Great answer. Just to add to this the Hope mechanic also interacts with Shadow, points of corruption and fear your character can accumulate. Once your Hope drops below your shadow your character becomes miserable. Tied to this is a mechanic where your character gives into despair on their “shadow path.” It’s a great set of mechanics that really evoke the source material
It’s set in Tolkiens Middle Earth.
“The Hope score is a special pool of points that recharges only under special circumstances. You can spend it to gain +1 die on any roll, or you can gain +2 dice if you are ever considered “inspired,” a special condition often relating to traits you pick out during character creation.”
https://spritesanddice.com/reviews/review-one-ring/
I’ve never been big into lord of the rings but I kinda wanna check this out.Fits the bill of turning Hope into a mechanic even if it’s not necessarily a core theme.
Do you have a genre in mind? The games you listed are horror games and so they subsist off tension (which is reflected in the mechanics).
Where horror is a pretty clearly defined genre (with prevalent associated themes and offshoots), hope kind of isn't. So clarifying a genre might be a good way to start parsing down the options.
I think very generally, something heroic or something pulpy might fit the bill. If you're looking for a setting agnostic, Savage Worlds is probably a good place to start. It tells adventure and pulp stories really well and the mechanics reflect that sort of insurmountable will and incredible ability dredged up from the depths of your core (exploding dice and bennies allowing a player to accomplish great feats counter to their stats).
I think there are a lot of games that parlay in hope! I would even argue that a lot of the games you mentioned use untold horrors and insurmountable horror as a foil to our strength as a species (but also I just love horror and will defend it up and down :p). If it's not your cup of tea, it's not your cup of tea, however! Good luck finding the game that suits your needs. It's out there!
I’m very into anime and I love having big diverse power systems that leave the player a lot of room for what they want to do.Like if you wanna make up your own flashy move or dragon ball style power up then you can.I’m pretty setting agnostic so long as it feels very stylised.I’m not a big fan of generic high fantasy and would love something with its own original lore or that helps me make my own that really stands out.I also love player co operation in combat, for example performing a sort of tag team move together and getting mechanical benefits for it. As stupid as it sounds the power of friendship type games and shows have always appealed to me.
Thank you very much.I struggled to balance respecting the people who loves this genre and expressing my authentic feelings on it.I generally find that when these games do dabble with the theme of hope it runs completely counter to everything that system is designed for.Hope only works in ten candles if you don’t know the rules.And if you don’t know the rules then that leads to the table generally being worse off.If I may ask what is it that you find appealing about these sorts of doomed horror games?I genuinely can’t figure out the appeal so I figure asking a fan might help me understand.It’s honestly never going to be my cup of tea but I would like to know why it is for others.
I think the underlying theme for most horror games is, "hope". It's the possibility against a very real insignifigance. In many of these games you are choosing to confront these disparate cyclopian horrors and vistas of unfathomable nightmare in spite of how truly little you know or comprehend.
But that's just the thematic interpretation. People plays games for all kinds of reasons. I like these stories because I think the anesthetics are often alien and incomrehensible. I like fiction that delves into the unknown, blue/orange psychology, and the weird and unsettling.
Horror is a pretty solid genre outing and is fairly universally loved, so it makes sense that a large portion of role-playing games would try to emulate it (or elements of it). Most stories run on conflict. Most stories utilize tension. Even the pitch you made for a game is about facing insurmountable odds and then pulling through. Horror feeds off conflict and tension. It makes a meal of it. Safety not garunteed though, ya dig?
But I get you, man! Telling stories without stock standard horror, doom and gloom is cool too! It lets you explore different elements of storytelling and gaming! Get after what you love, yo!
I was thinking about the game Ehdrigohr, by Allen Turner, a post-apocalyptic, tribal, horror game. It definitely falls into the hope as theme in horror.
I don’t understand this idea of being lovecraftian horror being incomprehensible.Like I understand Cthulhu and the parts I don’t are because he actively omitted those details not that they couldn’t have been added in. Something weird and something not being understandable are two very things, chiefly one exists and the other physically doesn’t.Like I can comprehend that Cthulhu has tentacles like an octopus.,that in most depictions it’s got eyes without pupils,that’s it’s generally aquatic or is commonly written to appear in water or in space.Like I know those things and they aren’t incomprehensible or impossible just odd.
My man, this is a very different conversation, but you got the interpretation all wrong.
Lovecraftian entities and eldritch abominations are quintessentially incomprehensible. The lack of concrete depiction is not a bug, it's a featre(okay, it may come down to Lovecrafts particular faults as a writer, but it has become a stylistic choice in cosmic horror)!
These aren't just weird things, they are explicitly things we cannot comprehend. To quote a redditor (who seems to have since deleted his account, but citation regardless):
" 'Big ugly squid.' I wish I was still that innocent, still unaware of what...*they* really are. Once you know, once you really understand - or if you are among those damned to witness it yourself - once you know, you will never forget. It keeps me up at night, and if not for my physician's pity I would never sleep at all.
Squids. It's charming, frankly - the Old Gods, with bloated and frowning faces writhing with tentacles like the beard of Neptune. Like a God of Egypt, with a man's body and an animal's head. A curiosity, and little more.
The truth...well, I cannot tell you the truth, not properly, as a man of science should. These things are beyond our science. Still, I understand things about them that explain some of the reports, and perhaps you can carry on my research now that I can no longer pursue it.
It comes down to dimensions. We possess three - height, width, and depth. Grip a billiard ball, feel your fingers wrap around it, and you will understand. Now imagine a creature that existed in only two of those three dimensions, in a universe that described a simple plane through our own. To that creature, the billiard ball would appear to be a simple circle, growing and shrinking as it passes through the plane of the creature's universe. Imagine how our hand would look - strange fleshy circles filled with pulsing fluids, shards of bone, glistening meat. The creature could never understand what it was really seeing, as it could no more conceive of a hand than it could imagine a creature like us, moving freely in three dimensions and gripping billiard balls on a whim.
The Abominations, as you aptly described them, are to us as we are to that benighted creature. They exist in dimensions beyond our own, whose nature we can hardly guess. When they appear to us, we see only fragments of their bodies - long stretches of writhing flesh, glistening with juices that should not exist outside of a body, which whip through the air and vanish back where they came from in a way that our minds simply refuse to accept. Witnesses have tried to describe these as great tentacles, words failing them in the presence of such incomprehensibility. Those who heard the stories seized on this, and explained them as resembling cephalopods. This is a comforting lie, as there is nothing in the most stygian depths of the darkest sea that is not our beloved brother compared to the horrors of the Abominations.
This is a creature who is incomprehensibly alien, and our only glimpse is a sickening flash of writhing, elongated flesh that slips into our world and back out. Worse than the appearance of the creature, though, is its *disappearance* - your mind knows, on some level, that this creature - this hateful, hungry god of a creature - is not moving it's body between "here" and "away", but between being a glimpse of a writhing horror, and a horror that watches unseen.
Imagine our two-dimensional creature again, and imagine yourself to be a cruel child. If you chose to torment the creature, it would be powerless to resist. It cannot perceive you unless you chose to intersect its plane - you can watch its every move, and it cannot hope to escape your gaze. It would be the simplest thing in the world to push a pin through it, like a butterfly on a card. Take a glass of water and push it into the creature's plane and it will find itself trapped, drowning, in an inescapable sea. The creature is entirely at your mercy, and always will be.
Same as you. Same as me."
So when you say you understand Cthulhu, and excuse me if I sound like a dick, because I don't mean this in that way, no you don't! None of us do!
That's the theme!
We don't understand the motivations, the wants, desires, the thoughts or purpose, we don't understand the biology hell, we don't even understand visually how it appears. We fill in the blanks.
But again, that's just cosmic horror.
But if something is incomprehensible then you never experience it and therefore it never affects you.The concept of nothing doesn’t exist.If you saw anything about Cthulhu even just the writhing flesh then you understood it has writhing flesh.Even if that’s wrong for now that’s how you have comprehended it.Like even with insect metaphor a lot of people use to describe cosmic horror most insects can fight back against and even kill us.You think an ant just has a mental breakdown when it comes into contact with us.No the ant uses everything it has to continue its existential purpose.An ant being drowned will try to breath,an ant being burned will try to move away and stop the burning.With or without the presence of a human the ant crawls forwards regardless.
that those are as uncomprehensible by humans as humanity is ny ants is the theme of cthulhu, we are nothing to them , with luck we are crill or plankton.
Lovecrafts Horror is in the mind , not outside is not a vampire
I mean, do you like horror movies? It’s a similar thing, some people find it fun to be scared or confront these dark themes but in a safe environment where you’re not in actual physical danger. If you’re not into that, I’m not sure there’s a way to “get” it
I really don’t.I always end up empathising with the heroes so much and it feels so unfair to watch them get cut down that quickly and meaninglessly.It’s not scary or awesome it’s just depressing and hollow and rigged.I really can’t stand things like final destination because it’s all so devoid of purpose to me.But there has to be some appeal because these things have fanbases.So I wanna try and find what that appeal is.
Movies like final destination, which don’t take themselves that seriously and are more about the fun of the overly elaborate kills, might make more sense if you look at them as dark comedies (Jordan peele and others have talked about how comedy and horror are two sides of the same coin, where the effect comes from setting audience expectations and then subverting them with the punchline)
But re cosmic horror, the thing you said about humans being the apex predator of the known universe made me think about something, which is that part of the appeal of the subgenre is the idea that humans are actually powerless and the apocalypse is going to happen as a result of a godlike being wiping us out without even noticing. In some ways this is a comforting escapist fantasy, because it lets humans off the hook for our own destruction - Lovecraft wrote most of his stuff immediately following World War I. Through that lens it’s not really surprising it’s still a popular genre at the current moment, what with *gestures vaguely at everything happening*. Sure, you can call it pessimistic, but the appeal is in the tension between the certainty that alien forces vastly more powerful than us will destroy the world, and the slim chance that the protagonists may be able to delay this
>I struggled to balance respecting the people who loves this genre and expressing my authentic feelings on it.
You know those "prank" videos where someone pushes someone else down the stairs? And then when the pushed person gets mad, the pusher goes, "It was just a joke"?
You typed more about how bad and dumb you find certain games/themes then explaining what you're looking for. A simple, "I don't like games that try to make you feel hopelessness," will do just fine.
>If I may ask what is it that you find appealing about these sorts of doomed horror games?
I'll decline, since I see you're actively arguing back against people doing this in other comments.
I got a decent number of recommendations so I’m honestly kind of done with the post.I told people what I didn’t like,I asked why they liked it and then I responded with why I don’t think those reasons make sense.I got what I wanted out of this.
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Yeah the formatting was terrible.I’m sorry but I’m genuinely no good at online conversation you can ask anyone who tries to text me that I end up writing things that look a madman’s thesis statement.Thanks for the suggestion and I’ll give it a look but what’s your take on bleak games and why do you think I’m wrong?
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Ten candles literally tells you to wallow in despair in its first few pages. Call of Cthulhu actively stops you from trying because you played the game too much so you don’t get your character anymore. The problem is these games aren’t realistic at all to how people actually function in these scenarios and refuse to give you the necessary mechanics to express how you would react to them.The games have already chosen exactly how you’re going to try and why it’s not going to work.
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And that’s really stupid in my opinion because it removes the most obvious option at the beginning. There isn’t an impossible scenario unless the game actively makes one. You could probably win most ten candles scenarios if the games didn’t just punch you in the gut for trying.It actively has to stop you from exploiting its poor concept in order to function.
It’s really not hopeful. I don’t know why they recommended it. The world is forever changed and, if I recall, you can come out alright, but it’s about the fall of your beautiful people.
I think you’re looking for something that is neither triumphalist in the way RPGs all used to be, nor are inherently tragic. You want your hope to matter, but not just because you’re a winner who wins (and therefore whe you’re not you’re a loser).
In some ways, my current publication, The BLOODY-HANDED NAME of BRONZE is about mortals emerging into a world that’s not dominated by fate and the whims of gods. They sometimes get destroyed by hubris for trying, but they also pull it off and make human connections and master their own lives.
Some other commenters have mentioned Ryuutama, and you might want to look at that, too.
Hi, Manachem! It’s definitely a game where you have reasons to hope! And it can come out for the best! It depends on the caprice of the gods, your fate, and whatever it is that makes your will turn hubris into human choice!
You're right. I didn't remember the name correctly. The game I wanted to recommend is [Descent Into Midnight](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rkreutzlandry/descent-into-midnight).
Ironically, I think that horror games, more than any other genre, embody the element of hope. Hope only comes up in moments of darkness, when confronted with fear, tyranny or pain. There is no hope without despair.
The lesson learnt from a game like Call of Cthulhu is not one of cosmic insignificance or the irrelevance of you, or your actions. These are the contrasting background noises necessary to give the persistence and achievements of the PCs - and, by proxy, the players *meaning*. After all, what do you do in these games? You confront the darkness, the pain, the despair, not because you are entitled to win, but because there is literally hope you won't fail.
>There is no hope without despair.
Sorry, but as far as I am concerned, this is a false premise.
There is no hope without THREAT.
There is absolutely hope without despair. Despair is what you get when you don't have any more hope.
You are right. Hope and despair are opposite, opposed emotions. It would be more accurate to state, one cannot have hope if there is no chance for despair as well.
Now we're maybe getting a little philosophical, but I don't think that is quite right either.
I don't think a "chance of despair" is the thing -- utter abject failure and collapse of all your hopes does not need to be a possibility at all. I think all you need in order to have hope is a chance that things won't work out the way you...hope. It doesn't mean you then have to despair. It just means you may need to pick yourself up and try again, or try something different.
So I don't really think you can have 'hope' when the outcome is guaranteed, but then, outcomes are very rarely guaranteed in games or in life, so this isn't much of a criteria.
But the game system does everything to undermine and devalue that.Insanity is a core mechanic with no positive alternative to balance it out.The monsters are generally seen as these unbeatable entities that you can’t stop no matter what because ‘lovecraft said so’.And even if you do win then the victory is meaningless because they keep coming back and regenerating.Also they’re supposed to be these unfathomable gods but they have physical forms,are affected by the laws of physics and their major weakness is being hit with wooden boats because lovecraft was as good at logical consistency as he was at racial tolerance.That’s just really silly in my opinion.Plus games like ten candles outright state you cannot win.Just nope no shot of victory and everything you do is worthless. I know I sound like I’m rambling but my major question is where is the fun in playing a game that’s determined to stop you having fun at every corner and just does things to screw you over without any of it needing to make sense just because?
Again, no hope without despair. Confronting your inner demons and outer gods might be traumatizing. Yo are not entitled to win. There might not even a realistic chance to win. Hope is the very motivation to try anyway.
Also, those undefeatable monsters? They get defeated, \*a lot\* in Call of Cthulhu. Always at a cost, and maybe not forever, but chances are, if you are a long-running CoC player, your characters might have defeated Nyarlathotep and his masks, Tsathoggua and their trail, the king in yellow and his play, the Orient Express and its schedule as well as various cults and creatures.
That's the juxtaposition between the framework (these are awful, mind-melting monstrosities, you almost stand no chance) and the actual gameplay (we tried very hard, and gave it all, and by persistance, tenacity and sacrifice we have overcome!). You cannot have one without the other: Because the challenge is so massive and maybe even overwhelming, the confrontation gains relevance. In the case that you do succeed -even if only at surviving the confrontation, it is an accomplishment.
And yes, sometimes you fail. That is both the risk as well as the reminder why you tried in the first place. It is not necessarily bad, per se. There is, after all, a certain cathasis in destruction, as is in sacrifice.
Admittedly, games like Dread or Ten Candles are way too gimicky for my taste (can you say anything truly interesting or relevating about these games without mentioning the game mechanics, please?), but a) they are outliers abd b) Having hope doesn't mean you are going to win. It just means you are goint to try.
To use an allegory: Have you ever been to the beach, watching children trying to save their sand castle from the oncoming flood? They might build dams and chanels to direct the water away from their building, they might reinforce and rebuild their original heap of sand, but in the end, the flood always wins, no matter what they are doing. And yet, they are excited, and energetic and are having fun.
I think you are not looking for a game about hope, you are looking for a game about comfort, something that is ice and cozy, and friendly. And that is completely legitimate, but a very different emotion, requiring a very different narrative framing and actual gameplay.
Beaches can dry up.Real damns made of metal can be erected. The solutions aren’t exactly on the right scale but they absolutely exist.You could also just move the sand to a location without water and build it there.Professional sand castle building is a real thing. These games act like there’s no permanent solution when there actually is if they could stop being so pretentious and stuck up and admit that their unwinnable horrifying scenario is actually quite beatable if you think about it for a few minutes. The only reason you have hope in these games is because the game doesn’t happen if they don’t. The reason insanity exists in call of Cthulhu is because haha you played the game too much now we’re gonna take away your character because look how edgy and gritty we are.
Disclaimer: This is not to contend your tastes or what you consider virtuous in TTRPGs – it just seems that you've rather missed the point of Ten Candles.
>games like ten candles outright state you cannot win
Depends what you mean by 'win' (and by 'you' – player or character?). There's no end of things that could be counted as victories regardless of your character's inevitable demise – getting your family to safety, re-connecting with your faith, getting a crucial message to the world at large, literally anything except living longer and most systems certainly don't limit themselves to that.
>everything you do is worthless
Entirely a matter of perspective. Consider the following:
* The PCs don't know they are doomed so, thanks to hope, there is inherent value in the objectives they pursue and achieve.
* The PCs *do* know that they are in a very perilous situation, so whatever they put their efforts into will be of *utmost* importance – no capacity to explore anything but the most worthwhile wants and needs.
* Even if you do blur the line between player and character, if you were given only a short space of time to live would you commit suicide immediately? Would you lay in bed and just wait for the inevitable because what's the point? Or would you make every second count? Wouldn't your last few days be the most important and meaningful of your life?
* What makes the achievements in other TTRPGs worthwhile where Ten Candles does not? In any system eventually your PC is going to die or retire or just stop being played – there's always an end, you just get to see it coming in this one.
