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MalcolmSheppard posted:Seriously? I'd say the opposite. Setting design has been denigrated since 3e, was said to be an obsession of "failed writers" and there hasn't been much development on that front in around 20 years. The most popular recent game setting is Golarion, where the goal was to create a place you can throw your modules because it would indulge hoary cliches. Hell, over in the OSR the sentiment is that nobody should have ever designed settings to begin with. There are upcoming exceptions like Edrigohr but mostly, rules are doing fine. In fact, I think we're reaching a stage where game designers feel the need to dazzle you with some convoluted innovation that is novel, but not necessarily better than already-existing functional methods. I've felt this pressure myself. And yet Sean K. Reynolds keeps finding work.
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May 16, 2016 20:14
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Dr. Buttass posted:Yes, but also, find some new stuff. A fair amount of early Pratchett is dedicated to directly lampooning the tropes I was just railing against, and while those are pretty good, and it grew into something great, I think if he were alive today and gave half a poo poo about some American schmuck's opinions he'd probably agree with me that if variety is the spice of life then a whole curry is much better than just a heaping tablespoon of cumin.
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May 16, 2016 20:30
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Kai Tave posted:And yet Sean K. Reynolds keeps finding work. A lot of game design is cargo cult, from all the D&D heart breakers and the hobby's obsession with equipment lists even in games where it doesn't make sense (FFG Star Wars, I'm looking at you) to the recent rise of Apocalypse World hacks. Sometimes you get a functional game whose rules reinforce the kinds of fiction or table experience they're trying to evoke, but a lot of times you just get a warmed over reskin of something else with a lot of holdover mechanics that don't really make sense in the new setting, genre, or style.
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May 16, 2016 20:35
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Chill la Chill posted:I enjoyed the whole post but especially this. I've habitually left RPG circles these last couple years cuz of this poo poo. It's entirely too boring and when I realize the GM's doing it, I pretty much just leave the group and do other stuff like weeb out or paint minis again. Paranoia and star wars were the only fun RPs I've done recently and a lot of that was our GM letting us try to recruit stormtroopers. Yeah, the last time I ran D&D, I specifically tried to not have black and white villains in the campaign. It worked rather well (the only things that came off as not morally complex were "natural" adversaries like bears or stirges) and drat if it didn't work well. I had to stat up everything initially as a possible adversary, but once you saw the way the group ended up seeing conflicts, you could start to see which way things were going to fall. And of course it allows for the flipping of tables when they find out their allies might do something that makes them a little uncomfortable. Making people actually think about the stuff instead of just smiting the obvious bad guy every time makes for some very interesting play on both sides of the screen, since there's not much better than having your expectations about the players you have be turned 180 degrees.
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May 16, 2016 20:37
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There's room for that kind of game, rkajdi (and it's the kind of game I want to play, incidentally), but there's also a place for players who just want a very familiar fantasy setting with cartoon ethics where you can go to town on some orcs without having to feel guilty or examine your motives. But there's obviously been a glut of the latter type for 30 years now, so I do agree that it'd be nice to have more exploration of the former. Unfortunately, it seems like a number of attempts at a more "mature" grey areas type game, can't quite help themselves not be horrible shitbags and throw in rape, torture, misogyny, etc. into the mix, because "mature themes" has to mean that to some people. I'm encouraged by the existence of TV shows like the new Battlestar Galactica series, Game of Thrones, etc. which have finally mainstreamed the idea that maybe nobody's really a hero, and maybe even the worst villains have likeable qualities, and for that matter maybe nobody has invulnerable plot armor. It's not easy to translate that into a group adventure game, necessarily, but I guess a few people are giving it a shot?
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May 16, 2016 20:49
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Sometimes you just want to have a few beers, kick down doors, and slaughter things with tentacles for mouths and take their loot, and I respect that. Other times, you want to have complex motivations and plots and entire adventures where no one so much as draws a sword, and I respect that too. It's when a game goes 'you can only play this one way' that I don't like, unless it's a board game, board games are fine for having only one way to play them. Maybe there's a game out there that's managed to dial down into a singular play style in a way that's really good, but I haven't read it yet. That hasn't stopped me from trying though. I should probably actually read Fellowship, since I backed it and all.
