The Culture: When The Brand Fits The Game Like Steak & Chocolate

(Following from yesterday's post.)

Well before we get to infamous trashfires like Senzar, Synnibarr, Multiverser, and worse (and yes, there is so much worse) are the mass of product clogging up the shelves that range between "Well-Intentioned, But Terrible" to "Do You Have Any Idea What You're Doing?" with a side of "You Just Want A Payday, Don't You?"

In short, the unfortunate majority of hobby game product out there made by people caught up in the Cargo Cult zeitgeist. This includes some well-known names, entire companies, and more than a few less-than-honest brokers out there.

For the sake of your sanity, I will not list all of them. I will focus on a few examples of a larger pattern.

Dungeons & Lightsabers

When Magic-Users By The Water got the license to make a new adaptation of Uncle George's Space Opera, it was as much about reviving an active awarness of the Brand in the hobby (Yes, I see you laughing; bear with me.) as it was an intention to show how Edition 3's ruleset can totally work for anything.

The first version, releasing about the time of The Phantom Menace, was not received with the nigh-uncritical glee hoped for by either part of that license deal. The second version, coming with Attack of the Clones, was a marked improvement but still not as hoped. The final version is still, in general, regarded as the best of the lot and went on to incorporate a lot of what Kulty Kathy and the KK Krew would discard when the Devil Mouse took over.

It's a Mech Piloting shitshow, like damn near everything else that Edition 3 put on the shelf. You do not roll up a man and do your best with what you've got in one of the many tumultuous eras of Uncle George's fantastic adventure setting. You purpose-build a droid (metaphorical most of the time), work as part of a squad (metaphorically most of the time), and go on mission-focused adventures.

It's telling that only when Filoni came around did anything you got out of playing that game looked like the source media, and then only when George wasn't keeping him on a tight leash. That's right: Rebels and The Bad Batch might as well be Filoni's Let's Plays turned into media because that's the only stuff that resembles how this game plays.

Turns out that this Brand doesn't work well with a degraded Bizarro D&D that was designed explicitly to be "Diablo on the tabletop". You can't do mass battles for shit (see Jon Mollison's video) in a Brand that's famous for them, and you can't focus on the mystical side (for a Brand famous for that) or engage in the necessary economic and political elements (in a setting where that is required). I question the wisdom of siloing each element into its own game (as the Fantasy Flight products did), but that's for another post.

At least the Stargate SG-1 game (like Spycraft, which it derives from) had a better excuse to be that focused, and even then you would have been better off using Palladium's RECON with modifications. These days you can expect fans of Cole & Anspach's series Galaxy's Edge and Forgotten Ruin to fall into the same trap if they are not careful. Every G.I. Joe fan adaptation of the era ran into this trap also.

You can also levy this complaint to the d20 System version of Legend of the Five Rings and 7th Sea, and the former series actually tried to make the most of that blend. (It was, sadly, an improvement on the non-d20 predecessors.)

While not an identical mismatch, you'll find a more general pattern appearing in the Babylon 5, Starship Troopers, and d20 Traveller adaptations- or that Totally Not Scooby Doo minigame published in Dungeon. You can, to slightly varying degrees, extend this to Palladium's entire catalog.

The Game That Should Have Used Runequest

Tribe 8. Dream Pod 9 did something ambitious with this one. Reusing Silhouette was one of the not-ambitous parts of that project, but an understable one.

This is a game all about fantastic adventure, dealing with alien godlike beings, mysticism and the use of it to draw power, and in time not only overthrowing said gods but building anew atop the ruins of a post-cataclysm world.

This should have been a setting for Runequest. Even back at the time, those savvy with the two games can--and did--make the connection. Instead it used a game where there was no language or structure for a core setting element, and what was attempted to plug that hole did not work. Everyone and their uncle misunderstood it because the rules to represent it were ass.

Couple that with a lack of scalability, no economy to speak of, no consideration for Faction Play, and the already present Theater Kid tendencies at DP9 were starting to make themselves felt in full flowering.

Today the smart thing to do would be to recognize the obvious, rewrite the Setting Bible to remove all reference to Silhouette, and publish it system-free- then direct the curious to use Runequest. An acceptable substitute, though it would be far more work, would be Warhammer Fantasy in its 1st or 2nd Editions; the reason for the work should be obvious if you are at all familiar with those editions.

You can slot all of White Wolf's products here also; the ruleset was never fit for purpose.

All Games Are Not Equal

Eden had a hit with All Flesh Must Be Eaten, its all-zombie game, and the gimmick allowed it to go nuts covering everything under the sun so long as you could put zombies in it. There would be a Planet of the Apes version, to much less success, and a pair of licensed games (Buffy/Angel).

The problem is that these products were Minimum Viable Product in terms of playable product. You could, and many did, just use the gimmick elements to run under a functional Game. You used them as Setting Bibles. You might as well refer to Wiki pages, and as this was in the earlier days of the Internet yes you could have just put up a fan page and linked up with a few web rings to get that goal achieved.

Here, then, is where so much trash falls: the Setting Bible wearing a proper Game as a badly-fitting skinsuit like the RPG version of Buffalo Bill. From things you may never have heard of (e.g. Tinker's Dam) to games that you wonder what went down to make that happen (all of West End's post-Shatterzone prodcuts) and many in between (all Star Trek games)- all of these deserve nothing more than a web page for the Setting Bible and a Game (maybe two) to use with them.

In short, NOT VIABLE PRODUCTS.

That you rarely see them anymore ought to be the clue you need to figure out how bad they are.

Similarly, you can slot "Why did you make this?" stuff like Battlelords of the 23rd Century here- stuff that ought to be just Traveller notes. You get the idea.

With the good and the bad sorted, I will move on how to salvage what can be salvaged tomorrow.