To be fair, there are a lot of people picking up the slack for D&D, but you don't hear about them for the same reason you don't hear about all the small time authors writing the next great original novel... until they actually get discovered spending money on a lot of promotion just isn't worth the cost.

Everything has its seasons and D&D/rpgs have had a rather extended summer. I also feel a bit that the seasonal conditions for D&D and Urban Fantasy are a bit out of phase in terms of their seasons in the same way that the public seems more drawn to sci-fi when the future looks bright, and towards heroic fantasy when the future looks more uncertain.

Urban Fantasy, the idea that there is a secret world of magic and that threatens the normal one most thrives when the audience feels safe enough in their lives to imagine danger in the shadows (it's no accident the genre exploded in the 90's) and the pretend of being a victim.

I don't think it's an accident either that D&D's heydays line up with periods of perceived threat (cold war tensions + the Carter economy, 9/11, covid+malaise+invasion) and D&D heroes often being played as those with the power and skill to kick down the doors of the enemy.

D&D is only faltering now because those in charge want to bend it away from the seasonal concerns it naturally caters to and make it into propaganda declaring seeking respite from the worries of the season to be hate speech.

It's why my default approach for something in the Urban Fantasy adjacent genre these days would be 'Hunters of The Damned'... exceptional heroes finding and kicking in the doors of enemies that live in the shadows and prey upon ordinary folks and corrupt those in authority.

"Play the monster" is appealing when times are easy. "Stop the monsters" is the zeitgeist of the day.

Yeah, I've noticed that monster hunting is in vogue. Monster of the Week, Night's Black Agents, Stokerverse, Chill... Call of Cthulhu dominates 99% of the genre tho so they can only do so much.

The seasonal zeitgeist makes it really frustrating because I constantly feel like I got left behind. Like, There's been precisely zero conspiracy thriller rpgs released in the last decade to my knowledge, which is weird because cryptids are more popular than they've ever been, the government has publicly acknowledged UFOs, the WEF is openly trying to conquer Earth, Resident Alien is airing on Syfy, and the X-Files is getting a reboot.

With urban fantasy I'm more interested in the fantasy part, like Harry Potter. Not horror or evil conspiracies or post-modern neo-marxist emogoth bullshit. D&D modern, urban arcana, basically. I'm completely burnt out on medieval fantasy. Moving it from Middle Earth to Modern Earth feels like the only way to keep my eyes from glazing over. I'm so unhappy that WotC cancelled d20 Modern because they were the only publisher with the clout to market it.

Quote from: yosemitemike on May 13, 2024, 10:59:31 AMI would guess that, since WoD/CoD is mostly moribund now, people don't have the motivation to publish that WoD Heartbreaker that they did when it was big.

All except #OnyxPath themselves, who are working on a new line called #CurseBorne.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 13, 2024, 07:14:33 PMThere's been precisely zero conspiracy thriller rpgs released in the last decade to my knowledge, which is weird because cryptids are more popular than they've ever been, the government has publicly acknowledged UFOs, the WEF is openly trying to conquer Earth, Resident Alien is airing on Syfy, and the X-Files is getting a reboot.

That's entirely due to the industry being dominated by left wing ideologues who view any 'conspiracy theories' as an alt-right thing despite having plenty of their own.

Quote from: Anon Adderlan on May 14, 2024, 03:23:35 AM

Quote from: yosemitemike on May 13, 2024, 10:59:31 AMI would guess that, since WoD/CoD is mostly moribund now, people don't have the motivation to publish that WoD Heartbreaker that they did when it was big.

All except #OnyxPath themselves, who are working on a new line called #CurseBorne.

They still suck at actual game design tho and none of the teasers explain what the fuck curseborn is. I'll take Urban Shadows over that shit any day of the week.

Quote

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 13, 2024, 07:14:33 PMThere's been precisely zero conspiracy thriller rpgs released in the last decade to my knowledge, which is weird because cryptids are more popular than they've ever been, the government has publicly acknowledged UFOs, the WEF is openly trying to conquer Earth, Resident Alien is airing on Syfy, and the X-Files is getting a reboot.

That's entirely due to the industry being dominated by left wing ideologues who view any 'conspiracy theories' as an alt-right thing despite having plenty of their own.

The old conspiracy theories were political for their day (there's a documentary book called Necronomicon is something that documents the 60s–90s conspiracy craze and it's wild!), but now come across as quaint and inoffensive for the most part. Roswell grays, Satanic cults, New World Order, cryptids, psychic powers...

