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A huge pile of #threeforged reviews
Sep. 22nd, 2015 04:58 pm#threeforged review 1533
Silver Tongues
This is another on the "good concept, terrible execution" pile.
The concept -- silver-tongued liars and charlatans competing to have the most of whatever they desire -- is great. The beginning text gave me a very Shooting The Moon vibe, which is amazing. Sadly, literally nothing else followed through.
I don't think I can easily summarize everything that's wrong with this game, but let me try to hit a few points.
* Having every character have their own unique thing to want makes the game feel way flatter and less competitive.
* Having each character hit with the same challenge means that the challenges are going to be flat and muddled, rather than sharply particular to that character.
* The betting system is extremely bland, particularly when you can bet zero. It also has nothing to do with the action in the game.
* The first "cut" mechanic is a flat mother-may-I.
* I love Apples-to-Apples style games, but non-anonymized judging is just asking for bias and cartel behavior.
* The duel and seduction mechanics are poorly explained.
Also, I want to take particular time to call attention to the second "Cut," mechanic, which is an emotional safety mechanism grafted onto the game. It's basically exactly how not to design an emotional safety mechanism:
* It is indistinguishable from another game mechanic.
* It is a hard cut with basically no nuance whatsoever.
* The rule text tries to shame people into not using it.
* It provides tactical benefit in a tactical game but we're definitely not supposed to use it tactically.
It's not that these aren't common problems with emotional safety mechanisms, many of which are extremely poorly designed. But in this case it's bad enough that I felt it was worth noting.
I feel bad for picking on this game so much, but there's sadly very little I like about it.
--
#threeforged review 1530
Q
This game has some good ideas, but suffers enormously from being too easy and ultimately, fails to cohere.
In Q, the GM is a bard, telling the players, who are children, about the exploits of their parents and older relatives in building this new community in the post-apocalypse. This is a great idea. This apocalypse was caused by monsters invading from another world. This is also a great idea. Unfortunately, the setting isn't much constructed beyond that, which is sad and frustrating. I'm not one to throw stones about sketchy settings, but there's really just not enough here to go on, but this setting is past sketchy, and a game with this premise and structure really needs a strong setting to propel it.
The conflict mechanics of the game simply do not function. First, and most easy to fix, the attributes are confusingly defined and not present except on the character sheet. But harder to fix is the massive weight towards success at literally every challenge. In each challenge, you are rolling multiple d6, possibly with a +1, hoping to get a single 3+ result. The consequences of failing this (you lose a point in an attribute temporarily) don't sum up to character death until you've lost multiple times, and even then there's a fairly easy out from the situation.
(yes, there's a "high pass" on 5+ but that's actually still pretty common and the consequences for the 3-4 result are basically nil.)
This is a problem because character death is supposedly the engine of the game. Each player has four characters, and only when one player has lost all four of their characters does the game end. This means that we'll have to slog through hundreds of scenarios, or purposefully kill off our characters with the sacrifice mechanics (to no particular end, because the rolls are so easy and the consequences of failure so avoidable that you'd never need the boost from it) in order to get to end-game.
This is a really common problem with novice game designers. Failure isn't fun! So they functionally write it out of the game. There's nothing inherently wrong with this (like there's nothing inherently wrong with a dinner of cake, ice cream, and cotton candy) but they still carry their assumptions of failure rate from previous games they've played, so the game only advances based on failure. This is a horrible trap, and it leads to flat, boring, unsound games. If you want to make a game entirely of success, you need to make success interesting by having it create new problems and spur future play. If you want to make a game where failure drives new problems and new play, you need to make failure at least a somewhat regular occurrence.
Ultimately, there are some good ideas here, but the game itself is flawed beyond functionality.
Good Things:
* Great idea for a structure.
* Interesting character creation.
Bad Things:
* Game system doesn't work.
* Both too many safeties and no real danger.
* Attributes aren't actually present.
* No functional setting.
--
#threeforged review at the request of +dave ring.
The Perfected City is really good, but I don't really want to play it.
