Rejected RPGs

[8BitNinja]

Let's start with a story:

You are a passionate player and writer of RPGs. For the longest time, you have been working on and perfecting a labor of love you call your own Tabletop Role Playing Game. After it's finally finished, you call up a game publishing company of your choice, and they actually want you to come in and show them your game. After giving your presentation, the person who seems to be in charge days "This is a terrible idea! How would anyone want to play this?" The whole room unanimously agrees.

What was the game you made? If it was actually a good idea, what other external factors could have shot it down?

[2D8HP]

I don't have to be that hypothetical.

In 1985 King Arthur Pendragon came out, which I loved (and still do), and it's the only game that I'd definitely class as a full role-playing game (instead of "roleplaying") is King Arthur Pendragon, .which I'd gladly play again.

KAP hasn't hit the highs of D&D yet, but it hasn't the lows either, and unfortunately none of the lame-os I gamed with in the mid '80's to the early 1990's (when I gave up), would try it ("6th century Britain isn't that fun dude"), and I had to wait over 30 years to play it, so the young people of the 21st century are superior (sorry age-mates, you had your chance!)

Too few have played it for it to be much known.

The flaw in it may be that KAP RP mechanics remove some agency from the players to encourage RP

Those rules mechanics actually encourage you to portray a different personality, which is why (to me) it is the only full role-playing game that I've played (to me Dungeons & Dragons is an "Adventure game". You can play a different personality without rules of course, it's called "acting").

:sigh:

[BlizzardSucks80]

FATAL

Nuff Said

[Lalliman]

Did you make this in response to the currently-running thread of the guy who is single-handedly fixing D&D? Because your proposed scenario is pretty much what is going on in that thread.

[Anonymouswizard]

Did you make this in response to the currently-running thread of the guy who is single-handedly fixing D&D? Because your proposed scenario is pretty much what is going on in that thread.

Ao, that thread singlehandedly stopped me from posting my D&D 'fix' in Homebrew until I've got all four basic classes and a decent selection of spells and talents written. The sheer amount of stubbornness on both sides, of which I partially contributed to, and the fact that the designer refused to add options that weren't 'tick down hp'. Just madness in all sides.

[huttj509]

Ao, that thread singlehandedly stopped me from posting my D&D 'fix' in Homebrew until I've got all four basic classes and a decent selection of spells and talents written. The sheer amount of stubbornness on both sides, of which I partially contributed to, and the fact that the designer refused to add options that weren't 'tick down hp'. Just madness in all sides.

In homebrew it might go over better.

[Wraith]

I am in a similar boat to 2D8HP, although in my case the game is called SLA Industries.

There's a LOT of references that go into describing this game, but to summarise: Imagine the ever-raining planet from Blade Runner, being run by the Wayland-Yutani Corporation, with the morality of MegaCity-1. The PC's are "special forces" who make a living by completing ultraviolent Contracts (aka, bounty board-style missions) and then selling the footage to omnipresent TV stations for kickbacks.

It's a game that I love dearly; it's gloriously over-the-top, everything is customisable and there's an in-built variety of missions, themes, agencies and alliances all to explore with surprising depth.

The problem is, even I have to acknowledge that the game is maimed in two key areas; layout and anachronisms.

The rulebook is very pretty and full of depth... but the layout has apparently been designed by an alien crab-person. The psychic powers (20-odd pages of stuff which are only applicable to 2 of the 9 races) are listed in exhaustive depth even before racial traits and class skills, which are ALSO in there AFTER your list of wargear and consumables; guns have up to 4 different kinds of ammo with stats for each kind, and all of it is lost in the middle 12 pages of the book without an appendices or compiled table in sight.
In short, you either have to learn the book by heart or otherwise spend minutes at a time pouring through pages and pages of text to find the one rule that you need to know every. Single. Time.

The lesson here: Apply logic to your rulebook so that it's obvious as to where everything should go and repeat it in an easy-to-digest appendices, otherwise people will take one look and think that your dumb layout is reflective of your dumb rules and dumb universe. :smalltongue:

The latter point is simply a matter of taste, but it's a big one - you'll notice by the list of references that I used to describe the game that it's very much a 1980's view of what a dystopia would be like, which can be fun but has already been explored exhaustively.
Altogether SLA Industries is a great game, but if you want exhaustive character creation and laundry lists of gadgets, Cyberpunk 2077 did it better; if you want nebulous 'magic' and weird sci-fi creatures then you'd be hard pressed to improve upon Shadowrun; for dark and oppressive atmosphere with genuinely fear-for-you-soul meta-story, no one beats Dark Heresy.

