Caffeinated Otter

Saw someone tweeting that they'd like there to be more SF RPGs, and on a whim decided to lok at the breakdown of my body of work by genre.

Instantly ran into the fantasy/SF demarcation problem; what am I supposed to do with, say, Mucilaginae? The premise is that you live in the far post-apocalypse when humans are extinct and the world has been inherited by invertebrate and amphibian life, but the adventure I wrote for it is that you need to go and sort out literal Dracula! Arcanohackers? You're shadowrunners who've been headhunted by the government...to infiltrate R'lyeh and steal shit from inside Cthulu's dreams. King Takes Rook? You're self-aware software living on a fractally complex cellular-automaton grid, and you...go on D&Dlike adventures and kill monsters?

True, a lot of it more straightforward; Draughtsman for example is spy thriller SF...soap opera? for fuck's sake

"WOO INDIES GET PAID" trumpets TTRPG Twitter, about a Polygon article which quotes such scrappy kitchen-table publishers as Paizo, Chaosium, Green Ronin, Magpie, Evil Hat,

Apparently someone on Twitter in the last couple of days kicked off a round of the perennial "Violence Bad?" discourse, and I don't remember seeing anyone explicitly go "You know, this is cropping up in the same environment as the perennial 'Sex Bad?' and 'All Fiction Without Clear-Cut Morality Play Digestible By Toddler Bad?' discourses and maybe that's not, y'know, a coincidence?" so that's me saying it, right there.

Anyway. Violence in RPGs is there because it's a drama engine. Nobody needs explained to them how violence can drive the drama of a game. The conceptual suspension of disbelief is really fuckin' low.

And unlike most things, you can model violence extremely sloppily and abstractly, with little care and attention to verisimilitude, and not only will nobody care, that actively makes the game better, because the thing is: nobody actually wants your TTRPG to evoke real violence at the table.

Which is also the exact set of points that helps sink that perennial companion piece, "What If TTRPGs Were About Romance Instead?" because modelling deep social relationships is hard and if that's what you make your game about, modelling them badly makes the game worse. If you make the game about that, people want it to evoke that.

(Also, as far as the "what if more SEX in TTRPGs?" people go: a lot of the time people don't want to evoke that at the table because people are generally selective about who we want to evoke that with at all. Which is not to knock those games which do it, or those people who play with people they do want to evoke it with, but "abstracted-swordfight drama" is a massively easier sell to Random Gaming People than "hot-fuck drama"!)

the OSR is that portion of D&D's fanbase that looks from the outside like a bunch of very dry historian nerds, and then if you wander a step too close you suddenly discover how many of the "historians" have a very specific interest in collecting Nazi memorabilia. They had an amount of fleeting cultural cachet around the time of the 5e playtest, whch is how one literal open neo-Nazi and one abusive shitlord harasser ended up originally credited as consultants on 5e, and Mearls ended up doxxing people who told him "um that's an abusive shitlord harasser" to said shitlord harasser and sniggering about it on Twitter.

The OSR is also commercially irrelevant to Wizards Hasbro, because they're guaranteed to scream at anything the company does beause it's not what they played as 14yos in the 80s, and they won't spend any relevant amount of money on it to do so.

They are, however, in a bit of a weird position; because the OGL's Circle Of Protection from Vexatious Lawsuit (Pinky Swear) kinda-sorta extended backwards through its own catalogue, accidentally shielding games that were effectively tiny subsets of 3e's rules-lawyering behemoth, protecting OSR efforts to clone B/X D&D over and over and over and over and over and say they were "writing RPG systems".

(I was maliciously looking forward to WotC sticking to their guns and accidentally levelling the Nazi bar, not gonna lie.)

I am extremely cynical about all the 5e third parties that announced Their Own OGL, With Blackjack And Hookers, following through, but I am mildly interested to see how much of the OSR will take Hasbro's Lovecraftian indifference to heart and actually write their own systems; and lo, apparently timeworn grandpa of the form Labyrinth Lord was contemplaing a 2.0, put in on hold in a panic over the OGL stuff, and has now announced it'll be going forward as a (mildly) incompatible, non-OGL game.

Consequences spin out in strange directions.