The setting is really well-developed, and obviously the authors care about it a lot. It's basically of "fancy oligarchs have duels in an alchemical-based fantasy city." To be totally honest, it's exactly the sort of modern fantasy setting I dislike. I'm going to try not to hold that against the game -- obviously the authors like the setting a lot and did a really good job with it -- but obviously that's going to color my response.
I imagine that, if you like that sort of thing, it's great.
Things that are good:
* Extremely well developed fantasy setting.
* Really cool scene structuring with a lot of clear, explicit, well-written rules.
* Dueling mechanic is basically just "both sides pose then the audience votes" but, for that, it's pretty well-realized.
* I love the mechanics for the early scene types.
* Love the grievance mechanics.
Things that bug me:
* The setting, as well-realized as it is, is incoherent. Really strong family systems are incompatible with absolute gender equality, without some sort of additional social forces. Simply put, to whose house do the kids belong? Likewise, I find it extremely hard to swallow that a society so caught up in blood line and lineage would have apparently no interest in the reproductive aspects of romance and marriage. I realize it is dumb for me to care so much about this, but fantasy anthropology matters a lot to me.
* "until no one has any more ideas" is a terrible rule. Get each person to add one thing. Or add things until one person passes. If you let someone like me keep spewing ideas, we're going to be here all day.
* Duels seem like they're going to take a needlessly long time. I want the dueling to be as sharp and crisp as the resolution mechanics of the other scenes.
* If someone gets ahead in a duel early on, it will be very hard for the other party to catch up, which will deflate later rounds. Better, I think, to only count score at the end.
* While playing families is a brilliant idea, I don't think it's executed very well. Ultimately the game struggles with the idea of the "face" as your character. I think that there's probably a better way of doing this, or that the game might be better served with a more simple character-player relationship.
While I ended up writing way more about what I didn't like than what I did, I think that the game is really quite good, if it's the sort of thing you like. It's not a shining jewel like Shinobi Village, but it's definitely playable right now and I'd recommend it to a number of people. Just not me.
(15123)
--
American Heroes is an incomplete game. I'm just going to say that right off so I don't keep coming back to it.
I wish this game was a little less sloppy. It could be a pretty cool government superheroes game. The parts of it I liked reminded me of the parts of Grrl Power (a comic about a government super team) that I like. Unfortunately, those parts are only a tiny part of the game.
Good Stuff:
* The team creation is pretty fun and seems like it would build something pretty interesting.
* The villain dossiers is a great way of doing a rotating GM superhero game.
Bad Stuff:
* All of the rigamorole of traits and powers and relationships and ultimately all the scenes come down to is a coin flip between the heroes and the villains? What? I mean, I understand there were time constraints and space constraints, but seriously, you can do better than that.
* The tone was really off putting and annoying. Like, yeah, sure, you're too cool for school and don't care. That's cool, don't mind if I don't give a shit either.
* Three writers and no one took out the racist quip in the intro? Seriously?
* Honestly by the time you get to resolution it's incoherent.
* The powers are really lackluster, which is fine as far as it goes, but creative uses of superpowers is one of the things I like about the "superhero pseudo-military government team" genre.
* The damn thing was really hard to read. Poor layout choices (text is fine, but put in some paragraph space somewhere, please), and confusing grammar and word choices.
All in all, not a good time. But reminded me to check Grrl Power. Which is a plus.
--
Shinobi Village only had one review, it was a one-sentencer, and I liked the name, so I checked it out. Man am I glad I did. This game is amazing.
Honestly, don't read me gushing about it, just go read it yourself: https://dl.orangedox.com/2VrhOv8LpIfxiqIWAn/1567.rtf
Now, the gushing:
* Hits the "goofy slice of life anime" tone right on the head. I'm kinda amazed that three consecutive authors managed to get this right, but the entire thing is perfect, down to the one non-ninja family, the ninja hipsters, the random sushi names, everything.
* One of the only times I've seen an improvement on the PTA scene framing structure. Randomly rolling the situation is fucking brilliant. The way that the probabilities are weighted is great.
