thread: 2012-03-21 : Monster Mania Con: barriers to interest
On 2012-03-22, Moreno wrote:
I don't know if I am showing a personal bias here or if it's common thing, but I think that horror fans are intrinsically less attracted to role-playing the stories they like than anime fans or fantasy fans or western fans or whatever.
The thought of being a knight in shining armor, or a powerful mage, or a Western Gunslinger, or a (fun) anime character, give the impression of... fun. Of play. "play pretend", laughing.
The idea of being a normal person eviscerated by a monster... less so.
Someone find this fun, right: Call of Cthulhu is a successful game. But for a game so well-liked and famous, with the amount of citation from Lovercraft in movies and books, why is played by so few groups? Less than something like Exalted that nobody, outside of gaming, never even heard of? (and Call of Cthulhu is much simpler to play and describe than Exalted)
To be clear: I agree with much of what Vincent said here. It's the particular example that I find a little misleading: no kind of presentation or game would have been able to sell role-playing to horror fans like you could do Anime fans.
