When will we finally see a resurgence of grim and gritty RPGs after more than a decade of literally superhero DND?
When will we finally see a resurgence of grim and gritty RPGs after more than a decade of literally superhero DND?
When will we finally see a resurgence of grim and gritty RPGs after more than a decade of literally superhero DND?
When grim and gritty means I don’t have to spend 30 minutes in charter creation just roll up Gen Rick the fighter man for him to get the infection by a random begger in town and get beaten to death by the guards for not paying taxes to his local lord
>fpbp
It comes down to this, if you have to spend a long time making a character your players will be averse to having those characters die off quickly.
>When will these games re-emerge
Make game systems that let you get going with fresh characters rapidly and then also make that system format successful enough for emulation by game publishers.
If character creation takes no effort and new characters can be dropped in at-will, there is zero player investment in these characters and all of the suffering they go through will be meaningless. Reasonably lengthy character creation actually helps grim and gritty, since players value their characters more and don't want to see bad things happen to them. In pursuit of convenience you killed the very game you sought.
>If character creation takes no effort and new characters can be dropped in at-will, there is zero player investment in these characters and all of the suffering they go through will be meaningless.
You cannot make people emotionally-invest in something you intend to make an effort at killing. You have to surprise them with death (and their investment will wane as death comes more commonly), or you have to give them time to invest emotionally.
A game with high death probability essentially trains players to have the emotional attachment of a rancher with their characters. It's just natural course. Superhero play came about to actually make people more invested in roleplay, and even Gygax understood this otherwise he would have put resurrect spells in the game.
>even Gygax understood this otherwise he WOULDN'T have put resurrect spells in the game.
Frick me.
you had your chance while game of thrones was popular
Man, I remember when every other DM was advertising a gritty political game. They still ran it in DnD or Pathfinder though instead of finding another system and just placed a bunch of questionable limitations to reduce the superpowers/anime.
It was fricking terrible because very few people running these games had any grasp on history or even reality at all and only knew pop culture from Game of Thrones. So glad we're out of that period
So like... 2017? It's a game, my guy. Wow shocking! It's almost as if pop culture exists or something. Learn to do your thing. There's nothing here to begrudge. Ok: some people get into fads. You're one of them, and then a different fad got popular and you were annoyed about it. It's called: growing up.
Nice bait
Thanks man. Let's bait together for a little bit. We could get really good at it until we're masters of the form.
You took that weirdly personally is there a story time
you had your chance while fear&hunger was popular
It still is though, and we’re likely gonna be seeing things that pull inspiration from it popping up over the next couple years
oh, I'm sure we will be seeing things that pull inspiration from Termina
Termina itself is drawing inspiration from Majora's Mask.
cute girl
When you run it, dipshit, I play a "grim and gritty" game once a week
Unless of course by "grim and gritty" you mean "mudcore bullshit", in which case you are 14 and go frick yourself
>decade
Dragonlance is from the 80's.
Today has a wider variety of RPGs than at any time ever before. You're seeing superhero RPGs become more popular. But there are also more "grim and gritty" RPGs on the market than at any time ever before. Find the thing you like and pursue it, and you won't care so much about what's popular. Your thing is out there, and it's actually more popular than it has ever been.
Did you just call Dragonlance grim and gritty, or did you claim that it's been popular outside of four years during the 90s and two years in the 2020s? Because damn. Either way? You hella got me.
People also claim that liking Dragonlance is 'embracing tradition', despite the Heroes of the Lance being more Special OC Donut Steel than anybody you see in a modern let's play.
>People also claim that liking Dragonlance is 'embracing tradition
That meme is more on aestetic, not archetypes and narrative. The Dragonlance party also is composed by pretty bog standard characters, Raistlin being the weak and sick edgelord with a skin condition was already old as a concept at the time (Elric).
>on
about
>Did you just call Dragonlance grim and gritty, or did you claim that it's been popular outside of four years during the 90s and two years in the 2020s?
He's saying that anyone claiming that superhero D&D started with WotC is a colossal homosexual-moron.
Which is true.
OSR is all over the place which you'd know if you werent a spambot
Frick your Denizens&Dysentery
Shadow of the Local Lord
god I hope not. Having the game not be padded with pillows is one thing but grim and gritty has a strong tendency to be pure fricking aids where the GM power trips like crazy and the threat of death becomes more of a threat of the busywork of making a new character than of losing something you've grown to like.
My games always had a tendency towards dark and grounded so i don't really care what the fad chaser will sheeplike regroup onto next.
I naturally gravitate towards that because i like the contrast jenerated with glorious and just events, especially for heroic games, and not because of 'muh realism' particularly. Conversely i also like the grotesque exaggerations of old warhammer fantasy for the sake of gallow "blackadder-y" humor.