* The single best use of paper-rock-scissors as a mechanic in any game ever. It is so fucking brilliant. See, when you aren't doing actual violence, you throw your signs one at a time. Which allows the other person involved to choose their response. Conversations and play-fighting aren't about luck or outwitting someone, they're about how you choose to respond to the other person. So . So . So . GOOD.
Quibbles:
* I think you should probably roll situation, rather than choose main character, first, because if you roll "someone leaves the island" or "someone comes to the island" you really want them to be the focus of the scene.
* I think that the game could benefit from a session structure. Not too much! But even meandering slice of life stories have a topic for the episode. If I were to organize a game of this, I'd suggest we pick out in advance that a character is trying to do a thing, and end play when the character has successfully done the thing or failed to do the thing in a conclusive way. i.e. "Ika wants to buy groceries."
In conclusion: Holy shit this game is amazing.
Example of play for Shinobi Village:
You're playing Ika, trying to buy groceries at the village market. I'm playing Sayuri, trying to sell my groceries.
I say, as Sayuri "I'm very sorry, but I cannot sell you groceries unless you first defeat me in single combat." This is clinging to tradition, being unyielding, I throw rock.
You, playing Iga, can decide how to respond to that. You could make your own appeal to tradition "well that's just not how it's done!" which is to say, you could make your own rock throw and we'd be at an impasse. You could try to trick me or steal the groceries, which is to say, make a scissors throw, which will lead to my winning the engagement. Or you could try to be passive and understanding, which will lead to you winning the engagement.
All of these decisions are intimately tied into the fiction situation. I'm not sure what's unclear about it?
--
#threeforged review: 10 million AD.
Holy shit what a great concept this is.
The concept is: Humans, having fucked up the world, put themselves in stasis for 10 million years while the world heals and regenerates. Now out of stasis, they're going to take it back, something which the current sentient species of the world object to rather strongly.
You play the current sentient species of the world, trying to fight off the human threat.
The implementation is a Apocalypse World clone. I feel like, ultimately, it loses a lot of the greatness of Apocalypse World, but if I instead understand it as a sketch for how to tweak AW to run this setting, I think it's pretty great.
Good Stuff:
* I love this setting a lot.
* There's a part, in the character creation, where it says "If the group discussion isn’t creating a Species of Sapient that you’d like to play, create one yourself" and I said "YES" out loud while reading it.
* The difference between Peoples and Sapients: oh yes. (basically, a people is a nation, a sapient is a species. Not all nations are a single species, not all species have a single nation. Brilliant and overlooked in SF.)
* I like the existence of the "Sapient Politics" section a great deal.
* Apocalypse World mass combat! Nice to have.
Bad Stuff:
* Way too many basic moves, and a lot of them seem fairly passive.
* It's frustrating to me that we have this world full of amazing species and peoples and God-Knows-What-Else and the entire social structure is basically a combined forces military dictatorship. That annoys me. Non-humans should have other social structures, other concerns. Rendering them as just another military coalition makes me way less sympathetic to them. Part of this might just be my personal politics: a military is, to me, a symbol of humanity's failures as a species.
* The Campaign seems like a really simplistic view of how military operations work. Which is, I guess, fine, just sort of annoying to me.
* The Trust and Sapient Politics sections have way too many questions. By the time, in Trust, I get to "for everyone else" I have answered 8 questions. Which means 9 PCs, 10 players including the MC. How many games have you played with over 10 players? This should be 3 questions, with an "everyone else" section at the end.
* I feel like a lot of the choices end up making the game bland, vis-a-vis Apocalypse World and many other PbtA games. Part of this is, of course, due to space constraints, but the lack of playbooks, for example, really hurts.
I like this a lot as an idea for an AW campaign. As a stand-alone game, it's going to need a lot more work and detailing before it's done.
--
review: Village Council.
Ho boy. I don't really know how else to say it: This game is a mess.
There's a few germs of good ideas here:
* The idea of playing a bunch of village elders trying to figure out how to deal with fantasy threats is pretty cool.
