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

Celebrim said:

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.

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I dont want to make up random Star Wars characters and go around doing things in the Star Wars universe. I want to reenact the saga. I want the ambiance of Bladerunner setting, but to also lean into its themes as an RP experience. I do not want rules for attack ships to wage space wars of the shoulder of Orion. I want experiences, not generic do anything RPG packages in these IPs.

payn said:

I dont want to make up random Star Wars characters and go around doing things in the Star Wars universe. I want to reenact the saga. I want the ambiance of Bladerunner setting, but to also lean into its themes as an RP experience. I do not want rules for attack ships to wage space wars of the shoulder of Orion. I want experiences, not generic do anything RPG packages in these IPs.

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For me, this is going to depend a lot on the nature of the licensed setting. Blade Runner is relatively narrow in scope and so I think it works best focusing on the themes and ambiance without, for example, shipping out to wage space wars.
But both Star Wars and Star Trek and even the Marvel Universe are pretty expansive with well-explored main story lines that I do not want to simply reenact. Those settings are fertile and broad enough to generate a lot more than the main sagas. I might be interested in telling stories adjacent to ones percolating in the main IP's storylines - but with separate characters, separate local goals and situations.

billd91 said:

For me, this is going to depend a lot on the nature of the licensed setting. Blade Runner is relatively narrow in scope and so I think it works best focusing on the themes and ambiance without, for example, shipping out to wage space wars.
But both Star Wars and Star Trek and even the Marvel Universe are pretty expansive with well-explored main story lines that I do not want to simply reenact. Those settings are fertile and broad enough to generate a lot more than the main sagas. I might be interested in telling stories adjacent to ones percolating in the main IP's storylines - but with separate characters, separate local goals and situations.

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Its certainly a preference. I'd only consider Star Trek to be expansive enough becasue exploration is its general theme of the ones mentioned. Though, folks certainly want to explore those IPs and im not going to stop them.

billd91 said:

For me, this is going to depend a lot on the nature of the licensed setting. Blade Runner is relatively narrow in scope and so I think it works best focusing on the themes and ambiance without, for example, shipping out to wage space wars.
But both Star Wars and Star Trek and even the Marvel Universe are pretty expansive with well-explored main story lines that I do not want to simply reenact. Those settings are fertile and broad enough to generate a lot more than the main sagas. I might be interested in telling stories adjacent to ones percolating in the main IP's storylines - but with separate characters, separate local goals and situations.

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Again, someone responded better and more succinctly than I could have. The idea that Star Wars (that's been around since 1977 and may have over a hundred novels and short stories, not to mention comics and TV shows to it's credit) or Marvel (been around at least since 1961, counting Fantastic Four #1 as modern marvel) isnt expansive enough to have adventures in or explore other than primary stories or characters is certainly A TAKE. Lol.

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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Yup. People really seem to enjoy making the level titles out to be more than they are. Rhetorical points I guess.

Celebrim said:

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.

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That's an issue I've definitely experienced. It feels like I'm outside the game instead of playing a character in it.

payn said:

I dont want to make up random Star Wars characters and go around doing things in the Star Wars universe. I want to reenact the saga. I want the ambiance of Bladerunner setting, but to also lean into its themes as an RP experience. I do not want rules for attack ships to wage space wars of the shoulder of Orion. I want experiences, not generic do anything RPG packages in these IPs.

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I still don't understand, except that we are obviously of very different preferences and aesthetics. I could almost exactly describe my own tastes as a negation of yours. I do want to make up random Star Wars characters and going around doing Star Wars things in the Star Wars universe. I do not want to reenact the Star Wars saga - I would just watch the movies. I do want the ambiance and themes of the Bladerunner setting but consider the world building of such a setting terrible and really not worth exploring in and of themselves. I legitimately feel Star Wars deals with artificial intelligence in a more intellectual and realistic manner than Bladerunner, which is to me very much a style over substance setting. Were I to run a game in a Bladerunner setting, I would want rules for attack ships blasting each other with p-beams off the shoulder of Orion, and I'd want to know who they were fighting and why. The fact that the lines are beautiful and evocative poetry is to me in the context of a game setting, less interesting than the world building. In fact, one of the big problems I have with almost every RPG printed in the last 10 years is it's just a bad game wrapped in evocative micro-fiction with no real solid examples of play or useable world building. It's all a bunch of failed novelists selling their fiction to a less discerning audience who can be suckered in by tag lines and contextless paragraphs.

