system like GURPS or Hero? Or FATE, which is the basis of the recent Dresden Files RPG?

d20 modern has been out for a few years now

A lot of the attempts we're seeing for stuff like this move away from modeling the powers and more on modeling the character dynamics, like in the Smallville RPG. Not saying you don't have a point, just that more and more the "character drama" series are becoming rules light games which try to avoid modelling the abilities of characters specifically and focus on modelling a kind of narrative, with the abilities being a secondary thing.

What about the Dresden Files RPG? Never played it, but if it's faithful to the books it's pretty kitchen-sinkish.

Most of your examples are wish-fulfillement wank.

People who do wish-fulfillement wank tend to suck at math, so there's a tendence to crap mechanics, unless an unwieldy simulation system is adapted.

Besides, I believe that the market for wish-fulfillement wank is already covered by White Wolf. So, you are agaist the oWoD inertia.

CapnTthePirateG wrote:What about the Dresden Files RPG? Never played it, but if it's faithful to the books it's pretty kitchen-sinkish.

It's not bad. If you've played with FATE at all, you know what's involved. Mechanics *heavily* take a backseat to narration, however - to the point that you get bonuses based upon using specific words in your action description.

echo

By the way, I don't think that the TTRPG market is "aching" for anything, except maybe aching from arthritis. It's a dying business, I suspect.

There's already a Buffy and Angel RPG:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffyverse ... ying_games

http://www.edenstudios.net/buffyrpg.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unisystem

hogarth wrote: Magic works differently in all of your examples, correct? So how would you try to simulate all of those types of stories using one system unless it's a generic system like GURPS or Hero? Or FATE, which is the basis of the recent Dresden Files RPG?

Obviously we're not trying to replicate those stories, just the kinds of stories. Harry Potter has a specific flavor of magic for its setting, so if you were doing a generalized game you would have to sketch it more broadly. So you can have domination and killing curses and just say that different magic schools call them different thing (vampires call theirs the Evil Eye), but a Bat Bogey hex would either have to be left out or be reskinned. But once you get that down, it's not that hard to replicate the main metaplot and flavor of Harry Potter: teenage magicians in a backwards subculture struggle in a series of cloak and dagger missions to stop a supernatural racial supremacy dictator and his minions from gaining ultimate political and phlebtonium-based power. From there you can add Teen Titans animesque Robin, Static Shock, Sailor Moon (the nerfed anime version), and Yusuke Urameshi and while you won't be able to replicate the story exactly you'll get a really close general gist.

Almaz wrote:Not saying you don't have a point, just that more and more the "character drama" series are becoming rules light games which try to avoid modelling the abilities of characters specifically and focus on modelling a kind of narrative, with the abilities being a secondary thing.

And I think that this is a bad direction to go because it creates a false dichotomy between 'what you want the story to be' and 'what the characters can do' and when you do this it creates utter bullshit like high-level Final Fantasy characters being thwarted by fences and Wonder Woman not pulling out her lasso on a mass murder suspect.

Even if that is the state of such settings in general, the next TTRPG doesn't have to ape it. I suspect that instead of it being something that people want it's just something that people expect and thus put with, like THAC0 and per-kill experience points and privatized health care.

Gx1080 wrote: Besides, I believe that the market for wish-fulfillement wank is already covered by White Wolf. So, you are agaist the oWoD inertia.

1) Yeah, because D&D and cyberpunk and superhero fiction aren't infamous for indulging in nerd fantasies. And we all know wish fulfillment is bad and doesn't sell because of how shameless it is. That's a WoD-specific criticism, doncha know.

2) White Wolf isn't cornering anything these days. WoD is extremely moribund. If someone wanted to put out a dark urban fantasy product and had a competent marketing team and rules set they could take them out in like in three or four years.

3) The WoD games is actually an extremely specific set of urban fantasy. If Hunter wasn't so crap you could probably model Buffy, but doing Harry Potter, Teen Titans (the comic book version), Sailor Moon, or Indiana Jones is out of the question. Even if you could replicate the mechanics the tone would clash with the game. It'd be like wanting Shadowrun to replicate the adventures of Green Arrow and Blue Beetle and Zatanna. On a strict mechanical level you could do so but the theme of the characters and their adventures would be dissonant with the metaplot.

They have a sailor moon RPG. It uses the tri-stat system and is one of the most horrible implementations of a game I've ever seen. A starting character has on average one attack per day that actually does any damage, if you don't build your character to be a combat twink odds are you'll miss your one attack, and then you get one minor ability that is more or less useless.

The one session we tried I attacked someone once, missed, ran away screaming like a little girl because I was literally helpless, and for the rest of the session I literally could only make people's hair ruffle dramatically in the wind.

I do question though how much of a market interest there is in playing the types of games you're talking about. WOD was about roleplaying the bad guy and being a vampire or other supernatural monster. That it was set in modern days was ancillary, as can be seen by the continuing fan base for dark ages WOD.

Slightly off topic, but where can you buy the PDF?

RobbyPants wrote:Slightly off topic, but where can you buy the PDF?

If you are talking about Sailor Moon, no where since Guardians of Order when belly up some years ago. So the only way to get that is torrents.

Now you could try to recreate it with Tri-Stat dX.

http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product_i ... cts_id=368

Sorry, I posted in the wrong thread. I was looking at the other thread trying to figure out where my post went! Damn tabbed browsers, and my inability to use them.

For a modern-base game that models a wide variety of "powers", I kinda like the Godlike ORE (one roll engine).

Godlike is WWII supers, and very setting specific. But the actual mechanics are pretty simple and versatile. It's designed so you can set up pretty much any superpower you can imagine, so that should work pretty well for Potter-esque spells (for instance). You could ditch the "battle of wills" mechanics if they felt too clunky, or leave them in (as a vague counterspelling concept).

