I swore I would get back to it, so damn it, here we go! Before I choked on the smarminess and had to stop for a while, I had gotten through these parts:
- Part one: Principles of play
- Part two: Character creation
- Part three: Classes and heritages
- Part four: Communities
- Part five: Rules
- Part six: Character progression, weapons and armour
Let’s try just a short one this time, and do the last ten pages that’s left of the second chapter. First off, we need to finish the gear section, which is rarely my favourite part of any game, but we’ll see how it goes.
There’s a list of 60 types of special doodads, and apparently you can hand them out randomly by deciding on a number of d12s to roll based on how pricey a haul the players have run into, and then rolling them. Works for me. Like that implies, the doodads are of increasing value, ranging from a Premium Bedroll (lets you recover 1 Stress during downtime) at a roll of 1, to a Belt of Unity (lets you spend 5 Hope to lead a Tag Team Roll with 3 players instead of 2). Huh. You know, I think I’d rather have the first than the last? 5 Hope is almost all the Hope you can possibly have at any one time, and a Tag Team Roll just means that more than one player rolls and then you pick the best result among them. That’s not precisely overpowered. Whereas getting rid of Stress is getting rid of Stress – who among us couldn’t do with being a little less Stressed, I ask you?
Let’s check out a few more. 55 is the Gem of Precision, which you can attach to a weapon and it lets you roll with Finesse when attacking with that weapon. That’s… a tiny bit better than usual if your Finesse is better than your Strength and Agility, I guess? But it’s going to be on the level of like one or two points, and you’ll be rolling 2d12 and taking the highest, so it’s not exactly going to matter a lot. This is meant to be among the coolest things out there?
A roll of 6 gives you… a pair of manacles that can be locked. Okay, that is even lamer, I’ll grant you. However, a roll of 5 (so technically a bit worse) gives you a pair of magical walkie-talkies with unlimited range and use. What is this I don’t even.
Some of the items are also “Recipes” which lets you create some kind of potion (from the list that’s next up) as a downtime move. Okay, can two people use the recipe at the same time? Can it be copied? The thing with “rulings, not rules” is that things have to make some kind of internal sense so you can extrapolate from them – this seems to run on video game logic, where an item and a skill is fundamentally the same thing! Aaarrgggghhh. Now I remember why I stopped this readthrough in the first place.
Okay, okay, so the game designers have no concept of utility and were probably just scribbling down the first thing that came to mind and called it genius, that’s about what I’ve come to expect from them. Let’s move on to potions! Those are a bit less annoying, most of them just heal you, remove Stress, gain Hope, add to damage, add to stats, basically just enhance your character in some way. There are some more interesting ones, though, like Death Tea that lets you instantly kill the next enemy you roll a Critical Success against, but if you haven’t done so before your next long rest, you die. Ooooh. Also, the Knowledge Stone lets you donate one of your cards to another player if you die with it in your possession.
Next there is a play example. The characters spend the time climbing up a mountain to a castle, where they fight a bunch of skeletons in the courtyard, and there’s a lot of over-complicated special rules being thrown around all the while. But! After reading through this scene, and then going back and rereading the rules chapter, I think that I have actually worked out how the flow of action is meant to go, which is at least a plus.
It’s like this. The GM says which of the players get to act, and try to keep the attention divided both fairly and reasonably between them. The players try to do stuff, and roll their Hope Die and Fear Die. If they succeed with Hope (Hope Die is higher than the Fear Die and the roll succeeded) or roll a critical success (Hope Die and Fear Die are equal), they just succeed. If, on the other hand, they either fail or succeed with Fear, the GM gets to make a GM move – most commonly, by having an enemy NPC attack someone. The GM can also interrupt even after a player succeeded with Hope by spending a point of Fear, which she gets more of whenever the players either succeed with Fear or fail with Fear (so a little less than three quarters of the time a player makes a roll, basically). So there’s a whole economy going on with Hope and Fear flying back and forth over the table and being used to power abilities and take actions and offset results and and and and and…
Wow. I hate this. I hate it. It’s an unholy bastard hybrid of really crunchy tactical gameplay, which I love, and the sort of smooth-flowing narrative play-to-find-out-what-happens you get in Powered by the Apocalypse, which I also love. This is ketchup on ice cream. This is two great tastes that completely ruin each other. This is the worst idea ever.
I mean, I’ve heard the idea of “GM fiat initiative” being criticised, but in my experience it works just fine in PbtA. But thing is, in PbtA the rule is really simple. The GM makes a move when:
- A player fails a roll.
- The game would get boring if the GM didn’t inject some new complications.
- Given the fictional situation, it wouldn’t make sense for something not to happen.
That’s it. It’s perfect, functional, elegant. It doesn’t need a fiddly point economy to make it work. It just needs a good GM who has the trust of his players.
But this mess… It’s like they put in complexity just because they could, without any attempt to make the complexity orderly or functional. And that has something to do with why the whole thing rubs me so thoroughly the wrong way, but I still can’t quite put my finger on it. Like, the game has colourful weirdness and cutesy subsystems, and I love colourful weirdness and cutesy subsystems! And yet, the whole thing just puts me in instant fight-or-flight mode. It’s like every line of text is not only calculated to offend me, but to do it in a sneaky, ambiguous way that will make me look like a deranged jerk if I ever admit to being offended.
Yeah. I need to think about this more.
Well, stay tuned for a lot more of me trying to figure out where I’m sensing a threat from, because this brings me up to almost exactly one third of the way through the book. Next up is the chapter on GMing. I am honestly a bit afraid to see what these people consider best practice…