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

Celebrim said:

My wife hates watching MCU movies because there are invariably multiple 10 minute fist fights in the movie and she gets bored in them. Fight choreography has no interest to her. Combat isn't an interesting spectacle for her.

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Well, I’m sure it doesn’t help that most of the fights aren’t very well done.

Bae'zel said:

For a decade I've never been able to "get" Burning Wheel games. I tried with Torchbearer and Mouse Guard, but no matter how many times I tried to read those rules, or even DM them, I just got confused and frustrated.

Every time someone online tried to explain them to me, it just got worse. Like someone trying to explain economics or physics. I just can't figure those games out.

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I was looking at the Torchbearer rules last night after another thread’s conversation and that is a game designed for someone who is very much not me. Total mental block.

TiQuinn said:

I was looking at the Torchbearer rules last night after another thread’s conversation and that is a game designed for someone who is very much not me. Total mental block.

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I know right? I loved the look and feel of that book so much that I bought it and flip through it occasionally. But my brain melts when I try to parse the rules. It is bizarre.

I've had a lot of fun with Blades in the Dark, but ironically I think it is only to the extent that I didn't understand it. The more I get it, the less appeal it has. Eventually it felt like...there was just no game there, you know? It leans so hard into improvisation and nothing is fixed, but at a certain point that makes it feel like you aren't really making meaningful choices. Or at least, not very meaningful in terms of success or failure, just in terms of story.

el-remmen said:

Well, I’m sure it doesn’t help that most of the fights aren’t very well done.

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Seriously. I think this is a major problem with a lot of MCU stuff - boring-ass fights with few stakes and weak choreography that doesn't bring either the "epic" nature of comics to life, nor feels real/relatable. Just like some kid slapping action figures together.

I have friends who have no conscious appreciation of fight choreography, who don't understand how martial arts work, and so on, but the reality is, they do respond to really exciting, well-choreographed action movies, whether low, mid, or high budget, old or new. Even my 70-something mother does!

And MCU movies and TV shows, for the most part, are not that.

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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Can you explain why? The only thing I can think of is you don't like the existence of a preestablished canon of events that must happen, or perhaps the sense that the PCs can never be the settings main protagonist. But your objection seems to be broader than that and apply to settings where neither issue is necessarily in play.

Celebrim said:

Can you explain why? The only thing I can think of is you don't like the existence of a preestablished canon of events that must happen, or perhaps the sense that the PCs can never be the settings main protagonist. But your objection seems to be broader than that and apply to settings where neither issue is necessarily in play.

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Obviously I'm not @el-remmen but I have increasingly become leery of licenced settings myself, for a couple of reasons beyond the ones you note (i.e. never really the protagonist, specific canon events).

1) Players often have completely encyclopedic or just really in-depth knowledge of these kind of settings or these settings specifically. They're not usually jerks about it - they don't say "Uh you can't do that!!" or "WRONG!!!" or whatever, but they do love to bring up and discuss lore, often irrelevant-but-funny lore (SW and Marvel/DC are the absolute worst for this), or get overexcited by lore characters/events or the like. I do find that the further out from the "mainstream" you get usually the less this is a problem, but still can be one.

2) On the flipside, if you are a player, even if you never mention lore, often you can see it being mangled in real time, and whilst that's survivable, it can be a little frustrating to realize the DM doesn't understand how X device works in lore (even though it might be very well-established), but do you really want to disrupt things by arguing with that? Probably not. And it can sort of chip away at the fun of a game, or act as an anti-immersive distraction from it.

None of this is unfixable, but it is enough that I would never want to run a Marvel or DC-set supers campaign as a result.

One of the few places I think this would mostly work out as a net positive is probably Star Trek, but even then...

aramis erak said:

Not just 5e... it goes all the way back to AD&D 1e, and in some reads of it, D&D Original Edition (Little White Books/Little Brown Books)... As 4th level is "Hero" and 8th is "Superhero". (OE levels were labeled, not numbered, but most people numbered them.)

Especially with AD&D formally making "Normal Man" level 0.

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What is a superhero then? I ran A LOT of AD&D 1e and the PCs were definitely not superheroes. They died too much. And didn't come back like superheroes

Ruin Explorer said:

1) Players often have completely encyclopedic or just really in-depth knowledge of these kind of settings or these settings specifically. They're not usually jerks about it - they don't say "Uh you can't do that!!" or "WRONG!!!" or whatever, but they do love to bring up and discuss lore, often irrelevant-but-funny lore (SW and Marvel/DC are the absolute worst for this), or get overexcited by lore characters/events or the like. I do find that the further out from the "mainstream" you get usually the less this is a problem, but still can be one.

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This is a big one for me. I'd much rather create a generic setting that borrows (or outright steals) from licensed IP than try to create something that fits within it. Part of it is ... I'm just not that big of a fan of any one thing to have the fan knowledge that a lot of my friends do for things. Whether it's Star Wars, or Star Trek, or Marvel/DC, I'm just not that far down the rabbit hole on these things. They'll reference things that just go whoosh, right over my head.

Theory of Games said:

What is a superhero then? I ran A LOT of AD&D 1e and the PCs were definitely not superheroes. They died too much. And didn't come back like superheroes

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The title superhero came from the miniatures game, Chainmail, and just meant tougher than hero figures. It has nothing to do with comics but the title always sounded off.