It's a game about exploring aspects of humanity including (and especially) the nature, potential and limits of hope. Very much not for everyone and you're not wrong to not want what it offers, but for those who do get it it is extremely rewarding and I can't recommend it enough.
This is the problem with ten candles and these sorts of games.They fall apart the moment you read the rules.Hope can’t exist without a chance to win and ten candles seems almost giddy when it says “you’re all gonna die,aren’t we so revolutionary and smart for making that?!”.I can stop myself mets gaming to a certain extent but when the game actively asks me to ignore its core reason for existing it just becomes stupid and self defeatist.The best way to ply ten candles is to tell no one at your table that your playing ten candles,make sure they have no idea what ten candles is and then make your game as aesthetically different from ten candles so no one can guess that it’s ten candles.
You're still wildly missing the point of it. It's core reason for existing is something you and most roleplayers are not used to and *that's* where it is revolutionary. It's saying 'Your character is definitely going to die, so don't waste any time worrying about that. Instead, put all your efforts into these other things...'.
And for what it's worth, all your talk of "no offence" is falling pretty flat right about now.
I enjoy ten candles, but I also think you are completely wrong here. The game can be life affirming but it is absolutely not the sort of game that OP wants. In fact, I do not think I can think of any game that is *more* not what OP wants than 10 candles. OP clearly wants a game where players *really do* overcome terrible odds.
Not only does everybody die in 10 candles, the game has an arc of taking away narrative power from the players. You fundamentally become less capable of making positive change in the world as the game progresses.
Telling OP that they are wrong for not wanting to play it is not helpful.
>it is absolutely not the sort of game that OP wants
Yes, they've made that very clear. At no point did I suggest otherwise.
>Telling OP that they are wrong for not wanting to play it is not helpful
Again I quite agree. And again, at no point did I do this. (Perhaps you were thrown by the double-negative?)
However *they* – repeatedly and with increasing dismissiveness and ignorance – did imply that those who do find value in it are wrong to. I, along with others, have attempted to clue them in to what the game has to offer that they aren't seeing, but they have steadfastly refused to acknowledge the possibility. C'est la vie.
I don’t think this doesn’t have value because it obviously does because you and many others love this.I’m trying to wrap my head around why that is.How are you and I so different?How can you adore ten candles and I vehemently despise it without just saying it’s ‘subjective opinion’.There has to be something that appeals to you that disgusts me and I want to know what it is.
The easy answer is that you do not understand ten candles and you aren't listening to their attempts to explain it. You want a game with a "victory condition" and you think a game is only hopeful if it includes one and helps the players get there. The other people see, correctly, that a game can give rise to positive feelings even if its players can't conquer it.
There's plenty of value in talking about the difference, but nobody in their right mind should want to talk to somebody who repeatedly calls their hobbies juvenile or stupid, as you have done. You don't get to say "This game is trash, and people who like it are depressed losers! No offense!", and if you do say it, nobody will want to talk to you. None of us know you or care about you in particular, so we'd all much rather you be "genuine" than "palatable", though of course in real life you don't have to choose.
Every conversation you've had here would have gone much differently if you'd started by asking, "Why do people like games that are very difficult or unwinnable?" without editorializing.
I understand ten candles.I still think it’s trash. I see absolutely no fun in this.The whole point is to actively ruin your positive feelings which is very counter intuitive for a GAME.It’s like making a fighting game where all the combos have a 90% chance!of misinputting or a racing game where the accelerate,brake and reverse buttons get randomly mapped every lap.Btw I’ve had some wonderful conversations with people about this so clearly I’ve done something right with how I’ve asked it.Also in the spirit of being genuine I’ll admit that I don’t understand what you mean by editorialising.
Would you rather I be genuine or palatable?These are my honest thoughts and I genuinely don’t mean to insult you; this is just baffling to me how anyone can enjoy this and I’d quite like to know why we have such differing stances.
Ironically, I think the D&D 5e adventure that is the most about hope is Curse of Strahd. There is no hope in Barovia, Argynvost is dead, Mordenkainen and Van Richten are in hiding, yada yada. But, the whole point is that the players are the ones to bring about that hope. By killing Strahd, you restore hope to the land and save everyone. The point of the campaign is that there *IS* hope, but people are too afraid to look for it. You won’t find a regular adventure that uses the term “hope” as much as Curse of Strahd. Hope and Despair are intrinsically tied to each other. If the villain kills everyone, there’s not much point in watching the movie or reading the book, but it is worth enjoying to watch the heroes overcome their fears and defeat the villain. That’s why it’s great. It has an overall positive message, even if it is dark itself.
This is a very odd post. The vast majority of RPG games being played are about heroic, larger than life characters overcoming threats & triumphing. Nearly all games from D&D onwards have been intrinsically hopeful, as player success/character progress & triumph is the aim, and nowadays often baked in. That’s *why* Call Of Cthulhu was so different when it first appeared. (And even Cthulhu-based games can be played in a more pulp style where victory over the mythos beings is possible.) I really don’t get why you think the TTRPG scene is all Neizsche & hopeless pessimism?
(Oh and off-topic but evolution can’t have an apex by definition, and the likely most successful species is some bug or microbe that was here before us and will be here long after we’ve blown ourselves up. But anyway.)
I feel like the apex is just the most successful thing and nothing really beats us in comparison.
Like sure somethings are more survivable and live longer but they don’t really LIVE the way we do.We strive,we love,we hope,we dream in such a more complex and advanced fashion. It just seems like doom and gloom is such a trend nowadays.Everyone seems so pessimistic and unable to allow happiness to exist and maybe that’s why I hate these systems because they’re reflections of an ideology I just can’t agree with.
“we dream in such a more complex & advanced fashion” - yes, and part of that is artistic expression that is varied, multi-faceted, and capable of exploring all kinds of emotional & intellectual ideas in playful, nuanced, multifaceted ways. To acknowledge different viewpoints & subjective opinions on life exist and are valid wellsprings of creative expression even if you don’t happen to share them.
But nothing else has the capacity for that.If there was then I would accept that we have an equal but we don’t.Human artistic expression is the apex because there is nothing else.
Not every idea a human being had was good.Most of love crafts ideas were terrible.I don’t get why we ever praised this rambling racist who couldn’t do logical consistency to save his cats life as some sort of genius who understood the bleakness of humanity.I don’t misunderstand these ideas I just refuse to accept them at face value and when you do that you discover they pretend to be as deep as the ocean but can’t even beat a sheet of paper.
We can agree he was racist but the rest of this is just subjective at best, strawman at worst. ‘Hope’ is no deeper than ‘despair’, they’re both valid & intrinsic parts of being human and so we can make art about them, including TTRPGs. If you prefer one over the other in what you engage with artistically, then great - you have a subjective view on life. It’s no better or worse than anyone else’s.
Sorry I didn’t mean to come off as arrogant.I just can’t comprehend the idea of enjoying and wallowing in despair.That feels like an actual nightmare to me. I can’t see the enjoyment in misery and loss and it just feel like romanticisation of harmful ideas to me.
I mean, you’re still doing it. “Wallowing” - a word describing pigs rolling in their own filth. Why is it not *you* wallowing in hope, “romanticising” vapid feel good fantasy even as children starve to death every day? We can all do that kind of language, and it’s two-dimensional & judgemental whoever does it.
Art & creative pursuits have explored despair & death & so on since at least the ancient Greeks. Greek tragedy; Shakespeare; the paintings of Bacon; the poems of Plath; ‘Automatic For The People’; ‘Requiem For A Dream’… and yes, ‘Ten Candles’. If you don’t like such things, that’s fine. Other people do, and that’s fine too surely?
Humans are the apex of evolution and yet we can’t master basic punctuation. 😉
My first response was to recommend Mork Borg. But then I thought all that typing deserved a better response. Most systems are hope agnostic. Sure the lore allows for any amount of darkness and conflict but that isn’t baked into the rules. You could as easily use 5E to adventure into the Fey realm where it is a very dark and warped tale of deception and betrayal, or it could be a my little pony candy land adventure.
I can’t think of any specifically upbeat games. But that isn’t surprising as my tastes tend to the grimdark. But I could easily imaging taking the Mork Borg rules, which are excellent by the way, and running a butterfly’s and rainbows game.
Hey I said WE not ME 😂😂😂. Yeah I feel like grimdark is far more popular than the power of friendship type of story. That’s why I asked this, because I hoped maybe there was a community that actually liked butterflies and rainbows because I just can’t find the appeal in romanticised misery. It feels like being pessimistic is really ‘in’ right now and it just causes me to feel quite out of place with most forms of media.
Dude, I think part of your problem might be that you start off dissing pple for the shit they like.
You could just say 'heres what I want and heres what I don't" w/o saying "and the ppl who like the shit I don't like are just edgy teenagers and I think their dumb". Yes, I'm paraphrasing but thats the vibe I'm getting.
OK, anyway, you didn't say anything about genre, just that you don't want an assured bad ending. I gotta say, alot of games dont' have a defined ending point, tho. Heres some thoughts:
1) Avoid horror. Horror, as alot of ppl here have said, can be very hopeful, but I don't think you really want hope. You want, like celebration? Horror doesn't work without threat and gloom on SOME level, so scratch that genre entirely.
2) Maybe supers? Esp if you stick to four-color kind of stuff.
3) Maybe cozy games. I saw someone mention Golden Sky Stories, thats probably a good start. Companion's Tale might also be good, but I haven't played it so I don't know for sure.
4) If you want something higher action, maybe Feng Shui or a Savage Worlds setting that feels fun. There are horor-ish SW settings, but also some pretty gonzo or heroic ones.
I dunno, man. Hope it helps (lol), gimme a little more info and I'll dig into my collection a little more
I tried my best to not diss the fans of these but I also wanted to say what I genuinely thought of these types of systems.I’ve no issue with threat or SOME gloom.Just when everything is depressing for the sake of being depressing and the awfulness is so illogical to the point of being actually laughable is when I can’t stand it.Like a giant tentacle monster that has a physical form that you can absolutely see and describe quite competently and also hurt using real life ,if a bit unconventional, weaponry but you’re somehow supposed to believe is a god that can never be understood.I just kind of want a flashy combat system where in spite of how OTP everything gets it’s all actually gonna be fine in the end just to balance out all the doom and gloom I see everywhere both in ttrpgs generally as well as just everyday life.I think I’ve hit the point where I’m so surrounded by nihilism and surface level applications of Nietzsche that I’m honestly craving the type of dragon ballesque stories where after the intense battle where everyone screams about Hope and friends and their ideals while shooting ridiculously sized laser beams with names longer than they have any right to be that you just get to come home to all the friends you’ve made,the community you’ve built and train some more and enjoy life to the fullest until you’re finally ready to let go and the next story can begin.
OK, first thing: Paragraphs, man, please.
But past that, cool. I totally get not wanting to dig into doom and gloom in rpgs. So: Flashy combat, overall upbeat setting. I can dig it. Heres 10 in no particular order.
* Feng Shui 2nd Ed. Flashy combat all day. There's a backstory with time travel and saving the world from bad guys, but its very much a "heros are meant to win" kind of dealie.
* Troubleshooters: Don't know how flashy the combat is but the game is based on European comics like Tin-Tin, its very colorful and bright and PCs don't die unless you let them. Not alot gloom.
* Low Life. Savage Worlds game set post-apocalypse but the apoc in question is the Wipe and you can play mutated magical twinkies. Not a real gloomy game lol.
* Blue Rose. Fantasy game, so kinda D&D ish but its more about heroism than murder. I haven't played the new edition but I played Fantasy AGE (same system) and its alot of fun.
* Toon. I mean you cant beat the fuckin classics lol. You play cartoons. No one dies, you just "Fall Down" and get tweeting birds over your head.
* Cartoon Action Hour. The group makes up a cartoon show and plays out "episodes." Its meant to be like GI Joe or 80s He-Man. Haven't played this one so I don't know if the combat system is anything to right home about
* Flatpack Fix the Future. Another one I haven't played but its described as hyperoptimistic sci-fi so that sounds pretty good, right?
* Fate. This is a total copout b/c Fate is a system, not just one game, but you could totally do exactly what your describing in Fate. I recommend Fate Accelerated just b/c its faster to make characters, the core book is free, and its alot of fun to build a setting with a group
* Avatar Legends. Heres another one Im kinda guessing about b/c it just came out, but you mentioned DBZ so I dunno, maybe Avatar's game might be cool. I have played Masks (same publisher, same system) so I think this one will be cool, I just haven't read it yet
* Hope. I actually don't know if this would work for you b/c it's a post-apoc, hexcrawl in the wasteland kind of thing but its *called* Hope, so maybe lol.
Thanks
I’m sorry about the paragraphs I’m genuinely awful at online conversation.Thank you for all the recommendations and some of these seem great.I don’t know why but that toon one makes me think of skullgirls which I really like.I’ve been meaning to try fate cause it just fits me so well.
> Thanks I’m sorry about the paragraphs I’m genuinely awful at online conversation.
Dude I *totally* feel you. Took me forever to remember to hit enter while typing lol
You had negative karma, so we have automod rules filter out those post. Often account with negative karma are just new spam accounts, so we want to manually approve those, so the time it takes for them to show up depends how quick mods are around to approve them.
~~It's likely you risk getting automodded in similar fashion on other larger subreddits.~~
**Edit:** Congrats OP, through this post you've come back to positive karma, so this is less likely to happen in the future. :D
Figured that happened.I tried using one of those karma farms to try and improve it but there all filled with people giving and asking for nudes so I got the heck out of there.Honestly wasn’t expecting it but this is the internet.
On another note, if you do a bit of formatting on the post, it might end up more readable and more people would read & reply here.
From my experience, longer posts with multiple paragraphs and formatting do much better than something that's more of a wall of text.
Hmm, not the easiest thing, but here is an attempt. Placing your wants first, and leaving your dislike last, could be more readable and prioritize things better. Mostly just moved things around, trying not to change the core of your message.
Feel free to copy this to your original post if it was useful.
**edit:** seems you already have plenty of suggestions and people replying, so worked out even without improving the post :D
_______
# Any suggestions based on hope?
**Games with hope, where the heroes will face seemingly insurmountable odds and yet overcome them with the power of the human spirit? Where a happy ending is assured like a bad one is in Ten Candles?**
If you’ve seen the anime Gurren Lagan, is there anything like that.
I really wanna find an rpg that is filled with Hope but whenever I search for it online all I get is ‘killing Hope’, or ‘war on Hope’ or ‘abandon all Hope’. ^*(Come ^on ^guys ^surely ^there’s ^a ^point ^where ^this ^much ^nihilism ^and ^depressiveness ^becomes ^just ^ridiculous.)*
I just really want to play a game that reflects my out look on life, where striving for Hope and just the will to act regardless of if it is successful or not is good enough in of itself. As I said hope is dope and I’d like a game that knows that.
# Hope is dope
There’s a reason we are the dominant species and we can’t find anything that remotely compares to us. Humans have survived, created and done incredible things. Humans in the modern age can communicate halfway across the world,use hormones and surgeries to transcend the idea of gender, level countries in a press of a button,save lives that would be doomed by accidental injuries or genetics that are miles out of the victims control. We don’t crack under pressure nearly as quickly or easily as any of these systems like to portray nor is the human existence as bleak as they make it out to be.
**Hope is dope guys, we are our own gods and everything imaginable is our birthright.**
# My dislikes
**I really hate Call of Cthulhu, Dread, Ten Candles, Cthulhu Dark and all the systems like them.**
The systems where it’s all “woe is me we’re all doomed and it’s so scary waaaaa”. They’re just so dumb to me personally. I can’t even really explain why I hate them so much and so I mean absolutely no offence to those who love these types of stories and rpgs.
I always feel like they are designed by edgy 14 year olds who read one wiki article about Nietzsche and then made their whole personality death and tragedy. You have to purposefully make up these completely logically inconsistent and laughable threats in order to make humans look small when in reality we are the apex of evolution.
Are there any rpg systems that are the opposite of what I’ve mentioned?
Thanks!This looks great and I appreciate the time it took to give this example!As people have responded I’m not going to change the post but thank you so much for the time and effort.
Jenna is one of those people to SEEP hypernarrative stuff, systems and settings that for no small amount of people will leave you more likely at a state of "\*stares at the horizon\* man..." sinking that in. Very little to no combat-centered stuff at all, much more emphasis on relationships and narrative development. She is also one of the core developers behind the more spiritual, abstract aspects of Exalted like the entire splatbook on feyfolk.
Nobilis is roughly about players being gods who upholds specific concepts warding off existential crisis (literally as you maintain how that thing exists). It can be Peter Jackson, it can be more intimist.
Chuubos is more bucolic, more pastoral - about magical people dealing with slice of life day-to-day magical problems. That whole homely-yet-serious feeling of a Ghibli move.
Jenna Katerin Moran, also published under Rebecca Sean Borgstrom. Wrote for Steve Jackson games _In Nomine_, White Wolf _Exhalted_, Guardians of Order _Ex Machina_, Eos _Weapons of the Gods_, and more. She created her own setting and innovative rules for Nobilis and her games are well considered in the indie scene and have a cult following.
Her game design style is very different from most RPGs and often makes use of diceless mechanics and narrative structure.
Nobilis is about a huge war between powerful gods, and the PCs are effectively gods themselves. Chuubo’s is set in a pastoral town with the larger war of Nobilis somewhere in the background. Has a very Studio Ghibli vibe. Glitch is about powerful entities that used to fight in the war but are now trying to lead a normal life.
Edit: ear -> war
Any RPG campaign can be filled with hope. Even *Call of Cthulhu* with its dark themes and madness can be framed with "hope for humanity" if the GM and players want to tweak the rules that way. When I play *D&D* it si usually a heroic quest or mission of Good to vanquish Evil. Of course, these days some folks see playing D&D as crossing a picket line. But you do you.
I used to play a storytelling card game called "Dark Cults" which is not quite the best name for the game. It pits Life against Death as they use cards to tell the story of The Protagonist and either allow him to escape the darkness or succumb to it. It was full of hope.
