@sbszine I struggle with gonzo. If a world doesn't make sense then I don't get a feel for it and I don't feel able to improvise around the themes/underlying logic.
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@Taskerland [ponders]
I think the first RPG that got me reading was Gangbusters, which got me to try Chandler, Hammett and Gardner ... which then led to ... well, to me having this image as my Mastodon image thingy.
Then hundreds of other RPGs got me to read thousands of other things. 😮
Fantasy games generally (not any specific game) did ruin any prospect of fantasy-novel reading for me, for sure.
Conversely, I look at a lot of OSR stuff and I a) don't think the worlds are more interesting than books, and b) I don't think they're as interesting as those old D&D modules were at the time.
A lot of OSR modules have settings that feel self-consciously derivative while also being so optimised for play that they don't feel real and so are not evocative for me, but then I know that I do tend to run worlds rather than games and OSR stuff is very gamey.
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@Taskerland The stuff I love is very gamey but it's very in-character-diegetic-gamey, which is something the OSR never seems interested in (and in fact seems overtly suspicious of).
The gameyness is interesting as something like Troika is pure 'lol random' held in place by procedural mechanics.
I would rather run Fatal than Troika because Fatal has a world (dogfuck rapeworld admittedly) while Troika has tables.
Very much a me-and-my-brain thing. Mileages vary, obviously.
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@Taskerland I found Troika had enough of a world to latch onto when my group played it. It's one of those things where there is a lot of drive by lore in the class descriptions etc. The negative for me is that Troika modules (like all NSR) tend to be linear / railroady with the tables as a gloss over that. But the game itself is good I think, and if you don't like the system it's still a fine gonzo setting for B/X.
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@sbszine I struggle with gonzo. If a world doesn't make sense then I don't get a feel for it and I don't feel able to improvise around the themes/underlying logic.
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@Taskerland @sbszine I can't handle gonzo when it has nothing to say. Like, gonzo for gonzo's sake just feels like a muddle of dreamlike vibes, there's nowhere to plant my feet.
Gonzo with a point, I can sink my teeth into, because the point becomes the gravitational core.