* Also, but not entirely related, the idea of playing an adventurer's guild is pretty cool, ala the early computer RPGs like Bard's Tale.
But, ultimately, none of these are developed, and the game spends an inordinate percentage of its word count describing a trick-taking card game and then saying "also, do some role-playing."
(Additionally, it meshes not at all with the rough mechanical outline sketches out in the beginning of the text.)
This is the worst form of bad story game design. The imaginary parts of your game have to matter. If they don't, it's just a card game with some boring character-acting that makes it slower and less interesting.
(obligatory link to an article on this topic: http://lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/427 . The most important thing is the cloud-to-dice arrow MUST ACTUALLY EXIST.)
I think, ultimately, this is a failure of the concept of the contest. Whoever wrote the card game rules simply didn't want to design the game the other designers had set forth, so wrote their own game on top of the others. Which means that not only is the text incoherent, it's also not very good.
The entire thing is extremely frustrating.
--
review: In the Shadow of Ares.
This isn't really a game so much as a pile of notes. I mean, there is a resolution system, and a setting, but it's not coherent enough to actually become a thing. That said, it's a pile of pretty great notes.
The premise is: A catastrophe in the Apollo program leads the Soviets to be the first to the Moon. American competitive drive plus the discovery of rare minerals on Mars creates a push to Mars colonization and, by the time a 1979 nuclear exchange destroys civilization on Earth, there is enough of a population on Mars to survive on their own. Barely.
It's a great premise.
Unfortunately, it doesn't cohere. But I'm not going to dwell on that, I'm just going to hit on some notes I liked and didn't like.
Notes I liked:
* There is a casual one-sentence drop about "radiation causing people to develop powers" which is never followed up on. I love this.
* I love the idea of having to deal with the abrupt transition from an export-focused frontier mining economy to a subsistence economy, and dealing with that culturally.
* Lots of great little details and things you might find in the setting.
* A really intriguing equipment and device system -- it doesn't hold together but there are the bones of something interesting there, namely, that you can take apart things for their components to make new things. It's a great match for the setting, where desperate Martians are trying to figure out how to survive with what they have at hand.
Notes I didn't like:
* Obviously, this is just a personal bugaboo, but if China is going to be setting up a Mars colony in the 70s it's going to be pretty damn weird, because China was going through some shit in the 70s.
* People use data as currency? That sounds stylish but makes literally no sense: the whole point of currency is that it is fungible, the whole point of data is that it is not fungible. Fortunately this idea is abandoned later.
* Are there, like, a dozen people on Mars? A hundred? A few thousand? Some of setting elements (criminal gangs, barter economy) could only exist at a fairly large scale of settlement. But the text seems really confused about this.
* The setting options. The setting is so amazing and strong, it doesn't need options, it needs the designer to make some strong choices.
There's the makings of a good game in these notes. I hope someone does it.
--
review: Tales on the Weird Seas
This game has a fantastic concept and some brilliant mechanical ideas and falters badly in the execution.
Good things:
* OMG it's Thomas the Tank Engine but boats.
* Let me reiterate: It's THOMAS THE TANK ENGINE. BUT WITH BOATS.
* This is so cool.
* The way classes are first described as working is so brilliant I am kicking myself for not having come up with it earlier. It's "pick whatever abilities you want, if you pick three from the same list, you get an extra class ability for being that class." So good. So smart. Everything about this is great.
* A lot of the game gets the whimsical tone and anachronism totally right. (don't worry about how an anthropomorphic boat picks things up.)
Bad Things:
* The HP / damage does not scale at all. Let's say two first level boats are fighting. Each hit does 1d6+1 to the target and 1d4+1 to the attacker. That's an average of 8 damage a hit. They have 220 HP between them. On average, it's going to take 28 hits to finish this fight. Each attack has a 50% chance of landing. So 56 rounds. There is no combat system in the world entertaining enough that I want to go 56 rounds.
* The concept of class is used inconsistently. As described in character creation, boats may well have no class at all, or multiple classes, but as described in advanced, they have "a class" that they belong to.