And so on; nothing that SLA Industries does is bad, but specific parts of it are done better by other games and what's left is a somewhat jaded yet quite cartoony pastiche of yesteryear, and even I appreciate that such a thing is an acquired taste that has long since gone out of fashion with most audiences. Which is why I haven't played it in ~8 years; everyone who I have described it to says "That sounds just like Cyberpunk, but more complicated"

The lesson here, I suppose, is: Understand what your game is about and try to make that reach a wide audience. Picking a niche theme is fine, but don't be surprised if it only reaches a niche audience.
Alternatively, give your game SOMETHING to make it stand out, as cut-and-paste themes around a solid but unremarkable system might not be enough to attract most people.

[JAL_1138]

Ao, that thread singlehandedly stopped me from posting my D&D 'fix' in Homebrew until I've got all four basic classes and a decent selection of spells and talents written. The sheer amount of stubbornness on both sides, of which I partially contributed to, and the fact that the designer refused to add options that weren't 'tick down hp'. Just madness in all sides.


In homebrew it might go over better.


Even in the main RPG thread, it'd almost certainly still go over better; I think that thread's gone to pieces in large part due to attitude/tone rather than just the merits or flaws of the system mechanically.

[Anonymouswizard]

In homebrew it might go over better.

Oh, mine was going in Homebrew anyway, I have a tendency to put things in their place, because things have a place and if they're out of their place how do they find them.


Even in the main RPG thread, it'd almost certainly still go over better; I think that thread's gone to pieces in large part due to attitude/tone rather than just the merits or flaws of the system mechanically.

Yeah, although I think that time isn't helped by trying to pay a simplified system on a forum that enjoys optimising D&D then explicitly comparing it to D&D. Then ignoring people pointing out systems he might enjoy looking at to argue with people trying to critique it.

[Epimethee]

2D8HP, i agree with you, Pendragon is great and may be the masterpiece in the work of Greg Stafford. You should also check is Great Pendragon Campaign, an amazing feat of role playing Game writing that tie together the many narratives of Arthurian legendarium.

I’m a fan of the game and more generally of the work of Stafford, like his amazing Glorantha setting. As one of the founders of Chaosium, his influence on the History of RPG is huge and in my opinion mainly for the best.

And i’m done with the fan service !

[8BitNinja]

Did you make this in response to the currently-running thread of the guy who is single-handedly fixing D&D? Because your proposed scenario is pretty much what is going on in that thread.

This is a coincidence, as I actually didn't know that thread existed. This was made entirely for fun and jokes, not to respond to another thread.

[Friv]

Let's start with a story:

You are a passionate player and writer of RPGs. For the longest time, you have been working on and perfecting a labor of love you call your own Tabletop Role Playing Game. After it's finally finished, you call up a game publishing company of your choice, and they actually want you to come in and show them your game. After giving your presentation, the person who seems to be in charge days "This is a terrible idea! How would anyone want to play this?" The whole room unanimously agrees.

What was the game you made? If it was actually a good idea, what other external factors could have shot it down?

Well, it's 2018, so I probably just self-publish it.

Depending on how much money I have, and how much I'm willing to spend, I spend some cash on basic black and white artwork, and some cash for a professional layout artist, and then I stick my book on DrivethruRPG and I probably sell ten copies. But it's my labour of love! I may also go around to conventions, and run the game for people who are interested, and then give them the link to the POD.

[JAL_1138]

Something I've actually run into when trying to homebrew-fix Savage Worlds' gear tables--my system would fail due to excessive fiddliness with gear and likely combat/skills, bringing in greater granularity than the system is really supposed to have, and more than I'd actually want from a system, because my nitpicky, wonkish personality gets in the way of painting in the broad strokes a rules-medium or rules-light system needs, and even when fully aware of the problem I can't seem to get around it.

I'd start trying to write something on a Savage Worlds or 5e level of crunch, and end up with something along the lines of GURPS' level of detail, that I would personally find too crunch-heavy to want to play.

[Cluedrew]

What was the game you made? If it was actually a good idea, what other external factors could have shot it down?Well... you see I'm making a game for me. The fact that other people enjoy it is... not secondary as I want to play it with other people, but I expect that to happen by fall-out in that I tend to play with people with similar interests (even within the scope of role-playing games). Put a different way I am completely fine with the fact that it doesn't have market appeal, that is not what it is designed for.

And that is just my main role-playing game project, I have some (more thought experiments admittedly) that are based around things that don't usually work so well. How well do you think those would be received?

[JAL_1138]

Well... you see I'm making a game for me. The fact that other people enjoy it is... not secondary as I want to play it with other people, but I expect that to happen by fall-out in that I tend to play with people with similar interests (even within the scope of role-playing games). Put a different way I am completely fine with the fact that it doesn't have market appeal, that is not what it is designed for.

And that is just my main role-playing game project, I have some (more thought experiments admittedly) that are based around things that don't usually work so well. How well do you think those would be received?