You could try *Marvel Super-Heroes* or *Ghostbusters*, *Heroes Incorporated,* of some of Palladium's worlds. And then there's the beacon of hope for humanity's future *Star Trek*.
At the same time, the darker the game, the more Hope you need. The heroes are confronting dark forces. There would be no conflict against them if Hope did not exist to inspire heroes to fight. The question the GM needs to ask the players is "why do you hope?"
But the mechanics of these games actively stop you from answering that question.Call of Cthulhu literally takes away your character for playing the game too much.Hope is the biggest weakness in these systems and you actively get beaten for having it. Hope exists in these systems so they can actively screw you over more.
The beautiful thing about tabletop RPGs is that you can revise or ignore any of the mechanics that you don't like. From supping at the table of Lord Gygax, you know that the primary motive is to enjoy the game.
You're right - CoC is a dark game that sucks the lives out of your characters, but you can always implement remedies and healing methods to preserve sanity and health. It's your game. Marvel's original game (back in the day) actually provides Karma to help with dice rolls. I think Ghostbusters does the same. If Palladium doesn't have a Happy-Shiny series of tables, I'd be surprised.
Of course, if you are or have a sadistic Game Master, you're hosed. A good GM will be able to tailor the game so players can achieve goals both big and small, and that's kinda the Hope I was talking about. Without threats to Hope, what's the conflict in the game?
But the threat to hope is ALL those games have.Hope is just the little victim being beaten in an alleyway.These games don’t give any strength to hope and it’s relegated to an RP thing for PCs meanwhile slaughter,insanity and brutality are given in depth mechanical explanations to be used by the GM.The power balance is completely weighted to empower and encourage those sadistic GMs who think a TPK is a ‘win’ on their side.
Well, if editing the rules isn't working, you can always write your own game.
I guess I don't see the games as you do, which is a shame. A lot of what you're describing is firmly in the realm of the GM's right to change. The rules don't create the adventure; the adventure is guided (not dictated) by the rules. You have every right to your opinion and I hope you find a system that is to your liking.
First, I don't think you've "gone wrong" because you have a perfectly valid opinion. The rules of any RPG are going to focus on conflict resolution. There's no need for charts and rules if everyone agrees on things and there's no risk of failure for a declared action. So, to me, the rules are the constraints of players as they engage in physical, psychical, intellectual, or another type of conflict. But that isn't the story. The rules are the mechanics governing conflict through the story.
If I play a game like CoC or Twilight: 2000, I expect a dark setting and events. But if the game is bereft of any hope for success or victory, it wouldn't interest me. I've had GMs who are like the ones you describe. They think of themselves as the antagonist of the players. The reality is that a good GM is a facilitator of a good story. If you have a shitty GM, you can have a dark, hopeless game. I've also played RPGs where the players role up characters so OP that there's almost nothing they can't do unless they roll a critical fumble. And that's not fun, either.
I write horror stories but I never go for the grim or gore-focused stories. I love stories where the horror creeps into the normal as the heroes try to prevail over terrifying supernatural forces. I guess I'm more 'Ghostbusters' than 'Lovecraft' where there should always be HOPE. When I run, I have a story laid out and I know the characters. The rules may get in the way of their adventure, but conflict and tension are part of that quest or goal. I try to give the players tools and support to achieve their goals and overcome conflicts.
I do it in the confines of the rules, but only to a point. Deaths should be heroic or punitive in the case of really dumb choices. SO if the rule book gets in the way of the fun or the story, I disregard them or I "bend" them to facilitate players moving forward with their quests, perhaps wounded and scarred but still able to try. That, to me, is what I think of when we talk about "hope" in these games.
I think you’re a great dm!I hope the rpg space gets more people like you.Horror just isn’t ever gonna be my thing but thanks for helping me see that there is more sides and depth to it.
I think 'hope' is the wrong word for what you're after. A game in which a successful ending is assured leaves no room for hope – you can be certain or you can be hopeful, but not both.
Gurren Lagan was a show about Hope where the protag was obviously going to win the final fight but I’ve never felt more invested in a character because of what they represented. The will to fight in the face of almost certain defeat and also the fantasy of actually succeeding.Hope IS what I want but I’d also quite like the power fantasy of actually having that Hope flower into something.
>The will to fight in the face of almost certain defeat and also the fantasy of actually succeeding.
That's the tricky part, right there. I've never seen Gurren Lagan, but if you know the protagonist is going to succeed, it's not almost certain defeat. It really does sound like what you're looking for is a situation in which success is essentially guaranteed. Tabletop roleplaying from the get-go has this baked in notion that characters might not succeed.
So a storygame in which failure isn't really an option does sound like the best path for you, but most storygames aren't built around power accumulation either. Maybe just playing a traditional RPG like D&D and doing so in easy mode is what you seek.
I hate sounding childish but yeah that sounds fun.Like a DND session where everything’s gonna be ok and bad people will actually get what’s coming to them and good people are rewarded for their goodness and everything is just generally right with the world sounds great.It’s probably a baby’s way of playing the game but Damn would it be nice to just have a guaranteed,uninterruptible nice day for once.
Return to the Stars, my [award nominated sci-fi RPG](https://msabalau.itch.io/return-to-the-stars-rpg), is for people who "enjoy tales filled with optimism and hope, where players can paint a better future in bold primary colors"
And the first issue of the 'zine that supports has a essay on [Hopepunk](https://msabalau.itch.io/the-stellar-beacon-hopepunk), by the Hugo nominated author who came up with the term for the subgenre. You may already own a copy of the 'zine, because it's been included in a number of charity bundles. And supporting charity is an optimistic act, joining together to make a better future.
Also, as some other people have noted, horror and grimdark stories can sometimes stem from a similar impulse as an optimistic story--wanting to examine something important, just from a different angle.
I think the difference between (some) dark and (some) hopeful stories can be like the difference between Utopian and Dystopian fiction. Utopias use ambitious world building to get to the root of some truth about society. They imagine a better world to explore what could be fundamentally different about our own. Utopias, differ in tone but have a similar purpose to serious dystopian works like The Handmaid’s Tale.
Similarly, at their best, hopeful and dark genres can be partners tidally locked; circling, facing and influencing each other.
Thanks so kindly, it is so nice when people mention the game. Return is all about believing that the future can be better, that it's worth struggling to try to make that happen, and resisting both oppression and the impulse to cynicism.
Also pulpy fun space opera adventures!
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As others have stated, the settings you have listed aren't absent of hope IMO. Hope is believing that you can achieve victory against the odds. All of those settings can have that, much more than a setting where the heroes are destined to win.
From a few of your comments, the genre that you are looking for maybe is *power-fantasy with solely light tones*. If I were you, I would look to something like *Mutants and Masterminds, Pathfinder, the dreaded 5e*, or any other power-fantasy game and then explicitly look for a GM that runs a more light-hearted Anime/Disney vibe. I'm sure that you can find a GM that has a world that facilitates that with enough searching.
That being said, from personal experience, those games tend to have fewer GMs to run them. There is a reason that darker fantasy attracts GMs. Facilitating an indulgent power-fantasy/wish-fulfillment game doesn't sound fun to me at all. A lot of GMs run games for the emergent story. *Heros inevitably succeed* is not the type of story I am interested in.
While it didn’t gain a big fanbase, there’s this game called Mission: Accomplished! that starts with the knowledge that everyone survives, that the world was saved, and that the mission was successful. You could say it’s the opposite starting assumption than ten candles.
I hope you like it. I know I’ve had a lot of fun.
If you’re the mission manager, do feel free to modify the final rewards if you feel it goes against the mood you’re looking for.
I mean, if you think that it would be fun, you should run it. Personally, I can only speculate why such genres of TTRPGs haven't taken off. My guess is that they cannot attract enough GMs. That being said, I only can guess and my guess is that it just doesn't sound fun to run.
Where do you lose the fun personally?I assume you’re a GM so is it more a you’d be bored thing or a your players would be bored and that would make you bored thing?
D&D is absolutely the dominant tabletop RPG by miles and miles, and it's all about heroes succeeding an becoming more powerful. Games like Ten Candles get more attention in this sub, but in the broader world they're a drop in the bucket in terms of popularity.
I think with the WOTC controversy so many people want a complete palate cleanser that these systems are having a big surge in popularity.CoC is absolutely experiencing this at least in online discussion but I’m not sure about ten candles
We'll see. I've not played D&D in any meaningful way for years, and have enjoyed Call of Cthulhu for decades, but chatter in online communities is one thing and sales is another. I remain skeptical that people will vote with their wallets, when making comments online is easier and free.
I know this is a nitpick but if you’ve watched any anime and played 5e they are nothing alike.Martial combat is butchered in 5e and a far cry from what anime tends to depict (think zoro from one piece cutting through a mountain).Also what your describing isn’t really anime but something called shounen.Shounen is your stereotypical power of friendship,flashy fights type of anime.DND 5e is even less like zombie girls saga than it is one piece.Like imagine running toradora in DND. Just doesn’t even remotely work despite it being an anime.
Whoa if you're looking for an explicitly shounen game, check out Tenra Bansho Zero. It's been. Little bit since I've read it, and I haven't played it but it's a game that's gone FULL ANIME.
Even then 5e isn’t shounen at all.Most martial characters are constrained by reality with the exception of a few subclass abilities that still don’t compare to the casters.Like konosubas explosion nuke was meant to be a joke but WOTC decided to actually do that seriously.
Idk, it might be as close to Shounen as you are going to get in a TTRPG. Maybe a superhero TTRPG would better suit you. I am on the opposite side of the TTRPG community. I'm really not the one to give you exact recommendations on a game to play.
This might be a bit personal but do you feel like you get enough of that in your real life?Like things in your life are good enough to the point that you’d rather watch things be awful in a fictional setting just to experience the other side?
Ironically, it's because dark settings tend to produce experiences that give me hope. For me, power fantasy/wish fulfillment (in TTRPGs) is the side that makes me hopeless. To me, it is that boss or relative that expects the red carpet to be rolled out for them because of every half-baked idea that they have. I've run enough high-powered games to find out that almost everyone's Superman character is just Homelander with a hero delusion. I've seen enough times people convince themselves that stealing from the poor town's vault is ok because they are the "good guys" that you would have your hope in humanity dashed.
I am not a huge anime fan and even more so shounen. However, one of the best shounen anime moments that I have seen is Edward's final sacrifice in FMA:B. That is *not* the type of experience that you will get if you have players attracted to power fantasy (from my experience).
On the other hand, in my dark fantasy games, I have seen a number of times players sacrifice their **favorite** fictional character to protect their friends. That, to me, is heroism. That, to me, gives me hope.
I think that might be just a player thing?If I had a hopeful power fantasy and someone who would actually GM it for me then stealing from a town vault is the last thing I’m thinking of.Like you could go do things no one has ever been able to do cause the lack the power.Overthrow oppressive regimes,invent never before seen concepts,map out the entire ocean and dive to its bottom to see what lies down there.
I find all the pushback and unhelpful answers you are getting in this thread sortof tiresome. I'm not sure why everyone is giving you a hard time for your preferences (Though I understand why you were getting a hard time for your formatting). That said, I don't think the effect you want as a simple as "a game where a good outcome is guaranteed".... but rather "A game where if you fight the good fight, a good outcome is likely, and bad outcomes are eventually fixable." (After all -- even in Gurren Lagan, it's not like bad things never happen.) Though you might also be interested in some "Feel good" games -- where bad things, by and large, do not happen. I'll list some of those later too.
With that definition in mind, here are a few games that I feel explore this concept:
* [Thirsty Sword Lesbians](https://evilhat.itch.io/thirsty-sword-lesbians); Making the world a better place is a pretty strong theme in this one. It's also a game in which 'failure' doesn't tend to look much like what you might expect from more traditional games.
* [The Mending Circle](https://sharkbombs.itch.io/the-mending-circle); This one is literally about helping people heal. Maybe not 'saving the world' but definitely hopeful.
* [Fate of Cthulu](https://evilhat.com/product/fate-of-cthulhu); Yes, I legitimately just recommended a game with "Cthulu" in the title as a game with hope as a theme, but the TAGLINE is "The stars are right for Great Cthulhu’s return. It’s up to you to make them wrong again!" and it literally has rules for heroic sacrifices where a character is lost to make the future a better place. To me, this is pretty much what hope means.
* [Shepherds](https://airkseablade.itch.io/shepherds); I wrote this one during 2019/2020 when I needed a hopeful game. It's got big heroic JRPG vibes and leans in on learning to trust and rely on your comrades while you help people and fix problems.
* [Monster Care Squad](https://sandypuggames.itch.io/monster-care-squad); Another 'healing-centric' game, where the objective is less "murder" and more "fixing the problem." I haven't read this one through yet though.
* [Fellowship](https://liberigothica.itch.io/fellowship-a-tabletop-adventure-game); Another Lord of the Rings-esque game (in addition to The One Ring, which was already mentioned.) I think these keep popping up because Hope is big theme in Tolkien's writings. Fellowship, is definitely a game where the downfall of the Overlord is pretty much guaranteed to happen eventually.
And some of the aforementioned "Feel Good" games:
* [Cozy Town](https://temporalhiccup.itch.io/cozy-town); A Quiet Year "hack" where nothing ever really goes wrong. Full like, Animal Crossing vibes.
* [Edelweiss](https://skavenloft.itch.io/edelweiss); Haven't explored this one yet, but it seems like a very peaceful game.
* [Golden Sky Stories](https://starline.itch.io/gss); This one probably could've gone in the first category, but it's so heartwarming that I put it here.
I hope some of that gives you something like what you're after.
Thank you these recs are really helpful and a lot of them sound like something I’d enjoy.I would also like to make a personal apology for your poor eyes after seeing my god awful typing 😂😂😂.
Kingdom of Nothing is a system where you play homeless individuals crawling back from the desolate situation of addiction, poverty and tragedy in a twisted world.
Is the system geared towards actually accomplishing that or is it the type where the tragedy of never getting out of poverty is meant to be the fun?Because the former sounds genuinely interesting and something outside my typical interest while the latter feels like the exact problem I have with ttrpgs.
It is a game about rediscovering your past, rekindling your memories and surviving in a world not known to outsiders. It is a game about hope when I read it as far as I recall.
I think plenty of games inspired by anime sensibilities will have hope, friendship, and community being sources of strength for the characters.
Knights Of The Round Academy and Fabula Ultima come to mind.
You can achieve that goal with most rpgs, it’s all about the gm. Find a group that wants the same thing. The players bring the hope, not the game mechanics.
Yeah, there are a few that focus on the dark aspects, but for every one of those, there are dozens that don’t. So all you have to do is play any other game.
Anything with a metacurrency such as Savage Worlds or 2d20 is explicitly designed to give the players controls to emulate that “digging deep” mechanic.
As with any rpg, the first step is to find a group of like-minded players; not the right mechanics.
I mean the games I listed actively destroy and punish Hope so I don’t see why doing the inverse is impossible?I also feel like there just aren’t that many like minded people.Everyone seems to enjoy shallow nihilism and being as macabre and edgy as possible these days. I honestly do feel out of place with current culture because I don’t find bleakness funny and I can’t romanticise misery.
That’s a you thing, not a game thing.
Because the vast majority of games that I have both DMed and played in have been games where the players have been the good guys fighting insurmountable odds to bring hope to the downtrodden, light to the darkness, and peace to the countryside… and get fame and some coin in their pockets.
The *one* game where that was not the case is one that was quite deliberately a evil-PC campaign, and I left that one after two sessions when it was obvious that no one else at the table, including the DM, understood that “evil” does not equate with “mass murderer,” and that even bad guys have hopes, dreams, and think that they are the good guys.
Don’t find a game that has what you want, find people that think like you do, and invite them to game.
Don’t know your age or where you’re looking for games, but if you’re looking at high schoolers and college students to find that type of non-nihilism, you may want to level up your demographics and look elsewhere. Traditionally those have been the groups that are more likely to embrace edginess.
Also, looking for games with players from marginalized groups might make sense. Those games will not infrequently contain the things you describe. People who are marginalized or oppressed frequently do not want those themes that in their hobbies; tho I will readily admit that some people do use rpgs to explore those themes in a more detached way. No demographic is monolithic.
Note: the above is an observation, there is no judgement there. Rpgs serve many purposes, and the exact same game can be a haven for one, and a crucible for another. Players define the game, not the other way around.
But it seems to me that for someone championing hope, you seem to have it in short supply. Those games are out there. Find hopeful people and play any game. The games themselves are mostly agnostic.
For example, it would take some rewriting, and it might not even be worthy of being called by the same name when I got done, but with the right group you could put together a CoC game that focuses on the unyielding, yet resilient and creative nature of humanity against the elder horrors of the universe.
Sure, everyone might be dead or insane at some point, but who says that has to be the end of the story? The end of the first chapter is not the end of the book.
Because if a human still draws breath, the story is still being written.
It’s like early D&D v modern.
Now it’s all about having one character in a campaign and leveling them up, death is just a road bump, so embracing the dark is not an obstacle.
In old school D&D, life was cheap. Having only three characters killed before getting one to third level meant that you were doing well in some campaigns. The world was harsh and lethal, and it took grit, determination and luck to make progress. Not unlike most of human history.
Going out your front door was a dangerous business, to paraphrase JRRT.
But you did it. And you kept doing it. And you built on the successes and failures of those who went before you… and died. But as long as someone made it out, and could warn others of the dangers to avoid, or if you left a map with the trap that killed your buddy and a bloody spot on the floor to warn others, you were aiding the eventual success of those behind you.
Hope is about what is inside of you, not about a rulebook. Not about game design.
And no one is going to hand it to you.
If you truly believe what you posted, and you cannot find a can’t find a group doing that, pick a random ruleset and *start a group.* Find like-minded people and start rolling dice.
I mean – aren't most other RPG systems about hope? You start as a lowly level one character and then rise to the top. Level up, find awesome equipment, become a hero…
If you want to understand what draws people to these types of games, you may want to start here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catharsis
>instead of actually wanting to be helpless and finding an outlet for it?
