Why did Gamma World fail to establish a longstanding science fiction legacy like Dungeons & Dragons helped to do for fantasy?
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Why did Gamma World fail to establish a longstanding science fiction legacy like Dungeons & Dragons helped to do for fantasy?
Name iconic and long standing post apocalypse novel serialization and compare to iconic and long standing fantasy novel serialization.
The Postman.
And it's about how much post-apo sucks and how much everyone would rather have it the regular way, except for bunch of rabid morons, so your point still stands
Fallout
D&D doesn't mold so much as it is molded. The community that surrounds it has been influencing it all the way back to the early years, throwing in every bit of fantasy and not even caring about legal rights until the lawsuits came later.
Since then, it's always been chasing to be the most popular game, and that means being the tofu game, nearly flavorless by itself but absorbing the flavors of what's around it.
It stood in the shadow of D&D.
It didn't have the same literary traditions to fall back on (Dark Is the Sun, Hot House, Star Man's Sun and Hiero's Journey vs. The Lord of the Rings, Conan, Elric, and A Wizard of Earthsea, Narnia, etc.).
It's probably too weird for a lot of people.
You can't just draw a dungeon on a piece of graph paper and randomly stock the rooms the way you can with D&D.
It doesn't have the same addictive kind of leveling.
I do really dig the setting though.
>You can't just draw a dungeon on a piece of graph paper and randomly stock the rooms the way you can with D&D.
The Hell you can't.
>You can't just draw a dungeon on a piece of graph paper and randomly stock the rooms the way you can with D&D.
Neither should you with D&D
Excepting for the fact that D&D was intended to be played that way.
Aren't Elric and Wizard of Earthsea post-apoc?
>Aren't Elric and Wizard of Earthsea post-apoc?
No...? I mean, I think the explanation for how Earthsea got the way it was could be called apocalyptic, but then what about the late bronze age collapse experienced in our world? Are we post apocalyptic?
As for Elric, I really don't get that one.
In any case, even if they technically qualified, they aren't at all the kind of thing people normally mean by post-apocalyptic. They are in fantasy worlds with magic and no industrial revolution, guns, modern technology, etc.
>Why did Gamma World fail to establish a longstanding science fiction legacy
Because it never pertained to fictional science in the first place; it was always just another work of fantasy and had nothing to do with plausible scientific theory.
Do you seriously think science fiction wouldn't be popular if it wasn't scientifically accurate? Have you ever heard of Star Wars?
Star Wars isn't scifi. It's space opera.
>real sci-fi has never been tried
It's the Hidden Fortress but with hints of the Knight's Tale and in SPACE
It certainly was inspired by Hidden Fortress, but the inspiration wasn't very strong. If it was really like Hidden Foretress, there'd be no Luke at all, and Obi-Wan would go and rescue the princess by himself.
Trips of truth have spoken. Star Wars is also space fantasy. The types of story the real movies tell and the types of game the West End d6 RPG lend itself to are essentially the same as those from other low fantasy stories with the occasional magician and a few wondrous beasts. The recent cartoon shows set in the Clone Wars or sometime before the Jedi purge make it a bit more high fantasy with space wizards all over the place. Beat for beat a typical Star Wars campaign story could be swapped out for a Dungeons and Dragons campaign and they'd play very similarly.
>pic
I feel like most of these distinctions are meaningless. Star Trek has had all kinds of fantastical godlike beings with magical powers since day one. (And how is J.J. Trek more fantasy than TOS / TNG, unless you just think fantasy means lower quality?) Babylon 5 has some fantastical powers too (Lorien, soul hunters, technomages, telepaths, and that episode where people's ghosts came back to visit), and takes the old fantasy war of law vs. chaos into space. I was scratching my head about the space opera delineation, because to me it means science fiction in outer space, but the wiki article says it emphasizes space warfare and certainly B5 and Star Wars are more focused on that than TOS and TNG, but then Wikipedia goes on to talk about TOS bringing attention to the genre, suggesting that TOS is space opera, even if it doesn't focus on war (though it obviously does have a little of that, with battles with the Klingons and Romulans).
>most of these distinctions are meaningless
There are only three. Which two are you going to eliminate?
Science fiction, which used to be speculative fiction, looks at man interacting with development of technology, man interacting with aliens where the interactions and commentary upon mankind is the important bit, and in the case of alternative history, how man might interact with other man in similar real world environment but with a big difference to real events.
Other than alt history TOS did that a lot. The fact that there are god-like aliens doesn't change that is it SF. One of the big questions of Who Mourns for Adonais? is "What would humans do if they met one of their former gods now that they are a more developed civilization?" Same for ST:V when they meet the alien claiming to be god. Same for the very first TNG episode where they meet Q.
B5 telepaths are a huge part of the setting and you see how JMS portrays humans, the exploration of how humans would develop with a new "science", not a great name for it but it'll do for now. The other big races integrate them into more or less every day life. Humans drug teeps to supress them or press them into psicorp service. Technomages: it's in the name, they are explicitly tech based. The Day of the Dead episode is a rare touch of what appears to be supernatural in an otherwise SF setting. Isolated instances should be weighed proportionately.