I miss that

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 13, 2024, 11:34:57 AM

Quote from: yosemitemike on May 13, 2024, 10:59:31 AMI would guess that, since WoD/CoD is mostly moribund now, people don't have the motivation to publish that WoD Heartbreaker that they did when it was big.  WoD-alikes just aren't really the thing any more.  A company called Fen Orc makes a series of Black Hack hacks along these lines but I don't know much about them.  They have some silver and electrum sellers so they have gotten some traction anyway.

I'm not looking for a heartbreaker, I'm looking for games in the urban fantasy genre. I don't actually like WoD/CoD because they're bad microfiction pretending to be games, which the fans don't actually play anyway.

Urban fantasy is still a thriving literary genre. It's oversaturated. I'm really surprised there's zero spillover into ttrpgs.

Do you mean that the most recent versions of WoD games don't get play, or that the old WoD games don't get played much now? I might accept either of those, but in the 90s and perhaps a little after that, the original WoD games were heavily played in several areas I lived.

Quote from: HappyDaze on May 14, 2024, 11:02:37 AM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 13, 2024, 11:34:57 AM

Quote from: yosemitemike on May 13, 2024, 10:59:31 AMI would guess that, since WoD/CoD is mostly moribund now, people don't have the motivation to publish that WoD Heartbreaker that they did when it was big.  WoD-alikes just aren't really the thing any more.  A company called Fen Orc makes a series of Black Hack hacks along these lines but I don't know much about them.  They have some silver and electrum sellers so they have gotten some traction anyway.

I'm not looking for a heartbreaker, I'm looking for games in the urban fantasy genre. I don't actually like WoD/CoD because they're bad microfiction pretending to be games, which the fans don't actually play anyway.

Urban fantasy is still a thriving literary genre. It's oversaturated. I'm really surprised there's zero spillover into ttrpgs.

Do you mean that the most recent versions of WoD games don't get play, or that the old WoD games don't get played much now? I might accept either of those, but in the 90s and perhaps a little after that, the original WoD games were heavily played in several areas I lived.

Check out Frank Trollman's Anatomy of Failed Design series to see what I mean. He writes several articles where he explains that the rules are unplayable as written and the groups who "played" ignored the rules anyway in favor of fiat or whatever.

This even extended to the CoD groups. They used fiat rather than even reading the rules. This notably resulted in things like groups not knowing basic facts about CoD vamps, like that they can identify other vamps on sight. I vaguely remember arguing with bad faith critics about it in the 2000s.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 14, 2024, 12:54:50 PM

Quote from: HappyDaze on May 14, 2024, 11:02:37 AM

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 13, 2024, 11:34:57 AM

Quote from: yosemitemike on May 13, 2024, 10:59:31 AMI would guess that, since WoD/CoD is mostly moribund now, people don't have the motivation to publish that WoD Heartbreaker that they did when it was big.  WoD-alikes just aren't really the thing any more.  A company called Fen Orc makes a series of Black Hack hacks along these lines but I don't know much about them.  They have some silver and electrum sellers so they have gotten some traction anyway.

I'm not looking for a heartbreaker, I'm looking for games in the urban fantasy genre. I don't actually like WoD/CoD because they're bad microfiction pretending to be games, which the fans don't actually play anyway.

Urban fantasy is still a thriving literary genre. It's oversaturated. I'm really surprised there's zero spillover into ttrpgs.

Do you mean that the most recent versions of WoD games don't get play, or that the old WoD games don't get played much now? I might accept either of those, but in the 90s and perhaps a little after that, the original WoD games were heavily played in several areas I lived.

Check out Frank Trollman's Anatomy of Failed Design series to see what I mean. He writes several articles where he explains that the rules are unplayable as written and the groups who "played" ignored the rules anyway in favor of fiat or whatever.

This even extended to the CoD groups. They used fiat rather than even reading the rules. This notably resulted in things like groups not knowing basic facts about CoD vamps, like that they can identify other vamps on sight. I vaguely remember arguing with bad faith critics about it in the 2000s.

I can provide a bit of a testimonial on that, since I was a teenager when the whole Goth-Techno Vampire Kung Fu peaked in the early 00s. Everybody I know who liked roleplaying bought the VTM books. Everybody read them. Everybody was very excited about the possibilities. We probably "started" 50 VTM/Werewolf campaigns, but I don't think we ever strung more than two consecutive sessions together, and there was a distinct sense of no one really "getting" how the rules were supposed to work.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on May 14, 2024, 12:54:50 PMCheck out Frank Trollman's Anatomy of Failed Design series to see what I mean. He writes several articles where he explains that the rules are unplayable as written and the groups who "played" ignored the rules anyway in favor of fiat or whatever.