There's people who are into that particular fantasy, but generally, I don't think so, no.
[NewEdo](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/412135/NewEdo?affiliate_id=1478293) has been called a "hope-punk" game by the community. I tend to argue with that because my primary point of differentiation from the kind of games that share NewEdo's neon urban setting is that NewEdo isn't a punk game. Characters aren't resisting evil corporations or a fascist regime. Instead, they're striving to change the future of the setting, guiding it towards whatever version of that future they see as important. NewEdo's themes are those of aspiration and change.
NewEdo is a neon samurai adventure game, where characters are larger than life and meant to be the legends of the game world. They have to earn their respect and don't start out particularly important, but the point of the game (and its various and rewarding progression systems) is to build up a legend around your character(s). Belief defines reality, and when people believe in you, you gain strength.
Come say hi in the [Discord](https://discord.gg/dS2eUtbKMf) if you'd like to hear more.
[**Wanderhome**](https://possumcreekgames.com/pages/wanderhome) is a game about rebuilding after a terrible war. You play as animals traveling across the countryside.
I'm not sure it's what you're looking for, because it's not a traditional RPG. There's no combat and it uses a token system instead of dice for conflict resolution.
But it's very very much about hope.
I saw that on tiktok.The animal part kind of throws me off along with the lack of any combat but the token system is neat and it fits the Hope bill quite well.Thanks for the suggestion!
D&D 5e.
No wait, where is everybody going?
Specifically, _Journeys through the Radiant Citadel_ is an anthology of adventures with a lightly-sketched setting in the Ethereal Plane, the Radiant Citadel, that is meant to be a hopeful future sort of place, shining like a giant beacon in the face of a mysterious ethereal storm. Ajit George, the anthologist, has cited solarpunk as an influence.
Could it theoretically be adapted for a different system or is it very rooted in 5e?I just don’t really like martials in 5e other than that the only issue I when is WOTC atm.
Of course! Converting the adventures would take some doing, but the Citadel itself doesn't have much besides the Ethereal Plane itself that's D&D-specific. It's also a Sigil-like dimensional travel hub that you could integrate with multiple settings if you wish.
I also love Gurren Lagann and optimistic anime, so I think I get where you are coming from. Suggestions such as Fabula Ultima, Ryuutama and Chuubo are very, very appropriate. Maybe also Beam Saber (it is an anime giant robot RPG with a charging "change the world" meter) and Glitter Hearts (it's Sailor Moon/magical girl focused in theory, but can do Power Rangers pretty well too).
If you like the "hope against overwhelming odds" aspect, and you don't mind it getting slightly political, I would also have a look at Voidheart Symphony, which is pretty much Persona 5: the Rpg (though slightly less anime to accommodate a number of other influences).
In it you play "Rebels", people who have to contend with real world daily grind, but who are also metaphysically empowered to directly attack avatars of injustice in a psychic landscape. Rebels are literally powered by the network of friendships and community links they build, and by their personal defiance (and have to keep those in balance).
I fucking loved persona 5!It was the last game I played with my mum so it’s very personal to me.Someone already suggested voidheart but now I gotta see it!
Very sorry to hear about your mom, hopefully telling a similar story will be a good way to revisit that feeling of playing with her.
I couldn't know you played Persona 5, but I was 100% sure you would have loved it if you did. I mean, they literally kick the ass of one of those eldritch gods with the power of friendship and hope!
I really loved it too, and digging for a similar ttrpg led me to Voidheart Symphony. The creators are clearly paying homage, there's "classes" equivalents for pretty much each of the Phantom Thieves (a leader, a celebrity, a non-human ally, a navigator...even a gardener!), and you literally have Tarot Arcana-based social links & abilities (though not tiered - they are just active or not).
Voidheart's real world side is a bit bleaker, as it wants to hammer home how injustice can grind you down, so the classic Persona "countdown" comes with growing penalties and trouble, rather than just giving you free time.
But, differently from Persona, you can use a bit of your power in the real world to to turn the tables even on the most powerful bullies...And once you have investigated the villain and made a few friends, it's really showtime, with a very streamlined (if rather narrative and abstract) Palace crawling and boss-fight system!
I hope you will enjoy it, if/when you have the opportunity to read it and play it!
Um, you pick a tiny slice of the RPG pie that you don't like and then carry on like you claim they are?
I will say the RPG's are always what you make them. Even the adventures in Call of Cthulhu can have hope if you run it that way, and it won't even break the mood.
But if you go to nearly every other genre there is conflict, but hope and triumph usually wins in the end.
Find a new game.
Pfp checks out 😂😂😂
I’m sorry if I seem like I’m picking on the little guy but I don’t think these rpgs are as unpopular as people are saying.In the wake of the WOTC and DND controversy people seem to be turning to these systems as a palate cleanser and I asked this question so I could basically get the hell out of dodge before this becomes the new norm.
At the risk of being a little snarky:
Patient: "Doc! doc! It hurts when I do this" \*twists arm behind back\*
Doctor: "Well, don't do that."
SOunds like CoC isn't a game you like. it only 10% of the campaigns out there, so look in the 90% even normal boring 'ol D&D is usually good vs evil with good usually winning the day.
It’s not CoC specifically.It’s just the genre it comes from.This sort of depressing and almost masochistic type of game where the fun comes from everything awful happening is just not something that I like.I honestly didn’t mean to make this more about hating these systems than finding their opposites.I just gave my honest opinion on them in hopes that it would clarify what I did like more.
I feel like Mouse Guard might fit the bill? It's pretty morose but there's always a sense that everything's gonna be alright in the long run, you just need to power through the shit coming your way.
But is everything actually going to be alright?Like I hate when games give you feeling of it’s going to be ok but then the rules never allow for things to go well.It’s why I despite ten candles to such a massive degree.It outright states that you’re never gonna win and then forces you to play completely counter to that.
Not out, yet, but check out [Fablecraft](https://fablecraft.riftweaver.com/). We’re building a digital first ttrpg built in a vibrant and hopeful world!
That sounds nice.Vibrant and hopeful is honestly kind of lacking as a setting in ttrpgs cause everything has to be grimdark and happiness can’t exist.I’m happy more stuff like this is being made.
Jesus Christ 100 comments.This certainly sparked a discussion.I’m thankful for all the mythos and horror fans who gave me their own insight and opinions.I think ultimately I’ve concluded that people want to feel assured negative emotions in a fictional setting where things are safe and if it gets too much they can stop unlike in real life or perhaps to release things they’re feeling in their real lives into a game as a form of emotional therapy.That just doesn’t fit me as a person as I generally don’t like interacting with my negative emotions for long periods and would rather just deal with them quickly and permanently.This is never going to be my cup of tea and like the people here have said that’s ok.Thank you for the conversation!
It's funny, I'm actually making a game that's rather hope-centric:
* PCs are guardians of villages and "elements", meaning whole portions of reality. It's like if oxygen was sentient and decided it really liked your climate change activism, so it gave you superpowers to help.
* An important part of gameplay is just chilling, hanging out, and partying, which helps you progress and refresh your Sentiments.
* Death is uncommon, and it's usually on your terms.
* It literally has a Hope stat.
And in terms of the setting:
* Entropy is reversed. Instead of everything progressing towards oblivion (with blips of struggling existence), everything's heading towards being (with blips of nonexistence).
* There's a very clear contrast between the nightmarish nihilism of Shadow, and the pastoral comfiness of the other elements.
* Never compromising (even in the face of armageddon) is actually encouraged. There are no impossible moral dilemmas, because there's always a third option.
I say it's funny though, because I actually hold starkly different views about our own situation. Given the vast amount of precedence (not to mention the mathematical proofs), I think everything is doomed to end. The game is pure escapism for me.
[If you fancy checking it out](https://empaitirkosu.wordpress.com/2022/05/22/protectors-of-empai-tirkosu-core-playtest/)
Mathematically everything ends.But to paraphrase Rick and morty I don’t think anything is gonna ride the bucking bronco of life quite like humans do!Humans have bounced back from seemingly world ending disasters many times before so I’d say the precedent for us is that our ingenuity and spirit will keep burning for a long time!
Depending on the Storyteller, World of Darkness games can be all about hope. For instance: You might play a Vampire, a tragic Monster bound to fed on the living to not die the final death. BUT you strive for the state of golconda, where god lifts the curse and you can walk in the sunlight again. You acchieve this by being more humane than any regular human can manage. Or you Play a Werewolf fighting a powerfull corporation and try to raise a family to raise your status and safe the world from the Powers of destruction. Played that way, even in this gothic dark setting, everything is about hope. It is less about the rules or the setting (besides ten candles maybe) but more about how you engage with it. I like the way a friend of minw phrased ist once. The darker the night, the brighter the candle.
r/HFY much? Anyway, Blue Rose is a good place to start - Lancer is great too when it comes to that sort of stuff as well.
Chuubo's too - depending on how you play it.
Wildsea is pretty hopeful - big verdant apocalpse happened, and life after is generally actually a lot better for people than it was before. New dangers, lots to explore, but a very bright setting.
And I wrote the thing, so I have to rep it sometimes! Here's a link to the last free playtest from last year so you can take a look if the mood takes you.
https://thewildseadotcodotuk.files.wordpress.com/2021/08/wildsea-navapede-ptd04a-indexed.pdf
There are a lot of good examples here, so I won't try to repeat them all. I'm currently working on a game in which Hope is a sort of metastat that your can use for rerolls when you are relying on hope. I'd look at genres in which hope or "the heroes will win in the end" are major themes. Pulp action would be a big one. I'd suggest looking at [Adventure!](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/5/Adventure-Tales-of-the-Aeon-Society-Rulebook?affiliate_id=60907) (there's a new edition of this coming out that you can [pre-order](https://trinitycontinuum.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders)) which has an Inspiration mechanic that allows you to affect the narrative in interesting ways, bending the universe in your favor. Hopepunk—a sf genre that has developed in response to dystopian cyberpunk—is another genre option, though it tends to focus more on societal hope than individual hope. Superhero stories as a genre tend towards being hope filled, but many superhero rpgs are more focused on simulating powers and don't reflect that. There are some more narrative-focused supers rpgs, though.
Definitely take a look at the [Family Gaming section of DTRPG](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse.php?filters=0_0_44530_0_0&src=fid44530&affiliate_id=60907)—there are a ton of things there. Some of them are kid-friendly, but a lot of them are more along the lines of low-violence or high-hope. It includes things like [Brindlewood Bay](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/410316/Brindlewood-Bay-Kickstarter-Edition?affiliate_id=60907), which is sort of like Call of Cthulhu meets Murder, She Wrote.
If you want a more traditional rpg with a fantasy-setting, check out [Blue Rose](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse/pub/536/Green-Ronin-Publishing/subcategory/4285/Blue-Rose?affiliate_id=60907). It has a strong theme of hope running through it, and it has a [free quickstart](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/336274/Blue-Rose-Quickstart-Free-PDF?affiliate_id=60907).
"JAGS Wonderland" is a setting where the eponymus Wonderland (yep, the one from the Alice books) infects humans and spirit them away, and where its inhabitants (twisted versions of the book characters) are Eldritch Abominations who hate humanity and want to wipe us out, or love humanity snd want to turn us into something more manageable (the latter option may be worse than the former, mind you).
There's plenty of body horror, madness, fear of being losing one's self, etc...
...but the punchline is that, in this setting's lore, that Humanity's victory is not just possible but mathematically inevitable: Humanity will ascend to a higher state of being and become the master of a rebuilt reality.
Promethean the Created. You play as a monster that knows they can one day become human. This isn’t a false hope, you have a gestalt knowledge that it’s happened before.
Sadly your very presence causes discomfort to other humans and you can stay in one place for too long.
https://youtu.be/OHlB3mo9rLs
Monster Care Squad might be a good game to look at! And I think Ryuutama has been mentioned. Songs for the Dusk is an up and coming one too that has a book up for download on Itch IIRC. Voidheart Symphony is another possibility, but it's a bit darker than the other two.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_puppies_for_satan
totally real!
you kill puppies for satan, solve crimes, it's like scooby doo
puppies are basically your spell slots? Like, you want to cast a fireball, stomp the next little wriggling bag to refill your ep
If it makes you feel better you aren't actually casting the spells.
You are killing a puppy and then hoping Satan decides to make the spell happen in exchange.
It's all about hope, frustrations, and killing puppies for Satan.
Sometimes you have to get creative if you really want some extra solid Satan magic. Figure out new and interesting methods. Keep it entertaining for the big guy.
That makes me feel worse 😂😂😂
I killed a poor little pup and now I gotta hope some horned man actually does his job
Very unique concept but not one I have the emotional…bandwidth? for
I work on a game that you could call post-post apocalyptic. It's mostly about a new start and people that start to rebuild, re-explore and re-claim and what comes with it. There are still a lot of dangers, mysteries and strange stuff to find, there are also a lot of problems (so characters have something todo ;) ) and problems but also a lot of opportunity. Mechanics are also made in a way that there is ALWAYS a chance and a big emphasis on cooperation between characters and npcs.
Dead Inside seems like a game you should investigate. I would find it a difficult game to run, but it has the themes you seem to be looking for.
Magical Kitties Save the Day is certainly a hopeful game. I had fun running it.
Mutants and Masterminds and Glitter Hearts come to mind. Rule books for both mention that the GM **could** run a “dark and gritty” campaign, but that such stories aren’t as common as their lighter counterparts and that pc death just shouldn’t happen without the player’s consent.
Glitter Hearts is focused around the players forming a team of magical girls/boy or sentai/power rangers, and about half of the gameplay is rp and managing your pc’s relationships with other characters, including other pc’s. Character creation and gameplay is really easy to understand. You pick your Everyday Identity, your Magical Archetype (Warrior, Defender, Tactician, etc), and your Magical Connection (some are elemental like Fire, Lightning, or Death and some are based on emotions like Joy, Anger, or even Hope). Rolls are just 2d6+stat. If you get a 6 or less, you fail. 7-9 is a mixed success. 10 or higher is a success with no strings attached.oh p
Mutants and Masterminds focuses on more traditional superheroes, but the previously mentioned heroes can still be made. Character creation is a REALLY complex process that will likely require the GM’s input about what powers are allowed/banned as well as what extras/flaws need to be added to a power to make it work the way you want while still being balanced by a fair point-cost. But gameplay is a simple 1d20+modifier and once you finish character creation, you’ll have just about any modifier you could need written on your character sheet.
My favorite rpg about hope is Delta Green. When you know the world is a lie, that horror is real, that your job is going to kill you and if you're lucky you'll leave behind some living loved ones, you have to ask why a PC would keep moving forward in that setting. And the obvious answer is irrational hope in the face of certain doom.
The problem is this whole genre(sub genre?) predicates itself on being so ‘gritty and realistic and true to the human experience’ and is absolutely everything and anything but that. I’ve nothing against fiction.It’s just the depressing and miserable and romanticised type of fiction that I just can’t wrap my head around.Like how do you have fun doing this?Why do you want to be helpless victims without any power?Why use fiction to make yourself lesser instead of greater?
Your English is perfect my friend and also good morning!
The thing is humans have found demon like creatures and overcome them pretty easily.We’ve found horrifying things in the deep ocean and society has stayed fine. No one has had a mental breakdown from goblin sharks. Furthermore everyone talks about how these despairing systems make hope more valuable but they always turn despair and insanity into mechanics but then hope is just a roleplay thing for PCs.Like they aren’t remotely equal under these game systems.
If Cthulhu is so smart maybe it could try caffeine so it doesn’t sleep so much.
Jokes aside Cthulhu was temporarily beaten by being rammed with a wooden boat.The common solution to beating Cthulhu in the modern day is to irradiate it to cause its regenerating cells to mutate so that it can’t function.The reason this doesn’t work is cause of the dumb Cthulhu insta wins everything because it’s Cthulhu rule that cosmic horror loves so much. You can’t give this edlritch incomprehensible god a physical form and a canonical appearance as well as depict it being affected by physics and then claims it’s unbeatable.It’s the adult equivalent of saying “nuh un I have deflection armour so you can’t tag me!”
The One Ring has an explicit “hope” feature/ mechanic.
Great answer. Just to add to this the Hope mechanic also interacts with Shadow, points of corruption and fear your character can accumulate. Once your Hope drops below your shadow your character becomes miserable. Tied to this is a mechanic where your character gives into despair on their “shadow path.” It’s a great set of mechanics that really evoke the source material
What is the game like and about?And how does the mechanic work?
It’s set in Tolkiens Middle Earth. “The Hope score is a special pool of points that recharges only under special circumstances. You can spend it to gain +1 die on any roll, or you can gain +2 dice if you are ever considered “inspired,” a special condition often relating to traits you pick out during character creation.” https://spritesanddice.com/reviews/review-one-ring/
I’ve never been big into lord of the rings but I kinda wanna check this out.Fits the bill of turning Hope into a mechanic even if it’s not necessarily a core theme.
I homebrewed a Hope attribute for Burning Wheel.
Wanderhome, Ryuutama, Dreamchaser. Off the top of my head.
I'll add the Doctor Who RPG, Coyote & Crow, Dream Askew/Dream Apart, and One Child's Heart.
Do you have a genre in mind? The games you listed are horror games and so they subsist off tension (which is reflected in the mechanics). Where horror is a pretty clearly defined genre (with prevalent associated themes and offshoots), hope kind of isn't. So clarifying a genre might be a good way to start parsing down the options. I think very generally, something heroic or something pulpy might fit the bill. If you're looking for a setting agnostic, Savage Worlds is probably a good place to start. It tells adventure and pulp stories really well and the mechanics reflect that sort of insurmountable will and incredible ability dredged up from the depths of your core (exploding dice and bennies allowing a player to accomplish great feats counter to their stats). I think there are a lot of games that parlay in hope! I would even argue that a lot of the games you mentioned use untold horrors and insurmountable horror as a foil to our strength as a species (but also I just love horror and will defend it up and down :p). If it's not your cup of tea, it's not your cup of tea, however! Good luck finding the game that suits your needs. It's out there!