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May 16, 2016 20:49
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ImpactVector posted:Right, and Monte Cook.
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May 16, 2016 20:49
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ImpactVector posted:Sometimes you get a functional game whose rules reinforce the kinds of fiction or table experience they're trying to evoke, but a lot of times you just get a warmed over reskin of something else with a lot of holdover mechanics that don't really make sense in the new setting, genre, or style. PbtA games are *especially* susceptible to this. It's incredibly easy to play Apocalypse World or Monsterhearts and not actually grasp what makes the system work. By that, I don't mean the bare mechanics (on a 7-9...) but how the mechanics exist to support the sort of fiction your game is modeled after. In many ways, a PbtA game is defined not by what you can do but by what the rules don't actively support. Example: in AW, there's no move for "I just beat the poo poo out of him." Why are you beating the poo poo out of him? Are you trying to get something? Impress a friend (or enemy)? Find some information? You don't just beat the poo poo out of people. Past that, you'll struggle to represent some actions with the mechanics not because the system is stunted but because there are intentional limitations.
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May 16, 2016 20:56
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MalcolmSheppard posted:Seriously? I'd say the opposite. Setting design has been denigrated since 3e, was said to be an obsession of "failed writers" and there hasn't been much development on that front in around 20 years. The most popular recent game setting is Golarion, where the goal was to create a place you can throw your modules because it would indulge hoary cliches. Hell, over in the OSR the sentiment is that nobody should have ever designed settings to begin with. There are upcoming exceptions like Edrigohr but mostly, rules are doing fine. In fact, I think we're reaching a stage where game designers feel the need to dazzle you with some convoluted innovation that is novel, but not necessarily better than already-existing functional methods. I've felt this pressure myself. Agreed that rules are doing fine, especially on the narrative side of the ledger where the last dozen years have seen HeroQuest, Fiasco, DramaSystem, and FATE, along with a zillion Forge-ish indie games, pushing forward the notion that RPGs don't have to be VR/physics simulations. You're also right about settings, although I think some of that is the demise of the supplement treadmill model of publishing dozens of books detailing aspects of a single setting, which after a while tended to only be purchased and read by collectors and bathroom-readers and I'm not entirely sure that's a great loss to the hobby. Kickstarter also seems to have created a big nostalgia reprint market for older games and settings, but I'm not going to complain too much if it gives us things like the Guide to Glorantha. Still, it's a little disheartening to see the same settings recycled over and over: more Battletech, more 40K, more Call of Cthulhu, more Star Wars, and more classic World Of Darkness. A big part of the audience now appears to be grumblingly middle-aged and knowing what it wants and doesn't want.
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May 16, 2016 20:57
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Leperflesh posted:There's room for that kind of game, rkajdi (and it's the kind of game I want to play, incidentally), but there's also a place for players who just want a very familiar fantasy setting with cartoon ethics where you can go to town on some orcs without having to feel guilty or examine your motives. I think this is it and it's really too bad. I liked games like Dogs in the Vineyard and I'm looking forward to trying some games of Kingdom or Microscope with friends over the summer. It's really weird that mature themes all focus on fetishes. The funny thing is that even in the black and white world of star wars, it's much easier to involve complex characters when their statline isn't encouraged by alignment and the improv style of play makes for better attempts at traditionally (for RPGs) risky behavior like engaging in enemies in a non-destructive manner.
