aramis erak
Legend
Are You Mental? ... to a certain degree. (DriveThruRPG )Are there any TTRPGs that play around in the medium of abstraction or absurdity?
Troika is definitely to the absurdist level.
So also Tales from the Floating Vagabond and Paranoia.
Different forms of absurdism.
But there are sseveral RPGs about martial arts as sports, including White Wolf's Streetfighter: The Storytelling Game..... and someone wrote Sumo rules for D&D back in the 80's.Oh yeah I forgot: Sports the RPG.
Nobody's roleplaying the Superbowl.
Jousting is also a sport, and it's prominent in King Arthur Pendragon....
Plus, there are some about sports. Not a lot, but a few.
Uhm, no. It's a an authorial and presentation style for drama, and operetta and opera are progressively more narrow subsets of it; Les Miserables the book is the same story, but no singing, as the musicals (technically Opera) both stage and screen delivered entirely in song and dance. In Strange New Worlds season 2, there's a musical episode, Subspace Rhapsody, it's still Star Trek and thus Space Opera, through and through... But technically not opera nor operetto as there's significant spoken dialogue.Let me clarify: the musical is a genre, not a medium.
BTVS Once More With Feeling is very much still a horror episode, and perhaps even more so than most episodes, since it's not really the typical action adventure episode. ANd it's a morality play, which is also not a genre, but a modality of plot that is often used in speculative fiction to make reflections on reality...
And Wagner's der Gotterdammerung is musical, but is mythic fantasy by genre; just shy of a literal faerie tale. Similar for Cats, which is anthropomorphic fantasia...
The various versions of Phantom of the Opera, they all basically tell the same story, in different ways. Ken Burns' staging is Operetta, so most dialogue is basically rhythmically spoken, but breaks into song repeatedly; Andrew Lloyd Webber's version is a full on opera, and the story for both is nigh on identical, but the tone and the amount of musicality change. And, of course, the original novel is utterly non-musical, but yet the same story.
Schoolhouse Rock is a musical as well, in the genre of fantasia; portions of the Muppet show also are musical, but the show itself, both runs, are by genre, behind the scenes in the same way as Glee or Hanna Montana.
Let's see... Man of La Mancha, Camelot, Robin Hood: Men in Tights: Historical fantasy, and in Camelot, also into alternate history. In the case of Man of La Mancha, it's indeed the same story as the novel, but told through song. And Sir Christopher Lee did a whole album inspired by it, including a metal cover of I, Don Quixote! Done as a duet, as it should be, with a third person sprechstimme for certain lines - dead true to the musical.
And then, there's Jesus Christ, Superstar.... for some, it's blasphemy, for others, an interesting presentation of the Passion, for others still, fuel for nightmares.
Oh, and we mustn't forget Spamalot... Monty Python & the Holy Grail redone as an operetta. Still comedic semi-medieval fantasy/alt-history.
That said, there are a pair of classic forms for movie musicals that are often considered genres of their own, the "Lets put on a show" musicals (I forget the film analysis term), and the Busby Berkley style (which is to ballet as operetta is to opera...). Busby style involves huge dance numbers viewed from afar with intricate patterns, and often, at least one number in a pool. (I'm not kidding.) The Busby style is severely unrealistic, but it's not even a majority of the 40's/50's/60's musicals.
Across those, we've got a dozen musical styles. Oh, and do note, many times, a revival of a musical will change the musical style... the same melody, the same story, but different instrumentation.