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rushthatspeaksYesterday's review.
This is the first roleplaying game manual put out by Systemic Insanity, a small company local to my household and containing a lot of people we know. As a result, though nobody who lives here worked on any of the text or ideas involved, there is a lovely picture of part of our back porch among the visuals, and we also provided many of the costumes. ... and yes, that is Thrud on the cover.
So I thought I'd read it and see whyfor the going through our closets.
Okay, so. I am not much into roleplaying games, though I have played many because I know a lot of people who like them a great deal. I am not a stats and dice and rules-geekery type person: I like my RPGs to be easy to use, comprehensible, intuitive, colorful, and readily manipulable in the service of the story. In fact, a good system, for me, should be one that actively makes it easier to tell the story the GM would like to tell. A good system should spark all kinds of ideas for the stories that can be told with it, because looking at the mechanics makes a person say 'oh hey that makes me notice how I could twist a plot in xyz direction'. If I find a gaming manual sparking stories in my head when I read it, it's probably going to be fun for me to play, and if not, not.
Those of you who are heavily into min-maxing may disagree with that. We maybe shouldn't play together, but I have no philosophical beef; it's just not what I like.
By my standards, therefore, this isn't a good system, but it also isn't terrible. The principal difficulty is that I can't figure out who it's aimed at, who the audience is.
What we have here is a system for simulating action movies. Everyone you play is a total badass. You have Plot Points, as a stat, and you have to use them to do things like permanently kill a major character-- no Plot Point equals you only thought they were dead, whereas in fact they skulked off afterward to plan their revenge in the sequel, we all know how that goes, right? The equivalent of experience points come from being cool: the cooler the things you do are, and the better they would look to an audience, the more the game rewards you for them. And there's a system for retconning things to make them helpful/more interesting/more badass. The best way I can describe this is to say that if this system had been at work in The Princess Bride, Our Hero would, in fact, have been left-handed until immediately after he said otherwise, and that delivery would have gotten him a whole lot of XP.
So that seems to me like a book aimed at, well, people like me, story-mode types, and also at new gamers; that sort of concept makes a great first RPG, a great one-shot to pull out with people who aren't sure about this and want to see whether they like being Errol Flynn for a while. The entire concept of Plot Points is just fun, the badassery quotient is fun; this lends itself well to light gaming.
Except.
There is no description/color in the book. There aren't sample settings, there aren't suggested story ideas, the sample characters are used to show you how to build a character. The various concepts have examples attached to them, but the examples aren't connected to each other and don't build to form ideas of how you could use these ideas in an overarching story.
What is there is a great many stats and rules. They are explained fairly dryly, they use quite technical RPG vocabulary (some of which is never explained in-book at all, so you need to know what it is from other games), and some of the rules are damn counterintuitive (the thing about how you track relative successes when everybody's competing to attain a single objective is ridiculously complex). So this means that the book is not penetrable to the sort of person I have just mentioned as being a prospective player. If you are running a game with a lot of stats and rules like this and you want to make it more story-centered, you need to be experienced enough to internalize all the new rules as you come up with your own story and have your characters take action, and the way this book is written is not designed to help with that.
So why not play it with people who really like stats and rules, then?
Because people who really love stats and rules are a) going to be playing something that gives them more fiddly bits to tinker with than an action movie has, and b) usually mod their own systems. Every RPG rules-geek I have known spends vast quantities of time tinkering with the systems that are already out there-- house rules, mods, fixes, special circumstance add-ons, difficulty increases, rules for how to take afternoon tea with Queen Victoria, you name it and someone out there has written it into GURPS or something D20-based and enjoyed doing that writing. Like, the reaction I expect this book to get from that sort of person is 'oh cool, another system, what can I cannibalize?' (Hey,yhlee, you might enjoy thinking about the retcon mechanic in this in the context of some of the stuff you think about...) But 'oh cool what can I cannibalize' does not equal 'I will play this a lot and make all my friends play it'.
In short, this has a really niche audience as it is. It's got some good ideas, but it needs to figure out what it wants to be and who it wants to be for, and until that gets sorted it isn't what I want to be doing with my weekend. I would mod this, if I were playing it, because I would just throw out half the numbers or more. And I don't mod things, because I don't find that interesting, so I'd rather not play this.
Your mileage may vary. If you are in need of an action movie simulator, this will in fact do that. It's just, I can't figure out why a person needs one this complicated.
