Gaming Reviews
Sep. 4th, 2005 12:55 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bluegargantuaHey,
So, a few gaming reviews of stuff that I picked up at GenCon and have now read through more-or-less in their entirety.
Thirty: This isn't quite a roleplaying game. Rather, it's sort of a one-shot deal where you play through the game once and your done. It may take awhile to play thorugh and should give you several enjoyable sessions. The basic gist of the game is that you're one of thirty handpicked knights. Your mission is to flee into the Tree of Life and secure the secret treasure of the Templars.
If you just want a game of Templar mysticism, this is probably the game to pick up. If you've got your own personal spin on how the tree of life should be set up and what kinds of tests knights might face, then this is worth reading through for the ideas but may not be as good a value. If you don't want to play this kind of game (or want some ongoing adventure dealie), then the game obviously is no good at all.
I do rather like the Fraternitas rules. Basically, this models the trust that a fighting band of warriors has. Everyone chips in some amount to a central pot which can then be used by anyone for any reason. Leftover dice at the end of the session go back as experience for each knight. So new guys are a bit of a drag, because they need to pull on the pool all the time, slowing down XP awards for the old hands. As they get more competant, they start putting dice back into the pool and making it better for everyone.
Making all the knights distinct from one another is going to be a bit of a challenge, but the rules do a good job of showing the various wasy to differentiate the characters. Clearly the game is looking for a fair amount of troupe play and that's probably as it should be.
I'm not super-anxious to play this game, but I do think it's worth trying out.
Discordian: You play a servant of Eris trying hard to disrupt the various conspiracies of the world with the Truth that there is no Truth and all is in flux. Hail Eris!
I'm a little disappoionted in this game as a rulebook. The system is just this side of "not actually there" and seems to be missing a key component. As an agent you have Dogma (the belief system of the conspiracy you've infiltrated which allows you to do belief-appropriate "magic") and Catma (the "belief system" of Discordianism which lets you do weird-ass stuff). The rules have a full system for allowing your Dogma to eat your Catma (basically you begin to actually believe the lie you espouse). The problem is that this appears to be a one-way street. There's no way to build your Catma back up. Perhaps this is deliberate, but it nothing in the rules suggests that one way or another.
Also, the GM section is basically a Discordian rant-o-fest. Which is quite enteratining and amusing and frankly, if you pick up this game to play it, almost no amount of GM advice will really be useful or needed. But it's still kind of an annoyance that the section (which is about half the book) offers next to nothing. Perhaps there are hidden wisdoms in the ranting I'm simply too Apollonian to understand.
I'd give this one a miss. Discordian was written by John Wick after he wrote Thirty. His desire to do something completely at odds with Thirty pretty much ran roughshod over any other considerations.
Polaris: I bought the game sight-unseen on the strength of the recommendations. I came away from the demo thinking this was one of the hottest games at GenCon. A thorough reading of the rules has me convinced that I was right.
So, Polaris. You're a warrior in a doomed fight to save your people from the predations of the Sun and the Mistakes of their past. It's one part Athurian legend, one part Silmarillion, one part Icelandic Saga. It's hot. Hot, hot hot. It's more of a storytelling game than a typical RPG. When it's your "go" you push your character sheet into the center and that defines various GMing duties for all the other players at the table. The player across from you is the Mistaken who tosses adversity and trouble your way. The people on your left and right take on important NPCs who are related to your character by blood or fealty and everything spirals up from there.
Conflict resolution is handled by key phrases -- short bits that you slip into the narration that define the negotiation around what's at stake. So a short exchange might go something like this (key phrases in italics):
And so it was that Vega slew the demon with 40 arms.
But only if Vega takes a serious wound herself.
But only if the demon tells me the secret words that control the Gates of Mist.
And furthermore Vega is struck deaf from the blasphemous words.
And so it was.
So, like that. And if you can't reach an agreement, the key phrases help resolve around that and will eventually lead to either breaking off the conflict or settling it via a die roll. But the focus is on negotiated settlements.
It's a tragic game, so things eventually spiral down to the knight's doom and I'm not so much about that, but the game is far too intriguing not to try out. I'm anxious to give this one a spin.
Capes: A superhero game with a slick set of mechanics. Unlike most superhero games, Capes doesn't spend a whole lot of time dealing with the nitty gritty of charcter construction and super-power rating and comparison. You can throw together a superhero or villian in under a minute if you want. And the way the game is set up, you'll appreciate it.
The game is played in scenes which are broken down into pages (i.e. one trip around the table). When a page starts, you can lay down "Goals" -- things that you want to see happen during this scene. Each goal has two sides, (basically for or against). Players can claim either side of the goal. Each side has a single d6. On your turn, you can roll a die for any side that you want. The goal with the high die gets resolved in favor of the winning side.
The fun part comes in with debt. Every time you use your super powers, you gain tokens of debt. You want to clear your debt and the way to do that is to Stake it on Goals that you want to win. Staking debt allows you to split up your dice and improves your odds of winning. So if you've got a 4 and your opponent has a 5, you can stake debt to split your 4 into a pair of 2's and then reroll the one of them. If you then roll up a 5 of your own, your side has a total of 7 and there's no way your opponent can top you (short of pulling some of their own splitting stunts).
When a Goal gets resolved, the winner clears all his Debt -- by converting them to story tokens that he gives to the losers. The losers get back double any Debt they staked. The story tokens allow you to take extra actions. The extra debt lets you get involved in more goals. So losing is bad in the short term, but can be great in the long term.
So you've got these tokens flying back and forth over the table and you're looking for various ways to get resources into play. This sparks scene generation and quickly setting up characters to bounce off of. In fact, unless you run with spotlight characters, you can really think of the characters as being secondary to the story which is secondary to the efforts to get control of it.
