What Genre would YOU like to play in?

Good morning GamersPlaners and GamersPlaneteers! Tell us about a genre or subgenre you would really like to play in! Have you been craving some acid fantasy? Gritty umbrella monster sci-fi? Dr Who planet-hopping shenanigans? Lancer with Kaiju? Chill woodland creatures dealing with real estate?For me, as almost always, it's a Dying Earth Science Fantasy. Something perhaps darker than Jack Vance (Dying Earth), but more comprehensible than Gene Wolfe (Book of the New Sun). Something like Latter Earth of WWN, but with better rules. Or like Ninth World of Numenera... but with better rules. The idea of the nihilism competing with the possibility of ancient secrets while staring down a dying sun just vibes with me!

I’m like a broken record here, I know, but I want to play in a zombie game!

I’m a Survivor.

Lately the genres I want to play the most are professional, relational, and academic dramas/dramedies/comedies.

By professional ones I mean the likes of ER, Shirobako, M*A*S*H, Crazy Ones, Planetes, or Century City (the futuristic one about lawyers). I suppose Lie to Me also technically fits, though it dives too much into the investigative angle.

Relational ones would be like Gossip Girl 2007 or Pixie Trix Comics or Gamers! (the anime). The stuff for which Dramatic Cortex is supposedly made (though I am not entirely convinced it's a good system to actually run meaningfully differentiated characters).

Academic ones inspired by such works as Nozaki-kun (academic/relational hybrid). Apparently variants with supernatural elements are more common, such as the various magical academies old and new. A game line that seems semi-fit (though also stepping into the supernatural) would be Oddity High. For the over-the-top academic silliness, there's Illuminati University, though I don't feel like diving into the character creation complexity levels of that. TfOS seems to also stand close by, but is probably too silly for my liking, and too adversarial.

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An interest close behind the other one would be something with courtly intrigue, yet presented in an accessible way to the audience/players. The closest work of fiction that could act as inspiration would be Apothecary Diaries. The closest game premise I've seen around here was a certain court of a pantheon where newer deities are trying to find a place.

It's no secret in my case that the two genres I'm most interested in are superheroes and cyberpunk. Or if I want to be really pie-in-the-sky about it, cyberpunk superheroes, something along the lines of Batman Beyond of Marvel's old 2099 comics line.

But weirdly, the kind of superhero game I'm most interested in, which is about as basic as it gets with that genre, also seems to be the hardest to find. Because I just want, you know, superheroes-superheroes. Like an Avengers- or JLA-style "powerful people of disparate backgrounds, origins and skillsets band together to save the world" story and not something laser-focused on a specific subgenre like teen supers, or dark-fantasy supers, or ultra-cynical The Boys-inspired supers. Which reminds me, I want to be one of the good guys. Superheroes, not super-mercenaries or super-assassins or super-paramilitary operatives or super-violent criminal-murdering vigilantes. Characters more interested in helping people who need it than in punishing people who deserve it.

You'd think that would be easy to find -- relatively speaking, at least -- because it's basically the supers equivalent of coming to a Dungeons & Dragons group with the oh-so-specific request of "I'd like to play a game about adventuring explorers in a fantasy realm largely based on medieval Europe who travel from town to town exploring forbidden ruins, fighting monsters, and finding treasure," but for whatever reason it's exceptionally rare in my experience.

I've had a bit of an itch to play a Starfinder or Spelljammer game. That sorta scifi/fantasy vibe.

I run the games that I want to play in ...

So if I could be a Jedi or a person dwelling in Middle-Earth or like.... a vampire?

Yea, that'd be great.

The dying earth genre is one of my favorites as well. Though I gravitate more towards either Nausicaa/Shunas's Journey or Tsutomu Nihei (mostly Bame!) rather than Vance for inspiration here.

Another genre I would like to play is mystery investigation. I have had The Troubleshooters sitting on my shelf for ages now and never got around to trying it out. But some classical Sherlock Holmes kind of mystery would also be interesting.