This is the first roleplaying game manual put out by Systemic Insanity, a small company local to my household and containing a lot of people we know. As a result, though nobody who lives here worked on any of the text or ideas involved, there is a lovely picture of part of our back porch among the visuals, and we also provided many of the costumes. ... and yes, that is Thrud on the cover.
So I thought I'd read it and see whyfor the going through our closets.
Okay, so. I am not much into roleplaying games, though I have played many because I know a lot of people who like them a great deal. I am not a stats and dice and rules-geekery type person: I like my RPGs to be easy to use, comprehensible, intuitive, colorful, and readily manipulable in the service of the story. In fact, a good system, for me, should be one that actively makes it easier to tell the story the GM would like to tell. A good system should spark all kinds of ideas for the stories that can be told with it, because looking at the mechanics makes a person say 'oh hey that makes me notice how I could twist a plot in xyz direction'. If I find a gaming manual sparking stories in my head when I read it, it's probably going to be fun for me to play, and if not, not.
Those of you who are heavily into min-maxing may disagree with that. We maybe shouldn't play together, but I have no philosophical beef; it's just not what I like.
By my standards, therefore, this isn't a good system, but it also isn't terrible. The principal difficulty is that I can't figure out who it's aimed at, who the audience is.
What we have here is a system for simulating action movies. Everyone you play is a total badass. You have Plot Points, as a stat, and you have to use them to do things like permanently kill a major character-- no Plot Point equals you only thought they were dead, whereas in fact they skulked off afterward to plan their revenge in the sequel, we all know how that goes, right? The equivalent of experience points come from being cool: the cooler the things you do are, and the better they would look to an audience, the more the game rewards you for them. And there's a system for retconning things to make them helpful/more interesting/more badass. The best way I can describe this is to say that if this system had been at work in The Princess Bride, Our Hero would, in fact, have been left-handed until immediately after he said otherwise, and that delivery would have gotten him a whole lot of XP.
So that seems to me like a book aimed at, well, people like me, story-mode types, and also at new gamers; that sort of concept makes a great first RPG, a great one-shot to pull out with people who aren't sure about this and want to see whether they like being Errol Flynn for a while. The entire concept of Plot Points is just fun, the badassery quotient is fun; this lends itself well to light gaming.
Except.
There is no description/color in the book. There aren't sample settings, there aren't suggested story ideas, the sample characters are used to show you how to build a character. The various concepts have examples attached to them, but the examples aren't connected to each other and don't build to form ideas of how you could use these ideas in an overarching story.
What is there is a great many stats and rules. They are explained fairly dryly, they use quite technical RPG vocabulary (some of which is never explained in-book at all, so you need to know what it is from other games), and some of the rules are damn counterintuitive (the thing about how you track relative successes when everybody's competing to attain a single objective is ridiculously complex). So this means that the book is not penetrable to the sort of person I have just mentioned as being a prospective player. If you are running a game with a lot of stats and rules like this and you want to make it more story-centered, you need to be experienced enough to internalize all the new rules as you come up with your own story and have your characters take action, and the way this book is written is not designed to help with that.
So why not play it with people who really like stats and rules, then?
Because people who really love stats and rules are a) going to be playing something that gives them more fiddly bits to tinker with than an action movie has, and b) usually mod their own systems. Every RPG rules-geek I have known spends vast quantities of time tinkering with the systems that are already out there-- house rules, mods, fixes, special circumstance add-ons, difficulty increases, rules for how to take afternoon tea with Queen Victoria, you name it and someone out there has written it into GURPS or something D20-based and enjoyed doing that writing. Like, the reaction I expect this book to get from that sort of person is 'oh cool, another system, what can I cannibalize?' (Hey,
yhlee, you might enjoy thinking about the retcon mechanic in this in the context of some of the stuff you think about...) But 'oh cool what can I cannibalize' does not equal 'I will play this a lot and make all my friends play it'. In short, this has a really niche audience as it is. It's got some good ideas, but it needs to figure out what it wants to be and who it wants to be for, and until that gets sorted it isn't what I want to be doing with my weekend. I would mod this, if I were playing it, because I would just throw out half the numbers or more. And I don't mod things, because I don't find that interesting, so I'd rather not play this.
Your mileage may vary. If you are in need of an action movie simulator, this will in fact do that. It's just, I can't figure out why a person needs one this complicated.
