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

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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Also not @el-remmen, but for me I discovered I did not want an RPG in the Star Wars/Marvel/insert IP here world/setting. I wanted the Star Wars/Marvel/insert IP here experience. Which is why I enjoy bespoke games that lean into it such as Alien and Bladerunner. I also prefer them in a short, but impactful dose. YMMV.

Arilyn said:

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.

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Eh. I was referring to this:

"The new D&D is too rule intensive. It's relegated the Dungeon Master to being an entertainer rather than master of the game. It's done away with the archetypes, focused on nothing but combat and character power, lost the group cooperative aspect, bastardized the class-based system, and resembles a comic-book superheroes game more than a fantasy RPG where a player can play any alignment desired, not just lawful good." - E. G. Gygax

WotC turned a heroic game into superheroes. I've run 5e and yeah, those PCs are FAR more capable than old-school (TSR) characters. Not saying 3-5.5 are bad games, just different.

The Firebird said:

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. ... Or at least, not very meaningful in terms of success or failure, just in terms of story.

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We gave up on it after managing to do a job exactly right. Nobody knew they'd been robbed until hours later. And half the party got no advancement points, because they hadn't had any fights. Thinking back on it, the kind of "story" it tries very hard to create is what's taught to aspiring scriptwriters. Sort of generic, and not arising from the setting, or from the characters.

Ruin Explorer said:

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...

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This sounds like a general complaint against a certain class of anti-social player and not against the concept of a licensed setting itself. The complaint sounds like "licensed settings bring out common anti-social behaviors in certain classes of nerds". And I feel like that's something that you can head off at the pass by knowing it is coming, or which would only be a problem with some groups.

Although you make me not want to be a player in a Tolkien setting just because I realize how hard it would be for me to respect the poor GM if he were "wrong".

Part of the reason I asked is that for the last 3 years plus I've been running a game in the Star Wars setting and none of the problems thus discussed are relevant. Yes, I do have 5 nerds I'm playing with who all geek out about Star Wars, but fortunately none of them are obsessive EU geeks and I seem to have the most lore/setting knowledge of the bunch in part because I'm the one doing all the research to prepare the games. Also, I'm running a game in a period that until recently was poorly explored - 3 to 4 years after the events of "Revenge of the Sith" and in a part of the galaxy which has not been explored heavily in the live action media - the Aparo sector (and now a bit of the Wyl sector).

Also when I started the game I very specifically called out a few lore related issues because I anticipated possible problems. First, I divided all Star Wars lore into three types:

a) Canonical within the campaign. These events either have actually happened, or barring PC intervention will happen, but in any event accurately portray how things in the game universe work. Note that time scale compression is assumed to be a thing even in telling of canonical events. For example, in the game universe the Death Stars attack on Yavin occurs two weeks after Luke, Han and Leia escape the Death Star because it takes that long to move the Death Star from Alderaan to the Gordian Reach even in hyperspace, something that is not obvious to a typical movie goer but which on the other hand doesn't contradict what is depicted in the movie.
b) Partially canonical in that the events may have occurred as related in broad outline, but the actual details may have no more relationship to real in game events than a typical Hollywood movie. The Prequel Trilogy and the Clone Wars cartoon is of this standing in the game. "Based on true events." But, for example to illustrate this, I explained before the game started that in the game universe Anakin met Padme when both were 15, and that the Clone Wars lasted 10 years and not 3 years. Thus, Anakin is 35 at the time of "Revenge of the Sith" in my timeline, and will be 57 at the time of "Return of the Jedi" in my timeline.
c) Not canonical at all. These events either never happened or never will happen, and do not accurately reflect how things work in the game universe.

