I like games and campaigns that have grit, a feeling of darkness, despair, and a sense of life being hard. Modern games lean into the cute so much that it is hard to convince people the world isn't some happy, colorful place filled with anime monsters that look like Pookie dolls from carnivals. Even the Lost Omens books fight you at this, as they are filled with happy, colorful, overly clean, and hopeful art that looks like vendor stalls at a Burning Man festival.
No, thank you. Please reduce the saturation of these colors to 10% in Photoshop and add a few grunge layers. You are the rule books and have no right to be happy or tell me to be the same. Adventurers will find poverty when they head into a town; most everyone is broke, there is nothing good for sale, and all those smiling pictures of happy people in the rulebook are lies.
The imagery of the books gives me the feeling everyone is wealthy, able to afford the best clothes dyed in the richest hues, with an abundance of food on the table, and a fat, lazy, prosperous society of 'have it all.'
In a way, it feels overly Disney.
Non-threatening, safe, too comforting, happy, and colorful, and there is little need to go adventuring outside these rich, opulent, no-problems, have-it-all places of civilization.
This society is ripe for the pickings. It is fat, lazy, and too rich to care about defending itself. This is a world ready for a hard fall down the civilizational ladder.
Evil, and the concept of evil, exists. Every society can be torn down. Just read the news. Peace and happiness are not "natural states" in nature. Land that is not defended is taken and ruled by savagery.
Wealthy, unprotected civilizations are seen as piles of wealth to plunder by the barbarian hordes. These days, they ride in on pickup trucks and take over their peaceful neighbors.
Tens of thousands of years of history don't lie. Nor does the world outside our window.
I get it; people play this game to escape the real world. Still, too happy a game world gets to be an opiate, a false place, and it feels fake and unreal. There is no compelling story, fight, or struggle, and nothing to work toward.
The Highhelm book is endemic in its use of pictures of happy, smiling dwarves, complete with a fourth-wall-breaking selfie on the cover. When I think of dwarves, I want a grittier, more challenging life. The cover tells me very little, and some of the fantastic interior pictures in this book would have made better covers. I would not mind this picture inside the book as the book between the cover and the pages, but when I think of a cover of a book, I reach for when I think of dwarves; this isn't the cover I would go for.
I get what they were going for on the cover of this book; it is a comparison between what you thought dwarves 'were' versus what they 'are' in this setting. You may have thought dwarves were giant dour stone heads carved into mountains, but look again! They are just like you. I get it thematically; this is the message you wanted to send, and the book delivers that message. The cover isn't misleading the book's content. But it doesn't speak to me.
But there don't seem to be many "great enemies" of this civilization. Why do they need to be in fortresses? Why do they need to mine? I am still reading the book, but from the art, these dwarves don't seem to be locked in an eternal battle with anything for survival - at least from the art.
I want drama and a call to action.
I don't want comfort imagery.
I don't want to see 'happy for no good reason.'
I know the enemies they face are up to me. Sometimes, I miss the old Orcus-worshipping orcs from AD&D and throwing a few hundred thousand of those at the mountain fortresses of the dwarves where no stone goes unsoaked in the blood of the fallen.
There are moments when I feel I can't tell those stories in Pathfinder 2 because the art tells everyone, "NO."
That is a problem.
Many of the Lost Omens books have an overly happy tone. The options inside them are great, and many interior pictures shine. It is just too darn delightful and colorful, page after page. I feel the designers aren't taking their world seriously; they care more about presenting non-threatening environments than a world filled with evil trying to destroy all that is good.
And you can define 'good' however you want, traditional or progressive! My problem isn't the definition of what is good; it presents a credible threat against it and calls us to action.
The remaster books do a better job of splitting Golarion from the game, as the player book no longer has an implied setting. The rules are more "setting neutral" now.
When you fight a game more than it serves as a tool of expression, there is a problem. This is when you reach for another game that enforces the tone you are looking for. I can get this tone quickly in games with a more neutral base, such as GURPS or OSRIC.
OSRIC is the community implementation of the greatest RPG ever written. When all else fails you, first edition will be there.
I like games like GURPS, which are more for world builders and assume nothing about the default world. Modern games focus more on delivering fantasy sandboxes instead of core rules, and D&D 5E (2014) does a better job presenting a neutral base world than Pathfinder. This is likely because the company never wants to release a setting book again and expects players to keep reusing 3.5E books for setting guides.
My two best tactical figure combat games are Pathfinder 2 and GURPS. The first is because it is the best mainstream option (and a tremendous 5E replacement), and the second is a legendary game that gives me complete control.
But Pathfinder 2 can be played as a darker, more gritty game. I own the books. I can do what I want with them. If I wish to create a grimdark world, I say it is a grimdark world, and we go from there. Nothing in the core books precludes that, and the Lost Omens "sample world" in the GM Core book can be ignored. Most of the content in Lost Omens can also be ignored or picked and sorted through as potential character options. For the most part, just stick to the core rulebooks.
I understand what they are trying to do with the art, making the fantasy genre more relatable to the social media crowd. But this is following, not leading.
You will never pander enough to anyone to make yourself "cool."
You must always be the "next big thing" by presenting something people want to see themselves in. And this doesn't happen by making what you have familiar. You must break through, present a world nobody has seen before, and show them the way.
Make the audience "want to be you."
Never make yourself look "more like the ordinary."
No comments:
Post a Comment