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| Day 6 - Flavor. I'm predisposed to dislike the flavour of today's entry due to the use of the American-English spelling of the word in the graphic. |
There are certain flavours of roleplaying games that draw me in. Science-fiction (of the harder variety), conspiracy, espionage, noir and modern-day horror tend to attract me. Fantasy less so, although I can't seem to resist reading OSR campaigns and scenarios and even some of the D&D5e ones. However, I suspect that Curse of Strahd and Ghosts of Saltmarsh are somewhat atypical for D&D. I do so want to get into Eberron as the idea of noir D&D floats my boat.
When I talk about hard-SF, I'm not always meaning that it's mostly technology that we could envisage, more that it is internally consistent and doesn't stretch credulity too much. Some degree of magitech is fine, as it follows Clarke's law.
I don't like horror games for shock and gore; I prefer the revealing of secrets, dark plans and fear. I don't mind the odds being stacked against the characters, but I do mind some of the tropes from Call of Cthulhu, especially convention Call of Cthulhu. There should always be a way - at some level - to solve the mystery or at least have some choices that seem meaningful. I do enjoy aspects where reality is no longer solid; the Yellow King, the Esoterrorists and Delta Green all lean into this. I quite like the idea of fairy tales, and dream-reality but I've never found a game that nails that genre for me.
I'm still searching for that perfect espionage game; Cold Shadows is close, but the system sucks and the rulebook suffered from needed a proper edit to make it tight. I keep on meaning to hack it with Wordplay/Tripod, although I have a sneaky feeling that there could be a deeply satisfying campaign game out there if you used the Forged in the Dark engine.
Then again, I loved running Old-School Essentials recently, so there's always space for a decent vanilla flavour too.
6 August 2021 (Belatedly)
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