* There's a list of monsters and places but very little idea about what to actually do in the game. I guess I can interpolate some D&Desque "fight monsters, get treasure" assumptions, but some of the abilities imply that there's other interesting stuff to do (i.e. science and exploration) but I don't have a strong sense of how to integrate that into the game.
Unfortunately I don't have any ideas about how to fix these problems. This is a game I want to see a developed version of, particularly if it keeps its sense of whimsy, but as of now, between the grinding combat and the unclear structure, I can't really make that happen.
--
Imperial Measure is a #threeforged game I just read.
I love the concept of this game but I think that the execution is somewhat lacking. The coolest things are:
* You play a character with seven lifetimes worth of experience.
* The mechanics are pretty slick.
* It has really strong adventure design component.
* I want more career choices, which means that it's a really compelling character creation set-up.
* Love the reroll / reward mechanics. Your character advances if you have a good death!
* Setting is totally boss, reminds me of Aristoi, one of my fav SF settings.
The problems are:
* The sample adventures, and the challenges, seem pretty beneath you. I mean, you are oligarchs of an immortal space empire. You should be initiating things or, if you're receiving commands, they should be about doing great and glorious deeds: discovering new physics, shaping planetary politics, reinventing artforms. The missions feel like something someone with a single lifetime of special forces training could do.
* Likewise, I don't feel like the difficulty scale is right. Someone who has a lifetime of experience as a chemist should not have a hard time storing a dangerous chemical (~25% success rate, by my count). I think that the way that the dice work is fine, but it should start with the really difficult things, and work their way up to totally amazing things.
* The goals and memories are cool but I didn't feel like there was much to do with them, in the game. I wanted them to tie into the missions, but I didn't feel like they did, at least, not strongly.
--
If I were to run the game I would
* Raise the difficulty scale, basically subtracting 1-2 from the difficulties listed, adding another tier.
* Tie the missions into the goal + memory. Probably make it so that each mission was instigated by one of the players, and had to be based on their goal + another player's memory.
For example: Su-lan's goal is to study republican forms of governance. She sets the mission to "Overthrow the Tyrant of Kesh," using the memory of Hassan's fourth life, where he led a regiment in the war against the Tyrant's father.
With those emendations, anyone want to play?
More thoughts on Imperial Measure.
I'm not 100% happy with the careers. I like the specificity of them, but I don't like how limiting they are. I want to add two more.
Artist:
* Compose: Writing, drafting, creating art on its own.
* Empathy: Emotional understanding of others and, more generally, of the human condition.
* Perform: Displaying art -- including your own -- in public
Historian:
* Research: Finding out information you don't have.
* Synthesize: Putting together disparate ideas and facts into a cohesive narrative.
* Inuit: Understanding the patterns of human history to predict future events.
I feel like there's room for one more, which would neatly bring the total to seven, but I'm not entirely sure what.
--
The Prophet's Price
This is a cool game about weird Crowleyistic Tarot Shit in the modern world, ala Promethea or other such stories. It has a lot of cool elements (magic is neat) but ultimately it feels disconnected, like something is not quite right and I can't put my finger on it.
It's probably that the game is really strongly connected to fatalism, as in, there's a prophecy and all of you, including the GM, are trying to make it come true. And there's no real meaningful opposition to that prophecy. So there's not a lot to find out via playing, or to struggle with. I feel like good stories about prophecy the prophecy is problematized, and something the protagonist struggles with. Here, there's none of that, which makes the whole thing feel mucky and flat.
Maybe if I played, I'd find something to care about in the game. But for now I can't see it.
--
Silver Tongues
This is another on the "good concept, terrible execution" pile.
The concept -- silver-tongued liars and charlatans competing to have the most of whatever they desire -- is great. The beginning text gave me a very Shooting The Moon vibe, which is amazing. Sadly, literally nothing else followed through.
I don't think I can easily summarize everything that's wrong with this game, but let me try to hit a few points.
* Having every character have their own unique thing to want makes the game feel way flatter and less competitive.
