Why do so many people absolutely loathe steam/diesel punk settings?

Which shortcuts not to take?

What’s your guide of what not to do.

How the hell can something like this be considered ugly?

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True enough. I'm just saying, imagine how weird it would be if cyberpunk was all about people dressing up as megacorp directors and their security goons.
"Check out this cool nerve stapler device I made! It's for like when you gotta insta-lobotomize unruly employees while you're breaking up a suspected pro-union rally!"

I think that ones considered sensory overload.

But too much goes for Grey, grey, grey.

They should have colorful parlors, grand architecture, comfy countryside. You know go the Miyazaki route. All that smoke and fog works a lot better with some contrast.

40k is even worse with shit like this yet people love it.

I don't like the same five gothic detective/horror stories in swatches of brown over and over.

kek

There’s a difference though-

Cyberpunk is about that class struggle of the elites vs. everyone else.

Meanwhile there was social upheaval in the centuries around the 19th (while the rich and the nobles has the lions share of power, the masses were not powerless and fought successfully for more of a day).

Plus you had non-asshole elites- philanthropists, democratic reformers, etc.

Well sure, but 40k doesn't call itself "futurecatholicpunk" or some shit like that.

Protip: a suspected pro-union rally is when you see three employees talking outside work hours!

What about cozy industrial apartments? I’ve essentially lived in a few.

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Not related to the plot elements but fucking pass.

Steampunk hasn't been good since the original Thief games

I can understand people disliking Steampunk asthetics as they often fell "tacked on", but I never had that problem with Dieselpunk. Stuff like pic related feels much more coherent in style than "victorian houses but with brass and copper gears and tubes"

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There was plenty of good steampunk.

That's a difference that makes no difference, though. It was still a time of widespread oppression, and we're viewing it in a distorted funhouse mirror which ought to exaggerate things.

There are sure to be "good" elites in cyberpunk, too, but you're about as likely to meet one in a story as your are to meet a non-crooked cop in a film noir. If they exist at all, they're probably protagonists, and are absolutely gonna pay harshly for bucking the system and if they're lucky they'll end up continuing the fight down on the streets.

Steampunk doesn't really have that shit, though.

Don't put gears, cogs, or valves on shit if they don't serve a purpose. Don't have a character wear goggles if they don't actually need eye protection. Don't make shit out of brass that doesn't need to be made out of brass. Or the biggest one of not actually having fucking anything run off of steam.
All of these have become hallmarks of quickly put together shit that's labeled Steampunk.

no

Why not steal it then?

I think such plot elements work. Communist or Democratic uprisings- or perhaps just reforms? While such systems were as repressive as cyberpunk, they saw plenty of reform and change, that makes for good plot hooks.

Well I think at least trains should have steam engines.

But yes, have more alternative energy sources- electricity namely. Doesn’t have to be everywhere, but having a steam powered airplane is rather silly.

> Why do so many people absolutely loathe steam/diesel punk settings?
If it was always depicted as image related, I wouldn't.

I'm also okay with as I play wholeheartedly Shadowrun because of the lore.

But ultimately, my hatred comes from . It is inherently stupid.

Time to find new better steampunk tropes?

My vote- more countryside, more colors, bright or dark, more political intrigue.

I should have clarified a bit better, but I meant Don't have things not run off of steampower in a Steampunk setting.
I've seen way too many shit settings where they just have some magic element that ends up being functionally magic to avoid having to explain how a steam boiler is powering a man portable laser.

I think some can work, just so long as it’s not too high fantasy.

Like maybe crystals that work like batteries.

> Well I think at least trains should have steam engines.
You missed the point.

Steam airplanes would be AWESOME, because gears, cogs, valves and a pilot wearing goggles WOULD ALL MAKE SENSE.

The point was that boots with cogs and no other purpose than being regular footwear is just plain stupid. Retractable steam-powered roller skates, on the other hand, would be 100% fine, and justify the goddamn goggles.

Holy shit! That's Edinburgh!

I'm fine with magic fuel sources, as long as they take the place of conventional fuel sources in a steam boiler. But once you have a magic crystal that pumps green fog through a tube to shoot lasers, you might as well just call yourself Atompunk and go full pulp fiction.