You could argue that most successful RPGs aren't designed for market appeal, at least initially. Once you have a player base, yeah, it's good to pay attention after that for subsequent editions/versions--lest yoj end up alienating a bunch of your best customers--but when they first start off, I think to a large extent they're usually designed for the developer and co., and then later marketed. D&D got its start largely that way, Savage Worlds kind of developed that way as the designer(s) thought about how to pare down his/their earlier Deadlands and The Great Rail Wars games into a faster, easier system to streamline combats that kept taking too long in home games in those and other systems, etc.

As for things that usually don't work, depending on what they are, it could be that they haven't worked because prior attempts haven't been done particularly well or weren't ready for primetime or just needed a different spin, rather than an inherent problem with the concept. They might take off like a rocket, or at least find a niche audience big enough to be viable, with the right approach.

[BlizzardSucks80]

Something I've actually run into when trying to homebrew-fix Savage Worlds' gear tables--my system would fail due to excessive fiddliness with gear and likely combat/skills, bringing in greater granularity than the system is really supposed to have, and more than I'd actually want from a system, because my nitpicky, wonkish personality gets in the way of painting in the broad strokes a rules-medium or rules-light system needs, and even when fully aware of the problem I can't seem to get around it.

I'd start trying to write something on a Savage Worlds or 5e level of crunch, and end up with something along the lines of GURPS' level of detail, that I would personally find too crunch-heavy to want to play.

I can totally relate to that. I can't tell you how many systems I have made that started out simple, but I enjoyed working on the system so much that I felt the need to add more and more stuff to it. Then it becomes an unbearable, overly-complicated mess that makes it hard to muster the motivation to start playing it.

[NichG]

Well, I've had this theory-craft idea for a game where the players only ever receive subjective descriptions of the rules from the perspective of how their characters experience the world...

It's pretty much impossible to publish without totally defeating the purpose, and goes full bore against people's inclinations towards wanting to understand a system and their own mechanics before play.

At the same time I've had people say 'I'd play that', so I guess it doesn't count?

[8BitNinja]

I've had an idea for a game based on the MOTHER series (Probably the first two, as MOTHER 3 takes place centuries apart from the first two. I had also not played 3.) It would be a classless system where character abilities from the game such as PSI, gear repair, and praying would be taken over by feats and skills. Some stats would be changed (Offense, for example, would be changed to Strength), but at the core it would be very much grounded in the MOTHER series. Although it would probably do well if shared around something such as Starman.net, it wouldn't fare well if I tried to publish it, as Nintendo and Creatures Inc. own the franchise name. Last time I checked, they are not really into the Tabletop RPG market.

[AceOfFools]

At the same time I've had people say 'I'd play that', so I guess it doesn't count?

I've seen people online whose response to FATAL was "I'd play that, if only to see how truly awful it is."

So low bar.

(A better metric is "I'd pay money for that," and I've seen enough of NichG that I be surprised if he hadn't been told similar).

[Anonymouswizard]

I don't have to be that hypothetical.

In 1985 King Arthur Pendragon came out, which I loved (and still do), and it's the only game that I'd definitely class as a full role-playing game (instead of "roleplaying") is King Arthur Pendragon, .which I'd gladly play again.

KAP hasn't hit the highs of D&D yet, but it hasn't the lows either, and unfortunately none of the lame-os I gamed with in the mid '80's to the early 1990's (when I gave up), would try it ("6th century Britain isn't that fun dude"), and I had to wait over 30 years to play it, so the young people of the 21st century are superior (sorry age-mates, you had your chance!)

Too few have played it for it to be much known.

The flaw in it may be that KAP RP mechanics remove some agency from the players to encourage RP

Those rules mechanics actually encourage you to portray a different personality, which is why (to me) it is the only full role-playing game that I've played (to me Dungeons & Dragons is an "Adventure game". You can play a different personality without rules of course, it's called "acting").

:sigh:

For me this game is Unknown Armies. I've had people respond to my description with 'that sounds really cool', but when it comes time to pick a new game the group just asks if anybody is willing to run D&D.

It annoys me because the game has a lot of flavour. Alright, you're essentially going to either be playing people out of their depth or criminals of some form or another, but the game is built around that. It's, well, built to be the awesome kind of urban fantasy.

I've read and played other Urban Fantasy games, but none have never clicked the same way Unknown Armies did. Characters with Obsessions, thing's they'll chase to the exclusion of almost anything else, and defined things that make them afraid, angry, or noble! Crazy Adepts who use thematic magic, and avatars who channel the power of popular archetypes. Conspiracies and occult organisations, but on the small scale. It's amazing.

And people still want to play D&D instead. Because who cares about being a fleshwarper or having power over cliches when you can just be an elf instead.

[Knaight]

If we're talking about hypothetical works, my current project would probably fit. I'm calling it Legacy, and the core of it is that it is a game for exactly two players plus a GM, where the players play a master and apprentice with adventures set years apart, gradually transitioning down a chain of masters and apprentices with the player switching from role to role. It's a weird enough concept that I could see it having particular trouble reaching a publisher, for all that finding interested players is easy (too easy, given that there's inevitably way more than two).