Serious question, Veeky Forums - are mundane things boring to you?

Serious question, Veeky Forums - are mundane things boring to you?

I mean, the appeal of fantastic and exotic settings is self-explanatory, but would you participate in a game where you basically live out a mostly ordinary life? Like, roleplaying as a farmer or a trader or a fisherman - the things that games like Harvest Moon or Rune Factory offer, or maybe even something along the lines of Golden Sky Stories, I guess.

The argument against it I see very often is "if I wanted to do mundane things, I would just do them in real life", but is that argument enough to convince you personally in particular?

Why can't a game have both?
As for OP, not especially, but it depends on what I'm doing. I'd find interest in being a barista, for example.

In general, yes. Part of it is I just legitimately like genre fiction and prefer to play with that instead of IRL. I don't mind grounded settings but I find those are more fun if there are androids and that stuff.

I've seen people talk about playing stuff like a straight-up high school game where the biggest conflict is making sure you do well on the math test so Mom won't ground you for the weekend. And there's literally nothing else going on. I find the very notion of playing that kind of game intolerable.

Now if that high school had a vampire problem...

> I'd find interest in being a barista, for example.
How so?

Yeah I hope he comes back and explains himself. I'm not a barista but I'm friends with a few and it seems like any other boring part-time job you take because you need some extra cash while at school.

Like if he wanted to play a game where he's a cop or a firefighter or something like that I'd understand him a little more (though I still think a game where you play someone like that is infinitely more fun if you run into monsters or killer robots).

Thing about mundane shit as shown in slice-of-life its just a slice. Its quaint or interesting for a bit to look at what the details of a normal thing are, its not interesting to have to do them 8 hours at a time, 5 days a week in various forms for 40+ years as a game. Not a lot of play there. You can abstract it, like in a board game or farmville, but those rely heavily on making the physical/mental labour over time into a simple interaction with immediate gratification.

You can kind of get away with it as one shot rpgs like Millennial Apartment Hunters and the like. There's a perverse irony there that can be fun for a bit. Can't see it being fun for long though.

>but would you participate in a game where you basically live out a mostly ordinary life?
But I can do that for real.

Yes, mundane things are boring.

t. geneticist

Yep. Mundanity is my bane, the cause of all ennui, and games are my panacea.

I just lost The Game.

FUCK

Not all mundane things are boring. I'd play the shit out of a good management rpg if I ever found a GM to run it.

Also not everyone has the same bar for what is mundane. Some anons do thing that I consider exotic every day, and what I consider mundane can be exotic for other anons.

The management rpg is gming.

That's why I DM a lot.

No, I like my job a lot, and although it's mundane, I think it's exciting and mentally stimulating. But it's impossible to represent it in a tabletop game.

Just about same.

It's about the game aspect. Good games can be constructed on farming, fishing, archietecture--whatever.

It really is about the game and the rules--that's what makes it fun.

Plot is low-hanging fruit in all things fiction. Movies, novels, games, poetry, video games--whatever.

If it's media? Plot is irrelevant. Works of fiction that try to capture your interest by relying on the plot are almost universally garbage created by people who aren't very good at creating that thing.

A well-designed game about kittens being playful can be fun. A well written novel about remembering your favorite kind of cookie to have with tea could be a work of high literature worth being read by everyone everywhere. A well-made movie where a guy mostly just smiles awkwardly for two hours can be a run-away hit. A well-written poem can be about a vase.

The subject matter doesn't matter. The design does. Only bad design is substituted by compelling subject matter. Good design makes the subject matter compelling, instead.

Huh. Good question. On one hand, while I was in my cups last weekend, someone asked me to describe what I wanted to be when I retire, and I said quite unironically that I want a small farm and lots of routine tasks that make my back ache and my knees and joints hurt, chopping my own firewood and meeting another old man for bonfire coffee a couple of times a week - just like my late grandfather.* I'm also quite the fan of fishing minigames and spent well over a hundred hours on he ps2 harvest moon back in the day.

On the other hand, there are days at work when the only thing that keeps me sane is dreaming about the next session.

*Before he went, I once asked him why he didn't move to town and join a retirement village. He looked at me as if I had called my granny a whore and said something to the effect of "life is not about being happy, boy".

pic related

I do administrative law. You?

Nanotechnology process research and development (etching to be precise).

No. Runequest actually had a touch of the mundane career path to give your character some background.

To put it as a friend of mine had put it at the time: "It's one thing to be a hero and have to go kill some wyverns that are killing local sheep, but it's another thing if you have to go kill wyverns because they're killing YOUR sheep."

...which makes it kinda cool.

So...having the PC's occasionally slow down and describe what they're having for dinner at the local tavern, or explain how they're going to convince the local bowyer to make them a bow with the weird wood they found, or tell you how they're going to get X stuff up a mountainside to accomplish Y can be interesting, and give the PC's some realism that is often lost when players go into video game/battle mode for extended periods.

Given that most RPGs spice up the mundane with the fantastical, I think you could combine the two to make the mundane actually interesting.

You mean a mundane setting?
Because you can totally do awesome things in a mundane setting, DM's willing. Your farmer can lead a violent uprising and overthrow a local lord, before clashing with king's army. Your trader can start the next Hansa and rule the world through the power of money. Your fisherman can break his back with blood and thunder when he sees the white whale.

Yeah, I don't really know what that is, but it sounds hard to make some kind of tabletop Papers Please game out of it.

It's one of the processes needed to make transistors, accelerometers or anything that can be done on a silicon wafer (pic related, those are transistors from a CPU before the connections and metal lines are done);

The entertainment value in roleplaying mundane things is generally dependent upon how interestingly the person you're RPing with can make doing those things for you, which often comes down to interpersonal relationships with other people involved in the undertakings.

Just standing alone on a riverbank and fishing for five hours as an RP experience is a very low starting threshold for fun, I would say. Even the most "mundane" of movies or novels or whatnot centered around these sorts of things tend to use them as a backdrop for conversations or memories or other such non-strictly-mechanical-action activities to take place.

>Are mundane things boring to you?
In real life, I can make them interesting.
Often, by thinking about Veeky Forums stuff with half my brain.

When I am playing an rpg?
Hell yes, it's boring.

>Would you participate in a game where you basically live out a mostly ordinary life?
No

>Is that argument enough to convince you personally in particular?
That argument is weak.
People play Guitar Hero because success is easier than when actually playing guitar, but with no usable skill learned.
It is far easier to play a farmer doing farmwork than to actually farm.
But the question is why, out of all things imaginable, would you choose to play something mundane?

I can get behind spending some time in a session explaining or roleplaying what the characters are doing during down time.
And I love it when players add little touches like writing a letter to their family while the ranger cooks dinner or whatever. That's great.
But a whole session of it?
I'd skip it.
When I game, I want Adventure!, Excitement!, and other things a Jedi craves not.
If I play a farmer, I want to play that farmer on the most exciting, adventurous day of his life.
I do not want to roleplay tilling fields.

I have enjoyed games like Rune Factory, but in a very vidya way and when I want a vidya experience.
My ttrpg time is set aside for something else, something more.

There is a whole market for Slice of Life.
There are people who absolutely adore it. I guess.
People also love hot sauce and food so spicy it's literally a weapon.
I don't get it.
I don't want it.
I can't imagine wanting it.
But I can't fault them for liking what they like.
I hope I helped, OP.