There was an actual attempt to engineer steam-powered airplanes by the Confederacy during the American Civil War.

So just justify the accessories. Like goggles for smoke or dust storms.

> Time to find new better steampunk tropes?
The day I'll set out to find "better steampunk tropes" will be the day I set out to find myself a legendary NAWALT.

Might exist, not worth the trouble, wouldn't mind if it finds me, doubt it exist.

Toxic community and retarded attention whoring cosplayers made it for normies

Also, I almost got into a fight with some faggot twink at a con when he was showing me his gay steampunk goggles and told me he made them by butchering an old pair of WWI Germany Army welding goggles

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That it is, I lived there for nine years.
So just don’t go high fantasy with it.

I have "combustion engines" that burn a strange red-gold oil mined from deep within the earth, certain plant extracts, and the blood of certain magical beasts. Do they still count as dieselpunk?

You are clearly someone who’s opinion I should care about.

And I definitely don't care about the opinion of someone who's too retarded to use the correct form of "whose"

Don't get me wrong, I LOVE Steampunk. I'm about to run a campaign in a steampunk setting. But I agree with

What smoke or dust storms would make the rest of said attire even in the least realistic?

And how do you justify 25 pounds of non-precious moving metal worn as accessories?

Oh, I know, let's make a setting where you can play a super-elf with natural rainbow-patterned hair, steampunk robe, boobplate, rotating gear accessories riding unicorns and shooting magic-guns of friendship.

>inb4 someone unironically likes the idea
Please, don't reproduce.

Sure. I mean as long as you take the extra effort to connect your magical elements into the setting proper I don't see any reason to complain. Using magical elements to remove the titular part of settings is what I hate.

brilliant refutation

>what happened to make people hate it?
Mostly the recent more mainstream fanbase that thinks steampunk means dressing like willy wonka plus googles, dials, pipes and gears everywhere. If in 2018 we still think google glass is goofy there's no need for steam machinery to be so omnipresent in punk clothing. I mean, top hats and googles are silly, that's like wearing a digital watch with a tuxedo.
I'd prefer it if the tech was more low-key like Hitsugi no Chaika or Howls Moving Castle.

Ran a pretty good campaign of it in Savage Worlds for a couple years. Was more gunpowder fantasy than real steampunk. One of the players played a dinosaur druid/psionics guy who eventually started summoning spinosaurs and even transforming into them. I did have the standard "anarchist wants to free the working class" arc when one of the PCs (the loose cannon) wanted to buy an airship even though he had barely any money, and the guy said he'd do it if they'd help him assassinate the city council before his uprising took place. So they did, and they won. Then the anarchist turned out to be an even worse leader than the city council (surprise surprise). So they killed him, took his airships, and flew off. Later, they went full-retard on a crime spree and stole one of the empire's 400-foot-long airships, when it was docked, bringing spinosaurs aboard to slaughter the crew. That's pic related's battle. It was fun. Steampunk is fun. The tophats and gears stuff is retarded, and it's also stupid if your entire point is "steampunk." It's certainly no worse than heroic fantasy.

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I mean, what if that hat with pipes and valves was a cold-weather-only hat? Then it can actually HAVE a use.

You can make things ridiculous, as long as you can justify it.

Nothing. But fashion is a powerful motivator to wear the stupidest thing (explain ties to me).

Isn't that like... the point? "Welcome to Dieselpunk, everything is ugly and terrible because we're World War's ugly industrialisation and disregard for human life applied to everything"?

to a worthless statement, yes it was

You can have pretty looking dieselpunk. Just like you can have pretty looking war film.

Unless it’s WW1, having that be pretty anywhere near a war zone invalidates it’s themes.

Everyone you meet in 40k is in uniform, it mimes mid 20th century militaristic dictatorial governments, if something is stapled to a soldier it's to better kil xenos, if something is glued to an uniform it's to better represent the empire's greatness.
It may have a lot of wires and stuff hanging, but most of it has a good in-lore explanation to be there.