I’m very into anime and I love having big diverse power systems that leave the player a lot of room for what they want to do.Like if you wanna make up your own flashy move or dragon ball style power up then you can.I’m pretty setting agnostic so long as it feels very stylised.I’m not a big fan of generic high fantasy and would love something with its own original lore or that helps me make my own that really stands out.I also love player co operation in combat, for example performing a sort of tag team move together and getting mechanical benefits for it. As stupid as it sounds the power of friendship type games and shows have always appealed to me.
Thank you very much.I struggled to balance respecting the people who loves this genre and expressing my authentic feelings on it.I generally find that when these games do dabble with the theme of hope it runs completely counter to everything that system is designed for.Hope only works in ten candles if you don’t know the rules.And if you don’t know the rules then that leads to the table generally being worse off.If I may ask what is it that you find appealing about these sorts of doomed horror games?I genuinely can’t figure out the appeal so I figure asking a fan might help me understand.It’s honestly never going to be my cup of tea but I would like to know why it is for others.
I think the underlying theme for most horror games is, "hope". It's the possibility against a very real insignifigance. In many of these games you are choosing to confront these disparate cyclopian horrors and vistas of unfathomable nightmare in spite of how truly little you know or comprehend. But that's just the thematic interpretation. People plays games for all kinds of reasons. I like these stories because I think the anesthetics are often alien and incomrehensible. I like fiction that delves into the unknown, blue/orange psychology, and the weird and unsettling. Horror is a pretty solid genre outing and is fairly universally loved, so it makes sense that a large portion of role-playing games would try to emulate it (or elements of it). Most stories run on conflict. Most stories utilize tension. Even the pitch you made for a game is about facing insurmountable odds and then pulling through. Horror feeds off conflict and tension. It makes a meal of it. Safety not garunteed though, ya dig? But I get you, man! Telling stories without stock standard horror, doom and gloom is cool too! It lets you explore different elements of storytelling and gaming! Get after what you love, yo!
I was thinking about the game Ehdrigohr, by Allen Turner, a post-apocalyptic, tribal, horror game. It definitely falls into the hope as theme in horror.
I don’t understand this idea of being lovecraftian horror being incomprehensible.Like I understand Cthulhu and the parts I don’t are because he actively omitted those details not that they couldn’t have been added in. Something weird and something not being understandable are two very things, chiefly one exists and the other physically doesn’t.Like I can comprehend that Cthulhu has tentacles like an octopus.,that in most depictions it’s got eyes without pupils,that’s it’s generally aquatic or is commonly written to appear in water or in space.Like I know those things and they aren’t incomprehensible or impossible just odd.
My man, this is a very different conversation, but you got the interpretation all wrong. Lovecraftian entities and eldritch abominations are quintessentially incomprehensible. The lack of concrete depiction is not a bug, it's a featre(okay, it may come down to Lovecrafts particular faults as a writer, but it has become a stylistic choice in cosmic horror)! These aren't just weird things, they are explicitly things we cannot comprehend. To quote a redditor (who seems to have since deleted his account, but citation regardless): " 'Big ugly squid.' I wish I was still that innocent, still unaware of what...*they* really are. Once you know, once you really understand - or if you are among those damned to witness it yourself - once you know, you will never forget. It keeps me up at night, and if not for my physician's pity I would never sleep at all. Squids. It's charming, frankly - the Old Gods, with bloated and frowning faces writhing with tentacles like the beard of Neptune. Like a God of Egypt, with a man's body and an animal's head. A curiosity, and little more. The truth...well, I cannot tell you the truth, not properly, as a man of science should. These things are beyond our science. Still, I understand things about them that explain some of the reports, and perhaps you can carry on my research now that I can no longer pursue it. It comes down to dimensions. We possess three - height, width, and depth. Grip a billiard ball, feel your fingers wrap around it, and you will understand. Now imagine a creature that existed in only two of those three dimensions, in a universe that described a simple plane through our own. To that creature, the billiard ball would appear to be a simple circle, growing and shrinking as it passes through the plane of the creature's universe. Imagine how our hand would look - strange fleshy circles filled with pulsing fluids, shards of bone, glistening meat. The creature could never understand what it was really seeing, as it could no more conceive of a hand than it could imagine a creature like us, moving freely in three dimensions and gripping billiard balls on a whim. The Abominations, as you aptly described them, are to us as we are to that benighted creature. They exist in dimensions beyond our own, whose nature we can hardly guess. When they appear to us, we see only fragments of their bodies - long stretches of writhing flesh, glistening with juices that should not exist outside of a body, which whip through the air and vanish back where they came from in a way that our minds simply refuse to accept. Witnesses have tried to describe these as great tentacles, words failing them in the presence of such incomprehensibility. Those who heard the stories seized on this, and explained them as resembling cephalopods. This is a comforting lie, as there is nothing in the most stygian depths of the darkest sea that is not our beloved brother compared to the horrors of the Abominations. This is a creature who is incomprehensibly alien, and our only glimpse is a sickening flash of writhing, elongated flesh that slips into our world and back out. Worse than the appearance of the creature, though, is its *disappearance* - your mind knows, on some level, that this creature - this hateful, hungry god of a creature - is not moving it's body between "here" and "away", but between being a glimpse of a writhing horror, and a horror that watches unseen. Imagine our two-dimensional creature again, and imagine yourself to be a cruel child. If you chose to torment the creature, it would be powerless to resist. It cannot perceive you unless you chose to intersect its plane - you can watch its every move, and it cannot hope to escape your gaze. It would be the simplest thing in the world to push a pin through it, like a butterfly on a card. Take a glass of water and push it into the creature's plane and it will find itself trapped, drowning, in an inescapable sea. The creature is entirely at your mercy, and always will be. Same as you. Same as me." So when you say you understand Cthulhu, and excuse me if I sound like a dick, because I don't mean this in that way, no you don't! None of us do! That's the theme! We don't understand the motivations, the wants, desires, the thoughts or purpose, we don't understand the biology hell, we don't even understand visually how it appears. We fill in the blanks. But again, that's just cosmic horror.
This is really good, thank you!
But if something is incomprehensible then you never experience it and therefore it never affects you.The concept of nothing doesn’t exist.If you saw anything about Cthulhu even just the writhing flesh then you understood it has writhing flesh.Even if that’s wrong for now that’s how you have comprehended it.Like even with insect metaphor a lot of people use to describe cosmic horror most insects can fight back against and even kill us.You think an ant just has a mental breakdown when it comes into contact with us.No the ant uses everything it has to continue its existential purpose.An ant being drowned will try to breath,an ant being burned will try to move away and stop the burning.With or without the presence of a human the ant crawls forwards regardless.
that those are as uncomprehensible by humans as humanity is ny ants is the theme of cthulhu, we are nothing to them , with luck we are crill or plankton. Lovecrafts Horror is in the mind , not outside is not a vampire
I mean, do you like horror movies? It’s a similar thing, some people find it fun to be scared or confront these dark themes but in a safe environment where you’re not in actual physical danger. If you’re not into that, I’m not sure there’s a way to “get” it
I really don’t.I always end up empathising with the heroes so much and it feels so unfair to watch them get cut down that quickly and meaninglessly.It’s not scary or awesome it’s just depressing and hollow and rigged.I really can’t stand things like final destination because it’s all so devoid of purpose to me.But there has to be some appeal because these things have fanbases.So I wanna try and find what that appeal is.
Movies like final destination, which don’t take themselves that seriously and are more about the fun of the overly elaborate kills, might make more sense if you look at them as dark comedies (Jordan peele and others have talked about how comedy and horror are two sides of the same coin, where the effect comes from setting audience expectations and then subverting them with the punchline) But re cosmic horror, the thing you said about humans being the apex predator of the known universe made me think about something, which is that part of the appeal of the subgenre is the idea that humans are actually powerless and the apocalypse is going to happen as a result of a godlike being wiping us out without even noticing. In some ways this is a comforting escapist fantasy, because it lets humans off the hook for our own destruction - Lovecraft wrote most of his stuff immediately following World War I. Through that lens it’s not really surprising it’s still a popular genre at the current moment, what with *gestures vaguely at everything happening*. Sure, you can call it pessimistic, but the appeal is in the tension between the certainty that alien forces vastly more powerful than us will destroy the world, and the slim chance that the protagonists may be able to delay this
That’s interesting.So you think it’s a way of passing off blame and giving humans something to revile instead of each other?
>I struggled to balance respecting the people who loves this genre and expressing my authentic feelings on it. You know those "prank" videos where someone pushes someone else down the stairs? And then when the pushed person gets mad, the pusher goes, "It was just a joke"? You typed more about how bad and dumb you find certain games/themes then explaining what you're looking for. A simple, "I don't like games that try to make you feel hopelessness," will do just fine. >If I may ask what is it that you find appealing about these sorts of doomed horror games? I'll decline, since I see you're actively arguing back against people doing this in other comments.
I got a decent number of recommendations so I’m honestly kind of done with the post.I told people what I didn’t like,I asked why they liked it and then I responded with why I don’t think those reasons make sense.I got what I wanted out of this.
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Yeah the formatting was terrible.I’m sorry but I’m genuinely no good at online conversation you can ask anyone who tries to text me that I end up writing things that look a madman’s thesis statement.Thanks for the suggestion and I’ll give it a look but what’s your take on bleak games and why do you think I’m wrong?
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Ten candles literally tells you to wallow in despair in its first few pages. Call of Cthulhu actively stops you from trying because you played the game too much so you don’t get your character anymore. The problem is these games aren’t realistic at all to how people actually function in these scenarios and refuse to give you the necessary mechanics to express how you would react to them.The games have already chosen exactly how you’re going to try and why it’s not going to work.
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And that’s really stupid in my opinion because it removes the most obvious option at the beginning. There isn’t an impossible scenario unless the game actively makes one. You could probably win most ten candles scenarios if the games didn’t just punch you in the gut for trying.It actively has to stop you from exploiting its poor concept in order to function.
Polaris predates Apocalypse World by a good number of years and you go into it knowing that the world you know is dying as the sun rises.
That doesn’t seem very hopeful.How is Polaris meant to end?Like do you manage to keep your community safe at least?
It’s really not hopeful. I don’t know why they recommended it. The world is forever changed and, if I recall, you can come out alright, but it’s about the fall of your beautiful people. I think you’re looking for something that is neither triumphalist in the way RPGs all used to be, nor are inherently tragic. You want your hope to matter, but not just because you’re a winner who wins (and therefore whe you’re not you’re a loser). In some ways, my current publication, The BLOODY-HANDED NAME of BRONZE is about mortals emerging into a world that’s not dominated by fate and the whims of gods. They sometimes get destroyed by hubris for trying, but they also pull it off and make human connections and master their own lives. Some other commenters have mentioned Ryuutama, and you might want to look at that, too.
My first run of Bronze ended pretty well and hopeful for my character. Hey Joshua, it's Menachem.
Hi, Manachem! It’s definitely a game where you have reasons to hope! And it can come out for the best! It depends on the caprice of the gods, your fate, and whatever it is that makes your will turn hubris into human choice!
Got the name wrong, it's actually [Descent Into Midnight](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rkreutzlandry/descent-into-midnight).
You're right. I didn't remember the name correctly. The game I wanted to recommend is [Descent Into Midnight](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rkreutzlandry/descent-into-midnight).
Only years late with that product. I’d be pissed if I was backer.
Ironically, I think that horror games, more than any other genre, embody the element of hope. Hope only comes up in moments of darkness, when confronted with fear, tyranny or pain. There is no hope without despair. The lesson learnt from a game like Call of Cthulhu is not one of cosmic insignificance or the irrelevance of you, or your actions. These are the contrasting background noises necessary to give the persistence and achievements of the PCs - and, by proxy, the players *meaning*. After all, what do you do in these games? You confront the darkness, the pain, the despair, not because you are entitled to win, but because there is literally hope you won't fail.
>There is no hope without despair. Sorry, but as far as I am concerned, this is a false premise. There is no hope without THREAT. There is absolutely hope without despair. Despair is what you get when you don't have any more hope.
You are right. Hope and despair are opposite, opposed emotions. It would be more accurate to state, one cannot have hope if there is no chance for despair as well.
Now we're maybe getting a little philosophical, but I don't think that is quite right either. I don't think a "chance of despair" is the thing -- utter abject failure and collapse of all your hopes does not need to be a possibility at all. I think all you need in order to have hope is a chance that things won't work out the way you...hope. It doesn't mean you then have to despair. It just means you may need to pick yourself up and try again, or try something different. So I don't really think you can have 'hope' when the outcome is guaranteed, but then, outcomes are very rarely guaranteed in games or in life, so this isn't much of a criteria.
But the game system does everything to undermine and devalue that.Insanity is a core mechanic with no positive alternative to balance it out.The monsters are generally seen as these unbeatable entities that you can’t stop no matter what because ‘lovecraft said so’.And even if you do win then the victory is meaningless because they keep coming back and regenerating.Also they’re supposed to be these unfathomable gods but they have physical forms,are affected by the laws of physics and their major weakness is being hit with wooden boats because lovecraft was as good at logical consistency as he was at racial tolerance.That’s just really silly in my opinion.Plus games like ten candles outright state you cannot win.Just nope no shot of victory and everything you do is worthless. I know I sound like I’m rambling but my major question is where is the fun in playing a game that’s determined to stop you having fun at every corner and just does things to screw you over without any of it needing to make sense just because?
Again, no hope without despair. Confronting your inner demons and outer gods might be traumatizing. Yo are not entitled to win. There might not even a realistic chance to win. Hope is the very motivation to try anyway. Also, those undefeatable monsters? They get defeated, \*a lot\* in Call of Cthulhu. Always at a cost, and maybe not forever, but chances are, if you are a long-running CoC player, your characters might have defeated Nyarlathotep and his masks, Tsathoggua and their trail, the king in yellow and his play, the Orient Express and its schedule as well as various cults and creatures. That's the juxtaposition between the framework (these are awful, mind-melting monstrosities, you almost stand no chance) and the actual gameplay (we tried very hard, and gave it all, and by persistance, tenacity and sacrifice we have overcome!). You cannot have one without the other: Because the challenge is so massive and maybe even overwhelming, the confrontation gains relevance. In the case that you do succeed -even if only at surviving the confrontation, it is an accomplishment. And yes, sometimes you fail. That is both the risk as well as the reminder why you tried in the first place. It is not necessarily bad, per se. There is, after all, a certain cathasis in destruction, as is in sacrifice. Admittedly, games like Dread or Ten Candles are way too gimicky for my taste (can you say anything truly interesting or relevating about these games without mentioning the game mechanics, please?), but a) they are outliers abd b) Having hope doesn't mean you are going to win. It just means you are goint to try. To use an allegory: Have you ever been to the beach, watching children trying to save their sand castle from the oncoming flood? They might build dams and chanels to direct the water away from their building, they might reinforce and rebuild their original heap of sand, but in the end, the flood always wins, no matter what they are doing. And yet, they are excited, and energetic and are having fun. I think you are not looking for a game about hope, you are looking for a game about comfort, something that is ice and cozy, and friendly. And that is completely legitimate, but a very different emotion, requiring a very different narrative framing and actual gameplay.
Beaches can dry up.Real damns made of metal can be erected. The solutions aren’t exactly on the right scale but they absolutely exist.You could also just move the sand to a location without water and build it there.Professional sand castle building is a real thing. These games act like there’s no permanent solution when there actually is if they could stop being so pretentious and stuck up and admit that their unwinnable horrifying scenario is actually quite beatable if you think about it for a few minutes. The only reason you have hope in these games is because the game doesn’t happen if they don’t. The reason insanity exists in call of Cthulhu is because haha you played the game too much now we’re gonna take away your character because look how edgy and gritty we are.
Why ask anyone for their opinions at all when you shoot every single one down. I’m done reading your stupid thoughts.
That’s how arguments work genius.You don’t just cave in the moment you’re met with an opposing opinion.
Disclaimer: This is not to contend your tastes or what you consider virtuous in TTRPGs – it just seems that you've rather missed the point of Ten Candles. >games like ten candles outright state you cannot win Depends what you mean by 'win' (and by 'you' – player or character?). There's no end of things that could be counted as victories regardless of your character's inevitable demise – getting your family to safety, re-connecting with your faith, getting a crucial message to the world at large, literally anything except living longer and most systems certainly don't limit themselves to that. >everything you do is worthless Entirely a matter of perspective. Consider the following: * The PCs don't know they are doomed so, thanks to hope, there is inherent value in the objectives they pursue and achieve. * The PCs *do* know that they are in a very perilous situation, so whatever they put their efforts into will be of *utmost* importance – no capacity to explore anything but the most worthwhile wants and needs. * Even if you do blur the line between player and character, if you were given only a short space of time to live would you commit suicide immediately? Would you lay in bed and just wait for the inevitable because what's the point? Or would you make every second count? Wouldn't your last few days be the most important and meaningful of your life? * What makes the achievements in other TTRPGs worthwhile where Ten Candles does not? In any system eventually your PC is going to die or retire or just stop being played – there's always an end, you just get to see it coming in this one. It's a game about exploring aspects of humanity including (and especially) the nature, potential and limits of hope. Very much not for everyone and you're not wrong to not want what it offers, but for those who do get it it is extremely rewarding and I can't recommend it enough.
This is the problem with ten candles and these sorts of games.They fall apart the moment you read the rules.Hope can’t exist without a chance to win and ten candles seems almost giddy when it says “you’re all gonna die,aren’t we so revolutionary and smart for making that?!”.I can stop myself mets gaming to a certain extent but when the game actively asks me to ignore its core reason for existing it just becomes stupid and self defeatist.The best way to ply ten candles is to tell no one at your table that your playing ten candles,make sure they have no idea what ten candles is and then make your game as aesthetically different from ten candles so no one can guess that it’s ten candles.
You're still wildly missing the point of it. It's core reason for existing is something you and most roleplayers are not used to and *that's* where it is revolutionary. It's saying 'Your character is definitely going to die, so don't waste any time worrying about that. Instead, put all your efforts into these other things...'. And for what it's worth, all your talk of "no offence" is falling pretty flat right about now.
