Seriously?

I got invited to a game recently.  I'm not sure about it, but I"m pretty certain that the game isn't for me.  It's a superheroes game, which isn't a genre I have a problem with, but the guy wants to play Fifth Edition Hero System.  Further, he asked everyone what their favorite type of character to make is:  Brick, Martial Artist, Energy Projector, Psychic, or Speedster?  The last bit, was that we've been told nothing about the setting or game, though after repeated pleadings, found out that we'll be "saving the world" because we're "nice guys" and that there have apparently been superheroes since WWII, and giant monsters have attacked Japan, but that hasn't changed the world notably.  Oh, and since being invited, the game has changed from being a couple of times a month to weekly.

I know there are people out there who think that sounds fun.  Hell, I know there was a point in my life when I was one of them.  I guess I've just changed.  But, at this point in my life, that game sounds miserable.  Let me unpack the reasons why:

Conflict not Combat

Think about your favorite movie that isn't a documentary.  I don't care what genre it is, whether it's an action movie or a romantic comedy, I am about to tell you what it's about with 100% accuracy.  Your favorite move is about conflict.  If it's an action movie, it's about physical conflict.  If it's a romantic comedy, it's either about conflict between people (the love triangle) or about a conflict of values (the will they-won't they).  Movies and role-playing games have a common thread, there has to be a conflict or there's no peg to hang the story on.

My issue is that most game's take the term "conflict" too literally.  The conflicts are always physical, and resolution of those conflicts is always synonymous with violence.  That's unfortunate, because movies, television, and books, (all important inspirations to gaming genres) all see resolution as possible in different ways.

What Does the Pagecount Say?

When I'm thinking of buying an RPG, the first thing I do is look at the table of contents.  The table of contents tells you a lot about a game.  It tells you what the game is about:  A game with a magic system is about magic, a game without one, isn't.  A book where half the book is about game mechanics, with the other half sharing GMing tips, setting stuff, and character creation is going to give a very different feel than a game where one tenth of the book is about mechanics and character creation and the rest is an overview of the setting.

Look at the player's handbook for Dungeons and Dragons sometime:  There's less than twenty-pages of setting material, and extensive rules for spells, equipment, character creation, skills, feats, and combat.  From that I know what the game is really about:  It's about characters who use spells, equipment, skills, and feats to fight things.  Where they do it isn't that important.  On the other hand, Talislanta's five hundred page tome with all the rules crammed into fifty pages or so, is a game about a strange alien world where the differences between magic schools are shaped as much by social opinion as by what the magic does.

The Quandary of the Computer Hacker: What Modern RPG's Have to Learn from the Classics

The Role-Playing Game is a distinctly modern genre.  The roots of Role-Playing Games go back over a century.  The first miniatures wargame was published in the 1800's, but it took almost a century between that game and the revolution of small unit tactics games in the 60's, which would become Chainmail, which would become Dungeons and Dragons.

If you're a gamer of my generation, your first RPG was D&D.  It had its weaknesses:  There were really only a couple ways to interact with the world.  You could talk to things or attack them.  There were charts for both.  Certain classes had other ways to interact with things:  Elves could spot secret doors; Dwarves could understand architecture and tunnels; Spell-casters could do a lot of things; and Thieves (they wouldn't be renamed rogues until second edition) had a list of things they could do that were denied all other classes.  Some book added secondary-skills, giving each character a useful occupation such as "armorer" or "cooper" but there weren't systems for these skills.  The (wilderness and dungeoneers) Survival Guides added a system of non-weapon proficiencies which gave you some new ways of interacting, but, essentially, all characters had a set of buttons, one was fight, one was talk, and then there were a few more that varied by class.