Because the Victorian-goggle asthetic is objectively the worst look to any game and every pleb-punk setting feels obligated to cling to it like fantasty does with Tolkien.

I mean I’d just go for fancy suits and military dresses.

>If in 2018 we still think google glass is goofy there's no need for steam machinery to be so omnipresent in punk clothing.
Steampunk has always made me think of this Far Side

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>legendary NAWALT
a what

If you live in a place cold enough to warrant for a hat with pipes hanging form it then you'd better go full Vostroyan, then you have my respect. Most steampunk representations aren't that consistent.

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Because it's popular. Actually worse than that, it used to be popular but not long enough ago that it's cool to say you like it. You can whine all you want about how it's an empty aesthetic and makes no sense, but then so does the VAST majority of """medieval""" fantasy.

>a steam powered airplane is rather silly.
youtube.com/watch?v=nw6NFmcnW-8

Steam planes were a thing.

Yeah... sad that people don't think of the actual PRACTICALITY of this shit.

It doesn't have to make sense in OUR world. It just has to make sense in ITS world.

Overall, though, if cogs and pipes are made "fashionable" in the fictional world and it is explained WHY this is the case, it could be made acceptable. For example, badges. Certain cog designs could designate factional alignment.
Or just imagine those worthless chains some people have on their clothes. Not the pocket-click type. You know the kind. If it's not too bulky, pipes could work as the sort of comparison to that type of fashion.

I'm not against the seemingly needless application of Steampunk altogether, as long as it makes SENSE in the world it's presented in.

Older shirts didn't have buttons, ties would tie the neck hole to keep the chest warm. Now it's a vestigial fashion statement

Thing is, your campaign's summary sounds better elaborated than most steampunk things I've seen out there. I mean, would you accept pic related as a character pic?
I tought it was "welcome to dieselpunk, our skies aren't blue, but our planes look like 40's cars, every chick is a pin-up model and electricity is mostly used for household appliances."
Made me chuckle
Medieval fantasy has it's downsides but it's consistently better elaborated than steampunk. Common steampunk fashion is equivalent to the silliest examples of high-fantasy armor in inconsistency, low fantasy still at least tries to keep within the brackets of historical armor and clothing with the occasional justified deviation.
You notice I only talked about fashion because that's what steampunk developed into, a fashion statement.

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I feel the discussion is bogged down in fashion- it’s really silly to add all the cogs, but it’s really easy to remove, and not much harder to justify if you really want it.
Fair enough.

I think that’s an innoffensive example- keeping your goggles on your top hat is pretty simple.

Also on that note- I feel we should see more medieval legacies in steampunk- go to a haunted castle, have the Queen wield a magic sword, throw in some dragons.

Iron Kingdoms is the only steampunk setting I like.

youtube.com/watch?v=TFCuE5rHbPA

It's a picture nigga the only sense it engages is your fucking eyes

Yeah, and it has way too much visual information, it’s lost on people.

It's easy to market that's the real problem with it. Anyone who wants a piece of this pie just throws gears and brass on shit and tries to get as much money out of it while making nothing worthwhile. It's the same reason why people hate low quality knock off shit, it offends them unless they're morons or are desperate for that.

I get that. It's just that I feel if people want it for the fashion, they need to work just as hard, if not HARDER, to justify it because you're adding several extra pounds onto your clothes. It better be for a damn good reason.

To be fair how many paragraphs of text can your average cosplayer give you?

Steampunk avoids adding magical elements in order to try and cover up the fact that most steampunk technology literally only works through magic.

>I mean, would you accept pic related as a character pic?
Would depend. For a whimsical alchemist or inventor, fine. For anything else... probably not. I don't really like most of the style. It's ok for cosplay but 90% of the time it looks like shit for an RPG character.

It can still be low fantasy.

Like the magic sword being like only one of five magic artifacts.

Seems to me he’s like an industrial era used car salesman.

Doesn't matter. The existence of magic in a steampunk setting makes it harder for people to ignore that this kind of technology is basically magic dressed up as technology, because, for example, it is impossible to build a steam-powered airplane in real life because the need for both something to heat the water and the water proper will make it too heavy to fly.

