TTRPG Genres You Just Can't Get Into -and- Tell Me Why I'm Wrong About X Genre I Don't Like

MNblockhead said:

What about alt-history? An old west where racism doesn't exist? The problem with old west is going to be who will be the antagonist which is generally going to mean taking on one human group based on history against another. Unless you do a cowboys vs. aliens style game.

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aramis erak said:

this is a common problem with the very focused games typical of the Storygames movement.

It's also common for narrow focused Trad games... especially mission based ones — Star Trek, Delta Force, most police procedurals (TFG's Crime Fighter is the one I've run), Recon, Chill, Bureau 13, ALIENS Adventure Game.
Also, any campaign premise based upon being part of an organization that has rules.

It is important to make the campaign premise clear at outset...
... I've run a few Traveller campaigns where the characters were still in service.

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el-remmen said:

I am not into playing in licensed worlds, you know stuff based on films, books, and shows for anything more than a one-shot, and even then I would probably just being polite. I would play Laser Sword Space Opera, but never Star Wars. I would play some kind of Supers, even a ruleset based on a franchise (the SAGA version of Marvel Super Heroes is my favorite heroes rules), but never an Avengers game. I would play in post-apocalyptic desert petrol wars, but not Mad Max. Etc. . .

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Celebrim said:

I will admit to having very little breadth to my RPG experiences.

I have only played various types of fantasy - generic fantasy, horror fantasy, and science fantasy. I have very little idea how to run or tell stories in other genres for an RPG and indeed, can't imagine how they would work from either a system or narrative perspective.

I can imagine a fantasy supers game, but can't imagine particularly compelling stories within it, and well, it would still be a genre of fantasy. I understand some people like supers, but don't have a particularly good understanding of what they actually do when playing it.

I really can't imagine hard science fiction. I find it interesting that Traveller, which seems to be the best of the bunch, almost seems to actively avoid narratives set in the primary universe in comparison to crash landing the players on a primitive planet or finding a derelict spaceship or finding some super science mystery and then running some other genre.

I've been playing Minecraft on a server with other adults for the first time, and I've noticed and marveled at how differently everyone is playing the game. I had thought the way I was playing was intuitive and obvious and fun, but I notice everyone else is doing different things and finding fun in different ways some of which make me scratch my head ("Why don't you light up your base so creepers don't appear randomly?" or "Why don't you build stairs so you don't have to jump around your base?"). I suspect that actually sitting in on really different groups would be just as informative and inspirational (and infuriating?), and I have long tried to broaden my horizons by going to cons and such, but still haven't yet had that "Eureka" moment where I sit at a table doing wildly different things that I'm used to where what they are doing feels like a new form of fun I hadn't considered.

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Dannyalcatraz said:

Kurt R. A. Giambastiani’s “Fallen Cloud” novels are an alt-history series in which- at the beginning of the series- the western expansion of the settlers slowed dramatically when they ran into Native Americans who rode raptors. Pretty cool series.

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Dannyalcatraz said:

First Nations tribes riding dinosaurs a bit too far? Cut a couple million years off of that and they could be using giant flightless birds instead.

Or lean into it in the other direction- the First Nations tribes aren’t human, they’re the humanoid descendants of dinosaurs. Your own version of “Sleestacks”, if you will.

Then again, ripping off Julian May’s Saga of Pliocene Exile does introduce aliens into the (obviously) deep past. That background could change the nature of the American Westward Expansion.

FWIW, I had a fantasy campaign setting in which crashlanded Grays used their advanced technology to disguise themselves as Elves of legend. “Underhill” was their buried, crashed ship; temporal and spatial distortions of legend therin resulting from their use of stasis fields and multidimensional engineering. A similar approach could account for assorted Native legends. And they might have an interest in who controls the land…

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Duke_ said:

I've seen it argued that D&D 5e is a fantasy supers game. I've only played in campaign of it, but I'd say my rogue is a combination of Batman, Mystique, and Psylocke (with less powerful telekinesis, but other powers that make up for it, such as flight).

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