Likewise I told the players that the future isn't fixed, and that hypothetically they could disrupt or change the canonical stories, but that it was a big universe and the most likely thing that would happen is that they'd become big fish in their small corner of it. As things stand, they've been only lightly in touch with the established lore of the setting. They've met several canonical characters, but not any that a casual fan would be familiar with. They've influenced canonical events in the EU, but not any casual fans would be familiar with. And it's interesting that almost everything I've declared as fully canonical is in the future of the setting. It's less about how it informs the current story than it is setting a standard in tone.

Fortunately, I've had no players object to this, as none were huge fans of the particular stories I have openly deprecated. I do have one player who is a big fan of "Crimson Dawn" who make be disappointed to discover that in my timeline, Darth Maul is truly dead (his brother is pretending to be Maul for the cachet of such claim), but that's not come up or maybe he'll think it's a cool twist if it does. But on the whole I don't have and haven't had any of the problems you are describing.

John Dallman said:

We gave up on it after managing to do a job exactly right. Nobody knew they'd been robbed until hours later. And half the party got no advancement points, because they hadn't had any fights. Thinking back on it, the kind of "story" it tries very hard to create is what's taught to aspiring scriptwriters. Sort of generic, and not arising from the setting, or from the characters.

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I've frequently criticized Nar not in its conception as for what it is trying to do or what problem it is trying to solve, but rather in its execution as failing to achieve its goals. Instead of creating the experience of being a character within a heroic genre story, it creates the experience of being a part of a team of novice screenwriters collaborating on a script.

Celebrim said:

This sounds like a general complaint against a certain class of anti-social player

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I'm sorry, you fell at the first hurdle.

I'm specifically talking about players who aren't anti-social, and I made that very clear. So read again?

The rest of your post just seems to illustrate the huge problems that settings with heavy canon, not all of it known to you, can bring. That's a ton of effort you don't really need with most settings, or settings where only the DM knows them well.

Celebrim said:

First, I divided all Star Wars lore into three types

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I mean "lol", like you see the problem here right? And I laugh BECAUSE I HAVE DONE THE SAME THING and my god, it's not a casual task where casual knowledge from say, just watching the movies, will be enough.

Celebrim said:

fortunately none of them are obsessive EU geeks and I seem to have the most lore/setting knowledge of the bunch

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Yeah I think that might be a major factor there. That's one of the reasons I'd be less concerned with Star Trek than, say, Marvel.

Celebrim said:

Instead of creating the experience of being a character within a heroic genre story, it creates the experience of being a part of a team of novice screenwriters collaborating on a script.

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Yeah that's definitely the vibe I've had with a couple of RPGs.

payn said:

Also not @el-remmen, but for me I discovered I did not want an RPG in the Star Wars/Marvel/insert IP here world/setting. I wanted the Star Wars/Marvel/insert IP here experience. Which is why I enjoy bespoke games that lean into it such as Alien and Bladerunner. I also prefer them in a short, but impactful dose. YMMV.

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I don't really understand what you are trying to say here. Are you saying you enjoy the Star Wars story but not the setting, but the Bladerunner setting (if not or as well as the story)?

My take on my current Star Wars Bounty Hunter game is that if you enjoy Andor with its relatively small gritty scale, then you'd enjoy my game. And a lot of my game does feel (to me) very much like Bladerunner in a Star Wars setting, because Star Wars is a Cyberpunk setting in my opinion.

Celebrim said:

Can you explain why?

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Not sure that I can easily express why I feel this way. Part of it may be that I prefer long form serialized TTRPGs, and as such, the longer a game set in such a license goes on the more chance there is for a conflict between what you want to do and what the setting suggests as part of what defines it.

It could be that everyone comes to an established franchise with their own view of what is important about it and what makes it meaningful and it is harder to come to consensus about it than a more genericized setting-like version of the IP. (and that includes how our feelings might - and often do - differ from the creators of those worlds instead).