>friend goes on vacation
>comes back with iron kingdoms book
>asks me to run it for him
>looks cool but I have no idea what I am doing
>no else wants to really play but they go along with it cause im the only GM
>play 1 session of exploration campaign on ship
>2 people who were in it get kicked out of group for personal drama
>campaign dies
>no one wants to play IK anymore
>we go back to other games
>friend occasionally brings up how he spent 60 bucks on that book and no one wanted to play
>everyone immediately tells him to fuck off because he bought it without consulting anyone as to whether they actually wanted to play it
I'd love to play the game but I just can't GM in pre-gen settings, I feel like I'm breaking the rules every 2 seconds.

Okay. Why hide it then? Why not be upfront and say ‘this isn’t scifi, it’s fabtasy with a different skin’.

>if cogs and pipes are made "fashionable"
>Common steampunk fashion
See, that's my point exactly. You don't actually have any valid criticisms here but claim to hate it anyway, so you pretend bad cosplay is literally all there is to the genre. No one in Perdido Street Station or Fallen London glued cogs to their hats

I think there’s something to be had with mixing thrcimlracticality of Victorian fashion with minimalism.

"Not All Women Are Like That!" ie someone who could qualify as a "good woman" according to the faggots on /r9k/.

Purity, basically. Steampunk fans tend to think of themselves as Science Fiction and Alternate History fans; making it Fantasy instead of Sci-Fi is completely losing the "point" of the setting to most people.

It's why my Dieselpunk-Fantasy setting is explicitly Eberron-style "magic that turned industrial" instead of trying to pretend to be science fiction with a low-tech aesthetic.

Point.

The GM can't break rules. That's the glory of being GM.

but seriously think of the sort of world you'd like to play in, find a system that fits it best, then take all the liberties you like. or read a LOT about the pregen setting. I read a lot of Forgotten Realms books, so I'm sure I could GM a pretty accurate campaign in Faerun if I so desired.

I never said I hate it. And I presented many valid criticisms. My points are that a lot of people, those who only know the surface level of Steampunk, think "cogs and pipes" and don't know about the justification. I've seen cosplayers with really inventive parts to their costumes that really show they understand the genre.
And just because you take the genre of Steampunk doesn't mean it has to be in this realistic world. I took a lot from Steampunk and Dieselpunk, making the sort of in-between I needed for my world and played around with that. Of course, that's just the general technology of the world. There is a lot of nuance that I don't have time to go into right now, but I make sure to justify EVERYTHING I do. THAT'S the big thing, as with ANY writing: justification. If I can't explain WHY something is the way it is, then it has no right to be that way.

Barring the steam plane bit, this. Cyberpunk tends to work out ok because people are willing to technobabble their way into making things sound plausible. And despite steam technology being a simple thing people can learn about and pick up on pretty quickly, a majority just throw their hands up and try and gloss over as much as they can with magic bullshit.

Explains why most steampunk boring me, despite it appealing to me.

I say you should have dragons and elves, Kings and queens vying for power, even a dark lord or two, or gives you much more to play with.

>An influx and over saturation of the market around 2012-2014 where everyone and their dog was pumping out low quality steampunk content that fit within a very narrow confine of what fit into those parameters

>tfw you posted your low quality d20 steampunk homebrew in january 2008

Magic turned industrial is always kind of fun to me.
Just using magic as a power source feels kinda bland to me though. I once had the idea of magic as a superconductor just as a thought experiment, but it never went anywhere beyond "the moment someone invents electricity and magnets humanity will have rail guns", which whilst fun, isn't anything much to go on.

What kind of magical industry do you have, user?

>THAT'S the big thing, as with ANY writing: justification. If I can't explain WHY something is the way it is, then it has no right to be that way.
And yet, you haven't come up with a single thing that's fundamentally wrong with steampunk, and keep ragging on bad cosplay

>Neither of those are shown when I google steampunk or steampunk books
That's literally the worst argument I've seem all day, and I browse Veeky Forums.

As a plot point I love the idea of Guns being anti-magic (a combination of fire and metal, mags greatest tools).