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May 16, 2016 20:58
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Dr. Buttass posted:I'm going to admit here that I've never heard of Smith, and I never bothered with Vance because I knew he had a fairly significant influence on DnD, so I assumed it was going to be more of what I didn't like about most of the fantasy I've read up to now. I guess I should be giving him a shot after all? The pulp series that he's best known for (The Dying Earth, Planet of Adventure, and The Demon Princes) reflect a deep angst about the relationship of the individual to society. Whereas Robert E. Howard opposed the "barbaric" individual to civilization and declared that the latter is corrupt, Vance is much more ambivalent. To Vance, to be a member of a society is to internalize its faults and failings, potentially leading to folly, corruption, ruin, death, and passive acquiescence to the same. But to be outside society is to be wretched and lonely. "Vancian" dialogue is always a burlesque. It shows up in the aforementioned series because they're picaresques wherein everyone is trying to swindle everyone else. In The Dying Earth this is because the world is the ruins of a hundred grand empires stacked on top of each other, beneath a sun so old it flickers in the sky like an old light bulb. Why build a house when you can live in a long-abandoned palace, and why do any work that benefits society when you can pursue your own indulgences at someone else's expense? In Planet of Adventure, the same selfish cynicism abounds because the planet is dominated by multiple sentient alien species who all regard humanity as slaves at best. Humans are aware that they're nowhere near the top of the food chain, so they have no pride in themselves or sense of common cause with other humans. In The Demon Princes, humanity is a vast, scattered cosmopolitan society, which makes people inclined to retreat into obsession with their field of expertise and their own little community, at the expense of civic virtue regarding galactic society as a whole. Vance's protagonists navigate these waters with a "When in Rome" attitude of non-judgment which has its limits, ranging from the utterly amoral Cugel to the humanistic Adam Reith.
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May 16, 2016 21:10
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Leperflesh posted:There's room for that kind of game, rkajdi (and it's the kind of game I want to play, incidentally), but there's also a place for players who just want a very familiar fantasy setting with cartoon ethics where you can go to town on some orcs without having to feel guilty or examine your motives. If there's one thing (and, really, only one. Don't actually read Xanth) Piers Anthony did right with Xanth, it's the way "The Adult Conspiracy" works from the perspective of a child. Like a lot of things in Xanth it was very nearly clever and it might even have gotten all the way if it hadn't taken a sudden hard-to-port at Anthony's Weird Sexual Hang-ups (don't read Xanth). We keep things like sex and swearing from children because, for various reasons, they're not appropriate for same, and so they have the fascination of the forbidden and to kids it looks a lot like adults are just keeping all sorts of fun things from them because the point of adults is to spoil childrens' fun. This is pretty accurate to how kids in real life look at the way adults address those things around them. The problem, in real life, is that a lot of people don't ever totally grow out of thinking that way. Hence all the rape. Dr. Buttass fucked around with this message at 21:37 on May 16, 2016 |
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May 16, 2016 21:20
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Zurui posted:PbtA games are *especially* susceptible to this. It's incredibly easy to play Apocalypse World or Monsterhearts and not actually grasp what makes the system work. By that, I don't mean the bare mechanics (on a 7-9...) but how the mechanics exist to support the sort of fiction your game is modeled after. In many ways, a PbtA game is defined not by what you can do but by what the rules don't actively support. Dungeon World's damage rolls are an instance of that. Turns out rolling for damage after rolling to hit (with the inherent risk for bad things on a failure) makes for anticlimactic results and really wonky damage/armor value scaling. And don't get me started on Bonds.
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May 16, 2016 21:22
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Leperflesh posted:There's room for that kind of game, rkajdi (and it's the kind of game I want to play, incidentally), but there's also a place for players who just want a very familiar fantasy setting with cartoon ethics where you can go to town on some orcs without having to feel guilty or examine your motives. Yeah, the constant conflation of any level of moral complexity with having piles of disgusting non-consentual sex stuff has been a problem for all of nerd culture. I have serious reservations about both the stories you listed strictly because they use rape as a way to further the plot. While I'm sure there are people in the nerd community that could use sexual assault as a positive thing to bring up to provoke real discussion, I've never actually seen it used that way in a game ever. My goal has also been to explicitly stay away from sex unless it's drug in by a player specifically and even then try to keep it as minimized in the game as possible. I've never seen it handled very well at the table, and I just avoid it as a rule since I don't think I could handle it all the effectively.
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May 16, 2016 21:22
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dwarf74 posted:Cook is at least really good on settings. Ehhhhhhhh. I think Numenera is really dull, and wasn't The Strange the game with the Elemental Plane of Native American Stereotypes for reasons?
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May 16, 2016 22:04
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Kai Tave posted:Ehhhhhhhh. I think Numenera is really dull, and wasn't The Strange the game with the Elemental Plane of Native American Stereotypes for reasons? Not only that but the EPoNAS had a lower rate of beings in it becoming Actual Real People for some reason.
