Dungeon Fantasy, Action, Monster Hunters . . . now post-apocalyptic?

[RogerBW]

Originally Posted by Rev. Pee Kitty

It's worth noting that you're also assuming that the game takes place just a few years after the apocalypse, with lenses like "Who I Was Before" and such. As I said just a few posts up (#44), that's a valid genre, but it's not one that you commonly find in gaming; just about all games that bill themselves as "post-apocalypse" take place at least a few generations after The End, sometimes dozens of generations after. I'd also say it's the least well-suited to a simplified, "grab-n-go" treatment.

This is certainly a consideration I've met; I'm much more interested in the process of transformation than in the end result. GURPS Y2K was very nearly the perfect book for me, if only I could have worked out a way to have multiple apocalyptes running in parallel. I still use elements from that book in my convention games, which by their nature tend to be one-shot; I like to examine the profoundly transformational stage in a character's life as he goes from part of a society to part of a clan.

Similarly, I am more interested in the early stages of the Zombie Apocalypse than I am in what happens once everyone knows how things work. The first half of World War Z is pretty much ideal for me, whereas 28 Days Later is much less interesting; I'd rather skip forward from there to "how will we actually build a new society".

Originally Posted by Rev. Pee Kitty

I'd venture to say that if you asked enough people what kind of movie or game came to mind when they thought of "a post-apocalyptic setting," the most popular movie you'd hear would be Mad Max, and the most popular game would be Fallout. (Either that, or something involving zombies, but that's kind of its own genre.) In both of those settings, the pre-apocalyptic world is a memory at best.

The problem is that they say "Mad Max", but they mean "Mad Max 2".

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by PseudoFenton

However my point is that your apocalyptic setting may have zombies and lawless bandits being the worse thing you have to face, but in my nuclear-apocalyptic setting I may have to face down much more threatening foes!

I think that the latter approach enjoys more popularity. I happen to play a lot of post-apoc video games and watch a lot of post-apoc movies . . . and yeah, super-duper-mutants and freakish monsters are the imagination-grabbers.

Originally Posted by NorphTehDwarf

Because the post-apoc genre is really similar to the western genre. It's all about how people act when faced with extremes in a lawless setting.

That's certainly the social angle. It can coexist with the freakish angle. There's a whole nifty series of video games (Fallout) about walking the line between those two themes.

Originally Posted by Rev. Pee Kitty

The trouble here is that there's a huge difference between "the apocalypse is happening" games, "the apocalypse just happened" games, and "the apocalypse happened a while ago" games.

Yes, there is. And when you sit down with random real-world gamers as opposed to the idealistic ones posited on RPG forums, here's how it goes: "the apocalypse is happening" becomes a power game about loading vehicles with weapons and shooting other survivors or, in the hands of a realism-loving GM, a single adventure wherein just about everybody dies; "the apocalypse just happened" is "see above, but with more looting"; and "the apocalypse happened a while ago" ends up being some other genre (military, sci-fi, Western, etc.) set in a world with an interesting background that includes trappings of our world. Only the last natively supports campaigns of indefinite length.

Originally Posted by Rev. Pee Kitty

So if I were to do this, I'd want to focus on either "present apocalypse" or "after-the-fact post-apocalypse."

I think that "the apocalypse happened a while ago" is the approach that best lends itself to a simplified genre treatment, because it's essentially stable, and a campaign that has settled into a stable set of conventions is by far the easiest to write up in simple terms. The dynamism of an apocalypse in progress and the volatility of a world where the apocalypse just happened are an order more complex. Those approaches would call for a full-length Survivors book, not a simple series like Action, Dungeon Fantasy, or Monster Hunters.

Originally Posted by Greg 1

Separate books might be the way to go, rather than a series with a particular setting.

Note that a series need not offer a setting. Dungeon Fantasy has no setting at all, while Action and Monster Hunters have the nominal setting of "our world" but offer so many alternate takes on "our world" that neither has a canonical setting. The same would be true of a series about post-apocalypse gaming. "Our world after any number of disasters" wouldn't have a unique, canonical setting.

Originally Posted by PseudoFenton

But that isn't producing another grab-and-go pre-built series like DF, Action and MH though, which is what this thread is trying to guess/discuss.

After working for SJ Games for almost 17 years, and being involved in discussions of GURPS Survivors off and on the whole time, it's quite clear that there's no auctorial will to produce a full-length genre book (a book I wanted, by the way . . . please don't read things otherwise) that discusses all possible disasters and all power levels in all three major modes: "the apocalypse is happening, "the apocalypse just happened," and "the apocalypse happened a while ago." Nobody wants to write that book. Thus, a short series in the vein of Action, Dungeon Fantasy, or Monster Hunters is its last hope.