Stupid Trek is fantasy not SF because the things important to SF don't matter. There are some high tech elements and aliens present but there is no inkling of how these things affect the cultures or the people. It's all "let's transport across lightyears" or "this red goo makes planets implode". People die in the movies, which is pretty impactful for them, but it doesn't show or imply the broader impact of these things any more than D&D tries to explain how mages casting fireball or priests raising the dead makes society different.
>Wikipedia goes on to talk about TOS bringing attention to the genre, suggesting that TOS is space opera
I had a look at that page. It has one reference link next to that top section. The link is all about about Star Wars.
Later on it says Roddenberry called ST a space western. Given how popular westerns were at the time and how the science fiction of the same period was mostly monster of the week stuff it's no surprise he would try to give it a positive spin and relate it to something people liked rather than something they wouldn't care less about.
If you look at TOS and TNG a lot of the stories stray away from anything like adventure or melodrama which are two things that article says are needed. Undoubtedly I'm biased and I'd have to go through episode by episode but my impression is that old school Trek is SF more than space opera and not fantasy like the nutrek movies and whiel wikipedia is really useful for a lot of things I don't the space opera article is any more authoritative than me.
>had nothing to do with plausible scientific theory.
name 5 popular science fiction worksthat do
Pop sci-fi is a misnomer, homosexual.
I'm talking about the meanings of words, not the mismatched labels that morons fall for.
You could argue that no sci fi is plausible. The Hunger Games, Idiocracy, The Omega Man/I Am Legend, zombie movies, Philip K. Dick's works are my five. maybe Demolition Man, Jurassic Park, not sure about Judge Dredd.
It's too much of a wacky kitchen sink setting that doesn't have an identity of its own as much as it has pieces of every kind of post-apoc, fantasy, and sci-fi setting.
It did. Caves of Qud and Fallout owe their worldbuilding to it.
I think this really is the reason why it's not big in terms of Tabletop, or rather, group tabletop.
Fundamentally, the Fantasy genre has always been a story about a band of adventurers going out and doing their thing, ever since the Fellowship.
Comparatively, Post-Apoc has invariably lent itself to a story about one badass doing their thing, with a supporting cast. Cataclysm:DDA, Qud, Fallout, Mad Max, Tank Girl, Waterworld, Metro, I am Legend, Fist of the North Star... with the general exception of (more contemporary)zombie apocalypses, the genre naturally lends itself to focusing on a single-character narrative, which means the genre is best represented by the mediums that can facilitate those stories better.
Id love a Waterworld TTRPG.
Here you go, enjoy
This is actually a decent theory and why some Science Fiction TTRPGs actually found success, while single player VGs of the genre retain dominance. A Traveller crew or a 2020 gang naturally lend themselves to group dynamics. Table Top Role Playing Games being naturally collaborative is a big hit or miss and the combative nature of a lot of Post-Apoc media actually works against it. Kind of a shame honestly. Fallout 2 still makes me want a Post-Apoc epic focused on a bunch of weirdos, mutants, and tribals.
Yes but that's a very small and niche legacy compared to D&D, to which almost every fantasy game owes its identity.
is that a dead kennedys logo?
It is, I can only guess the author/illustrator was a fan. I base this on absolutely no knowledge at all other than that indeed being the Dead Kennedys logo
Because it's a bad game combined with pretty weird, yet also boring setting.
I mean from all Ubiquity games, Desolation sold the least. Post-apo setting for Deadlands sold like shit. All the regular and weird post-apo games sell like shit. Twilight 2k, at least the old one, was sold as "tacticool game", rather than "post-apo game", and it's telling that Merc 2k sold better.
Pro-tip: nobody wants to actually play post-apo, and the weirder you make it, the less people are going to get interested
>Post-apo
who the frick says this? Weird fricking abbreviation
Everyone, you dumb c**t
>What a post-abo thing to say
Counterargument: Adventure Time.
Cold war ended and nuclear apocalypses with mutation became less pop cultural.
Hippies kept being a thing though, so we're stuck with elves and pastoral romanticism.
>best version, tried something innovative, closer to MSH gameplay
>most people turned their noses because it departed from D&D's shadow
Wrong image, sorry about that.
I really like the idea of 3rd edition Gamma World. They tried cool new stuff, but it was also a mess. It was rushed to print before the editing was complete, and the need to include an errata booklet shows how ridiculous it was. It's also too rules-heavy and clunky. What it badly needed was a 4th edition that streamlined and tidied it up. *That* would've been awesome. But instead, they a made a 4th edition that was closer to a 2nd edition D&D variant.
I also think that while the action table is easier to use than you'd expect it to be (and I love the multiples of success), it should've used a d20 rather than percentile dice to streamline things as much as possible.
Gamma World's sucessor is Adventure Time. Both are wacky fantasy approaches to post-apoc. The most popular post-apoc franchise today is Fallout.
I swear I didn't see this post when I posted
Great minds think alike.
ehem
Speaking of space western