* Having each character hit with the same challenge means that the challenges are going to be flat and muddled, rather than sharply particular to that character.
* The betting system is extremely bland, particularly when you can bet zero. It also has nothing to do with the action in the game.
* The first "cut" mechanic is a flat mother-may-I.
* I love Apples-to-Apples style games, but non-anonymized judging is just asking for bias and cartel behavior.
* The duel and seduction mechanics are poorly explained.
Also, I want to take particular time to call attention to the second "Cut," mechanic, which is an emotional safety mechanism grafted onto the game. It's basically exactly how not to design an emotional safety mechanism:
* It is indistinguishable from another game mechanic.
* It is a hard cut with basically no nuance whatsoever.
* The rule text tries to shame people into not using it.
* It provides tactical benefit in a tactical game but we're definitely not supposed to use it tactically.
It's not that these aren't common problems with emotional safety mechanisms, many of which are extremely poorly designed. But in this case it's bad enough that I felt it was worth noting.
I feel bad for picking on this game so much, but there's sadly very little I like about it.
--
#threeforged review 1530
Q
This game has some good ideas, but suffers enormously from being too easy and ultimately, fails to cohere.
In Q, the GM is a bard, telling the players, who are children, about the exploits of their parents and older relatives in building this new community in the post-apocalypse. This is a great idea. This apocalypse was caused by monsters invading from another world. This is also a great idea. Unfortunately, the setting isn't much constructed beyond that, which is sad and frustrating. I'm not one to throw stones about sketchy settings, but there's really just not enough here to go on, but this setting is past sketchy, and a game with this premise and structure really needs a strong setting to propel it.
The conflict mechanics of the game simply do not function. First, and most easy to fix, the attributes are confusingly defined and not present except on the character sheet. But harder to fix is the massive weight towards success at literally every challenge. In each challenge, you are rolling multiple d6, possibly with a +1, hoping to get a single 3+ result. The consequences of failing this (you lose a point in an attribute temporarily) don't sum up to character death until you've lost multiple times, and even then there's a fairly easy out from the situation.
(yes, there's a "high pass" on 5+ but that's actually still pretty common and the consequences for the 3-4 result are basically nil.)
This is a problem because character death is supposedly the engine of the game. Each player has four characters, and only when one player has lost all four of their characters does the game end. This means that we'll have to slog through hundreds of scenarios, or purposefully kill off our characters with the sacrifice mechanics (to no particular end, because the rolls are so easy and the consequences of failure so avoidable that you'd never need the boost from it) in order to get to end-game.
This is a really common problem with novice game designers. Failure isn't fun! So they functionally write it out of the game. There's nothing inherently wrong with this (like there's nothing inherently wrong with a dinner of cake, ice cream, and cotton candy) but they still carry their assumptions of failure rate from previous games they've played, so the game only advances based on failure. This is a horrible trap, and it leads to flat, boring, unsound games. If you want to make a game entirely of success, you need to make success interesting by having it create new problems and spur future play. If you want to make a game where failure drives new problems and new play, you need to make failure at least a somewhat regular occurrence.
Ultimately, there are some good ideas here, but the game itself is flawed beyond functionality.
Good Things:
* Great idea for a structure.
* Interesting character creation.
Bad Things:
* Game system doesn't work.
* Both too many safeties and no real danger.
* Attributes aren't actually present.
* No functional setting.
--
#threeforged review at the request of +dave ring.
The Perfected City is really good, but I don't really want to play it.
The setting is really well-developed, and obviously the authors care about it a lot. It's basically of "fancy oligarchs have duels in an alchemical-based fantasy city." To be totally honest, it's exactly the sort of modern fantasy setting I dislike. I'm going to try not to hold that against the game -- obviously the authors like the setting a lot and did a really good job with it -- but obviously that's going to color my response.
I imagine that, if you like that sort of thing, it's great.
Things that are good:
* Extremely well developed fantasy setting.
* Really cool scene structuring with a lot of clear, explicit, well-written rules.
* Dueling mechanic is basically just "both sides pose then the audience votes" but, for that, it's pretty well-realized.