Finally there is always dark fantasy. This has been the staple of my solo games for a while now and there is something resembling a fleshed out world emerging from it. The entire thing is basically Berserk, Fear and Hunger and Blasphemous put in a blender.
I am actually thinking about collecting it all together and running a game set in that world here on GP. But there are some elements to it that get very dark and I probably don't want to explore those with strangers on the internet, so I need to think on that some more.

Speaking of mystery investigation. How do you guys set those up as GM/ST? Like, where do you start from? The subject of the investigation or the perpetrators/conspirators? How do you set up a compelling mystery? I'm contemplating inserting something like that in a game, but not sure where to begin the construction.

Also, what were your experiences with mystery/investigation campaigns/chronicles? I remember when I was recruiting for a game some folk specifically mention that they did not want mysteries or detective elements included, because they don't work well in pbp/rpgs. Any personal stories of satisfying resolution to the mystery or of one that bombed completely? What worked and what didn't in each scenario?

That got me thinking: some time after I grew up, I saw a rise in approaches to fiction/worlds/gaming that seems to be associated with the term 'Deconstruction', which allegedly is about examination of unstated/unexamined things in the genre and is supposedly best when done with love for the genre, but IME in practice 95%+ of the time means contempt for the genre and its conventions, as a sort of 'take that'. And I'm getting the impression that somehow Supers have been hit the most by these 'deconstructors' and it's very rare to see an at-face-value take on the genre nowadays. Conversely, while there are some deconstructor jabs at ISO Standard Fantasy, it seems to be a genre that weathered it the most: even though decon works exist, the at-face-value primordial titan is still standing tall.

Now, I don't have a strong opinion about supers gaming, but I do prefer non-ISO Standard fantasy, and about that, I think there's a strong issue that alternative fantasy seems to be often written to contrast against Standard, and not to stand on its own. I'd much rather have see original worldbuilding that stands on its own, not as a reaction to and take that against a different worldbuilding group.

I like to play any genre that has a supernatural element to it. Except horror, so Cthulhu and their ilk is not what I'm going for.

If the lore becomes too complex, I find it gets in the way of the story we are trying to tell. That is why I steer clear of heavy sci-fi, but I do embrace Star Wars, as the lore there is manageable. Starfinder is skirting the edge.

Now the superhero genre should tick the above boxes, and while I enjoy seeing the movies, I have yet to play a game that I actually enjoyed. But I haven't played that many superhero games.

Approaches and conclusions viewed from the GM side:

• It seems to make sense to start with the motive-deed-scene triangle, though I prefer either the motive or the deed as the core point around which the rest of the triangle is built. Evidence, escape routes or alibis, follow-up deeds, and other surrounding circumstances can be built on top/around that.
• It's very easy to unwittingly end up sending PCs on a pixel hunt, and it's important to regularly check yourself for whether you did so. If the PCs are went in the right direction, then started trying A, B, C, D and are wondering if the direction was wrong, but you are thinking 'why? clearly it is N, why are they not trying N?', you just sent them on a pixel hunt. (I know I did that to players as a GM more times than I should've.)
• Be wary of accidentally forgetting which information should be trivially available (my worst blunder: there was a photo of a suspect, and the suspect was famous enough that a search could point out who it is, especially since one PC was somewhat familiar with the suspect's profession's products).
• Attempts to be witty and produce gotchas often end up working not so fun for everyone else involved, and self-head-patting about 'outwitting' the investigators is not a good thing for a GM. Stuff that seems obvious or slightly concealed from a GM perspective is usually entirely opaque from the investigator perspective. If a PC sees through some mystery and thinks 'obvious!', well, let the PC enjoy the rare moment of feeling smart and outwitting the great conspirator.

From a player perspective:

• Pixel hunts are frustrating to be involved in.
• Riddles are not fun. The difference between a puzzle and a riddle is that the puzzle has a rational path from the given information to the correct answer even though one does not originally know the answer. Riddles are not that - they are shibboleths that distinguish the initiated ingroup from the uninitiated outgroup, because there usually is no way to arrive from the riddle to the answer using just the given information - it deliberately relies on some combination of deliberately misleading presentation, on information not provided as part of the question, or on a Kenobi-style Certain Point of View interpretation of the question and/or answer. (Trivial example: 'What is green all year round?' has only one correct answer - answers such as palm tree, frog, emerald, dollar, or painted fence are cassified as wrong 'just because'.)
• It is important to have the right 'tool' to engage in investigation. If the whole investigation is related to occult knowledge, being the one PC with none makes one unable to properly participate (one cannot obtain proper information about evidence, and making conclusions about evidence gained by others often starts getting into 'using meta knowledge that the PC lacks' territory).
• An investigation campaign is in a balancing act between using PC traits to succeed at stuff (and risking the feeling of 'I just rollplay, not roleplay, the investigative activities') and needing to rely on player wits for it (which risks going into 'I used player knowledge, not character competence, to bypass a character challenge' if predominately successful, or 'investigation games are only good for investigation-savvy players' if predominately unsuccessful).
• Keeping track of all the information required for solving mysteries can be challenging. A slower pacing of games (whether weekly three-hour real-time sessions, or slow PbP) can make some things harder to keep in memory, but also can offer more time to ponder given information between sessions/posts.

There are various commonly-quoted articles on how to handle investigative games, but the above are my personal impressions that come to mind at the time.

The deconstruction element is part of it, definitely. In the case of RPGs, though -- less so with PbP, but it's still present -- I think more of it has to do with people simply having been trained to expect certain things from their games.

D&D, and by extension most other games, is very mercenary in its presentation, and it can be hard to un-learn certain expectations and behaviors that come with that... assuming one is even inclined to.

What do mercenaries do to the bad guys? They kill them. Not just incapacitate them, or thwart their plans, or take them into custody -- kill them. In many games killing an enemy the easiest/simplest way to accomplish things like incapacitating them or thwarting their plans anyway. And taking them into custody becomes a whole second story, because it's not as if you can just call the proper authorities and wait for them to arrive at the twenty-third sub-basement of the millennium-old secret fortress hidden below the forbidden mountain beyond the cursed forest ten days' ride from the nearest settlement to collect the evil wizard they have no way of containing. Stabbing the villain until he stops moving and leaving him where he lies makes sense in the context of a medieval fantasy realm, not so much in a modern-day urban setting where that's just, you know... murder. But decades of "defeat = kill = victory" can be hard to shake off.

And it probably doesn't help that a lot of people's primary exposure to the superhero genre is through film nowadays, where even in major ongoing crossover universes like the MCU, the number of stories told is so limited that, frankly, conserving villains so they can be used again later isn't really necessary and as a result, a lot of them get killed off at the end of their one and only appearance -- even if it's not directly at the hands of the protagonist. Crossbones as a suicide bomber? Sure, why not -- at least we got to see Crossbones in a movie! Why deal with the logistics of having Batman keep Ra's al Ghul alive when you're not certain there will even be a sequel at all, and if there is, you can make it about the Joker instead? That all just exacerbates the idea that antagonists are disposable, and therefore the idea that defeating them should always be in a very... final way.

And besides that, mercenaries don't just kill... they get paid. That's baked into most RPGs too. Either in-world rewards like money or a new piece of gear or whatever, or rewards for the player like their character getting a cool new ability or being able to write a bigger number than before on your sheet. That constant "do thing, collect prize" loop doesn't always fit in well with a superhero story. Not just because of the presumed altruism of the characters themselves, but because of how superhero stories are usually structured. Your average superhero story doesn't follow a character on a journey from regular old moisture farmer to telekinetic laser-sword acrobat as they increase their competence incrementally over the course of an entire film trilogy or a series of novels -- it "levels them up" from NPC to 20th-level demigod as the setup for the story and then keeps them there, largely unchanged, for years or decades without any further increase in their capabilities. Frontloading all of the progression like that removes the "press button to dispense treat" aspect that many expect from a campaign.

Of course, there are other forms of development the characters can undergo, but most of those don't involve getting to erase +4 and write +5 instead. Again, that's less of an issue in the medium of PbP than it is in the hobby at large, but the issue still exists. Or at least it's an issue for me personally; for others it's not a problem at all because fun is fun, and that's cool too. It's just not what draws me in, is all.

Is this really the dominant portrayal? To my mind, mercs in an anti-crime context evoke bounty hunters, and those tend to have preferences to take targets alive (Vader's line about Bobby's infamy notwithstanding).

