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Alexander Macris's avatar

Brian, thanks so much for dropping by to comment!

I think you are 100% correct about the fact that patron-style play that mixes gameplay at the table with online and PbP would enable the sort of "niches" that exist in Boot Hill and Gangbuster to have some playability. I used a similar technique in running Mekton, where each player had a mech pilot as well as an "HQ" character that was involved in mission planning, tech/repair, intel, etc. and it worked well. (It wasn't true patron-style play because they were still all "on the same team".) But that sort of gameplay is not common, and most RPGs don't provide any rules whatsoever for it. My game ACKS virtually stands alone in having robust backend/downtime rules.

Outside of such elevated styles of play, in "ordinary" tabletop games, the sort of niches you describe -- drover, rancher, cook, trapper, mayor -- seem to be rarely played and often the player(s) who do play them seem to end up unhappy. Most people seem to want to play, e.g., gunslingers, mobsters, and so on.

For instance, in Cyberpunk, there were a number of roles -- Solo, Media, Corporate, Fixer, Nomad, Netrunner -- similar to what you are describing with Westerns and Gangbusters. Yet despite the breadth of options, most players want to play bad-ass mercenaries and street samurais (Solos in game parlance) most of the time. Within the Cyberpunk community this was widely known as how the game was played in practice, most published adventures revolved around special operations missions, and most supplements that got released were primarily of use to cybered-up killers -- e.g. "Maximum Metal" "Blackhand's Firearms" "Chrome Berets" and so on.

There's probably a separate essay that I need to be write that explains why "high action" tends to be the default activity at every TTRPG table. You've already alluded to it, in that outside of "high action" people rarely sit at the same table at the same time doing similar stuff, and in traditional gameplay, having 6-8 players all doing different stuff in different locations tends to be slow, unwieldy, and unfavored. (Never Split the Party etc.)

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Daddy Warpig's avatar

Well, F/X systems aren't just for niche protection, in fact they're pretty much the reason people play TTRPG's: they like Fantasy & Sci-Fi of whatever variety, and like playing the game in their own worlds with those elements. They read those kinds of stories and want to play in those kinds of worlds.

So F/X are critical to their enjoyment of their games, because they don't want "realistic" Westerns, they want Weird Westerns, and so forth. You take that away and most—not all, but most—peoples' interest will crash.

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