One of the… I'm going to say "dependencies for enjoyment"<\/i> in many – I might even say "most" RPGs I've run (or run into) in the last few years is a deep knowledge of the genre — not just the genre for the setting, but the RPG<\/i> genre of the game in question.<\/p>\n
So… like this: once upon a time, all you really needed to know when starting to play D&D was "there's magic, no guns, and weird monsters." Same was true, basically, for Traveller<\/i> or whatever.<\/p>\n
Maybe that's still true for 5e versions of those games. Probably is. Anyway.<\/p>\n
But there are a WHOLE BUNCH of games\/settings out there now that drop a tremendous<\/b> amount of signal when trying to reach a new gamer, because that new gamer doesn't have the decades of previous gaming exposure that informs the game designer's decisions for a game.<\/p>\n
Dungeon World<\/i>, for example, is fun, and it works with new players, but it doesn't work as well – there just isn't as much there<\/i> – for the gamer who never played the old versions of D&D DW is reflecting. Ditto Black Hack or whatever.<\/p>\n
Same thing is true for genre mashups: Steampunk Planetary Romance isn't inherently<\/i> cool or interesting as a concept if the person you're sharing it with isn't familiar with the "pure" components of that salad, you know? It's just weird sci-fi with wood ships and a lot of brass and goggles. It might work for the player, but it won't work for the intended\/expected reasons.<\/p>\n
Masters of Umdaar<\/i> is I run into this constantly when playing with my kids – lots of stuff I find interesting\/entertaining… until I realize that for all intents and purposes, my kids just don't Get the Joke.<\/b><\/p>\n First, I need to run the original games everyone's ironically riffing off of, before we can get to the new stuff, or it's not a nuanced re-envisioning for them. It's just… weird and kind of confusing.<\/p>\n When I run a game that doesn't have that problem, it's almost always something only trying to be itself<\/i>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One of the… I'm going to say "dependencies for enjoyment" in many – I might even say "most" RPGs I've<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"close","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[53,115],"class_list":["post-12258","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-musing","tag-gaming","tag-google"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12258"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12258\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12259,"href":"https:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12258\/revisions\/12259"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}phenomenally boring<\/del> not especially compelling if you didn't grow up on the right cartoons, you know?<\/p>\n