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May 16, 2016 22:10
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I feel like Cook has a rep as a "setting guy" due to working on Planescape back in the day, a setting which is viewed with enough rosy-lensed nostalgia to power a small sun, but none of the Monte Cook Presents a World by Monte Cook settings that I've read (Arcana Unearthed/Evolved, Monte Cook's WoD, Numenera) have ever struck me with half the "man this is so rad I can't wait to play something in it" as, say, Keith Baker's Eberron or any random given game by Greg Stolze.
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May 16, 2016 22:44
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I'll stick up for Cook's Ptolus, but it's basically a setting designed hand-in-glove to allow for standard-issue 3e dungeon-clearing/city adventuring/high-level planar nonsense. It's well done, there's a lot of it, and it meshes well together, but none of the bits of it (gods, factions, adversaries, artifacts, new races, new monsters, etc.) struck me as very memorable.
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May 16, 2016 22:47
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I liked McWod, the major problem with it is that the actual character classes did little to no work in actually supporting the fiction he wanted to create. The Awakened were an absolute joke of a class, and Demons and Vampires barely functioned in normal society at higher levels. There was also the issue of not really going into much detail on how society has changed now that the Dakotas are a giant sphere of destruction, demons, and nothingness.
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May 16, 2016 22:54
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Kurieg posted:There was also the issue of not really going into much detail on how society has changed now that the Dakotas are a giant sphere of destruction, demons, and nothingness. Idk if this really constitutes much of a change.
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May 16, 2016 23:07
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Kwyndig posted:It's when a game goes 'you can only play this one way' that I don't like, unless it's a board game, board games are fine for having only one way to play them. Maybe there's a game out there that's managed to dial down into a singular play style in a way that's really good, but I haven't read it yet. This comes down to differences in philosophy, but I don't feel there is anything bad with a game going "I am meant to be played in a very, very particular way." If anything, it tends to be easier to design for and allows you to better reinforce themes and motifs with mechanics since you know what adventures the PCs will be on.
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May 16, 2016 23:11
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Kwyndig posted:It's when a game goes 'you can only play this one way' that I don't like, unless it's a board game, board games are fine for having only one way to play them. Maybe there's a game out there that's managed to dial down into a singular play style in a way that's really good, but I haven't read it yet. RPGs are always better when they're explicitly designed to be played one specific way.
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May 16, 2016 23:14
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Kai Tave posted:Idk if this really constitutes much of a change. Yes Ha ha I've made this joke before. But More seriously the book talks about how mages, demons, werewolves, etc are all "Out" but also talks about how the FBI is working hard to keep their existence under wraps. The government knows that the awakened are all that keeps reality afloat but doesn't really move openly to protect them. They also talk about how california is basically in Fallout New Vegas levels of disrepair for some reason but the East Coast is just fine and dandy?
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May 16, 2016 23:15
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Covok posted:This comes down to differences in philosophy, but I don't feel there is anything bad with a game going "I am meant to be played in a very, very particular way." If anything, it tends to be easier to design for and allows you to better reinforce themes and motifs with mechanics since you know what adventures the PCs will be on. I don't either, it's just that every game I've read that has tried just hasn't done it for me. Could be that I'm just feeling very cynical today.
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May 16, 2016 23:48
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Kai Tave posted:I feel like Cook has a rep as a "setting guy" due to working on Planescape back in the day, a setting which is viewed with enough rosy-lensed nostalgia to power a small sun, but none of the Monte Cook Presents a World by Monte Cook settings that I've read (Arcana Unearthed/Evolved, Monte Cook's WoD, Numenera) have ever struck me with half the "man this is so rad I can't wait to play something in it" as, say, Keith Baker's Eberron or any random given game by Greg Stolze.
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May 17, 2016 02:19
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dwarf74 posted:I'll go to bat for the Diamond Throne setting and for Ptolus. Numenara seems like a neat enough setting, despite garbage mechanics. Meh, it's mostly just fantasy medieval stuff with "1 billion years in Earth's future" as a justification instead of magic. Kwyndig posted:I don't either, it's just that every game I've read that has tried just hasn't done it for me. Could be that I'm just feeling very cynical today. Maybe it comes down to play. I think games like that don't sing until you get someone who gets it to play for you and realize how the mechanics reinforce the exact meta-narrative rules you were looking for.
