I know I’ve been away for awhile and I’ll get to why in a later post. I’ve been working on lots of stuff behind the scenes. But, I'm posting here because I have a thought that's been stuck in my head for the past few days that I wanted to talk about.
Light. Hope. Optimism.
Now, I'm a fan of OSR-type games and vintage RPGs. I love me some White Box and those games can be pretty grim. Player character death is almost a forgone conclusion and the monsters, traps, and dungeon environment at large can kill you with little more than a cry of "Save or Die." There's nothing wrong with this style of play. I think the essence of this ethos is captured in one of my favorite new games: Shadowdark.
But it's not just limited to vintage games. Old School D&D is grim in that respect, but even 5e isn't inherently optimistic. It's high-powered, yes - but that's not the same thing. When I look at the RPGs out there, I see over and over again, settings without a lot of optimism. D&D, Shadowrun, Traveller, and World of Darkness. Heck, in World of Darkness its in the title of the product line!
Why don't we have more inherently optimistic RPGs? Games that have a bright (for lack of a better term) vibe?
As a kid, I played a lot of video games and many of the RPGs I played are games I recall as inherently bright, even cheery. Final Fantasy 4, Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, and Fable are all examples of what I'm talking about.
I like to think I captured that vibe with The Hero's Journey, Second Edition and hope to bring more games with a similar inherent optimism to the market in the future. Halfjinx is one of them, but I've got others in the pipe too that I can't go into detail at the moment.
I guess what I'm getting at is this: Am I missing something here? Am I the only one who enjoys a game where hope is a present, driving force? Where the players take on the roles of honest-to-goodness heroes? I mean, I was a teenager in the 1990s, so I get the whole edge lord thing even if it never appealed to me personally. But for me, personally, hope can be such a hard thing to find in the real world and an act of heroism can easily fall short in the face of a harsh world so why would I want to spend time playing in a world like that? Why not choose to do the right thing and see your efforts make a real difference in your elf games when that is so often not the case in real life?
Anyway, this has been eating at me for days and I just kinda wanted to rant about it. I guess what I'm getting at is that hope can feel like a fool's errand in our world, but both at the table and in our daily lives I think it's always worth it.
As I’ve said before, The Heroe Journey 2e is my favorite game. But games like THJ 2e, Orange Sky Stories, Beyond the Wall, and recently the adorable “Forgotten Ballad” by Eric Bloat, I’ll prep them and get them ready…no one shows. No one wants a game of hope.
I recently started running “The One Ring 2e” and I *am* excited about it. But to be honest, I’m running it because no one will play a hopeful game like THJ2e. I’m honestly using the brand power of LOTR to carry the game that would have been THJ2e.
But if I put down “Mork Borg” or “Dungeon Crawl Classics”, it will fill up in a day and I won’t even be able to accommodate all the players.
I don’t know why my favorite genre of games doesn’t capture interest. I love grimdark too, but it seems everyone else’s favorite.