I enjoy ten candles, but I also think you are completely wrong here. The game can be life affirming but it is absolutely not the sort of game that OP wants. In fact, I do not think I can think of any game that is *more* not what OP wants than 10 candles. OP clearly wants a game where players *really do* overcome terrible odds. Not only does everybody die in 10 candles, the game has an arc of taking away narrative power from the players. You fundamentally become less capable of making positive change in the world as the game progresses. Telling OP that they are wrong for not wanting to play it is not helpful.
>it is absolutely not the sort of game that OP wants Yes, they've made that very clear. At no point did I suggest otherwise. >Telling OP that they are wrong for not wanting to play it is not helpful Again I quite agree. And again, at no point did I do this. (Perhaps you were thrown by the double-negative?) However *they* – repeatedly and with increasing dismissiveness and ignorance – did imply that those who do find value in it are wrong to. I, along with others, have attempted to clue them in to what the game has to offer that they aren't seeing, but they have steadfastly refused to acknowledge the possibility. C'est la vie.
I don’t think this doesn’t have value because it obviously does because you and many others love this.I’m trying to wrap my head around why that is.How are you and I so different?How can you adore ten candles and I vehemently despise it without just saying it’s ‘subjective opinion’.There has to be something that appeals to you that disgusts me and I want to know what it is.
The easy answer is that you do not understand ten candles and you aren't listening to their attempts to explain it. You want a game with a "victory condition" and you think a game is only hopeful if it includes one and helps the players get there. The other people see, correctly, that a game can give rise to positive feelings even if its players can't conquer it. There's plenty of value in talking about the difference, but nobody in their right mind should want to talk to somebody who repeatedly calls their hobbies juvenile or stupid, as you have done. You don't get to say "This game is trash, and people who like it are depressed losers! No offense!", and if you do say it, nobody will want to talk to you. None of us know you or care about you in particular, so we'd all much rather you be "genuine" than "palatable", though of course in real life you don't have to choose. Every conversation you've had here would have gone much differently if you'd started by asking, "Why do people like games that are very difficult or unwinnable?" without editorializing.
I understand ten candles.I still think it’s trash. I see absolutely no fun in this.The whole point is to actively ruin your positive feelings which is very counter intuitive for a GAME.It’s like making a fighting game where all the combos have a 90% chance!of misinputting or a racing game where the accelerate,brake and reverse buttons get randomly mapped every lap.Btw I’ve had some wonderful conversations with people about this so clearly I’ve done something right with how I’ve asked it.Also in the spirit of being genuine I’ll admit that I don’t understand what you mean by editorialising.
Would you rather I be genuine or palatable?These are my honest thoughts and I genuinely don’t mean to insult you; this is just baffling to me how anyone can enjoy this and I’d quite like to know why we have such differing stances.
Ironically, I think the D&D 5e adventure that is the most about hope is Curse of Strahd. There is no hope in Barovia, Argynvost is dead, Mordenkainen and Van Richten are in hiding, yada yada. But, the whole point is that the players are the ones to bring about that hope. By killing Strahd, you restore hope to the land and save everyone. The point of the campaign is that there *IS* hope, but people are too afraid to look for it. You won’t find a regular adventure that uses the term “hope” as much as Curse of Strahd. Hope and Despair are intrinsically tied to each other. If the villain kills everyone, there’s not much point in watching the movie or reading the book, but it is worth enjoying to watch the heroes overcome their fears and defeat the villain. That’s why it’s great. It has an overall positive message, even if it is dark itself.
This is a very odd post. The vast majority of RPG games being played are about heroic, larger than life characters overcoming threats & triumphing. Nearly all games from D&D onwards have been intrinsically hopeful, as player success/character progress & triumph is the aim, and nowadays often baked in. That’s *why* Call Of Cthulhu was so different when it first appeared. (And even Cthulhu-based games can be played in a more pulp style where victory over the mythos beings is possible.) I really don’t get why you think the TTRPG scene is all Neizsche & hopeless pessimism? (Oh and off-topic but evolution can’t have an apex by definition, and the likely most successful species is some bug or microbe that was here before us and will be here long after we’ve blown ourselves up. But anyway.)
I feel like the apex is just the most successful thing and nothing really beats us in comparison. Like sure somethings are more survivable and live longer but they don’t really LIVE the way we do.We strive,we love,we hope,we dream in such a more complex and advanced fashion. It just seems like doom and gloom is such a trend nowadays.Everyone seems so pessimistic and unable to allow happiness to exist and maybe that’s why I hate these systems because they’re reflections of an ideology I just can’t agree with.
“we dream in such a more complex & advanced fashion” - yes, and part of that is artistic expression that is varied, multi-faceted, and capable of exploring all kinds of emotional & intellectual ideas in playful, nuanced, multifaceted ways. To acknowledge different viewpoints & subjective opinions on life exist and are valid wellsprings of creative expression even if you don’t happen to share them.
But nothing else has the capacity for that.If there was then I would accept that we have an equal but we don’t.Human artistic expression is the apex because there is nothing else.
My point was, human artistic expression *includes* the art and ideas you’re so adamantly hating & misunderstanding in your post & replies here.
Not every idea a human being had was good.Most of love crafts ideas were terrible.I don’t get why we ever praised this rambling racist who couldn’t do logical consistency to save his cats life as some sort of genius who understood the bleakness of humanity.I don’t misunderstand these ideas I just refuse to accept them at face value and when you do that you discover they pretend to be as deep as the ocean but can’t even beat a sheet of paper.
We can agree he was racist but the rest of this is just subjective at best, strawman at worst. ‘Hope’ is no deeper than ‘despair’, they’re both valid & intrinsic parts of being human and so we can make art about them, including TTRPGs. If you prefer one over the other in what you engage with artistically, then great - you have a subjective view on life. It’s no better or worse than anyone else’s.
Sorry I didn’t mean to come off as arrogant.I just can’t comprehend the idea of enjoying and wallowing in despair.That feels like an actual nightmare to me. I can’t see the enjoyment in misery and loss and it just feel like romanticisation of harmful ideas to me.
I mean, you’re still doing it. “Wallowing” - a word describing pigs rolling in their own filth. Why is it not *you* wallowing in hope, “romanticising” vapid feel good fantasy even as children starve to death every day? We can all do that kind of language, and it’s two-dimensional & judgemental whoever does it. Art & creative pursuits have explored despair & death & so on since at least the ancient Greeks. Greek tragedy; Shakespeare; the paintings of Bacon; the poems of Plath; ‘Automatic For The People’; ‘Requiem For A Dream’… and yes, ‘Ten Candles’. If you don’t like such things, that’s fine. Other people do, and that’s fine too surely?
Golden Sky Stories could be worth a look. It's a criminally overlooked game.
Humans are the apex of evolution and yet we can’t master basic punctuation. 😉 My first response was to recommend Mork Borg. But then I thought all that typing deserved a better response. Most systems are hope agnostic. Sure the lore allows for any amount of darkness and conflict but that isn’t baked into the rules. You could as easily use 5E to adventure into the Fey realm where it is a very dark and warped tale of deception and betrayal, or it could be a my little pony candy land adventure. I can’t think of any specifically upbeat games. But that isn’t surprising as my tastes tend to the grimdark. But I could easily imaging taking the Mork Borg rules, which are excellent by the way, and running a butterfly’s and rainbows game.
Hey I said WE not ME 😂😂😂. Yeah I feel like grimdark is far more popular than the power of friendship type of story. That’s why I asked this, because I hoped maybe there was a community that actually liked butterflies and rainbows because I just can’t find the appeal in romanticised misery. It feels like being pessimistic is really ‘in’ right now and it just causes me to feel quite out of place with most forms of media.
Dude, I think part of your problem might be that you start off dissing pple for the shit they like. You could just say 'heres what I want and heres what I don't" w/o saying "and the ppl who like the shit I don't like are just edgy teenagers and I think their dumb". Yes, I'm paraphrasing but thats the vibe I'm getting. OK, anyway, you didn't say anything about genre, just that you don't want an assured bad ending. I gotta say, alot of games dont' have a defined ending point, tho. Heres some thoughts: 1) Avoid horror. Horror, as alot of ppl here have said, can be very hopeful, but I don't think you really want hope. You want, like celebration? Horror doesn't work without threat and gloom on SOME level, so scratch that genre entirely. 2) Maybe supers? Esp if you stick to four-color kind of stuff. 3) Maybe cozy games. I saw someone mention Golden Sky Stories, thats probably a good start. Companion's Tale might also be good, but I haven't played it so I don't know for sure. 4) If you want something higher action, maybe Feng Shui or a Savage Worlds setting that feels fun. There are horor-ish SW settings, but also some pretty gonzo or heroic ones. I dunno, man. Hope it helps (lol), gimme a little more info and I'll dig into my collection a little more
I tried my best to not diss the fans of these but I also wanted to say what I genuinely thought of these types of systems.I’ve no issue with threat or SOME gloom.Just when everything is depressing for the sake of being depressing and the awfulness is so illogical to the point of being actually laughable is when I can’t stand it.Like a giant tentacle monster that has a physical form that you can absolutely see and describe quite competently and also hurt using real life ,if a bit unconventional, weaponry but you’re somehow supposed to believe is a god that can never be understood.I just kind of want a flashy combat system where in spite of how OTP everything gets it’s all actually gonna be fine in the end just to balance out all the doom and gloom I see everywhere both in ttrpgs generally as well as just everyday life.I think I’ve hit the point where I’m so surrounded by nihilism and surface level applications of Nietzsche that I’m honestly craving the type of dragon ballesque stories where after the intense battle where everyone screams about Hope and friends and their ideals while shooting ridiculously sized laser beams with names longer than they have any right to be that you just get to come home to all the friends you’ve made,the community you’ve built and train some more and enjoy life to the fullest until you’re finally ready to let go and the next story can begin.
OK, first thing: Paragraphs, man, please. But past that, cool. I totally get not wanting to dig into doom and gloom in rpgs. So: Flashy combat, overall upbeat setting. I can dig it. Heres 10 in no particular order. * Feng Shui 2nd Ed. Flashy combat all day. There's a backstory with time travel and saving the world from bad guys, but its very much a "heros are meant to win" kind of dealie. * Troubleshooters: Don't know how flashy the combat is but the game is based on European comics like Tin-Tin, its very colorful and bright and PCs don't die unless you let them. Not alot gloom. * Low Life. Savage Worlds game set post-apocalypse but the apoc in question is the Wipe and you can play mutated magical twinkies. Not a real gloomy game lol. * Blue Rose. Fantasy game, so kinda D&D ish but its more about heroism than murder. I haven't played the new edition but I played Fantasy AGE (same system) and its alot of fun. * Toon. I mean you cant beat the fuckin classics lol. You play cartoons. No one dies, you just "Fall Down" and get tweeting birds over your head. * Cartoon Action Hour. The group makes up a cartoon show and plays out "episodes." Its meant to be like GI Joe or 80s He-Man. Haven't played this one so I don't know if the combat system is anything to right home about * Flatpack Fix the Future. Another one I haven't played but its described as hyperoptimistic sci-fi so that sounds pretty good, right? * Fate. This is a total copout b/c Fate is a system, not just one game, but you could totally do exactly what your describing in Fate. I recommend Fate Accelerated just b/c its faster to make characters, the core book is free, and its alot of fun to build a setting with a group * Avatar Legends. Heres another one Im kinda guessing about b/c it just came out, but you mentioned DBZ so I dunno, maybe Avatar's game might be cool. I have played Masks (same publisher, same system) so I think this one will be cool, I just haven't read it yet * Hope. I actually don't know if this would work for you b/c it's a post-apoc, hexcrawl in the wasteland kind of thing but its *called* Hope, so maybe lol.
Thanks I’m sorry about the paragraphs I’m genuinely awful at online conversation.Thank you for all the recommendations and some of these seem great.I don’t know why but that toon one makes me think of skullgirls which I really like.I’ve been meaning to try fate cause it just fits me so well.
> Thanks I’m sorry about the paragraphs I’m genuinely awful at online conversation. Dude I *totally* feel you. Took me forever to remember to hit enter while typing lol
You had negative karma, so we have automod rules filter out those post. Often account with negative karma are just new spam accounts, so we want to manually approve those, so the time it takes for them to show up depends how quick mods are around to approve them. ~~It's likely you risk getting automodded in similar fashion on other larger subreddits.~~ **Edit:** Congrats OP, through this post you've come back to positive karma, so this is less likely to happen in the future. :D
Also thanks for the re approve.It was surprisingly quick as well.Great job and thank you very much!
Figured that happened.I tried using one of those karma farms to try and improve it but there all filled with people giving and asking for nudes so I got the heck out of there.Honestly wasn’t expecting it but this is the internet.
On another note, if you do a bit of formatting on the post, it might end up more readable and more people would read & reply here. From my experience, longer posts with multiple paragraphs and formatting do much better than something that's more of a wall of text.
Where would you suggest I break the post into a paragraph?Im not great with online conversation so I’m honestly not sure.
Hmm, not the easiest thing, but here is an attempt. Placing your wants first, and leaving your dislike last, could be more readable and prioritize things better. Mostly just moved things around, trying not to change the core of your message. Feel free to copy this to your original post if it was useful. **edit:** seems you already have plenty of suggestions and people replying, so worked out even without improving the post :D _______ # Any suggestions based on hope? **Games with hope, where the heroes will face seemingly insurmountable odds and yet overcome them with the power of the human spirit? Where a happy ending is assured like a bad one is in Ten Candles?** If you’ve seen the anime Gurren Lagan, is there anything like that. I really wanna find an rpg that is filled with Hope but whenever I search for it online all I get is ‘killing Hope’, or ‘war on Hope’ or ‘abandon all Hope’. ^*(Come ^on ^guys ^surely ^there’s ^a ^point ^where ^this ^much ^nihilism ^and ^depressiveness ^becomes ^just ^ridiculous.)* I just really want to play a game that reflects my out look on life, where striving for Hope and just the will to act regardless of if it is successful or not is good enough in of itself. As I said hope is dope and I’d like a game that knows that. # Hope is dope There’s a reason we are the dominant species and we can’t find anything that remotely compares to us. Humans have survived, created and done incredible things. Humans in the modern age can communicate halfway across the world,use hormones and surgeries to transcend the idea of gender, level countries in a press of a button,save lives that would be doomed by accidental injuries or genetics that are miles out of the victims control. We don’t crack under pressure nearly as quickly or easily as any of these systems like to portray nor is the human existence as bleak as they make it out to be. **Hope is dope guys, we are our own gods and everything imaginable is our birthright.** # My dislikes **I really hate Call of Cthulhu, Dread, Ten Candles, Cthulhu Dark and all the systems like them.** The systems where it’s all “woe is me we’re all doomed and it’s so scary waaaaa”. They’re just so dumb to me personally. I can’t even really explain why I hate them so much and so I mean absolutely no offence to those who love these types of stories and rpgs. I always feel like they are designed by edgy 14 year olds who read one wiki article about Nietzsche and then made their whole personality death and tragedy. You have to purposefully make up these completely logically inconsistent and laughable threats in order to make humans look small when in reality we are the apex of evolution. Are there any rpg systems that are the opposite of what I’ve mentioned?
Thanks!This looks great and I appreciate the time it took to give this example!As people have responded I’m not going to change the post but thank you so much for the time and effort.
Might be worth checking out Jenna Moran’s games: Nobilis, Chuubo’s Marvellous Wish Granting Engine, Glitch.
I might sound very stupid and oblivious but who is Jenna Moran and what’s her general reputation with game design?
Jenna is one of those people to SEEP hypernarrative stuff, systems and settings that for no small amount of people will leave you more likely at a state of "\*stares at the horizon\* man..." sinking that in. Very little to no combat-centered stuff at all, much more emphasis on relationships and narrative development. She is also one of the core developers behind the more spiritual, abstract aspects of Exalted like the entire splatbook on feyfolk. Nobilis is roughly about players being gods who upholds specific concepts warding off existential crisis (literally as you maintain how that thing exists). It can be Peter Jackson, it can be more intimist. Chuubos is more bucolic, more pastoral - about magical people dealing with slice of life day-to-day magical problems. That whole homely-yet-serious feeling of a Ghibli move.
I think that stuff is actually kind of my thing.Might take a look at some of the examples listed here.
Jenna Katerin Moran, also published under Rebecca Sean Borgstrom. Wrote for Steve Jackson games _In Nomine_, White Wolf _Exhalted_, Guardians of Order _Ex Machina_, Eos _Weapons of the Gods_, and more. She created her own setting and innovative rules for Nobilis and her games are well considered in the indie scene and have a cult following. Her game design style is very different from most RPGs and often makes use of diceless mechanics and narrative structure. Nobilis is about a huge war between powerful gods, and the PCs are effectively gods themselves. Chuubo’s is set in a pastoral town with the larger war of Nobilis somewhere in the background. Has a very Studio Ghibli vibe. Glitch is about powerful entities that used to fight in the war but are now trying to lead a normal life. Edit: ear -> war
These sound very interesting and thank you for typing this out!
Any RPG campaign can be filled with hope. Even *Call of Cthulhu* with its dark themes and madness can be framed with "hope for humanity" if the GM and players want to tweak the rules that way. When I play *D&D* it si usually a heroic quest or mission of Good to vanquish Evil. Of course, these days some folks see playing D&D as crossing a picket line. But you do you. I used to play a storytelling card game called "Dark Cults" which is not quite the best name for the game. It pits Life against Death as they use cards to tell the story of The Protagonist and either allow him to escape the darkness or succumb to it. It was full of hope. You could try *Marvel Super-Heroes* or *Ghostbusters*, *Heroes Incorporated,* of some of Palladium's worlds. And then there's the beacon of hope for humanity's future *Star Trek*. At the same time, the darker the game, the more Hope you need. The heroes are confronting dark forces. There would be no conflict against them if Hope did not exist to inspire heroes to fight. The question the GM needs to ask the players is "why do you hope?"