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May 17, 2016 02:21
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dwarf74 posted:I'll go to bat for the Diamond Throne setting and for Ptolus. Numenara seems like a neat enough setting, despite garbage mechanics. Same here and I like MCWoD far more than the stock versions.
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May 17, 2016 02:32
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MalcolmSheppard posted:Seriously? I'd say the opposite. Setting design has been denigrated since 3e, was said to be an obsession of "failed writers" and there hasn't been much development on that front in around 20 years. The most popular recent game setting is Golarion, where the goal was to create a place you can throw your modules because it would indulge hoary cliches. Hell, over in the OSR the sentiment is that nobody should have ever designed settings to begin with. There are upcoming exceptions like Edrigohr but mostly, rules are doing fine. In fact, I think we're reaching a stage where game designers feel the need to dazzle you with some convoluted innovation that is novel, but not necessarily better than already-existing functional methods. I've felt this pressure myself. Saying that there "hasn't been much development" I think is amazingly dismissive, especially when it comes to more progressive or unique settings you yourself have contributed to. d20 did a lot of damage, certainly, but there aren't a lot of systems coming out that aren't at least tied to a setting. And though it may be just the power of nostalgia, most kickstarters hitting it big are doing it based on settings, not systems. I don't think 7th Sea or Exalted made their money primarily on their systems, and a lot of new systems just don't launch without at least an implied setting. There are some exceptions with Fate Core or some *World games that don't have more a setting orientation, but it's mainly the F20 / OSR games that distort the market usually by often only having an implied or token setting. People may poo-poo settings but their wallets keep coming out time and time again for them, so I wouldn't honestly trust that kind of dismissive talk. Novelty has always been a pressure, though, it's nothing new. It's an easy way to differentiate yourself from other games. (Especially these days, with all those F20 games.) If you've got a core mechanic based on d24s, that'll really stand out. It's probably a bad idea, but it's going to make people at least go "what was that game that used d24s"? Of course, the hope is that the gimmick hooks them in for whatever else you have. And honestly, innovation for its own sake is probably better than the alternative. It may not always work out, but I'll take people trying to force clever mechanics into games over another "D&D, but..." But my point is that groundbreaking system design is rarely rewarded, where derivative design is often championed mainly on the strength of the brand of the product involved (the game, the writer, the setting, etc.). I'd absolutely agree that setting and system often work best when tied together, but I think the ability to craft each isn't generally same skillset. A lot of writers recognize this - Tynes turned to Stolze for Unknown Armies, for example, or Hite turning to Law's expertise with his own GUMSHOE system for his games. Once again, a few folks can manage both, and it's often a necessity in what's a cottage industry as often as not, but you can also get some very strong games when you have a smart division of labor like that.
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May 17, 2016 05:02
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Kai Tave posted:I feel like Cook has a rep as a "setting guy" due to working on Planescape back in the day, a setting which is viewed with enough rosy-lensed nostalgia to power a small sun, but none of the Monte Cook Presents a World by Monte Cook settings that I've read (Arcana Unearthed/Evolved, Monte Cook's WoD, Numenera) have ever struck me with half the "man this is so rad I can't wait to play something in it" as, say, Keith Baker's Eberron or any random given game by Greg Stolze. The only Planescape book that I know that Cook did solo was among the worst books in the Planescape line, Guide to the Astral Plane. Which is really disappointing given what other writers were able to do with the similarly vacant Ethereal Plane a few books before.
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May 17, 2016 12:06
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Cook mostly did a a lot of books on the tail end of the Planescape line, including most of the metaplot-driving adventures (Great Modron March, Dead Gods, Faction War). By no means was he involved in its creation, but he was chiefly responsible for the setting's outro.
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May 17, 2016 12:38
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dwarf74 posted:I'll go to bat for the Diamond Throne setting and for Ptolus. Numenara seems like a neat enough setting, despite garbage mechanics. Counterpoint: the Nibovian Wife.
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May 17, 2016 12:41
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I always found bits and pieces of Monte Cook's settings interesting but the settings themselves are usually just "D&D, but..." And that's not necessarily a bad thing, but that means they're going to have to really struggle to get my attention.
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May 17, 2016 13:23
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I don't know a lot about Monte Cook's writing besides that he really, really seems to love the "magic is just super-science!" meme. Which was great when Vance did it, but in the context of game design is a vile, insidious disease.
