D&D General No One Reads Conan Now -- So What Are They Reading?

Shardstone said:

One of the weirdest oversights in contemporary RPGs is the weird reluctance to turn to Animanga for inspiration.

One Piece is currently the second best selling "book" of all time, behind Harry Potter, and is the best selling comic of all time.

Dragon Ball is so popular that during the finale of the new anime a few years ago (Super), there were people gathering in huge numbers across the world to watch Goku use Ultra Instinct (his new form).

Naruto, Bleach, Attack On Titan, Fullmetal Alchemist, Jujutsu Kaisen, Frieran, Hunter X Hunter and so on are some of the biggest sources of Fantasy entertainment for Millennials, Gen Z, and Gen Alpha. It is no longer niche. I have high school students in every demographic talking to me about One Piece or Bleach. You can hardly find a PoC in America below 40 who does not love the naughty word out of Naruto.

These are demographics ripe to be reached out to via game content. But so many RPGs these days are so afraid of giving their players "superpowers" or feeling too "anime," as if these feelings are bad things.

Having read multiple versions of Beowulf, he is in many ways an Animanga character. Super strong, super hot, does incredible things, fights monsters, has his ups and downs. The Knights of the Round all have various anime powers. Hell, Aragorn himself could easily be the star of a Rangers anime with NO CHANGES to lore or presentation and it'd fit just well.

Not only that, but Animanga was super influenced by 1E and 2E D&D. Frieran, one of the biggest new series, pulls so many tropes from D&D that it's insane. The entire Isekai genre is all about what happens if a random Earth person fell into a D&D-style Fantasy world. Even the creator of world famous series Bleach has made a spin-off about witches in "Reverse London" fighting dragons, which are basically just any magical creature you could possibly imagine.

The fantasies that Anime provides are largely looked down upon. That is, playing characters who are powerful, unique with regards to their world, grow stronger, and do big and epic things. Everyone loves to talk about how 5E characters are superheroes, but why is that a problem when some of the biggest IPs of our times are Western (MCU) or Eastern superheroes? And what's wrong with wanting to be someone powerful who can effect change in their world via force of will?

PF2E is a game that appeals to the Anime fantasy pretty well. We have other games like Icon and Lancer (for mecha stuff). But in a lot of communities, and to a lot of people who are mainstream designers, this kind of stuff seems needlessly anathema. I love Free League games, I love Shadowdark, I love OSE, I love the *World Games and Forged in the Dark games, but I think its a shame we don't have just as many big developers creating the opposite. And I think it's a shame these aforementioned designers all have such a negative opinion of people who want an element of power fantasy or heroism or flamboyant magic in their RPGs.

Click to expand...

Bedrockgames said:

This is definitely changing I think. I see a lot more people putting out RPGs that draw on this kind of inspiration

Click to expand...

Voadam said:

I had a book of the complete works of Shakespeare and found it really tough to parse out stuff in the plays. Things really transformed in listening to an audio book version, hearing the cadence and back and forth and the emphasis of it as spoken dialogue and conversations added a lot of little bits that made comprehension much easier for me of the same material.

Click to expand...

Shardstone said:

Which is good, and I'm proud to be part of that zeitgeist, it just perplexes it that its an opinion that held for so long. Animanga has been this popular since the mid 2010s. I guess it's a cultural divide between Gen X and younger generations though, especially since Gen X directly inspired Millennial designers.

Click to expand...

Shardstone said:

One of the weirdest oversights in contemporary RPGs is the weird reluctance to turn to Animanga for inspiration.

Click to expand...

Shardstone said:

One of the weirdest oversights in contemporary RPGs is the weird reluctance to turn to Animanga for inspiration.

One Piece is currently the one of best selling "book series" of all time, behind Harry Potter, and is the best selling comic of all time.

Dragon Ball is so popular that during the finale of the new anime a few years ago (Super), there were people gathering in huge numbers across the world to watch Goku use Ultra Instinct (his new form).

Naruto, Bleach, Attack On Titan, Fullmetal Alchemist, Jujutsu Kaisen, Frieran, Hunter X Hunter and so on are some of the biggest sources of Fantasy entertainment for Millennials, Gen Z, and Gen Alpha. It is no longer niche. I have high school students in every demographic talking to me about One Piece or Bleach. You can hardly find a PoC in America below 40 who does not love the naughty word out of Naruto.