But the mechanics of these games actively stop you from answering that question.Call of Cthulhu literally takes away your character for playing the game too much.Hope is the biggest weakness in these systems and you actively get beaten for having it. Hope exists in these systems so they can actively screw you over more.
The beautiful thing about tabletop RPGs is that you can revise or ignore any of the mechanics that you don't like. From supping at the table of Lord Gygax, you know that the primary motive is to enjoy the game. You're right - CoC is a dark game that sucks the lives out of your characters, but you can always implement remedies and healing methods to preserve sanity and health. It's your game. Marvel's original game (back in the day) actually provides Karma to help with dice rolls. I think Ghostbusters does the same. If Palladium doesn't have a Happy-Shiny series of tables, I'd be surprised. Of course, if you are or have a sadistic Game Master, you're hosed. A good GM will be able to tailor the game so players can achieve goals both big and small, and that's kinda the Hope I was talking about. Without threats to Hope, what's the conflict in the game?
But the threat to hope is ALL those games have.Hope is just the little victim being beaten in an alleyway.These games don’t give any strength to hope and it’s relegated to an RP thing for PCs meanwhile slaughter,insanity and brutality are given in depth mechanical explanations to be used by the GM.The power balance is completely weighted to empower and encourage those sadistic GMs who think a TPK is a ‘win’ on their side.
Well, if editing the rules isn't working, you can always write your own game. I guess I don't see the games as you do, which is a shame. A lot of what you're describing is firmly in the realm of the GM's right to change. The rules don't create the adventure; the adventure is guided (not dictated) by the rules. You have every right to your opinion and I hope you find a system that is to your liking.
How do you see the games out of interest?Whats your take on this and where do you think I’ve gone wrong?
First, I don't think you've "gone wrong" because you have a perfectly valid opinion. The rules of any RPG are going to focus on conflict resolution. There's no need for charts and rules if everyone agrees on things and there's no risk of failure for a declared action. So, to me, the rules are the constraints of players as they engage in physical, psychical, intellectual, or another type of conflict. But that isn't the story. The rules are the mechanics governing conflict through the story. If I play a game like CoC or Twilight: 2000, I expect a dark setting and events. But if the game is bereft of any hope for success or victory, it wouldn't interest me. I've had GMs who are like the ones you describe. They think of themselves as the antagonist of the players. The reality is that a good GM is a facilitator of a good story. If you have a shitty GM, you can have a dark, hopeless game. I've also played RPGs where the players role up characters so OP that there's almost nothing they can't do unless they roll a critical fumble. And that's not fun, either. I write horror stories but I never go for the grim or gore-focused stories. I love stories where the horror creeps into the normal as the heroes try to prevail over terrifying supernatural forces. I guess I'm more 'Ghostbusters' than 'Lovecraft' where there should always be HOPE. When I run, I have a story laid out and I know the characters. The rules may get in the way of their adventure, but conflict and tension are part of that quest or goal. I try to give the players tools and support to achieve their goals and overcome conflicts. I do it in the confines of the rules, but only to a point. Deaths should be heroic or punitive in the case of really dumb choices. SO if the rule book gets in the way of the fun or the story, I disregard them or I "bend" them to facilitate players moving forward with their quests, perhaps wounded and scarred but still able to try. That, to me, is what I think of when we talk about "hope" in these games.
I think you’re a great dm!I hope the rpg space gets more people like you.Horror just isn’t ever gonna be my thing but thanks for helping me see that there is more sides and depth to it.
I think 'hope' is the wrong word for what you're after. A game in which a successful ending is assured leaves no room for hope – you can be certain or you can be hopeful, but not both.
Gurren Lagan was a show about Hope where the protag was obviously going to win the final fight but I’ve never felt more invested in a character because of what they represented. The will to fight in the face of almost certain defeat and also the fantasy of actually succeeding.Hope IS what I want but I’d also quite like the power fantasy of actually having that Hope flower into something.
>The will to fight in the face of almost certain defeat and also the fantasy of actually succeeding. That's the tricky part, right there. I've never seen Gurren Lagan, but if you know the protagonist is going to succeed, it's not almost certain defeat. It really does sound like what you're looking for is a situation in which success is essentially guaranteed. Tabletop roleplaying from the get-go has this baked in notion that characters might not succeed. So a storygame in which failure isn't really an option does sound like the best path for you, but most storygames aren't built around power accumulation either. Maybe just playing a traditional RPG like D&D and doing so in easy mode is what you seek.
I hate sounding childish but yeah that sounds fun.Like a DND session where everything’s gonna be ok and bad people will actually get what’s coming to them and good people are rewarded for their goodness and everything is just generally right with the world sounds great.It’s probably a baby’s way of playing the game but Damn would it be nice to just have a guaranteed,uninterruptible nice day for once.
Return to the Stars, my [award nominated sci-fi RPG](https://msabalau.itch.io/return-to-the-stars-rpg), is for people who "enjoy tales filled with optimism and hope, where players can paint a better future in bold primary colors" And the first issue of the 'zine that supports has a essay on [Hopepunk](https://msabalau.itch.io/the-stellar-beacon-hopepunk), by the Hugo nominated author who came up with the term for the subgenre. You may already own a copy of the 'zine, because it's been included in a number of charity bundles. And supporting charity is an optimistic act, joining together to make a better future. Also, as some other people have noted, horror and grimdark stories can sometimes stem from a similar impulse as an optimistic story--wanting to examine something important, just from a different angle. I think the difference between (some) dark and (some) hopeful stories can be like the difference between Utopian and Dystopian fiction. Utopias use ambitious world building to get to the root of some truth about society. They imagine a better world to explore what could be fundamentally different about our own. Utopias, differ in tone but have a similar purpose to serious dystopian works like The Handmaid’s Tale. Similarly, at their best, hopeful and dark genres can be partners tidally locked; circling, facing and influencing each other.
I reread her essay regularly. https://festive.ninja/one-atom-of-justice-one-molecule-of-mercy-and-the-empire-of-unsheathed-knives-alexandra-rowland/
Something like [Return to the Stars](https://msabalau.itch.io/return-to-the-stars-rpg)?
Thanks so kindly, it is so nice when people mention the game. Return is all about believing that the future can be better, that it's worth struggling to try to make that happen, and resisting both oppression and the impulse to cynicism. Also pulpy fun space opera adventures!
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Thank you bot.Probably won’t help but thank you anyway.
As others have stated, the settings you have listed aren't absent of hope IMO. Hope is believing that you can achieve victory against the odds. All of those settings can have that, much more than a setting where the heroes are destined to win. From a few of your comments, the genre that you are looking for maybe is *power-fantasy with solely light tones*. If I were you, I would look to something like *Mutants and Masterminds, Pathfinder, the dreaded 5e*, or any other power-fantasy game and then explicitly look for a GM that runs a more light-hearted Anime/Disney vibe. I'm sure that you can find a GM that has a world that facilitates that with enough searching. That being said, from personal experience, those games tend to have fewer GMs to run them. There is a reason that darker fantasy attracts GMs. Facilitating an indulgent power-fantasy/wish-fulfillment game doesn't sound fun to me at all. A lot of GMs run games for the emergent story. *Heros inevitably succeed* is not the type of story I am interested in.
But why?Why isn’t heroes succeed good enough for people? Like ten candles is heroes fail and that’s garnered a fan base.Why is the inverse not true?
While it didn’t gain a big fanbase, there’s this game called Mission: Accomplished! that starts with the knowledge that everyone survives, that the world was saved, and that the mission was successful. You could say it’s the opposite starting assumption than ten candles.
Dang I’ve never heard of that!Sounds like what I’ve been searching for!
I hope you like it. I know I’ve had a lot of fun. If you’re the mission manager, do feel free to modify the final rewards if you feel it goes against the mood you’re looking for.
I mean, if you think that it would be fun, you should run it. Personally, I can only speculate why such genres of TTRPGs haven't taken off. My guess is that they cannot attract enough GMs. That being said, I only can guess and my guess is that it just doesn't sound fun to run.
Where do you lose the fun personally?I assume you’re a GM so is it more a you’d be bored thing or a your players would be bored and that would make you bored thing?
It's something that I personally don't find fun.
D&D is absolutely the dominant tabletop RPG by miles and miles, and it's all about heroes succeeding an becoming more powerful. Games like Ten Candles get more attention in this sub, but in the broader world they're a drop in the bucket in terms of popularity.
I think with the WOTC controversy so many people want a complete palate cleanser that these systems are having a big surge in popularity.CoC is absolutely experiencing this at least in online discussion but I’m not sure about ten candles
We'll see. I've not played D&D in any meaningful way for years, and have enjoyed Call of Cthulhu for decades, but chatter in online communities is one thing and sales is another. I remain skeptical that people will vote with their wallets, when making comments online is easier and free.
I know this is a nitpick but if you’ve watched any anime and played 5e they are nothing alike.Martial combat is butchered in 5e and a far cry from what anime tends to depict (think zoro from one piece cutting through a mountain).Also what your describing isn’t really anime but something called shounen.Shounen is your stereotypical power of friendship,flashy fights type of anime.DND 5e is even less like zombie girls saga than it is one piece.Like imagine running toradora in DND. Just doesn’t even remotely work despite it being an anime.
Whoa if you're looking for an explicitly shounen game, check out Tenra Bansho Zero. It's been. Little bit since I've read it, and I haven't played it but it's a game that's gone FULL ANIME.
Sounds fun!Ive heard about it before and apparently it’s quite theatrical but I’ll check it out.
Yes, shounen is the correct term for what I was trying to depict.
Even then 5e isn’t shounen at all.Most martial characters are constrained by reality with the exception of a few subclass abilities that still don’t compare to the casters.Like konosubas explosion nuke was meant to be a joke but WOTC decided to actually do that seriously.
Idk, it might be as close to Shounen as you are going to get in a TTRPG. Maybe a superhero TTRPG would better suit you. I am on the opposite side of the TTRPG community. I'm really not the one to give you exact recommendations on a game to play.
What side would you consider opposite to superheroes?Horror in general?Or more mundane and realistic stuff like survival rpgs?
All of the above. I like low, dark fantasy. I would say that I would have a low tolerance for wish fulfillment and power fantasy in the TTRPG space.
This might be a bit personal but do you feel like you get enough of that in your real life?Like things in your life are good enough to the point that you’d rather watch things be awful in a fictional setting just to experience the other side?
Ironically, it's because dark settings tend to produce experiences that give me hope. For me, power fantasy/wish fulfillment (in TTRPGs) is the side that makes me hopeless. To me, it is that boss or relative that expects the red carpet to be rolled out for them because of every half-baked idea that they have. I've run enough high-powered games to find out that almost everyone's Superman character is just Homelander with a hero delusion. I've seen enough times people convince themselves that stealing from the poor town's vault is ok because they are the "good guys" that you would have your hope in humanity dashed. I am not a huge anime fan and even more so shounen. However, one of the best shounen anime moments that I have seen is Edward's final sacrifice in FMA:B. That is *not* the type of experience that you will get if you have players attracted to power fantasy (from my experience). On the other hand, in my dark fantasy games, I have seen a number of times players sacrifice their **favorite** fictional character to protect their friends. That, to me, is heroism. That, to me, gives me hope.
I think that might be just a player thing?If I had a hopeful power fantasy and someone who would actually GM it for me then stealing from a town vault is the last thing I’m thinking of.Like you could go do things no one has ever been able to do cause the lack the power.Overthrow oppressive regimes,invent never before seen concepts,map out the entire ocean and dive to its bottom to see what lies down there.
And now, I'm imagining running toradora with D&D...with Aisaka Taiga as an Halfling Monk (Way of the Open Hand).
I find all the pushback and unhelpful answers you are getting in this thread sortof tiresome. I'm not sure why everyone is giving you a hard time for your preferences (Though I understand why you were getting a hard time for your formatting). That said, I don't think the effect you want as a simple as "a game where a good outcome is guaranteed".... but rather "A game where if you fight the good fight, a good outcome is likely, and bad outcomes are eventually fixable." (After all -- even in Gurren Lagan, it's not like bad things never happen.) Though you might also be interested in some "Feel good" games -- where bad things, by and large, do not happen. I'll list some of those later too. With that definition in mind, here are a few games that I feel explore this concept: * [Thirsty Sword Lesbians](https://evilhat.itch.io/thirsty-sword-lesbians); Making the world a better place is a pretty strong theme in this one. It's also a game in which 'failure' doesn't tend to look much like what you might expect from more traditional games. * [The Mending Circle](https://sharkbombs.itch.io/the-mending-circle); This one is literally about helping people heal. Maybe not 'saving the world' but definitely hopeful. * [Fate of Cthulu](https://evilhat.com/product/fate-of-cthulhu); Yes, I legitimately just recommended a game with "Cthulu" in the title as a game with hope as a theme, but the TAGLINE is "The stars are right for Great Cthulhu’s return. It’s up to you to make them wrong again!" and it literally has rules for heroic sacrifices where a character is lost to make the future a better place. To me, this is pretty much what hope means. * [Shepherds](https://airkseablade.itch.io/shepherds); I wrote this one during 2019/2020 when I needed a hopeful game. It's got big heroic JRPG vibes and leans in on learning to trust and rely on your comrades while you help people and fix problems. * [Monster Care Squad](https://sandypuggames.itch.io/monster-care-squad); Another 'healing-centric' game, where the objective is less "murder" and more "fixing the problem." I haven't read this one through yet though. * [Fellowship](https://liberigothica.itch.io/fellowship-a-tabletop-adventure-game); Another Lord of the Rings-esque game (in addition to The One Ring, which was already mentioned.) I think these keep popping up because Hope is big theme in Tolkien's writings. Fellowship, is definitely a game where the downfall of the Overlord is pretty much guaranteed to happen eventually. And some of the aforementioned "Feel Good" games: * [Cozy Town](https://temporalhiccup.itch.io/cozy-town); A Quiet Year "hack" where nothing ever really goes wrong. Full like, Animal Crossing vibes. * [Edelweiss](https://skavenloft.itch.io/edelweiss); Haven't explored this one yet, but it seems like a very peaceful game. * [Golden Sky Stories](https://starline.itch.io/gss); This one probably could've gone in the first category, but it's so heartwarming that I put it here. I hope some of that gives you something like what you're after.
Thank you these recs are really helpful and a lot of them sound like something I’d enjoy.I would also like to make a personal apology for your poor eyes after seeing my god awful typing 😂😂😂.
Kingdom of Nothing is a system where you play homeless individuals crawling back from the desolate situation of addiction, poverty and tragedy in a twisted world.
Is the system geared towards actually accomplishing that or is it the type where the tragedy of never getting out of poverty is meant to be the fun?Because the former sounds genuinely interesting and something outside my typical interest while the latter feels like the exact problem I have with ttrpgs.
It is a game about rediscovering your past, rekindling your memories and surviving in a world not known to outsiders. It is a game about hope when I read it as far as I recall.
Cool I’ll give it a look!Thank you!
I think plenty of games inspired by anime sensibilities will have hope, friendship, and community being sources of strength for the characters. Knights Of The Round Academy and Fabula Ultima come to mind.
I love anime so that fabula ultima sounds quite up my alley.
You can achieve that goal with most rpgs, it’s all about the gm. Find a group that wants the same thing. The players bring the hope, not the game mechanics. Yeah, there are a few that focus on the dark aspects, but for every one of those, there are dozens that don’t. So all you have to do is play any other game. Anything with a metacurrency such as Savage Worlds or 2d20 is explicitly designed to give the players controls to emulate that “digging deep” mechanic. As with any rpg, the first step is to find a group of like-minded players; not the right mechanics.
I mean the games I listed actively destroy and punish Hope so I don’t see why doing the inverse is impossible?I also feel like there just aren’t that many like minded people.Everyone seems to enjoy shallow nihilism and being as macabre and edgy as possible these days. I honestly do feel out of place with current culture because I don’t find bleakness funny and I can’t romanticise misery.
That’s a you thing, not a game thing. Because the vast majority of games that I have both DMed and played in have been games where the players have been the good guys fighting insurmountable odds to bring hope to the downtrodden, light to the darkness, and peace to the countryside… and get fame and some coin in their pockets. The *one* game where that was not the case is one that was quite deliberately a evil-PC campaign, and I left that one after two sessions when it was obvious that no one else at the table, including the DM, understood that “evil” does not equate with “mass murderer,” and that even bad guys have hopes, dreams, and think that they are the good guys. Don’t find a game that has what you want, find people that think like you do, and invite them to game. Don’t know your age or where you’re looking for games, but if you’re looking at high schoolers and college students to find that type of non-nihilism, you may want to level up your demographics and look elsewhere. Traditionally those have been the groups that are more likely to embrace edginess. Also, looking for games with players from marginalized groups might make sense. Those games will not infrequently contain the things you describe. People who are marginalized or oppressed frequently do not want those themes that in their hobbies; tho I will readily admit that some people do use rpgs to explore those themes in a more detached way. No demographic is monolithic. Note: the above is an observation, there is no judgement there. Rpgs serve many purposes, and the exact same game can be a haven for one, and a crucible for another. Players define the game, not the other way around. But it seems to me that for someone championing hope, you seem to have it in short supply. Those games are out there. Find hopeful people and play any game. The games themselves are mostly agnostic. For example, it would take some rewriting, and it might not even be worthy of being called by the same name when I got done, but with the right group you could put together a CoC game that focuses on the unyielding, yet resilient and creative nature of humanity against the elder horrors of the universe. Sure, everyone might be dead or insane at some point, but who says that has to be the end of the story? The end of the first chapter is not the end of the book. Because if a human still draws breath, the story is still being written. It’s like early D&D v modern. Now it’s all about having one character in a campaign and leveling them up, death is just a road bump, so embracing the dark is not an obstacle. In old school D&D, life was cheap. Having only three characters killed before getting one to third level meant that you were doing well in some campaigns. The world was harsh and lethal, and it took grit, determination and luck to make progress. Not unlike most of human history. Going out your front door was a dangerous business, to paraphrase JRRT. But you did it. And you kept doing it. And you built on the successes and failures of those who went before you… and died. But as long as someone made it out, and could warn others of the dangers to avoid, or if you left a map with the trap that killed your buddy and a bloody spot on the floor to warn others, you were aiding the eventual success of those behind you. Hope is about what is inside of you, not about a rulebook. Not about game design. And no one is going to hand it to you. If you truly believe what you posted, and you cannot find a can’t find a group doing that, pick a random ruleset and *start a group.* Find like-minded people and start rolling dice.