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May 17, 2016 14:03
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dwarf74 posted:Numenara seems like a neat enough setting, despite garbage mechanics. The setting chapter is huge, but it spends more time describing villages than places you can go and actually find or do cool stuff. This is a setting where you have abandoned magitech factories and weird mutated beasts roaming forgotten undergroud bunkers, but let's spend four loving pages describing this generic village in detail. That's not a joke, by the way. Pages 140 to 143 describe a village that the book even says is generic as hell. Meanwhile, the largest city in the same region gets a little over a page, and major landmark artifacts are lucky if they get half a page.
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May 17, 2016 14:26
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Bah, I've got several editions of Gamma World and Remnants if I wanted to play post apocalypse games. And if I really wanted to do Vance, I'm fairly certain I've got a copy of the Dying Earth RPG lying around. Numenara sounds like bad writing from everything I've heard about it.
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May 17, 2016 14:35
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Serf posted:Counterpoint: the Nibovian Wife. Evil Mastermind posted:Numenera is barely a setting. It's the future, maybe post-apocalypse, and all the technologies from previous eras is bizarre magic super-science that nobody really understands. The idea is that you're a wandering hero/dungeon diver as per normal D&D spec, but nothing about the given setting really stands out.
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May 17, 2016 14:45
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Numenera says that it's set in this super-far-future that's so far into the future that nanomachines and hyper-future-tech exists, but it's also a post-apocalyptic-ish setting to justify scarcity of the hyper-future-tech, but it's also built on the ruins of older civilizations so that you can throw in "oh it's a coffee maker, how [mysterious/quaint/essential]" And Cook couldn't quite stick the landing as far as detailing all of the older civilizations because once he got past the nanomachines and the Year 2000 and the D&D fantasy layers of history he sort of just goes "and there are other besides those" Evil Mastermind posted:The idea is that you're a wandering hero/dungeon diver as per normal D&D spec, but nothing about the given setting really stands out. And finally from a marketing perspective the book keeps beating you over the head with how it's supposed to be a game of exploration, and the XP system is "the GM hands out XP points whenever you do exploratory stuff" to try to maintain that veneer, but the rules are really more suited for an F20 dungeon crawler. Which in retrospect isn't all that surprising because the Cypher item mechanic and the Effort mechanics and XP mechanics were originally houserules from Cook's D&D 3rd edition home game
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May 17, 2016 14:46
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So WotC is no longer paying up-front for Adventurer's League adventures. Now, authors will instead get royalties by selling those adventures on DM's Guild. Some facets to keep in mind apparently... (1) WotC was previously paying $250-$500 per adventure, depending on length. (2) Quite a few of the authors are piping in to say they are making more from royalties than they got paid by WotC. (Earlier adventures were actually purchased by WotC; WotC owns them and has already paid the authors, but they are letting those authors earn royalties from DM's Guild anyway as a show of goodwill. (3) Adventurer's League adventures were previously available for free, but only to DMs who ran organized play. I am no kind of professional writer, so I'm curious what the folks here think about this. Obviously, this is cheaper for WotC. It also migrates all the risk and cost onto authors and buyers, so it's right in line with their "we aren't really doing anything" management philosophy.
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May 17, 2016 15:03
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dwarf74 posted:Good to know; as I said, it sounded neat, but it's not like I was going to shell out any cash for the system. I know it mostly from rad artwork, and if that's not reflected in the setting text, that's too bad. Like, I have no problem with wanting to do a weird post-apoc-fantasy-sci-fi mash up. I'm down with a Thundarr-style deal where the world is based on old album covers and Jack Kirby artwork. But if you're going to do that, you pretty much have to broad-stroke it, or just go straight up AWorld style "draw maps, leave blanks" deal where you just give a general tone and let the GM and characters make stuff up as needed. But the way Numenera doe sit feels so back-asswards. They care more about the cities on the map than the places you'll actually be going to on adventures.
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May 17, 2016 15:08
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I know that lowest-common-denominator stuff is often popular, but I'm shocked at the amount of critical praise for what is a thoroughly mediocre product in every way (except the art).
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May 17, 2016 15:11
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