Giant robots:

Battletech
Mekton
Mecha!
Heavy Gear
Jovian Chronicles
Robot Warrior (aka Battletech for Champions - everybody was getting in to the act)
Cyberpunk2020 introduced Appleseed-like powered suits, so that gets thrown in...
What else?

It strikes me that "factions" as we know them in RPGs are a very 90s idea. There have always been cultures and interest groups of some kind in roleplaying games (Runequest's cults, for example), but their iconic, almost character class-like understanding, with selected representative quotes and all, specifically appeared with White Wolf's games.

There is a secret world that you belong to, and you have to keep yourself hidden from the unwashed masses.

Don't like:

Discreet Powered Factions/Splatbooks.

Over-sized Margins.

(Remarkably as 90's as White Wolf was, Aberrant was very dense for its size.)
90's Comic Book art/style/design (pretty much, all that.)


Do Like:
Mecha.
Simplified/condensed dice systems.

Metaplots that were kept hidden even from GMs, to be discovered piecemeal through splatbooks. (WoD, Tribe 8, Heavy Gear, 7th Sea...)

Quote from: Dirk Remmecke;548411Metaplots that were kept hidden even from GMs, to be discovered piecemeal through splatbooks. (WoD, Tribe 8, Heavy Gear, 7th Sea...)

I hated this as well. My least favorite being in Traveller: The New Era and Cyberpunk 2020/Cybergeneration.

However, I loved Mecha and Cybernetics everywhere. That was grand.

Quote from: Dirk Remmecke;548411Metaplots that were kept hidden even from GMs, to be discovered piecemeal through splatbooks. (WoD, Tribe 8, Heavy Gear, 7th Sea...)

There is a special circle of hell reserved for the people who did that.

Quote from: Dirk Remmecke;548411Metaplots that were kept hidden even from GMs, to be discovered piecemeal through splatbooks. (WoD, Tribe 8, Heavy Gear, 7th Sea...)

... and in fact never actually existed as a coherent, actual metaplot, as was the case with Vampire the Masquerade. What you had instead was a bunch of items on a list of plotpoints that should be assumed to be this or that by authors and freelancers (like "Tremere killed Saulot. Saulot is in the body of Tremere. Tremere is in the body of Goratrix. Lugoj is Tzimisce." that kind of stuff). Beyond that, the whole notion there was an actual "truth" to the setting written by WW guys to be found out through the supplement was a total smokescreen.

Really liked:
Urban Fantasy (even so some of the games I didn't really care for, I still think it's turned into a fertile ground for role playing games)
Alternate Horror games (CoC is one of my all-time favorite games, but damn if Kult and Whispering Vault were really good)

Didn't like:
Metaplots and especially long, drawn-out metaplots which tied the GM to a script and cannon events.
Darkness, darkness everywhere: Every setting seemed to be trying to out angst/goth/dark each other. After awhile it got really silly. I remember playing in an Elric! game and one of the other players and I shouted out "arrgh, this game is so dark we don't even use torches!"

Oh yeah, metaplots! Terrible things to appear in games. Especially hiding it from the GM!


As for Urban fantasy, I think the current book trend is more fertile than ever in terms of novels,  it is surprising games haven't re-jumped on the bandwagon.

Quote from: IceBlinkLuck;548428Darkness, darkness everywhere: Every setting seemed to be trying to out angst/goth/dark each other. After awhile it got really silly. I remember playing in an Elric! game and one of the other players and I shouted out "arrgh, this game is so dark we don't even use torches!"

Our go to taunt was "BLACK LIGHTS!" after a particularly bad lyric in a Type O Negative song.  

Fuck that was an awful band.

I can't remember many core game boxed sets so I guess that was quite a change from the 80s, when TSR would box everything up (and everyone else followed suit).

Quote from: Dirk Remmecke;548411Metaplots that were kept hidden even from GMs, to be discovered piecemeal through splatbooks. (WoD, Tribe 8, Heavy Gear, 7th Sea...)

The Metaplot is my #1 '90s hate, yup. #2 might be the TSR Ethics Code, or self-consciously 'Dark' games, or both.

I can't think of anything specifically '90s that I liked; it was the decade that drove me away from RPGs (slow tail-off '91-'95, abandoned but for occasional PBEM '96-'99) until the release of 3.0 D&D in 2000, from when I've gamed ever since. I don't think I bought anything between 'Traveller: The New Era' in 1994 and 3e D&D in 2000.

Quote from: IceBlinkLuck;548428Darkness, darkness everywhere: Every setting seemed to be trying to out angst/goth/dark each other. After awhile it got really silly. I remember playing in an Elric! game and one of the other players and I shouted out "arrgh, this game is so dark we don't even use torches!"

That kind of reflected the zeitgeist of much of the audience at the time though, this was the heyday of serious heavy metal after the silliness of glam rock and hair metal in the 80s. Even the cureheads were going more cure than cure. Excessive grimdark does get wearing though, the only reason it works in settings like WH40k is the mile-wide streak of campy humour blended in with it.

Quote from: The Traveller;548437That kind of reflected the zeitgeist of much of the audience at the time though, this was the heyday of serious heavy metal after the silliness of glam rock and hair metal in the 80s. Even the cureheads were going more cure than cure. Excessive grimdark does get wearing though, the only reason it works in settings like WH40k is the mile-wide streak of campy humour blended in with it.

I'm sure it did reflect the mood of the time, having lived through it, I remember all the bargain-basement vampirellas and really intense guys calling themselves "Lestat" as if their mothers really gave them that name. It still got to the point of unintentional self-parody, and this is coming from someone who owns every album by Siouxsie and the Banshees.

There's always been an element of 'dark' in the gaming industry. The first Stormbringer came out in the 80s as well as Call of Cthulhu and Warhammer FRP. It's just during the 90s it seemed like the hobby really just chased that trend to the point that it became a joke. I don't think it was any one game company's fault. I don't think anyone was pushing an agenda. I just think that they got some promising sales that indicated that gamers wanted darker worlds to play in and all the developers just went overboard chasing the trend.