It's great for when you just want to banter with your friends melodramatically and don't care if any plots get resolved. Streamline it a bit, adjust chargen, and there're your blorbo RPG.
Nobilis is essentially designed to emulate mid-00s meandering forum roleplay. Its resolution systems work on "you're BOTH pretty" principle, the damage system gives cool stuff to the injured, and the chargen is driven less by balance and more by giving you pointers to express your concept.
I do have a cursed idea that OSR would be a good foundation for litRPG. "We must avoid interacting with the System at all costs (unless you're a wizard) and resolve our problems with our human skills (unless you're a wizard)" is just an incredibly funny paradigm to inject into typical litRPG formula
On that note, fuck AI. Almost every portrait pack for RT is AI slop, sometimes unlabeled, finding anything manmade is a chore. For fantasy games at least you can go for packs made for, like, Baldur's Gate 2 10+ years ago, so you know they're made by actual human beings.
They rely on the fact that everyone gets custom portraits. The default portrait collection looks reasonably-sized at first glance, but then you break it down by race and class, and oops, you have maybe two options that fit.
Three organizations you can do basic quests for before picking one? Covenants fit better: they kinda coexist in an uneasy alliance but also hate one another.
Back when VtMB2 was announced and some planned features revealed, I did have a thought that VtR would fir better.
To start, Blood Potency is more friendly to CRPG trappings than Generation (tho character growth done entirely through diablerie would also rule: to fight the Man you must eat the Man).
Gun mages are funny because they're, like, what if NRA actually meant what they say about armed society being polite society and enforcement of social contracts and all that? And the answer is a crazy guy.
This is what genre cannibalizing itself looks like. Like, cheat power is a nerdy joke among isekai fans pointing out that the protag always gets a ridiculous power. Then someone wrote a story about a guy familiar with isekai and expecting to receive the power. Then it became the expected norm.
Modern isekai trends are often traced back to SAO, and while there is a lot of bad things that can be said about it, at least Kirito would absolutely murder the likes of Naofumi. It's a low bar, but he clears it.
It WAS! More precisely, it was common for a fantasy protag to run into a slave caravan, fight the slavers and free the slaves (with one of the slaves being a hot girl who sticks around to repay the debt/because she has nowhere else to go).
It was rarely systemic, but slavery was acknowledged as bad
The cultural war bullshit is exhausting because not responding to it feels like ceding ground to the worst people, but also the only genuine response to most of their complaints is "who the fuck cares? Stop being weird."
Tbf, I don't think most of those people are sincere. They want to complain about woke culture and so are reaching for any remotely plausible excuse. If it means ignoring the myths the game is based on, it's nothing, they can stretch farther.
The best part of MtAw is that SEELE fron Evangelion works as a slightly radical Silver Ladder legacy.
Loneliness is an Exarch plot. We will fix it by destroying the barriers between minds and uniting all of humanity as a giant naked woman to physically reach heaven. I get to be the godhead.
Unknown Armies has a fairly robust magic system, being a traditional TRPG.
It's also specifically a system designed to push you towards anti-social, potentially self-destructive behavior in pursuit of power and obsession, which is what actually matters and why it's good.
Saruman has a treatise explaining exactly how the song of Eru works through musical theory hidden in his study because he's both vain enough to write it and too jealous to never show it.
He likes to imagine future generations discovering it and marveling at his intellect, but doesn't plan to die.
Hubris is a coward's word invented by the Exatchs to keep us down in the dirt. Are you so small that merely looking at the heights we could clim gives you a vertigo?
This is why I don't punch depression, I bind it in jewelry and send after people I dislike. It's both a spy and a curse.
Mage vs vampire is funny because vampires are technically stronger in a straightforward manner but are full of weaknesses it's easy for a mage to exploit.
Consider iirc Time 2 which makes the target perceive the world as if it were a few hours earlier.
None of the isekai issues are new, they're just amplified from normal genre noise because it's written by a bunch of too-online weirdoes cannibalizing each other's ideas in a race to get on top of a Royal Road-like site and is then put to paper with barely any editing.
Tbf, Iron Dragon's Daughter is an attempted murder on the whole isrkai genre in written form despite being written several decades before the formation of the modern genre.
It even calls out slavery by starting the protagonist as a slave plotting to murder her overseer.
Broke: mutants are dangerous Woke: it's a metaphor that had to make concessions to a genre of entertainment, but it still mostly works if you aren't a boring pedant Bespoke: gays should be able to cause hurricanes irl. The world would be better
