Is there any genre or theme that the TTRPG medium does not work for?

aramis erak said:

No, they're not, but when one does historical fiction in an interactive medium, they're automatically what it changes into, one, the other, or both.

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Umbran said:

Sure. Let's think of one: Low stakes mundane drama.

I'm thinking Driving Miss Daisy. Or Leaving Las Vegas. Or Little House on the Prairie. Basically, just daily unremarkable life, "Papers & Paychecks, the RPG".

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Faolyn said:

I've actually seen a few sports-related RPGs in Itch bundles I've bought. Like, with literal rules for playing the sport, not just using the sport as a way to tie the players together. I saw a basketball one and one around a sci-fi sport. I haven't kept any of them because I'm not interested in that genre, and I have no idea how well they would play, but sports RPGs definitely do exist.

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Committed Hero said:

Drama System or Primetime Adventures.

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Reynard said:

There is no reason you could not do sports drama as a TTRPG, though. It should actually work pretty well, in fact, with built in "tactical" situations and the sport taking place of what would typically be combat.

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Aldarc said:

I think that it would be fun with PbtA, which is not a tactical sort of game. The Moves system would work well for sports moves and complications in the sportsball game. But this would cater more towards sports as drama, both on and off the field/court.

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Bedrockgames said:

That would almost be a good thread on its own. I do think there are applications, but I also don't know how good RPGs are in general for edutainment. Where I think they can be helpful is 1) Sparking Interest in history or a particular historical topic (my interest in Rome started with the green book for 2E for instance), 2) Encouraging players and GMs to do research for their characters, the campaign and the setting. But one thing you quickly find out if you do historical campaigns, the questions historians are interested in, are often not the questions GMs are looking to answer when setting up a history campaign. One thing I always find helpful when I am running historical settings: start with the resources you know you have and build around that (i.e. if you have the floor plans of a particular historical building, use that in your campaign, that is ten times easier then deciding you want something first then finding the resources on it)

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Committed Hero said:

Drama System or Primetime Adventures.

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Thomas Shey said:

There's no reason you couldn't do something with Cortex in that regard too, far as it goes, though you'd have to decide what dice were there to do in that particular case.

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Umbran said:

You both are missing the point. The original question is not "can you, technically speaking, write an engine for such a game." The question is whether the medium, in general, is GOOD for the genre.

Like, technically you can tap dance on foam rubber, but is isn't a great medium for the dance style.

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Bedrockgames said:

I think some of this is going


There is a solution to this. I made a counter terrorism RPG once and I was able to go to the Boston FBI office and talk with someone who is there for anyone in media (thankfully they considered RPGs media in that case). He explained to me how evidence was gathered in an investigation, how FBI teams were put together. It actually wasn't that hard to make gamble. An FBI team is about the size of an adventuring party, and the evidence thing was easily handled by having evidence gather teams and analysis teams be resources the players can access (so the players don't necessarily comb the scene for clues, though an invidual character might for whatever reason, but rather call in a forensics team----and I just gave the teams different ratings which translated into a dice pool they rolled at the scene). In a lot of ways this works better because the players can focus more on investigation, interviewing, etc than on analyzing blood samples.

That said you often have to juice up or make gameable any genre. Genres based on real life you may want to add more chases with suspects, more harrowing dangers, etc. But I think true crime could be workable (plus it is very easy as the GM can literally rip from the headlines)

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