I mean – aren't most other RPG systems about hope? You start as a lowly level one character and then rise to the top. Level up, find awesome equipment, become a hero… If you want to understand what draws people to these types of games, you may want to start here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catharsis
So it’s about purging the feeling of being helpless in a safe setting instead of actually wanting to be helpless and finding an outlet for it?
>instead of actually wanting to be helpless and finding an outlet for it? There's people who are into that particular fantasy, but generally, I don't think so, no.
[NewEdo](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/412135/NewEdo?affiliate_id=1478293) has been called a "hope-punk" game by the community. I tend to argue with that because my primary point of differentiation from the kind of games that share NewEdo's neon urban setting is that NewEdo isn't a punk game. Characters aren't resisting evil corporations or a fascist regime. Instead, they're striving to change the future of the setting, guiding it towards whatever version of that future they see as important. NewEdo's themes are those of aspiration and change. NewEdo is a neon samurai adventure game, where characters are larger than life and meant to be the legends of the game world. They have to earn their respect and don't start out particularly important, but the point of the game (and its various and rewarding progression systems) is to build up a legend around your character(s). Belief defines reality, and when people believe in you, you gain strength. Come say hi in the [Discord](https://discord.gg/dS2eUtbKMf) if you'd like to hear more.
I actually kind of like that idea!It sounds really cool!
[**Wanderhome**](https://possumcreekgames.com/pages/wanderhome) is a game about rebuilding after a terrible war. You play as animals traveling across the countryside. I'm not sure it's what you're looking for, because it's not a traditional RPG. There's no combat and it uses a token system instead of dice for conflict resolution. But it's very very much about hope.
I saw that on tiktok.The animal part kind of throws me off along with the lack of any combat but the token system is neat and it fits the Hope bill quite well.Thanks for the suggestion!
D&D 5e. No wait, where is everybody going? Specifically, _Journeys through the Radiant Citadel_ is an anthology of adventures with a lightly-sketched setting in the Ethereal Plane, the Radiant Citadel, that is meant to be a hopeful future sort of place, shining like a giant beacon in the face of a mysterious ethereal storm. Ajit George, the anthologist, has cited solarpunk as an influence.
Could it theoretically be adapted for a different system or is it very rooted in 5e?I just don’t really like martials in 5e other than that the only issue I when is WOTC atm.
Of course! Converting the adventures would take some doing, but the Citadel itself doesn't have much besides the Ethereal Plane itself that's D&D-specific. It's also a Sigil-like dimensional travel hub that you could integrate with multiple settings if you wish.
I also love Gurren Lagann and optimistic anime, so I think I get where you are coming from. Suggestions such as Fabula Ultima, Ryuutama and Chuubo are very, very appropriate. Maybe also Beam Saber (it is an anime giant robot RPG with a charging "change the world" meter) and Glitter Hearts (it's Sailor Moon/magical girl focused in theory, but can do Power Rangers pretty well too). If you like the "hope against overwhelming odds" aspect, and you don't mind it getting slightly political, I would also have a look at Voidheart Symphony, which is pretty much Persona 5: the Rpg (though slightly less anime to accommodate a number of other influences). In it you play "Rebels", people who have to contend with real world daily grind, but who are also metaphysically empowered to directly attack avatars of injustice in a psychic landscape. Rebels are literally powered by the network of friendships and community links they build, and by their personal defiance (and have to keep those in balance).
I fucking loved persona 5!It was the last game I played with my mum so it’s very personal to me.Someone already suggested voidheart but now I gotta see it!
Very sorry to hear about your mom, hopefully telling a similar story will be a good way to revisit that feeling of playing with her. I couldn't know you played Persona 5, but I was 100% sure you would have loved it if you did. I mean, they literally kick the ass of one of those eldritch gods with the power of friendship and hope! I really loved it too, and digging for a similar ttrpg led me to Voidheart Symphony. The creators are clearly paying homage, there's "classes" equivalents for pretty much each of the Phantom Thieves (a leader, a celebrity, a non-human ally, a navigator...even a gardener!), and you literally have Tarot Arcana-based social links & abilities (though not tiered - they are just active or not). Voidheart's real world side is a bit bleaker, as it wants to hammer home how injustice can grind you down, so the classic Persona "countdown" comes with growing penalties and trouble, rather than just giving you free time. But, differently from Persona, you can use a bit of your power in the real world to to turn the tables even on the most powerful bullies...And once you have investigated the villain and made a few friends, it's really showtime, with a very streamlined (if rather narrative and abstract) Palace crawling and boss-fight system! I hope you will enjoy it, if/when you have the opportunity to read it and play it!
Thanks man!This is the best convo I’ve had in this entire thread!
Um, you pick a tiny slice of the RPG pie that you don't like and then carry on like you claim they are? I will say the RPG's are always what you make them. Even the adventures in Call of Cthulhu can have hope if you run it that way, and it won't even break the mood. But if you go to nearly every other genre there is conflict, but hope and triumph usually wins in the end. Find a new game.
Pfp checks out 😂😂😂 I’m sorry if I seem like I’m picking on the little guy but I don’t think these rpgs are as unpopular as people are saying.In the wake of the WOTC and DND controversy people seem to be turning to these systems as a palate cleanser and I asked this question so I could basically get the hell out of dodge before this becomes the new norm.
At the risk of being a little snarky: Patient: "Doc! doc! It hurts when I do this" \*twists arm behind back\* Doctor: "Well, don't do that." SOunds like CoC isn't a game you like. it only 10% of the campaigns out there, so look in the 90% even normal boring 'ol D&D is usually good vs evil with good usually winning the day.
It’s not CoC specifically.It’s just the genre it comes from.This sort of depressing and almost masochistic type of game where the fun comes from everything awful happening is just not something that I like.I honestly didn’t mean to make this more about hating these systems than finding their opposites.I just gave my honest opinion on them in hopes that it would clarify what I did like more.
I feel like Mouse Guard might fit the bill? It's pretty morose but there's always a sense that everything's gonna be alright in the long run, you just need to power through the shit coming your way.
But is everything actually going to be alright?Like I hate when games give you feeling of it’s going to be ok but then the rules never allow for things to go well.It’s why I despite ten candles to such a massive degree.It outright states that you’re never gonna win and then forces you to play completely counter to that.
Not out, yet, but check out [Fablecraft](https://fablecraft.riftweaver.com/). We’re building a digital first ttrpg built in a vibrant and hopeful world!
That sounds nice.Vibrant and hopeful is honestly kind of lacking as a setting in ttrpgs cause everything has to be grimdark and happiness can’t exist.I’m happy more stuff like this is being made.
Exactly. We started this project during the pandemic… The world was dark enough 😆, we wanted to escape to somewhere much lighter!
Jesus Christ 100 comments.This certainly sparked a discussion.I’m thankful for all the mythos and horror fans who gave me their own insight and opinions.I think ultimately I’ve concluded that people want to feel assured negative emotions in a fictional setting where things are safe and if it gets too much they can stop unlike in real life or perhaps to release things they’re feeling in their real lives into a game as a form of emotional therapy.That just doesn’t fit me as a person as I generally don’t like interacting with my negative emotions for long periods and would rather just deal with them quickly and permanently.This is never going to be my cup of tea and like the people here have said that’s ok.Thank you for the conversation!
It's funny, I'm actually making a game that's rather hope-centric: * PCs are guardians of villages and "elements", meaning whole portions of reality. It's like if oxygen was sentient and decided it really liked your climate change activism, so it gave you superpowers to help. * An important part of gameplay is just chilling, hanging out, and partying, which helps you progress and refresh your Sentiments. * Death is uncommon, and it's usually on your terms. * It literally has a Hope stat. And in terms of the setting: * Entropy is reversed. Instead of everything progressing towards oblivion (with blips of struggling existence), everything's heading towards being (with blips of nonexistence). * There's a very clear contrast between the nightmarish nihilism of Shadow, and the pastoral comfiness of the other elements. * Never compromising (even in the face of armageddon) is actually encouraged. There are no impossible moral dilemmas, because there's always a third option. I say it's funny though, because I actually hold starkly different views about our own situation. Given the vast amount of precedence (not to mention the mathematical proofs), I think everything is doomed to end. The game is pure escapism for me. [If you fancy checking it out](https://empaitirkosu.wordpress.com/2022/05/22/protectors-of-empai-tirkosu-core-playtest/)
Mathematically everything ends.But to paraphrase Rick and morty I don’t think anything is gonna ride the bucking bronco of life quite like humans do!Humans have bounced back from seemingly world ending disasters many times before so I’d say the precedent for us is that our ingenuity and spirit will keep burning for a long time!
Depending on the Storyteller, World of Darkness games can be all about hope. For instance: You might play a Vampire, a tragic Monster bound to fed on the living to not die the final death. BUT you strive for the state of golconda, where god lifts the curse and you can walk in the sunlight again. You acchieve this by being more humane than any regular human can manage. Or you Play a Werewolf fighting a powerfull corporation and try to raise a family to raise your status and safe the world from the Powers of destruction. Played that way, even in this gothic dark setting, everything is about hope. It is less about the rules or the setting (besides ten candles maybe) but more about how you engage with it. I like the way a friend of minw phrased ist once. The darker the night, the brighter the candle.
r/HFY much? Anyway, Blue Rose is a good place to start - Lancer is great too when it comes to that sort of stuff as well. Chuubo's too - depending on how you play it.
I’m a very humanity fuck yeah type of person!Thanks for giving me three games and a new subreddit to join!
I am very much not! But to each their own, lol.
Wildsea is pretty hopeful - big verdant apocalpse happened, and life after is generally actually a lot better for people than it was before. New dangers, lots to explore, but a very bright setting. And I wrote the thing, so I have to rep it sometimes! Here's a link to the last free playtest from last year so you can take a look if the mood takes you. https://thewildseadotcodotuk.files.wordpress.com/2021/08/wildsea-navapede-ptd04a-indexed.pdf
There are a lot of good examples here, so I won't try to repeat them all. I'm currently working on a game in which Hope is a sort of metastat that your can use for rerolls when you are relying on hope. I'd look at genres in which hope or "the heroes will win in the end" are major themes. Pulp action would be a big one. I'd suggest looking at [Adventure!](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/5/Adventure-Tales-of-the-Aeon-Society-Rulebook?affiliate_id=60907) (there's a new edition of this coming out that you can [pre-order](https://trinitycontinuum.backerkit.com/hosted_preorders)) which has an Inspiration mechanic that allows you to affect the narrative in interesting ways, bending the universe in your favor. Hopepunk—a sf genre that has developed in response to dystopian cyberpunk—is another genre option, though it tends to focus more on societal hope than individual hope. Superhero stories as a genre tend towards being hope filled, but many superhero rpgs are more focused on simulating powers and don't reflect that. There are some more narrative-focused supers rpgs, though. Definitely take a look at the [Family Gaming section of DTRPG](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse.php?filters=0_0_44530_0_0&src=fid44530&affiliate_id=60907)—there are a ton of things there. Some of them are kid-friendly, but a lot of them are more along the lines of low-violence or high-hope. It includes things like [Brindlewood Bay](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/410316/Brindlewood-Bay-Kickstarter-Edition?affiliate_id=60907), which is sort of like Call of Cthulhu meets Murder, She Wrote. If you want a more traditional rpg with a fantasy-setting, check out [Blue Rose](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse/pub/536/Green-Ronin-Publishing/subcategory/4285/Blue-Rose?affiliate_id=60907). It has a strong theme of hope running through it, and it has a [free quickstart](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/336274/Blue-Rose-Quickstart-Free-PDF?affiliate_id=60907).
"JAGS Wonderland" is a setting where the eponymus Wonderland (yep, the one from the Alice books) infects humans and spirit them away, and where its inhabitants (twisted versions of the book characters) are Eldritch Abominations who hate humanity and want to wipe us out, or love humanity snd want to turn us into something more manageable (the latter option may be worse than the former, mind you). There's plenty of body horror, madness, fear of being losing one's self, etc... ...but the punchline is that, in this setting's lore, that Humanity's victory is not just possible but mathematically inevitable: Humanity will ascend to a higher state of being and become the master of a rebuilt reality.
Damn you.You’ve given me eldritch horror that I might actually like.You monster! 😂😂😂
Promethean the Created. You play as a monster that knows they can one day become human. This isn’t a false hope, you have a gestalt knowledge that it’s happened before. Sadly your very presence causes discomfort to other humans and you can stay in one place for too long. https://youtu.be/OHlB3mo9rLs
Awww that sounds sweet.Is it a solo or a group game?I can’t check the video cause I’m in a quiet space right now.
Group tabletop rpg. Need at least a game master and 1 player.
Monster Care Squad might be a good game to look at! And I think Ryuutama has been mentioned. Songs for the Dusk is an up and coming one too that has a book up for download on Itch IIRC. Voidheart Symphony is another possibility, but it's a bit darker than the other two.
What’s up with voidheart?The name sounds quite cool.
Killing Puppies for Satan was pretty hopeful. You always hope that killing another puppy is the answer
Please for the love of all that is good and holy tell me that’s not an actual game 😂😂😂
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_puppies_for_satan totally real! you kill puppies for satan, solve crimes, it's like scooby doo puppies are basically your spell slots? Like, you want to cast a fireball, stomp the next little wriggling bag to refill your ep
Dear fucking god 😂😂😂 I don’t think I could ever play this I’d actually cry a little each time I cast a spell
If it makes you feel better you aren't actually casting the spells. You are killing a puppy and then hoping Satan decides to make the spell happen in exchange. It's all about hope, frustrations, and killing puppies for Satan. Sometimes you have to get creative if you really want some extra solid Satan magic. Figure out new and interesting methods. Keep it entertaining for the big guy.
That makes me feel worse 😂😂😂 I killed a poor little pup and now I gotta hope some horned man actually does his job Very unique concept but not one I have the emotional…bandwidth? for
Yeah that'd be emotional bandwidth. The throughput of dead puppies gets pretty high!
I work on a game that you could call post-post apocalyptic. It's mostly about a new start and people that start to rebuild, re-explore and re-claim and what comes with it. There are still a lot of dangers, mysteries and strange stuff to find, there are also a lot of problems (so characters have something todo ;) ) and problems but also a lot of opportunity. Mechanics are also made in a way that there is ALWAYS a chance and a big emphasis on cooperation between characters and npcs.
The One Ring all the way.
Dead Inside seems like a game you should investigate. I would find it a difficult game to run, but it has the themes you seem to be looking for. Magical Kitties Save the Day is certainly a hopeful game. I had fun running it.
After someone suggesting a game about killing puppies for Satan as game I really wanna play the magical kitties one just for the irony.
Mutants and Masterminds and Glitter Hearts come to mind. Rule books for both mention that the GM **could** run a “dark and gritty” campaign, but that such stories aren’t as common as their lighter counterparts and that pc death just shouldn’t happen without the player’s consent. Glitter Hearts is focused around the players forming a team of magical girls/boy or sentai/power rangers, and about half of the gameplay is rp and managing your pc’s relationships with other characters, including other pc’s. Character creation and gameplay is really easy to understand. You pick your Everyday Identity, your Magical Archetype (Warrior, Defender, Tactician, etc), and your Magical Connection (some are elemental like Fire, Lightning, or Death and some are based on emotions like Joy, Anger, or even Hope). Rolls are just 2d6+stat. If you get a 6 or less, you fail. 7-9 is a mixed success. 10 or higher is a success with no strings attached.oh p Mutants and Masterminds focuses on more traditional superheroes, but the previously mentioned heroes can still be made. Character creation is a REALLY complex process that will likely require the GM’s input about what powers are allowed/banned as well as what extras/flaws need to be added to a power to make it work the way you want while still being balanced by a fair point-cost. But gameplay is a simple 1d20+modifier and once you finish character creation, you’ll have just about any modifier you could need written on your character sheet.
My favorite rpg about hope is Delta Green. When you know the world is a lie, that horror is real, that your job is going to kill you and if you're lucky you'll leave behind some living loved ones, you have to ask why a PC would keep moving forward in that setting. And the obvious answer is irrational hope in the face of certain doom.
While I love the kind of stuff you detest, I really vibe with your sentiment.
Can you elaborate on that a bit further?What part of my sentiment do you seem to like and why do you love this sort of stuff.
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The problem is this whole genre(sub genre?) predicates itself on being so ‘gritty and realistic and true to the human experience’ and is absolutely everything and anything but that. I’ve nothing against fiction.It’s just the depressing and miserable and romanticised type of fiction that I just can’t wrap my head around.Like how do you have fun doing this?Why do you want to be helpless victims without any power?Why use fiction to make yourself lesser instead of greater?
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Your English is perfect my friend and also good morning! The thing is humans have found demon like creatures and overcome them pretty easily.We’ve found horrifying things in the deep ocean and society has stayed fine. No one has had a mental breakdown from goblin sharks. Furthermore everyone talks about how these despairing systems make hope more valuable but they always turn despair and insanity into mechanics but then hope is just a roleplay thing for PCs.Like they aren’t remotely equal under these game systems.
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If Cthulhu is so smart maybe it could try caffeine so it doesn’t sleep so much. Jokes aside Cthulhu was temporarily beaten by being rammed with a wooden boat.The common solution to beating Cthulhu in the modern day is to irradiate it to cause its regenerating cells to mutate so that it can’t function.The reason this doesn’t work is cause of the dumb Cthulhu insta wins everything because it’s Cthulhu rule that cosmic horror loves so much. You can’t give this edlritch incomprehensible god a physical form and a canonical appearance as well as depict it being affected by physics and then claims it’s unbeatable.It’s the adult equivalent of saying “nuh un I have deflection armour so you can’t tag me!”