Originally Posted by Rev. Pee Kitty

It's worth noting that you're also assuming that the game takes place just a few years after the apocalypse, with lenses like "Who I Was Before" and such.

Yeah – and I don't think that's the same genre as "post-apocalypse," and I believe it's the one least amenable to long-term campaigning in mini-genre-series format.

Originally Posted by RogerBW

I'm much more interested in the process of transformation than in the end result.

I'd rather skip forward from there to "how will we actually build a new society".

Unfortunately for fans of transformation and rebuilding, neither has the star power to compete with giant super-mutants, zombie hordes, underground A-bomb-worshipping cults, and action girls.

Originally Posted by RogerBW

The problem is that they say "Mad Max", but they mean "Mad Max 2".

That really isn't a problem – it's just an issue of series identification. When people say "Mad Max," they mean "the entire fictional series wherein Mel Gibson plays Mad Max Rockatansky" and not the film titled Mad Max, just as when they say "Star Wars," they mean "the entire series of movies and spinoff books rather than just the movie subtitled A New Hope. And for that matter, "Fallout" means the entire series of games (with emphasis on Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas), and not just the original Fallout from way back when.

I do think that a successful series would have to draw on what I would call "fun" influences. Were it mine to write, I would be influenced by movies like The Road Warrior and The Blood of Heroes, comics like Tank Girl and The Walking Dead, and video games like the Fallout series and to some extent Half-Life and even Brink. I would also give honorable mentions to "crap-world" settings like that of the movie Soldier and game Borderlands, which are counted out of post-apocalypse fiction on a technicality; all the tropes are in place. With apologies to their fans, I think that Twilight: 2000-style stuff isn't interesting enough to garner good sales in 2011, and that films like The Day After are downright dire and unmarketable to gamers.

A really brief summary is that GURPS Post-Apocalypse isn't quite the same thing as GURPS Survivors and definitely isn't the same thing as GURPS Survivalism. And I believe I've listed the three concepts here in roughly descending order by reasonable sales expectations in the current market.

[PseudoFenton]

Originally Posted by Kromm

all possible disasters and all power levels in all three major modes: "the apocalypse is happening, "the apocalypse just happened," and "the apocalypse happened a while ago." Nobody wants to write that book.

Yeah, its feasible... but a massive headache to produce, I figure it'll be easier to do it in smaller instalments each being a treatment to a different aspect... but you'd still have to do much of the heavy lifting right off the bat, and you'd also get reduced sales from the ones that didn't appeal as much.
Alas, it is but a dream.

Unfortunately for fans of transformation and rebuilding, neither has the star power to compete with giant super-mutants, zombie hordes, underground A-bomb-worshipping cults, and action girls.

Sadly true, although I'd love to (and no doubt will run my own at one point) play a "rebuild society and survive its fall" game... giant mutants and action girls do have a certain appeal, it may be to appeal to the lowest common denominator, but gun-slinging gals blasting chunks out of oversized-glowing-saber-raccoons are too cool not to enjoy occasionally. (Although it'll rot your brains and your teeth if you have too much!)

[Anders]

*cough*ReignofSteel*cough*

[Kromm]

Originally Posted by Asta Kask

*cough*ReignofSteel*cough*

A classic example of a stable, after-the-apocalypse setting with gonzo monsters and fighting. Quite seriously: The apocalypse is over and humanity lost. It isn't just over, either . . . it's been over for long enough for things to fall into patterns. And the fact that the killer robots aren't mutated or zombified doesn't take away from the fact that they're killer robots from the future ahhhhhh! You can play the setting straight, but it sure isn't about transformation and rebuilding. It's about fighting the killer robots.

[PK]

Originally Posted by PseudoFenton

But that isn't producing another grab-and-go pre-built series like DF, Action and MH though, which is what this thread is trying to guess/discuss.

QFT, by the way. Let's respect the OP and this thread by remembering its purpose: To discuss potential/future worked genre treatments in the vein of DF, Action, and MH. That means that any such treatment:

1. Has to tackle a single sub-genre. A full genre (e.g., "fantasy," "survivalism") is too broad a topic for a grab-n-go, worked-genre series. Put simply, you can't have a worked-genre series that covers both "apocalyptic gaming" and "after-the-fact post-apocalyptic gaming" -- any more than you can have one that handles both "dungeon fantasy" and "courtly intrigue fantasy."

