TTRPGs & D&D

Fletch said:
I think I played one single session of the West End Star Wars RPG when I was a kid. Had such a good time with it, though, that it's forever what I think is the default Star Wars system.

Played a bit of the D20 version too during the Living Force days. It plays a well as any other D20 system, but since that's a system I liked, it was fine. I made the mistake of making a starfighter pilot character, though, and never came across a single opportunity to fly a starfighter.
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I think the West End one worked really well in part because of its limited scope - the closest you could get to being a Jedi was a Quixotic Jedi so you were basically Chirrut Imwe and so everyone was playing with the same power level. It was so bare bones. Loved that about it. I need to find my old copies.

The D20 version I really did enjoy but you're right, gotta have the right class for the right game. Definitely a system you need to talk to each other ahead of time about. "Am I EVER going to get to do The Thing?"
 
JakeEkiss said:
See, the filming thing makes sense to me. I'm not a regular CR viewer (nothing against it, but I've never made it through an episode, though I watch clips occassionally) so I had no idea how far in advance they film seasons. That's a practical concern that tracks. It more depressed me from the fan angle that the fans somehow thought that the system is why they liked the show and not, y'know, the very charismatic and talented performers/players. It just seemed to me a wild misunderstanding of what made CR fun to watch.

The whole "will this be a D&D killer" is a terrible question anyway and he probably knows it. Nobody working on those games thinks they're going to supplant a game that has 40 yrs of pedigree and brand recognition in the space. It wouldn't matter how good they are mechanically, the cultural momentum just isn't there and in the modern media landscape simply can't be built in the same way. Like, people routinely use "D&D" as the name of the activity regardless of the system they're playing. It's like Kleenex. Even if you aren't playing the game proper, it's dominance of the space would take a very very long time to wash out.
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Yeah, following the online chatter I suspect they were going to piss off half their fans switching to Daggerheart and half their fans staying with D&D and in the end it was logistics--the game wasn't done yet, the new DM already knew a system and he's now running it for 13 players, and all 13 had played that system before as opposed to only 7 of them having beta-tested their own game. CR is nothing if not very smart about how they run their business, whether folks hate 'em or love 'em. Nothing they do is without a plan. (I reckon if Daggerheart finds legs we'll see a long-form game of it later once it's had the kinks worked out. Their Candela Obscura series was frankly some magnificent storytelling, top to bottom.)

And yeah, Shawn is a smart guy. He knows nothing is going to kill the thing that has outlasted everyone else. He talks about the cycle a lot, too - D&D will fall out of favor for a bit (a la Pathfinder's emergence) but folks tend to find their way back to the familiar. It's the cultural recognition thing - people aren't making memes out of Mork Borg that people who haven't played it will understand. (I think the closest thing to alignment memes might be VtM clans and even those are for a niche audience. I really don't think there's another TTRPG that has "outside the hobby" recognition like that.)
 
docsilence said:
I really don't think there's another TTRPG that has "outside the hobby" recognition like that.)
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Definitely not, for better or ill. I still remember the 90s when D&D while it was still being played by loads of people, was very much not the hot thing out there. I started gaming in that era when the old World of Darkness stuff was just crushing everything and there were a lot more new games out there. I still want to find a copy of Continuum sometime and try to play it. That one sounded so interesting from the pitch I was told but I never knew anyone who had the books or knew how to play.
 
