Adventures in 52 Cards Alternate Settings

[2018-02-21 18:19:41] <guile> Hm, somebody throwing likes down on our Space Adventures in 52 Cards posts is making me want to mess around with that again
[2018-02-21 18:20:03] <guile> The magic of forum likes
[2018-02-21 18:20:19] <Ironybot> I did have big plans for upgrades and such, but it's never seemed important to get back to. Also, Falconis is rarely online these days.
[2018-02-21 18:20:55] <guile> Bit of a problem, that
[2018-02-21 18:21:40] <guile> Guess we could set up the tables for other genres on the gdoc and then add stuff to 'em as we feel like
[2018-02-21 18:23:06] <guile> Random thought, re-reading your retrospective Irony: support for solo play? Like, having a second pool of cards to draw from to represent the rest of your crew, maybe
[2018-02-21 18:24:18] <guile> I guess the existing hand of five is already 'do a thing your character does (switch cards to 'your' suit) or some random other thing according to the table (whatever the card does naturally)'
[2018-02-21 18:24:36] <guile> So the Hearts captain would do stuff with Hearts, and his NPC crew is the cards as read
[2018-02-21 18:28:59] <Ironybot> Yeah. Everything is basically narrative anyway so there's little functional difference between giving an order/the crew doing something and your character doing it proper.
[2018-02-21 18:29:53] <Ironybot> You can pretty much play solitaire as-is but then you're telling a story to yourself. Which, you know, can be fun from time to time but it's not the sort of fun the game is built around where people can effectively bounce off each other.
[2018-02-21 18:30:13] <guile> And I suppose, if you're alone- yeah, play a video game or something, not a party game.
[2018-02-21 18:44:37] <guile> Do you think Westerns, Horror, Historical or Rom-com should be their own Adventure in 52 Cards, Ironybot? Or is Space, Fantasy, Apocaylpse and Mystery sufficient?
[2018-02-21 18:46:08] <Ironybot> I think that the nature of the game is such that some genres aren't likely to work with it well.
[2018-02-21 18:46:45] <Ironybot> Something like a mystery is only really playable as a parody of the mystery genre, because there is no solution, no puzzle to be solved; both problem and solution at being invented as you go.
[2018-02-21 18:47:09] <guile> True enough
[2018-02-21 18:47:22] <Ironybot> Likewise our current version only works as science fiction because it's explicitly soft science fiction, where people are expected to handwave things and laughable plotlines are the norm.
[2018-02-21 18:47:38] <guile> I suppose 'mystery' is basically the Diamonds suit anyway, and therefore any genre can have a mystery
[2018-02-21 18:47:44] <guile> Albeit yes, a soft science sort of mystery
[2018-02-21 18:49:37] <Ironybot> Of the options you listed I'd say that Apocalypse is the strongest option, because in the former narratives are generally built around a series of short encounters each of which has a challenge and social can slide into combat really easy; encounter other survivors and you never know if you can trust them. Betrayal, negotiation, and conflict are all reasonable outcomes of any given encounter so the possibility space
[2018-02-21 18:49:37] <Ironybot> supports the idea of any card being played after any other card more easily.
[2018-02-21 18:50:23] <Ironybot> Likewise you can support things in a soft sort of way just like sci-fi does with technobabble by going "he has a working [useful modern device]! This solves so many problems!"
[2018-02-21 18:51:47] <Ironybot> I'd probably say that rom-com is easiest after that because rom-com supports wacky silliness easily. After that... I'd want to go with horror, but that would take a group well versed in the nature of storytelling to manage the buildup and resolution of tension without making things feel ridiculous and ruining the whole horror theme.
[2018-02-21 18:52:10] <Ironybot> It is a genre given to contrivance and unpredictability in its plots, though.
[2018-02-21 18:52:35] <Ironybot> I might go with some sort of espionage/spy games as another likely one.
[2018-02-21 18:52:39] <guile> Right. For Apocalypse Adventure I kinda wanted both a World (modern, water world, zombie world, whatever) and a Apocalypse Event (zombies, ice age, whatever) setting draw, but I don't think there's a good way to manage that using the rules as written
[2018-02-21 18:52:43] <guile> Ah, that's a good one