Mash-ups don't get me very far these days. <\/p>\n
See, I play with my kids a lot, and they don't know the baseline genres well enough to appreciate mash-ups of those genres. <\/p>\n
Which is to say, they just don't get the joke, yet.<\/p>\n
At the risk of repeating myself, I'm going to dive into this a bit more.<\/p>\n
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 associated 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. The premise was simple and straightforward.<\/p>\n
Still true for 5e versions of those games, probably.<\/p>\n
But there are a WHOLE BUNCH of games\/settings out there now that lose a tremendous amount of signal when trying to reach a new player, because that player doesn't have the decades of previous gaming exposure that informs the game designer's decisions for a game.<\/p>\n
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. Now, that might still work for the player, but it won't work for the intended\/expected reasons. <\/p>\n
Masters of Umdaar<\/i> is… not especially compelling if you didn't grow up on the right cartoons, you know?<\/p>\n
I run into this constantly<\/i> when playing with my kids – 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
So first, I'd need to run the original games everyone's ironically riffing off of, then<\/i> we can get to the mashups. Otherwise, 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":"
Mash-ups don't get me very far these days. See, I play with my kids a lot, and they don't know<\/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":[53,115,141,276],"class_list":["post-12439","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-musing","tag-gaming","tag-google","tag-rpgaday","tag-rpgaday2017"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12439","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=12439"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12439\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12441,"href":"https:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12439\/revisions\/12441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12439"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/randomaverage.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}