This even extended to the CoD groups. They used fiat rather than even reading the rules. This notably resulted in things like groups not knowing basic facts about CoD vamps, like that they can identify other vamps on sight. I vaguely remember arguing with bad faith critics about it in the 2000s.

I gave up trying to run WoD by the rules in the book after a handful of sessions.  I spent a lot of the 90s hand-waving it. I ran 6 or 7 campaigns of various flavors of WoD.  I never actually ran it in the sense of using the rules as written.

I played in a kitchen sink CoD campaign for a while.  I think I'm the only one who actually read any of the rules.  The person playing the vampire and the GM were both surprised to hear that celerity doesn't give extra actions in this version.  I'm not sure how they could be surprised by this except that they just didn't look at the rules for the discipline at all and just assumed it worked like it had in Masquerade.

Quote from: yosemitemike on May 16, 2024, 05:49:10 AMI gave up trying to run WoD by the rules in the book after a handful of sessions.  I spent a lot of the 90s hand-waving it. I ran 6 or 7 campaigns of various flavors of WoD.  I never actually ran it in the sense of using the rules as written.

What part was the problem? I DMed it for a session and played a session. Seemed like an actually fairly simple system? Aberrant is what I DMed the most with a brief foray into Aeon/Trinity.

On all honesty the system is so simple I suspect that is why they pad so much of it out with prose pretending to be worldbuilding.

The chargen instructions though for several were a mess. It seemed like the real instructions were on one page that didnt even look like instructions. Least the editions I had.

But part for the course with lazy WW writers.

Quote from: Omega on May 16, 2024, 05:57:49 AMWhat part was the problem? I DMed it for a session and played a session. Seemed like an actually fairly simple system?

I suppose.  If you ignored most of the subsystems which was most of the game.  Every storyteller game I have run, which is 8-9 of them now, was a pile of disjointed subsystems that didn't really fit together.  I would guess that your GM ignored most of that which was most of the actual rules.  The core resolution mechanic was a but clunky but it worked.  The problem was the rest of it.

All my stuff except for Werewolf:Wild West are in storage. Since it seems to be a complete game I'll have a look through. Got it from a friend who got it from the owner of Viking Leathers way back.

Exactly.

When you confront the fans about it, they get irrationally defensive. I once tried suggesting to CoD fans to use point buy a la GURPS (or more specifically Everlasting) to keep splats balanced against each other for mixed splat play, and they told me that's bad because having good crossover rules would ruin the distinct vibes each splat is going for. Oh, and they admit they've never played any games other than CoD. They completely refuse to acknowledge any constructive criticism of the rules and settings.

For example, power creep is a huge problem with the splats. IIRC a starting vampire or werewolf with the right build can lift a car for a few seconds, while a starting geist can telekinetically lift all the the cars on a street. Another example is the Coils of the Dragon are basically worthless. They either give weak highly situational benefits or provide "solutions" to "problems" that are already easily avoidable.

I get that CoD has gotten tons of bad faith criticism ever since it first released. It still gets irrational hate from butthurt WoD fans, even though it's been cancelled for years and has fallen into such obscurity that new fans all go into WoD and are only aware of CoD by its reputation as "that sucky bad game with no lore" (this is completely wrong btw). But not all the criticism was bad faith.

I get that Justin Achilli wanted the vampires to be depowered to the point where vampire hunters are a credible threat, but a better way to accomplish that would've been to have vampires get worse curses as their powers increased such that vampire hunters could take advantage of to compensate for being only human. Not to mention that you could make the vampire hunters into outright superheroes to compensate. I don't care that would go against the "vibe," that emo goth vibe is not why I'm interested in urban fantasy.

This is a roleplaying game, not limited by a tv budget. I want the vampires to be supervillains. I want the Ordo Dracul to have drugs that can let vampires walk in sunlight for hours at a time, not let them survive a few seconds longer against dawn light specifically. Make it costly to manufacture or inflict some other drawback for the sake of game balance, I guess, but make it worth spending XP on.

Of course that's not gonna happen because the game is cancelled, and I don't expect Curseborn to be any good. God, it sucks to be an urban fantasy fan in the tabletop scene. d20 Urban Arcana has been dead since 2008 and nobody has tried to recapture its setting.

White Wolf and their sidelines all had problems. Be it lazy writing to power creep, to just flat out trolling the players.