>Join a "Grim and gritty" game
>DM keeps talking up how awful it is with slavery and super racism
>Characters with PTSD and panic attacks who keep telling us how it's MAGA country and they're hunted for sport
>People keep talking about how they need to unionize but the evil capitalists won't let them and it's totally super bad
>Everywhere the group goes, despite being 80% undesirables, everyone has been neutral or ok and there's been no sign of bigotry directed at the group (many have even been lustful and aroused by the group and welcomed)
>People magically create or distribute resources in such abundances that want is a thing of the past and magic is easily accessible to the point that scarcity is a choice and no one tries to stop people from growing magical power to break scarcity
>The "undesirables" even have a royal family with more influence than anyone but is still the under dog somehow
The problem with modern "Grim and Gritty" is either you get an absolute slog shit show that's hardly fun to play because the DM keeps undoing any progress "To keep it from" or adds restrictions or penalties that are just unfair and don't enable fun or a mechanic that could be interesting to play with, or you get a DM with no guts to actually be unpleasant and a bigot to the players and tell them no and put up a fight. It ends up being "Trust me bro, it's really bad" but everything you see and experience really just makes it feel like people are making shit up to overthrow the system
The classic problem of tragedies written by people who have never been victims
It's less never having been victims and more having utterly moronic perspectives
I have to agree with
A former coworker of mine was from Liberia. As far as he was concerned not being able to keep your cool when bullets fly through your windows is a skill issue. When we talked about PTSD at one point he explained he feels the same way about people who complain about war/trauma as he does about people who complain about micro aggressions.
On the flip side he loved to joke around and complain about his little brother spending all day on the PS4.
He is not a man who I think could write tragedy if only because he doesn't seem to really connect with the negative side of human emotion.
He might write a good basis for someone to spin into tragedy though.
I think the problem with Grim and Gritty RPGs is that:
a) the majority of GMs and designers who run them exaggerate the awfulness of medieval life because they either don't know better or because they want to make life more grimdark for players.
b) the game mechanics aren't engaging or enjoyable enough to get players to 'embrace the suck'.
A is easy to solve, B is not so easy and requires someone look at core gameplay loops and decide what they want to achieve with their grim and gritty rpg (other than DnD but you die of dysentery every time you enter town.)
Players need to feel that their characters aren't dying arbitrarily because the GM decided to murder them via cholera or local lord, or because they failed some random roll.
So are we talking Conan grim or Polish WFRP 1e GM grim?
I'm working on an horror/sci-fi/action game that's grim and gritty. PCs are generated mostly automatically in a batch and chosen from a roster before game sessions. Combat supports improvised moves and is generally quite fast, and can often be quite deadly, especially if you're not careful. Humans are almost totally wiped out and you're trying to reclaim and recover loot to either attempt to survive long term or mount some kind of suicide mission to strike back at the invading alien entities that did this.
The grim and gritty RPGs that existed didn't go anywhere and lots of people have been making grim and gritty RPGs. Shadow of the Demon Lord (I like the class system a lot) and Conan: Adventures in ane Age Undreamed Of (Conan is crack to me so it gets bonus points) are my two standouts from the past several years. I haven't played it, but I've heard Adventurer, Conqueror, King is good. Barbarians of Lemuria and Burning Wheel are also good gritty fantasy games.
The ascension of the Internet has made it easier than ever to get access to games for whatever sort of tone or focus you want, whether from and gritty in your mind is Dark Souls, Conan, Game of Thrones, or the Hundred Years War. There's a resurgence for every genre, basically. There is a lot more shit, of course, because there's more being made in general. And D&D is woefully dominant, but the best way to fight that is to look into the indie games or smaller publishers that are still out there.
What constitutes "grim and gritty"? must there be no magic, or limited magic, how "historical" or "realistic" does it need to be?
Try playing something other than DnD
>resurgence
Why do you need something to have a "resurgence".
Just play what YOU want with people YOU like baka.
I like dark fantasy but my friends are too lighthearted and prone to get out of character for le ebin jokes for it to work.
I don't know if it's because they think roleplaying seriously is for nerds or what but it pissess me off every time, so I just run light hearted campaigns were I don't have to get mad when they don't take it seriously.
It's been almost 25 years since 3e took D&D in a more superheroic direction, and there's a reason it stayed that way. Fact is most people aren't tryhards who need to pretend they want to be shit-covered peasants in their escapist fantasy games.
>Fact is most people got into it during the marvel fad and will leave just as quickly
ftfy
Anon I'm sorry but not everyone wants to be a shit covered peasant who will die from an infected wound like you
People play TTRPG's to, and this may shock you, play out a escapist fantasy and not be subjected to hell
I have a shotgun. What cuck libshits want doesn't matter.
what.