This is another game I'm really looking forward to trying out.
later
Tom
So, a few gaming reviews of stuff that I picked up at GenCon and have now read through more-or-less in their entirety.
Thirty: This isn't quite a roleplaying game. Rather, it's sort of a one-shot deal where you play through the game once and your done. It may take awhile to play thorugh and should give you several enjoyable sessions. The basic gist of the game is that you're one of thirty handpicked knights. Your mission is to flee into the Tree of Life and secure the secret treasure of the Templars.
If you just want a game of Templar mysticism, this is probably the game to pick up. If you've got your own personal spin on how the tree of life should be set up and what kinds of tests knights might face, then this is worth reading through for the ideas but may not be as good a value. If you don't want to play this kind of game (or want some ongoing adventure dealie), then the game obviously is no good at all.
I do rather like the Fraternitas rules. Basically, this models the trust that a fighting band of warriors has. Everyone chips in some amount to a central pot which can then be used by anyone for any reason. Leftover dice at the end of the session go back as experience for each knight. So new guys are a bit of a drag, because they need to pull on the pool all the time, slowing down XP awards for the old hands. As they get more competant, they start putting dice back into the pool and making it better for everyone.
Making all the knights distinct from one another is going to be a bit of a challenge, but the rules do a good job of showing the various wasy to differentiate the characters. Clearly the game is looking for a fair amount of troupe play and that's probably as it should be.
I'm not super-anxious to play this game, but I do think it's worth trying out.
Discordian: You play a servant of Eris trying hard to disrupt the various conspiracies of the world with the Truth that there is no Truth and all is in flux. Hail Eris!
I'm a little disappoionted in this game as a rulebook. The system is just this side of "not actually there" and seems to be missing a key component. As an agent you have Dogma (the belief system of the conspiracy you've infiltrated which allows you to do belief-appropriate "magic") and Catma (the "belief system" of Discordianism which lets you do weird-ass stuff). The rules have a full system for allowing your Dogma to eat your Catma (basically you begin to actually believe the lie you espouse). The problem is that this appears to be a one-way street. There's no way to build your Catma back up. Perhaps this is deliberate, but it nothing in the rules suggests that one way or another.
Also, the GM section is basically a Discordian rant-o-fest. Which is quite enteratining and amusing and frankly, if you pick up this game to play it, almost no amount of GM advice will really be useful or needed. But it's still kind of an annoyance that the section (which is about half the book) offers next to nothing. Perhaps there are hidden wisdoms in the ranting I'm simply too Apollonian to understand.
I'd give this one a miss. Discordian was written by John Wick after he wrote Thirty. His desire to do something completely at odds with Thirty pretty much ran roughshod over any other considerations.
Polaris: I bought the game sight-unseen on the strength of the recommendations. I came away from the demo thinking this was one of the hottest games at GenCon. A thorough reading of the rules has me convinced that I was right.
So, Polaris. You're a warrior in a doomed fight to save your people from the predations of the Sun and the Mistakes of their past. It's one part Athurian legend, one part Silmarillion, one part Icelandic Saga. It's hot. Hot, hot hot. It's more of a storytelling game than a typical RPG. When it's your "go" you push your character sheet into the center and that defines various GMing duties for all the other players at the table. The player across from you is the Mistaken who tosses adversity and trouble your way. The people on your left and right take on important NPCs who are related to your character by blood or fealty and everything spirals up from there.
Conflict resolution is handled by key phrases -- short bits that you slip into the narration that define the negotiation around what's at stake. So a short exchange might go something like this (key phrases in italics):
And so it was that Vega slew the demon with 40 arms.
But only if Vega takes a serious wound herself.
But only if the demon tells me the secret words that control the Gates of Mist.
And furthermore Vega is struck deaf from the blasphemous words.
And so it was.
So, like that. And if you can't reach an agreement, the key phrases help resolve around that and will eventually lead to either breaking off the conflict or settling it via a die roll. But the focus is on negotiated settlements.
It's a tragic game, so things eventually spiral down to the knight's doom and I'm not so much about that, but the game is far too intriguing not to try out. I'm anxious to give this one a spin.
Capes: A superhero game with a slick set of mechanics. Unlike most superhero games, Capes doesn't spend a whole lot of time dealing with the nitty gritty of charcter construction and super-power rating and comparison. You can throw together a superhero or villian in under a minute if you want. And the way the game is set up, you'll appreciate it.
The game is played in scenes which are broken down into pages (i.e. one trip around the table). When a page starts, you can lay down "Goals" -- things that you want to see happen during this scene. Each goal has two sides, (basically for or against). Players can claim either side of the goal. Each side has a single d6. On your turn, you can roll a die for any side that you want. The goal with the high die gets resolved in favor of the winning side.
The fun part comes in with debt. Every time you use your super powers, you gain tokens of debt. You want to clear your debt and the way to do that is to Stake it on Goals that you want to win. Staking debt allows you to split up your dice and improves your odds of winning. So if you've got a 4 and your opponent has a 5, you can stake debt to split your 4 into a pair of 2's and then reroll the one of them. If you then roll up a 5 of your own, your side has a total of 7 and there's no way your opponent can top you (short of pulling some of their own splitting stunts).
When a Goal gets resolved, the winner clears all his Debt -- by converting them to story tokens that he gives to the losers. The losers get back double any Debt they staked. The story tokens allow you to take extra actions. The extra debt lets you get involved in more goals. So losing is bad in the short term, but can be great in the long term.
So you've got these tokens flying back and forth over the table and you're looking for various ways to get resources into play. This sparks scene generation and quickly setting up characters to bounce off of. In fact, unless you run with spotlight characters, you can really think of the characters as being secondary to the story which is secondary to the efforts to get control of it.
This is another game I'm really looking forward to trying out.
later
Tom
