I would like to see some new approaches to Superheroes and Mecha RPGs. These are both genres that I love, but there are surprisingly few games of these genres, most of the ones that exist can be lumped into one of a handful of categories, and none of them have been especially satisfying to me.
In the case of superheroes, on the one extreme end you get games that are just waaay too crunchy like Mutants & Masterminds, or games that are considered good but too narrowly scoped for my tastes, like the PbtA game Masks. Then there’s FASERIP, which is kind of like an OSR Supers game, but I found that it kind of falls apart if you try to make it point buy, and randomized superheroes are cool but not ideal as the primary approach imo, and also the whole chart thing for resolution management is kind of clunky. I’d like to see something that takes the kind of creation mechanics from M&M or FASERIP but strips it down into something more FKR-ish. Tbh I think FATE works pretty well for superheroes, but it would be cool to see a dedicated Supers game doing something really new with it.
As for Mecha, those games also tend to be on the crunchier side like Mekton or Lancer, or likewise, there are some interesting indie Mecha games the names of which I can’t think of offhand but like with Masks, are a little over-scoped for my tastes. Even as someone who does not like crunch, I understand the temptation to want to make Mecha games a little crunchier, but it’s a fine line. Also, it’s difficult to separate out the Mecha side of the character from the Pilot side in a way that’s satisfying. Either it feels like basically just two separate characters or they’re so tightly integrated that usually, one (usually the Pilot) feels secondary to the other. I’m attempting my own approach to this with Get Into the Machine, Shinji!, and I have not seen anyone do it quite like this and I’m pretty excited about it, if I may say so myself.
I would also like to see more games with Domain-level play. I was really intrigued by Legacy: Life Among the Ruins, a PbtA domain game, but it’s a little too crunchy and “gamey” and has certain PbtA-isms that I don’t love. Cypher / Numenera also has a domain-style mechanic that’s also still a little too crunchy, but closer to what I would want. I’ve utilized a very stripped down version of these ideas into most of my campaigns, but I’ve never codified it, and even though it’s so simple, or perhaps because it’s so simple, I’m not sure how I even would codify it. I have talked about this in more detail in an article I wrote for High Level Games a long while back.
Even though I talked above about genres, I would also like to continue to see more works that defy genre as we conceive of it. One reason why I’ve loved so much of Patrick Stuart’s works, is that while they certainly wear their influences on their sleeve, many of his works defy traditional genre conventions. Silent Titans is wholly unique, and I firmly believe that Veins of the Earth is a brilliant Deconstruction of the Underdark, even if Patrick Stuart takes umbrage with that specific wording.
