I know that adaptational TTRPGs get a bit of a weird reputation as just filing the serial numbers off of Star Wars or whatever, but honestly they are continually one of the most interesting things in the entire medium to me. There is something deeply compelling about seeing people look at another form of art and decide what to adapt, how to capture it, and what to leave behind in adaptation? It's seeing someone else tell you why they love the thing they love, by making a game that is entirely about those things. It's like how Chainsaw Man using shot-reverse shot for conversations even though it's a manga, it is a desperate attempt to filter one medium through the other, to try to capture what makes one amazing within the limitations of the other.
Okay no actually I have more to say about this because it is legitimately one of my favorite things about a medium I love a lot. I've talked about this before, but I think about it a lot and I am freed from the shackles of Twitter character limit and i accidentally took two adderalls so i can feel my brain fire on all cylinders and no cylinders at once.
First note, I know they're commonly called "genre emulation" but I dislike the term because while many adaptational games are genre emulation, there are just as many games that are trying to emulate specific works within a genre or just individual works themselves. As well, a lot of adaptational games aren't always limited to a single genre, but rather by thematic similarity (as much as I dislike them, the "anime tournament arc" games are instructive here, because a tournament arc is profoundly not a genre, but it is a set of common tropes that are thematically connected to each other). And finally, to say that they simply "emulate" other works is disingenuous, because they often put in a lot of unique ideas and collating from across works and genres, as well as making sacrifices and decisions in order to keep the spirit of the inspirational source material, rather than directly emulating them perfectly as it is. Hence why I refer to them as "adaptational games".
And those sacrifices of decisions are what I am extremely interested in. There's a GDC talk by Riot Games designer Alex Jaffe, where he talks about what he calls "cursed design problems." Cursed design problems are where there is a subtle intrinsic contradiction in your game's power fantasies. He brings up Smash Bros' competitive four player free for all battles as an example. You can't have a fair free for all match as the chaos is antithetical to any measured play, and then people will divide up into groups and team up on each other, which negates it being a competitive game and a free-for-all, so you've lost both fantasies of a competitive free-for-all. The solution to these problems is to cast aside one of the fantasies and lean into the other one. For Smash, they got rid of the idea of a competitive free-for-all, and leaned into the chaos, creating random items and gimmicky stages.
This may sound familiar to anyone who has tried to make an adaptational TTRPG. Early on, you'll want to figure out what parts you deem important enough that it's core to the adaptational process. What is thematically important, how to mechanically represent it, the aesthetic ideas behind it, etc. This is where you quickly find out that some issues that aren't cursed in any other medium become cursed when you're adapting them to TTRPGs.
One of my favorite examples is Borderlands. Borderlands is a game with fast combat, where you use randomly generated guns with extremely high stats to get Big Stat Numbers and see a big number fly across the screen when you shoot a dude. In TTRPGs, you have to do the math by hand, and that is completely antithetical to any sort of speed. So you have to choose, do you want the big numbers, or do you want the combat to feel fast and chaotic?
Obviously, this is a smaller example, because there's still a lot of tonal and thematic ideas in Borderlands that are still adaptable, and personally, I know exactly which I would pick in adaptation, but it is still a decision you have to make. And it gets bigger with stuff like Pokemon, which has so many cursed problems that they start to get recursive, and I genuinely believe it to be unadaptable without so many sacrifices it doesn't really scratch the same itch.
And this is exactly why I find adaptational games so fascinating. Because people still try. And there's always a lot to learn from these games. Either the author realizes this cursed problem pretty early on and have to make a priority call on what they think is more important (which is VERY interesting because it is effectively making a statement on what they believe to be the heart of the work in question), or they don't realize this at all and make a game that is muddy and doesn't work very well (Which is EVEN MORE interesting because I'm the type of person who likes kusoge).
This is why I invoke Fujimoto's name here. The act of adaptation isn't just emulation or recreation wholesale, it is a statement by the author as to what they love and why they love it. It is Goodbye Eri, it's exploring something you truly love by breaking it apart and shoving it into a format it was never meant to be, and by doing so, you find the failings of tabletop, too. It is a creative exercise in medium literacy, in thematic understanding, and of self-expression as you find the meaning of a text you love.
That's why I love them. You are seeing someone tell you why they love the things they do. And that's special, to me.