If you wanted something non-powered, like Indiana Jones...you probably want a pulp heroes game. I've heard decent things about Spirit of the Century, but have never played it or read it.

Lago PARANOIA wrote:

hogarth wrote: Magic works differently in all of your examples, correct? So how would you try to simulate all of those types of stories using one system unless it's a generic system like GURPS or Hero? Or FATE, which is the basis of the recent Dresden Files RPG?

Obviously we're not trying to replicate those stories, just the kinds of stories.

Okay, if "sorta close" is good enough, then why don't World of Darkness, Dresden Files RPG, Buffy RPG, etc. fit your definition of "Generic Urban Fantasy"? Or do you mean really, really generic a la FATE/GURPS/Hero, in which case, why don't those fit your definition?

Lago wrote:Considering the popularity of urban fantasy (various low-powered superhero books, those dumb monster mash books, Buffy and Angel, Charmed, various anime, the latter Harry Potter books) the fact that no one has tried to make a Generic Urban Fantasy setting in the style of D&D is to me very baffling.

What would make an Urban Fantasy setting "generic"? The entire concept is basically that you take "Our Vampires Are Different" and start telling a story. But if your vampires catch fire in sunlight that is a different setting than one where they don't. And if some vampires catch fire in sunlight and others don't, that is a different setting still. You said it yourself:

Lago wrote:So if you want a good (or at least supported) TTRPG that you can play urban fantasy games in, you're pretty much limited to WoD and Shadowrun. It's not that they're bad settings, it's that they're specific settings that hinder adventures.

Look: V:tM is just all the vampire tropes that 10 years of authors could think of thrown into a blender. And that's still a specific setting. It's not even possible to have an Urban Fantasy game and have it not be a specific setting.

Consider the basic Monster of the Week plot format for Urban Fantasy. It doesn't really matter whether we're talking a piece of Harry Potter filler or an episode of Angel for this purpose. There's a monster who has some magic powers, it is identified, and then the heroes use magical lore to use the weaknesses of the monster against it, roll credits. Now think about that for a moment. Think about it in the context of the heroes being players instead of puppets in a single-author fiction piece. The "magical lore" and the "weaknesses" part of the game don't come from first principles, they come from the setting.

That's the core difference between Urban Fantasy and Tolkienian Fantasy. In pseudo-medieval land, your go-to solution to problems is to stab them in the face with a sword. That's amenable to being labeled "generic" because the players don't need to consult the setting to determine which end of the sword goes into their opponents. But if the way people solve problems is to interact with the magic, then the rules the magic has are the setting and "genericness" is not possible.

-Username17

Okay, if "sorta close" is good enough, then why don't World of Darkness, Dresden Files RPG, Buffy RPG, etc. fit your definition of "Generic Urban Fantasy"? Or do you mean really, really generic a la FATE/GURPS/Hero, in which case, why don't those fit your definition?

pretty sure that none of those games count as "good"

wod is okay despite the hate that it gets, but mage is probably not the kind of magic you're going to want in urban fantasy. also everythin wod writes is tied to fluff which means a lot of reworking if you want more generic mechanics

First off, I didn't said "White Wolf", I said the oWoD inertia. It's a half-decent game, that is getting reprints, and while is perfectly possible to compete, and even drive it out the market, you are not covering new ground, you are basically doing a WoD without the suck.

And I'm probably biased, since I find the Urban Fantasy fanbase utterly depisable.

And I'm probably biased, since I find the Urban Fantasy fanbase utterly depisable.

tbh I find most of the ttrpg fanbase despicable

Psychic Robot wrote:

Okay, if "sorta close" is good enough, then why don't World of Darkness, Dresden Files RPG, Buffy RPG, etc. fit your definition of "Generic Urban Fantasy"? Or do you mean really, really generic a la FATE/GURPS/Hero, in which case, why don't those fit your definition?

pretty sure that none of those games count as "good"

Then "there should be something like X, except better" is a statement that's so vague it borders on meaningless.

D&D manages to be a generic setting even though their trolls regenerate, their demons and devils hate each other, their Paladins have a specific code of conduct spelled out in the PHB, genies can grant exactly three wishes but only for non-genies, and so on and so forth. Why is practically all magic Vancian? Because it's a D&D setting, and the fact that you made up a new geography doesn't change that.

Similarly, just because you don't want to establish that Death Eaters, the Camarilla, and the Watcher Council are rubbing shoulders in New York City doesn't mean you can't establish that vampires lose their superpowers in sunlight.

I'd say that regenerating trolls and genies granting three wishes to non-genies are now common in fantasy, even though that's probably just due to D&D's influence on later fantasy RPGs.

But your larger point still stands.

The three wishes is folkloric. Regenerating trolls is, to my knowledge, just the enshrinement of a DM deciding to turn a bridge-lurking giant into a puzzle monster by giving it the power of the Hydra.

CatharzGodfoot wrote:The three wishes is folkloric. Regenerating trolls is, to my knowledge, just the enshrinement of a DM deciding to turn a bridge-lurking giant into a puzzle monster by giving it the power of the Hydra.

The regenerating troll is from Three Hearts and Three Lions by Poul Anderson.

Chamomile wrote:D&D manages to be a generic setting even though their trolls regenerate, their demons and devils hate each other, their Paladins have a specific code of conduct spelled out in the PHB, genies can grant exactly three wishes but only for non-genies, and so on and so forth.

It's a mishmash of a bunch of different sources, but I don't know how that makes it "generic". That's like saying Rifts is a generic setting.