Part of it is that I don't usually play TTRPGs to emulate movies or shows (though my tastes run more literary, so not sure if books apply for me - I do want my D&D to emulate the picaresque elements of LotR). I am the kind of person who is turned off when someone uses tv/film tropes to justify the success of in-game action or event (unless the game is specifically about that - like Hong Kong Action Theatre! but I would not specifically want to play Hardboiled the TTRPG or whatever). My response to a D&D player (for example) saying something like "If this were an action movie, X would happen. . ." is "This is not an action movie. The dice decide what happens not narrative expectation."

It could be that some settings just exist perfectly as is and the stories that have already taken place there are the only ones I care about. I love Middle-Earth. I would get the recent Moria set for the One Ring game or whatever, but only to steal from it for my own fantasy setting, not to have characters "visit Moria." This place already has had its important stories. Let's see what happens somewhere else.

The last one (and the one that I fear will make me sound jerky), is that many GMs (and dare I say the vast majority of players) are not good or prepared enough to actually effectively evoke the feeling of the setting/franchise for my tastes - I run into this problem in non-licensed games too, please don't bring your goofy character antics to a gothic horror set game. . .

And to be clear, I am not trying to put down anyone else's enjoyment of this. I have and may again play in such a game at a con or at a friend's behest, if nothing better is around, and have a decent time (and I am definitely not gonna be a pill about it at the table). If others are into having adventures in the world of Avatar, they should have fun and make it their own and do whatever, but I'll be over here playing Faux Pan-Asian Elemental Warriors.

The two exceptions i can think of that I ran, were both set specifically as one-shots during or immediately after Star Wars episode IV

- An over the top Jawa Revenge Squad murking Stormtroopers on Tatooine (which ended up being too one-note to be much fun beyond a few moments).

- One in which the PCs were Rebel spies aboard the Death Star doing their best behind the scenes to help Luke, Leia, Han, etc escape with the plans without giving themselves away. This one was fun and had good tension based on the players knowing that success meant the characters would die if the mission was a success given the goal of blowing up the Death Star (this was over a decade before Rogue One, and might be part of the reason why that movie does not do it for me ).

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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Bae'zel said:

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.

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It still may not be for you, but sometimes it helps to get an outside perspective of someone who does get the game. I couldn't get Fate, for example, until I read someone else talking about how Fate works. There are a number of videos out there for people who "get" these other non-traditional systems.

Ruin Explorer said:

I'm sorry, you fell at the first hurdle.

I'm specifically talking about players who aren't anti-social, and I made that very clear. So read again?

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You said: "They're not usually jerks about it..." However, you then went on to describe what I would describe as anti-social behavior albeit of a less intense sort. If I had a player who was always sidetracking the game in the middle by getting into long side discussions, I'd consider this anti-social in the context of meeting to play a game. If it happens every once in a while, well, no big deal. I let them talk until I sense the group is wanting to move on, then take on the role of bad guy/manager to get things back on track. But it is IMO being rude to distract from the game with too many side discussions.

The rest of your post just seems to illustrate the huge problems that settings with heavy canon, not all of it known to you, can bring. That's a ton of effort you don't really need with most settings, or settings where only the DM knows them well.

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No, quite the contrary, this is a massive amount of cognitive load and creativity I can off load to let me focus on the things that will actually matter to the adventure. This is all the world building stuff that I might otherwise have to do in my own homebrew setting, but it's already been done. This is the difference in workload between using a rules set and writing your own rules set. If I have to extensively house rule a game (and I always do), even if it ends up being 600 pages of house rules (and it can be) that's still less effort than making up my own system entirely from scratch. Editing something is massively less work than creating something.

I mean "lol", like you see the problem here right? And I laugh BECAUSE I HAVE DONE THE SAME THING and my god, it's not a casual task where casual knowledge from say, just watching the movies, will be enough.

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Yes, but I'm not a casual fan of Star Wars either. Indeed, I'd say I'm enough of a nerd that any nerd IP big enough to be successful in the mainstream, I'm not actually a casual fan of. So any IP I am likely to run because I like it, I've already got these opinions anyway so I might as well use them.