These are demographics ripe to be reached out to via game content. But so many RPGs these days are so afraid of giving their players "superpowers" or feeling too "anime," as if these feelings are bad things.

Having read multiple versions of Beowulf, he is in many ways an Animanga character. Super strong, super hot, does incredible things, fights monsters, has his ups and downs. The Knights of the Round all have various anime powers. Hell, Aragorn himself could easily be the star of a Rangers anime with NO CHANGES to lore or presentation and it'd fit just well.

Not only that, but Animanga was super influenced by 1E and 2E D&D. Frieran, one of the biggest new series, pulls so many tropes from D&D that it's insane. The entire Isekai genre is all about what happens if a random Earth person fell into a D&D-style Fantasy world. Even the creator of world famous series Bleach has made a spin-off about witches in "Reverse London" fighting dragons, which are basically just any magical creature you could possibly imagine.

The fantasies that Anime provides are largely looked down upon. That is, playing characters who are powerful, unique with regards to their world, grow stronger, and do big and epic things. Everyone loves to talk about how 5E characters are superheroes, but why is that a problem when some of the biggest IPs of our times are Western (MCU) or Eastern superheroes? And what's wrong with wanting to be someone powerful who can effect change in their world via force of will?

Click to expand...

Shardstone said:

I guess it's a cultural divide between Gen X and younger generations though, especially since Gen X directly inspired Millennial designers.

Click to expand...

Ralif Redhammer said:

I read Lumley's Necroscope series when I was younger, but I didn't discover his Titus Crowe series until much later, when I went deep into Appendix N research. It's a decent take, though I think the second book in the series is a bit of a wobble.

Click to expand...

• They're fantasy, but much, much closer to "alt world reality" than high fantasy.
• They're thoroughly grounded as humans-only worlds. No elves, no dwarves, no gnomes, no dragonborn, no tieflings, no halflings, no ANYTHING other than humans. It's not that I mind if there's non-human intelligences meandering about, it's just that unless there are specific, highly contextualized reasons why those things are relevant to the story, they come across as boring and bland at best, and tedious at worst. On the RPG front, this is even more pronounced, as I've yet to play with a single player who could actually make race matter at the gametable as anything more than a set of mechanical bonuses and inane "color and fluff".
  • Literary case in point -- I have overall enjoyed Sanderson's Stormlight Archive, but find the entire concept of "spren" and "the Shadesmar" to be immaterial at best to my enjoyment of the works. I find myself largely skipping chapters that focus on either.
• The conflicts are personal and intimate. There's no "cosmic catastrophe" / "save the world with the Great MacGuffin" tropes. They're about people dealing with human concerns. At best, the heroes' actions might affect a city, or a small nation-state at the most. The world's problems remain the world's problems elsewhere, out of sight of the protagonist.

innerdude said:

Beyond Tolkien, the most radical changes to my views of fantasy fiction have come from authors Anthony Ryan and Guy Gavriel Kay.

If I could somehow magically convince every user of this website to read Blood Song by Anthony Ryan and Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay, I would consider my life's work as a humanist complete.

They profoundly speak to my taste in fantasy these days.

• They're fantasy, but much, much closer to "alt world reality" than high fantasy.
• They're thoroughly grounded as humans-only worlds. No elves, no dwarves, no gnomes, no dragonborn, no tieflings, no halflings, no ANYTHING other than humans. It's not that I mind if there's non-human intelligences meandering about, it's just that unless there are specific, highly contextualized reasons why those things are relevant to the story, they come across as boring and bland at best, and tedious at worst. On the RPG front, this is even more pronounced, as I've yet to play with a single player who could actually make race matter at the gametable as anything more than a set of mechanical bonuses and inane "color and fluff".
  • Literary case in point -- I have overall enjoyed Sanderson's Stormlight Archive, but find the entire concept of "spren" and "the Shadesmar" to be immaterial at best to my enjoyment of the works. I find myself largely skipping chapters that focus on either.
• The conflicts are personal and intimate. There's no "cosmic catastrophe" / "save the world with the Great MacGuffin" tropes. They're about people dealing with human concerns. At best, the heroes' actions might affect a city, or a small nation-state at the most. The world's problems remain the world's problems elsewhere, out of sight of the protagonist.

Click to expand...