Anon needs to force people to join his game at gun point. Dunno why, it's pretty fun, low key and low level, but the stakes feel like they matter; y'know?
sorry anon, but its the libtards who want game of thrones. real conservamen play high fantasy.
Define your terms you fricking cretin. Rolling to see if you die from dysentery does not a good game make nor the fake "historically accurate" shit covered brown medievel settings that still have D&D wizards in them.
You wouldn't have that problem if you played literally anything besides D&D.
when game of thrones' popularity dies down
OSR has existed for decades now and is exactly what you're talking about. If you did a basic amount of research into this topic, you would have figured that out.
Define grim and gritty. Mudcore peaseant simulator? Grim Hollow/ Drakkenheim 5e? Warhammer Fantasy? Shadow of the Demonlord? Warhammer? Do these count? Yes? No? Why?
He's seen buzzwords and thinks he's supposed to want them, he doesn't know what they actually mean.
If it's coming from a GM, grim and gritty means mudcore peasant simulator. If it's from a player, it means they're pissy about not being able to find a group that will let them be a sociopathic, greed-driven murderhobo.
Hey, I wanna play an earnestly heroic fool that's trying to bring light to a world all but lost to darkness and apathy.
Never
ESG IED killed it
Its just blacks, gays and trannies now and forever.
Don't lump blacks in with the gays and trannies. There have always been black nerds. The troony shit has only been prevalent in the last decade.
TND.
>friend wants to run grim and gritty game with his own system
>it's just Pathfinder with totally random character generation, nearly unusable magic, and ten thousand stacking penalties
Literally anytime that you want to. Just write your own setting and find a ruleset you can adjust to feel good with what you want and go for it. It's the normal thing to do, the only limitation is your own inability.
When grim and gritty can morph into Heroic and has easy to understand classes and archetypes for people to play off of.
You'll call me a homosexual but you know it's true. The market (for serious, simple stories) is there as things will swing back in favour for such a tone of ttRPG but it needs to make a lot of concessions to appeal to the masses if that's what it wants.
Oh, forgot to mention, it needs to have low to very low mortality.
>but that's not-
Sorry Black person, it needs to have low mortality to be popular with the new players and style of play.
I don't care how a grim and gritty RPG will manage to keep its tone despite that, but without that nobody will buy it. Also make books that are actually fun to read through.
Honestly this
People have a tendency to get attached to the characters they make so they're naturally going to not go near a game where they can die from a bad cough
grim and gritty low mortality is easy.
Each time you would die you can chose instead to roll up a permanent wound, losing limbs and eyes as major wounds, or losing functionality as a minor.
e.g.
nerve damage causing some disadvantages on actions that need that limb,
or crippled organs, scarred lungs causing you to lose a chunk of your turn/movement after a few rounds of combat as you cant catch your breath enough.
or a wound that never quite heals, causing it to risk infection if not cleaned, leading to the party needing to make camp more often so they can boil water and clean the wound, or using expensive medicine to supress the symptoms to avoid needing to make camp.
the major troubles is as you say, needing a normie player base to get new players in, and 'grim and gritty' isn't a good feeling to have for new players that haven't stuck with it long enough to taste the sweet victory of succeeding despite the oppressive nature of the world.
or you can just call it roguelike, make the players bring 5 characters sheets and just kill everyone in 2 hits, but let them keep one item or spell from the previous life, new players LOVE that shit and its pretty fun as a once off, the spell/ability combos people end up trying to make is really fun.
>don't kill the players just permanently maim them! problem solved!
stuopid reatard
does this count?
Nah, you can become a Grey Warden very easily, and you'll only die during the Joining if you get the worst possible roll.
ok, apart from that then?
Apart from that, it's fine in a thematic sense. The actual system has the usual Green Ronin issue of the writers not being that great at math, though.
Resurgence?
Wtf are you talking about OP?, did you miss the whole MORK BORG OSR wave?, it was super popular for a while, there was a lot of grim and gritty games going on and it quickly died because they fricking suck.
Sounds like you don’t really play games OP, you just like to whine about them online.
be the change you want to see in the world you lazy shit
Didn't WFRP get a new edition a while back? And I think the guy who made Shitshow of the Poop Lord is making a slightly less horror-fantasy-based version of the system.
need a game in BRP similar to Against the Dark Master
You won't. There won't be a resurgence of grim and gritty, it will be superheroes with a Grimm & Gritty™ pallet swap. Its like tacticool.
You can always play a grim and gritty game, adjust rules or find ones that do what you want, but waiting around for marketing goons to remember to cycle to your segment of the census is moronic.