The development of genre tropes

The transition from historical war games to war games based on fiction (fantasy in this case), also openend a can of worms, because suddenly we are not any longer operating on axioms of realism, but on genre tropes. It took around 10 years (at least that's how I understand it), for this difference to become explicitly noticed. As far as I know CoC and Marvel FASERIP were the first games to hardwire the tropes in the rules.

This is not about having magic in the world, but about having bigger than life heroes, plot immunity, etc. The whole 90ies (AD&D2, WoD) seemed to be a time of struggle, in which people tried to enforce this via best practices ("How to run a good game") instead of just focusing of designing rules according to what they wanted to achieve - at least in the mainstream. Only in the 00ies the rules were fully understood as having another potential: providing an exciting game as well enforcing a genre. Latter not really in D&D 3.X though.

Kill'em and take their theory!

Last week (Saturday, the 21st of November) I held a lecture on RPGs and RPG theory in Vienna in the MQ in the Quartier für digitale Kultur.

I chose the name Kill'em and take their theory! - RPG-Theorie zwischen Schwert und Method Acting
I had a lot of fun doing it, and in the end the 90 to 120 minutes seemed to be nearly too short.

I also showed some videos. Here are the links:

The Gamers - Clip I showed

D&D 80ies Commercial

Dark Dungeons

Initative and damage by strength and weapon type

Savage Worlds does really well by speeding things up.
But there is a way to stay as fast and take Quickness/ Agility into account without giving it such a huge advantage as in Savage Worlds: high Agility characters just receive some extra cards up front before the battle and play them instead of the dealt one whenever they want.
The only question is balance: does Agility become to strong this way?

But then you could bind melee to strength and make damage independent from Strength.

The latter is a question of genre simulation: is it really like this that a hit by Bud Spencer does more damage then one by Terence Hill? The only thing we know for sure after thinking about it for a mere second is that Bud Spencer for sure could stand a hit by Terence Hill, but this is more a Toughness thing then having anything to do with Hill's strength.
One the other hand: a hit by Godzilla should definitely hurt bud Spencer.
Maybe just have size impact damage instead of strength?

Question of the day: Does a sword more damage than a knife? And does a chainsaw do more damage again?
Actually this seems to be much more dependent on the scene than on the weapon. But here the big immersion/narativsm gap has to be worked on.

Why even try to attack the big opponent early on in the game, when you know that he will only be defeated (easily) in the last act anyways? Genre awareness can destroy immersion or even the genre story. Because the writer is not the character, while the player should be the character.