I also want and believe I do offer and create experiences, but that these experiences are only possible because I have an expansive system of rules that lets the players do anything they wish which is possible within the expansive and rich settings that I am bringing to life for them. Want to know what life was like for a smuggler like Han Solo before he joined the rebellion? I can do that for you. Want to know what Lando Calrissian's life as a Baronial prefect trying to keep up an independent operation outside of the confines of the mining guild was like? I can do that for you. Want to know what it was like to be one of those bounty hunters Darth Vader knows by name and respects and hires to bring in to find Han Solo? I can do that for you. Want to know what it was like to be one of the founding members of the rebellion back before the Alliance to Restore the Republic was even declared? I can do that for you. Want to know what it was like to be recruited into the Rebellion and work your way up to being a pilot for Gold Wing prior to the battle of Yavin? I can do that for you. Want to be an honorable Imperial Officer during the rise of the empire period wrestling with your conscious as the institution and work you believe in gradually becomes more and more corrupt and self-defeating? I can do that for you. Heck, you want to play Star Trek within Star Wars I'll run a campaign where you are part of the Republic Survey Corp 100 years before the Battle of Yavin, tasked with exploring new worlds, seeking out new lifeforms, boldly going where no one has gone before, and bringing new member species into the Fede... I mean Republic. I can do that for you. I can't do all of that all at once, as those are wildly different experiences, but I can run those games.

Celebrim said:

I still don't understand,

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and thats ok.

payn said:

Its certainly a preference. I'd only consider Star Trek to be expansive enough becasue exploration is its general theme of the ones mentioned. Though, folks certainly want to explore those IPs and im not going to stop them.

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So, again, showing how different we are, I consider Star Trek a much harder game experience to capture than Star Wars because the world building for Star Wars is far less sound and the experience in the show is far more driven by plot protection and narrative convention IMO than Star Wars.

Take for example the concept of "the away team" that is so central to the Star Trek experience. Nothing about that makes sense. You don't normally send all the most important officers of the ship on away teams. Nor does it make sense that in a universe with communicators and transporters that the away team would become regularly isolated from the ship, or that a military would not have as part of its routine military operations a battalion sized force of marines to project power in the event a ground force was needed. To recreate the Star Trek experience requires ignoring what is realistic and reasonable because the setting never reifies or considers the implications of its technology and social conventions as a whole. The stories in the show rely on a reoccurring series of tropes to create drama which if the players are allowed to make their own choices can be easily avoided and circumvented to avoid the dramatic essence of Star Trek. This is the reason when FASA tried to make a game out of Star Trek it rapidly stopped feeling like Star Trek, because it's a rare Star Trek episode that feels like it's occurring in the declared setting. Instead, Star Trek feels like a series of Science Fiction short stories with stock characters that occur serially in disregard to the setting. And I like that in a TV series because when it works it involves exploration of science fiction themes (and when it doesn't, as in much of TNG, then it feels just like General Hospital in space), but I think it's terrible for an RPG.

Which is actually also why I think it would be easier to recreate Star Trek in the Star Wars setting, because there I'd have the PC's be the entire crew (aside from some droids) of the Republic exploration craft and they wouldn't have this massive military machine whose power they could call upon to solve problems. And there are no transporters with unconsidered impacts on how the universe works. They'd have to obey the tropes of Star Trek.

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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@Ruin Explorer and @el-remmen already covered in detail many of my feelings. I'll add that for me, personally, I can enjoy being a player in canon-heavy IP TTRPG. From my perspective as a player, it is no different than a GM who has a detailed world her or she created from scratch. Just let me know what I need to know about the setting and your campaign and expectations of tone at session zero and I'm good to go. Even if it is a setting I'm very familiar with, I don't mind what the GM does with it or whether the GM hews to continuity and canon. I accept the world as presented to me and focus on the party's story.

But running games in such setting--generally not for me. Pretty much for many of the same reasons other have posted about.

Then again, I have one exception. I love running games in The Old World setting of WFRP. Perhaps it helps that none of my players have any familiarity with the older versions of the game (either TTRPG or miniature war game) or the decades of fiction. While I hew fairly close to the setting material as presented in the 4th edition books and adventures, I also do not let myself feel constrained by them. There have been a number of times in the settings history where Games Workshop did major lore retcons, so it is matter of pick your version of the lore in many instances. I realize that all of this can be said about most or all major, long-lived settings.

So I guess it comes down to what setting do I most easily grok and naturally invest my time into, even outside of game prep, that an understanding of it has just seeped into me. Other than WFRP's The Old World, that has just always been my own homebrewed settings.