First, never said I hated it, just justified the hate OP said people have for it.
Second, Perdido Street Station is one book lost among cogs and goggles when you google steampunk books, the other one didn't seem to surface. Bad cosplay isn't all there is to the genre, but it's most of what people look for in it.

Not him, but I'll have a crack:
Because it doesn't understand the "punk" bit of it's name anymore. William Gibson, the guy who wrote Neuromancer and invented Cyberpunk, also wrote a book called "The Difference Engine" - which can be considered the first Steampunk novel, and understand that it's the Victorian times.
If you invent crazy technology in Victorian times, things are going to get a lot worse for literally everyone except the richest of the rich. Victorian times had child labour, factories with no safety standards, increasing urbanisation that really wasn't prepared for it leading to disease and horrible living conditions and poverty and a gap between rich and poor that would make Bill Gates blush.
Now take that to 11. THAT is Steampunk, the divide between the haves and the have nots being exemplified by advanced technology at the time.
You want a lack of internal consistency? There's your lack of internal consistency: whimsy and "lolcogs!" in a time that was awful for a majority of people and stealing a name that's supposed to reflect that and very much doesn't.

I don't mind steampunk but is right, it's very much overdone and the aesthetic as a whole has too many 'fans' who believe it's all about wearing top hats and putting gears and cogs onto whatever the hell you want without any regard as whether it makes logical sense or not. Dieselpunk's better IMO, mostly because it doesn't have as many fans as steampunk and dieselpunk settings tend to feel a lot more grounded than steampunk settings and don't overdo it in the same way steampunk does

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It's literally just contrarians. Look at the faggot excuses in the thread.

>dude OVERSATURATION!
What a meaningless, shitty fucking statement. Steampunk/cogfop is one of the least used "genres" of things ever. There is only a tiny amount of games, a few movies, and very few tv shows if any that use it. I'm not sure how many books use it but I assume it's not a lot. The fact that people still like fantasy despite it being way, WAY more oversaturated is stupid.

>dude cogfop people hate it because gluing gears to something makes an entire genre meaningless

This is the worst argument by far though, and simply shows the people who hold it are contrarian asshats. Do you hate cyberpunk because some fat tranny wore neon glasses to some event? Obviously not. Do you hate fantasy because some Larpers show up with shitty bad costumes? No, obviously. Then tell me; why do you hate steampunk when some Veeky Forums faggot cherrypicks a dumb tumblr retard that glued some gears onto a tophat? Do you actually let the trivial actions of a surface level "fan" offend you and turn you off from the entire concept of steampunk?

Seriously, fuck all of you retards who feed OP lies. Alt-history and steampunk/diesel punk or alt-technology settings are fucking cool and vastly underexplored. The reason you hate the genre is because you're a contrarian faggot who justifies themselves by how much more intelligent and mature you are by others. Fuck off.

Oh, and for all of you
>Oh well being just different technology doesn't mean -punk, it's not punk unless it's about rebelling hur dur
faggots- you're wrong too. The -punk suffix has become shorthand to mean "setting with unrealistic/fantastical technology of this type." The social implications are not necessary nor even necessarily desirable depending on the game you want to run.

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>Second, Perdido Street Station is one book lost among cogs and goggles when you google steampunk books, the other one didn't seem to surface.
Because people pretend it isn't steampunk, because it's actually cool to like. But it is steampunk, and it is popular.
>Because it doesn't understand the "punk" bit of it's name anymore
I'm sure you get butthurt when people use "decimate" to mean reducing by more than 10% too

Some of the "technology" in the setting so far?
>Guns: The first guns were basically hollowed wooden tubes "powered" by a certain berry whose juice violently explodes when exposed to air; it's still the basis of "gunpowder" today, just refined and made safer & easier to use.
>Trains
>Tanks (military use only)
>Armor-clad ships
>Cars (still mostly seen in the cities and in the hands of the rich)
>Radio (relatively new, mostly a hobgoblin thing)
>Power Tools like Chainsaws, normal and weaponized, harvester-machines, etc
>Airships (expensive and mostly military-exclusive)
>Electric lightning

Why can’t you do a steampunk story about a Democratic Revolution?