2. Has to be amenable to a simple, fun-before-detail approach. So, nothing that demands ultra-realistic contagion rules or a reworking of food in GURPS to calculate calories required per day. This has traditionally meant "cinematic gaming," if only because that is an easier mode for handwaving such details away -- but I think a worked-genre can handle non-cinematic play as well, just not ultra-detailed play. So, "a gritty game in which PCs explore the ruins of what used to be civilization, raid bandit camps, and avoid radiation" is doable, but "a gritty game in which PCs manage all the needs of a local community, track crops and harvest cycles, and deal with the infected" is too much detail. (It also lacks much general appeal, but that's #4.)

3. Has to support long-term gaming, not just one-shots or limited runs. This is simply a business requirement -- we want to generate a series with lasting appeal, so we can keep making more books in the series. This has worked great for DF, less so for Action and MH . . . but if we released a worked-genre series on (e.g.) "apocalypse now gaming" -- a genre which, by definition, can only support one adventure before it moves into the entirely different "immediate post-apocalyptic" genre -- we'd be giving up even the chance of long-term "GURPS Post-Apoc" gaming groups forming.

4. Has to have broad appeal. These series are designed to get new gamers into GURPS. To call back to #1 for a moment, I believe that there are definitely existing GURPS players who'd prefer courtly intrigue to dungeon delving -- but considering gamers as a whole, the latter is a far more popular genre. Similarly, given a choice between making a series inspired by Fallout (one of the most popular post-apoc video game series of all time) or The Road (one of the most critically acclaimed post-apoc novels of all time), I'll choose the former over the latter without hesitation.

[PK]

Originally Posted by The Cardinal

with 3-4 PDFs there would enough room for both Gamma World gonzo and Twilight2000 grittiness:

Vol. 1-3 would cover 250 pts. heroes with access to mutant powers and weird tech.
Vol. 4 would contain 150 pts. versions of the templates, and discussions about the more "down-to-earth" grittiness of shelter, disease, food, and the threat of your hungry/mean/lazy/freezing/frightened/evil/normal fellow man...

It's worth noting that MH took that approach. MH1 had the high-end heroes, and MH4 has the lower-end versions (usable either as low-powered PCs or as sidekicks for the high-powered ones). And MH4 sold horribly in comparison to the first three books.

So with the benefit of that hindsight, were I doing a worked-genre series now -- one that I wanted to cover everything from gritty and low-powered to gonzo and high-powered -- I'd default to "low-powered" (which would probably still mean 150 points or so) and offer lenses for powering-up. That way, it's all in one book.

Of course, what I wouldn't do would be to try and capture both Twilight 2000 ("we all managed to survive a war, now let's rebuild") and Fallout/Gamma World ("long ago, there was another civilization, but that's all history now") in the same series. As I've said, "immediate post-apoc" (the war just happened and now we have to rebuild the world) and "after-the-fact post-apoc" (the war happened long ago and everyone accepts that this is the new world) are radically different genres. So again, were I writing such a series, I'd write for the latter, but design it to work for gritty or gonzo games -- Fallout is a great example of walking the line between the two, and it's hopefully clear how easy it is to play a "GURPS Fallout" game as gritter or more gonzo with just a few changes.

[sir_pudding]

Originally Posted by Rev. Pee Kitty

It's worth noting that MH took that approach. MH1 had the high-end heroes, and MH4 has the lower-end versions (usable either as low-powered PCs or as sidekicks for the high-powered ones). And MH4 sold horribly in comparison to the first three books.

That's too bad, I rather like the way MH was organized. I wonder if that's because there's less crunch in Sidekicks and crunch sells. At a guess whatever book had the rules for RPM and the expanded Wildcards would have sold best, regardless. You should have just hinted at them in the first three and then published both as an Appendix to Sidekicks. :)

[Not another shrubbery]

Originally Posted by sir_pudding

That's too bad, I rather like the way MH was organized. I wonder if that's because there's less crunch in Sidekicks and crunch sells. At a guess whatever book had the rules for RPM and the expanded Wildcards would have sold best, regardless. You should have just hinted at them in the first three and then published both as an Appendix to Sidekicks. :)

It could have been a timing issue, or just a drop off in interest in the series. I wonder what would have happened if Sidekicks-level adventuring was the first entry, with the supplements ratcheting up the power level?

[Kromm]

Book n+1 of a series generally sells less strongly than books 1 through n. There are inevitably exceptions, but that's the overall trend. I wouldn't read very much into it. The interesting cases aren't the later books that don't sell as well but the later books that sell unusually well and break the pattern. Those tell me "Publish more stuff like this!"