Low/No Magic fantasy. Or hard sci fi.

Magic is boring. Killing dragons by cunning and guile will never be boring.

Likewise if you want political intrigue magic tends to break this. Limitation brings more fun.

Edit:
It is not possible to throw a fireball(as the spell) from your fingertips. But a LAWs rocket is a pretty close approximation.

That is why his name is Boredflak. His drip and aura are infinite.

I guess there are a few possible ways to interpret it, but to my mind "mercenary" in a modern context is like... Blackwater. Private military. Soldiers of fortune. You could choose to take it a different way, but it seems like splitting hairs, and not really relevant to the point I was making: I want to play in a superhero game where murder is generally considered to be a bad thing.

Some parts of above in combination...

First, I run the games I want to play in, mostly. But sometimes I have the luck to find games which satisfy me on a deeper level.

What I like most is a Science Fantasy post-cataclysmic setting, not freshly gone down like MadMax or MutantYearZero, but one after the new civilisation has evolved into something concrete. LosTech, I like the idea of a shaman from the steppes in the middle of nowhere finding a hovertank and worshipping it as the "vessel of the gods".

I love to instill the sense of wonder in the players, to give them the opportunity to resolve contradictions in the background, to shed light on areas that are more than just geographical locations, to illuminate the dark corners of history and perhaps to clarify who may have done what and for what reason – in short: discovery.

But not as a pure puzzle, rather integrated into the various cultures that have developed, the misunderstandings and ancestral enmities, egoism in personal and biological terms, dependencies of an open and covert nature, which inevitably lead to these moral dilemmas of having to decide who can be granted these relics or whether one even wants to ensure that nothing and no one from the past survives into the present day.

Then, as a special spice, it is best to add the looming danger of a new cataclysm, because people are beginning to ignore and repeat the old mistakes... (As we humans have experienced time and again, and are experiencing now.)

Apparently, I prefer campaigns over one-shots...

I get that. With RPG's I only play D&D in the Forgotten Realms.

But for reading, my favourite is apocalypse fiction. Not post-apocalypse, I want the book to start in a place where everything is OK, and then turns to, well whatever. When the dust settles and the protagonist(s) create a plan for the future, I'm done. It's the crisis that I'm attracted to.

I would really like an apocalyptic RPG. I know, I know, there are tons of them. But I want a "real" apocalypse. A possible one. No zombies, no mutants, no para-normal anything. Just real people, living through a real crisis.

I don't know how many novels I have in my collection, somewhere around a hundred? And I'm always impressed by a unique way for the end to come.

I've tried several times to create a GURPS or S.P.E.C.I.A.L system game, but I get so mired down in the details it never gets anywhere.

I enjoy games that deal with survival as much as conflict. I been in a couple, one magic and the other post apocalyptic (without aliens or other abortions) I find it fun to try and work with limited resources and overcome trials that may or may not involve just running away or hiding instead of taking everything on directly.

At other times i also enjoy games that just ignore all the minutia to let the characters explore and act larger than life, be the hero, and be involved in epic adventure.

I have been on a Urban Fantasy binge lately. Started rereading Dresden Files recently and my wife started watching Supernatural so I've been watching a lot of that as well. Not as interested in playing the monsters that go bump in the night, but the "normal" people fighting them. Something like Supernatural/Buffy/Angel. Bought Monster of the Week but hasn't gotten around to read it yet.

I love problem solving, and I think what I like best about an apocalypse scenario, is instead of finding a problem in the world, the world is the problem. The whole world, suddenly becomes the problem. And it's a merciless problem, so you need a solution immediately.

Then the exploration part comes to life. In an apocalyptic event everything becomes a mystery. Even your own neighbourhood, your own home. Is it still standing? Is it on fire? Or underwater?

You can spend every penny you have on an underground bunker, only to have the whole area flood...

That's kind of a neat idea for a game. Call it "Preppers" or "Survivalists" depending on your age. Give the characters a list of skills to choose from, then a certain amount of time and resources to prepare. Then, unleash the apocalypse and see who survives. You can't prep for everything, no matter how rich or skilled you are.