JakeEkiss said:
Definitely not, for better or ill. I still remember the 90s when D&D while it was still being played by loads of people, was very much not the hot thing out there. I started gaming in that era when the old World of Darkness stuff was just crushing everything and there were a lot more new games out there. I still want to find a copy of Continuum sometime and try to play it. That one sounded so interesting from the pitch I was told but I never knew anyone who had the books or knew how to play.
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WoD I think has the best reach outside of D&D and even that's iffy. Even when BRIGHT came out I was whining "It's just a knockoff Shadowrun!" and nobody knew what I meant. I even wonder how many Cyberpunk 2077 players are aware of the TTRPG origins.
 
docsilence said:
WoD I think has the best reach outside of D&D and even that's iffy. Even when BRIGHT came out I was whining "It's just a knockoff Shadowrun!" and nobody knew what I meant. I even wonder how many Cyberpunk 2077 players are aware of the TTRPG origins.
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It's ok nobody connected Bright with Shadowrun, I wouldn't want to do Shadowrun dirty like that. I wonder a bit about Cyberpunk. They did do a fair amount of press with Mike Pondsmith for the recent game, so it might have a little better penetration than average, but I agree it's still nothing compared to the 800lb Gorilla that is D&D. WoD I think got loads of reach, but it was all aesthetics. None of it tied back to the games proper. Outside of the Bloodlines games and that one surprisingly good TV show (for the time anyway, real bummer about the lead) it's also pretty obscure if you aren't in the hobby.

I do like that we're in another period kinda like the 90s where there's a lot more out there fighting for people's attention. There are a lot of systems I'd like to try and I feel enough people have gotten their fill of D&D that it's a good time to get groups to branch out without too much complaining.
 
Jolene00Negative said:
people play campaigns to completion?!

How?!
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Sheer bloody-mindedness usually. I've completed something like 3-4 multi-year campaigns in various systems. Last one was the longest by a wide margin (6 yrs) and only really worked because the whole party was set to do it and until the very end none of us had kids. Even so we average a session a month most of the time (covid not withstanding).
 
the most I've ever played a campaign start to finish is like. "This game will be 4 sessions long"

Maaaaybe in some of the quarterly games that get run on the open hearth, but most of those are Star Trek games, so there's no real ending in a tv show mindset
 
Jolene00Negative said:
people play campaigns to completion?!

How?!
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It takes brass balls to finish campaigns.

Go and do likewise, gents. The game is out there, you pick it up, it's yours. You don't? I have no sympathy for you. You wanna go out on those sits tonight and close, close, it's yours. If not you're going to be shining my dice. Bunch of losers sitting around in a bar.

"Oh yeah, I used to be into tabletop, it's a tough racket."

These are the new errata. These are the Glengarry errata. And to you, they're gold. And you don't get them. Why? Because to give them to you is just throwing them away.

They're for closers.
 
Jolene00Negative said:
people play campaigns to completion?!

How?!
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I will say I've never been a PLAYER in a game that ran to completion, so I'm probably biased, but the first thing that has made sure we always finish a campaign is a game is a promise to our friends - this is my time I'm giving to you and I'm not going to forgo that time to go do something else. I also always run games with one or two more people than we need to play and have a rule that if we have a quorum, we game. Keeps the story moving and prevents getting into the doldrums waiting for everyone to show up.

The other thing is just knowing organically when it's time to end and having more than one off-ramp. RPGs are organic stories told through improv and chance. We've never waited for a perfect ending or a PLANNED ending - we see a specific goal on the horizon and go: this is a good place to bring these characters to a close. (I usually end around level 15 and we go back and revisit the characters later to get us to 20.) We find the ending rather than plan for it.
 
Jolene00Negative said:
yeah, just every time a campaign happens amongst my friend group real life scheduling gets in the way
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Definitely the real challenge. I do think for the foreseeable future I'll be doing shorter campaigns and/or games that are built more to be collections of discreet adventures rather than big overarching things. The last campaign I did had three distinct arcs that were ultimately connected, but which each had a sort of signature villain (or two) at the heart of them. I'd love to do a game that intentionally takes place over the course of years of a party's life. And like every time an arc ends we do a long time skip of multiple years and pick up again later. That way you're more likely to have stepping off points every few sessions. Like "ok, we can leave these characters here, and if we come back to them awesome".
 
May be an image of text that says 'Jul18 Jul 18 ursus-arctos-horibili-chadder Foul beast ate that adventurer whole, RIP'
 
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