Jama

@Jama

He/him

Tabletop, video games, sports and maybe someday some other things if I get the ambition to learn.

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Jama @Jama9/4/2024, 3:17 AM

I mentioned this in the comments of Mara's Post about Rules Sizing, that Wildsea does a great job of giving examples for all the rules you're using as you're using them. I've been turning this over for some time today, off and on, as I've been struggling to figure out why games like Wildsea and Numenera and even Shadowrun click much easier in my brain than D&D and Pathfinder. Rambling hypothesizing below.

I want to start with the positive here. Wildsea and Numenera do a good job of mixing the interesting parts of the setting in with the rules detail. Something about the PF/DND books read like... textbooks? Their two columns leave very little room in the margins, unlike Numenera. Wildsea will explicitly create examples as part of the rules text, which helps me immediately grab on to what the game is trying to do (the worst part of the book though is that it uses 3 columns)

I know that what gets me through the dryer parts of Numenera and Wildsea is the fact I get to see more of the good stuff. Maybe it's just the setting is so strong that it carries things for me? I don't know, I just feel more compelled to learn more about how the games work than I do the others.

Maybe it's because I've been familiar with DND for 20 years now, so I just Know How the Sausage Is Made.

I might be coming to the realization that I like fantasy, just not telling fantasy stories. I like fantasy in JRPGs and such, but when asked to come up with a D&D game, I've struggled every time its com up. I can't tell if it's this though, because when I was looking at Beacon, a Final-Fantasy-Ass game, that's ostensibly high fantasy, but it's got enough gription for my brain to grab onto.

Contrast this with Sci-Fi, a genre I don't really consume at all, but I'm fascinated by mech stuff and cyberpunk. I love Sci-fantasy type stuff like Numenera, but I don't do shit with the genre itself. I don't now why I'm like this because I barely watch anything sci-fi. I don't really care for Star Wars. I've still only seen one season of Star Trek (Voyager, season 1), I've only watched one Gundam (0079). Maybe it's easier for me to extrapolate out the urban fantasy type stuff I've seen? I dunno.

Maybe the answer to my original query is just that straight fantasy doesn't click with me right now.

With that in mind, time to genre shift this game further and see if I can make it work. Maybe that will be enough to get my brain to stop sliding off the pages.

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in reply to @Jama's post:

Mara @amaranth-witch9/4/2024, 3:52 AM

One of the things which keeps me coming back to Shadowrun specifically is that the game does two things:

It gives you a very clear in-fiction example of What A Player Character Is And Does (you are a Crime Fellow who Does Crime To Pay The Bills, in addition to anything else you might be) and also therefore gives several examples of what a player character IS NOT. This is something it has over other genre games like Cyberpunk2020/Red, which are like "congratulations! You are a [CLASS] in the Dark Future of the Cyberpunk World uhhhhh now your DM will have adventures for you", and a lot of the fiction even is from the perspective of both various just-random-folks and lone-wolf perspectives. Who are you in Cyberpunk? IDK, who do you wanna be? Why is the group together? IDK, your DM will tell you.
It doesn't force you to be a certain way. Yeah, if you build a silver-tongued wheeler-dealer with no combat training it is very dangerous for you to get into a shooting fight, but in combination with point one, you can easily go do the character archetype and you've got the built-in hook of "you are a crime team together who complement each other's strengths and weaknesses" to help guide there.

And your D&Dlikes struggle to do EITHER of these, nowadays, what with each edition subsequent to 3E getting looser and looser on things like "what even IS an adventuring party" and "why are we hanging out here, even" and just going "IDK, live your fantasy, whatever!" but also forcing characters to engage with one specific angle of the game - even if the campaign is a "combat-light" or "investigation" or "non-combat" campaign, your characters are gonna be heavily defined by "so what do you do in a fight at this level" because that's where the text is. It's a very specific game... which plays coy to the point of just not acknowledging that it is specific at all.

Clouder @Clouder9/4/2024, 1:19 PM

Explaining Shadowrun as defining who you are along with who you aren't is giving me a lot to think about. That's making a lot of games or settings I've bounced off of click into place.

Clouder @Clouder9/4/2024, 1:22 PM

I feel ya' on liking something but not liking telling stories in it. That's been Star Wars for me since I was a tween and getting into gaming. I've never been able to figure out how to assemble a satisfying adventure for folks to play through in that setting.

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