* I love the mechanics for the early scene types.
* Love the grievance mechanics.
Things that bug me:
* The setting, as well-realized as it is, is incoherent. Really strong family systems are incompatible with absolute gender equality, without some sort of additional social forces. Simply put, to whose house do the kids belong? Likewise, I find it extremely hard to swallow that a society so caught up in blood line and lineage would have apparently no interest in the reproductive aspects of romance and marriage. I realize it is dumb for me to care so much about this, but fantasy anthropology matters a lot to me.
* "until no one has any more ideas" is a terrible rule. Get each person to add one thing. Or add things until one person passes. If you let someone like me keep spewing ideas, we're going to be here all day.
* Duels seem like they're going to take a needlessly long time. I want the dueling to be as sharp and crisp as the resolution mechanics of the other scenes.
* If someone gets ahead in a duel early on, it will be very hard for the other party to catch up, which will deflate later rounds. Better, I think, to only count score at the end.
* While playing families is a brilliant idea, I don't think it's executed very well. Ultimately the game struggles with the idea of the "face" as your character. I think that there's probably a better way of doing this, or that the game might be better served with a more simple character-player relationship.
While I ended up writing way more about what I didn't like than what I did, I think that the game is really quite good, if it's the sort of thing you like. It's not a shining jewel like Shinobi Village, but it's definitely playable right now and I'd recommend it to a number of people. Just not me.
(15123)
--
American Heroes is an incomplete game. I'm just going to say that right off so I don't keep coming back to it.
I wish this game was a little less sloppy. It could be a pretty cool government superheroes game. The parts of it I liked reminded me of the parts of Grrl Power (a comic about a government super team) that I like. Unfortunately, those parts are only a tiny part of the game.
Good Stuff:
* The team creation is pretty fun and seems like it would build something pretty interesting.
* The villain dossiers is a great way of doing a rotating GM superhero game.
Bad Stuff:
* All of the rigamorole of traits and powers and relationships and ultimately all the scenes come down to is a coin flip between the heroes and the villains? What? I mean, I understand there were time constraints and space constraints, but seriously, you can do better than that.
* The tone was really off putting and annoying. Like, yeah, sure, you're too cool for school and don't care. That's cool, don't mind if I don't give a shit either.
* Three writers and no one took out the racist quip in the intro? Seriously?
* Honestly by the time you get to resolution it's incoherent.
* The powers are really lackluster, which is fine as far as it goes, but creative uses of superpowers is one of the things I like about the "superhero pseudo-military government team" genre.
* The damn thing was really hard to read. Poor layout choices (text is fine, but put in some paragraph space somewhere, please), and confusing grammar and word choices.
All in all, not a good time. But reminded me to check Grrl Power. Which is a plus.
--
Shinobi Village only had one review, it was a one-sentencer, and I liked the name, so I checked it out. Man am I glad I did. This game is amazing.
Honestly, don't read me gushing about it, just go read it yourself: https://dl.orangedox.com/2VrhOv8LpIfxiqIWAn/1567.rtf
Now, the gushing:
* Hits the "goofy slice of life anime" tone right on the head. I'm kinda amazed that three consecutive authors managed to get this right, but the entire thing is perfect, down to the one non-ninja family, the ninja hipsters, the random sushi names, everything.
* One of the only times I've seen an improvement on the PTA scene framing structure. Randomly rolling the situation is fucking brilliant. The way that the probabilities are weighted is great.
* The single best use of paper-rock-scissors as a mechanic in any game ever. It is so fucking brilliant. See, when you aren't doing actual violence, you throw your signs one at a time. Which allows the other person involved to choose their response. Conversations and play-fighting aren't about luck or outwitting someone, they're about how you choose to respond to the other person. So . So . So . GOOD.
Quibbles:
* I think you should probably roll situation, rather than choose main character, first, because if you roll "someone leaves the island" or "someone comes to the island" you really want them to be the focus of the scene.
* I think that the game could benefit from a session structure. Not too much! But even meandering slice of life stories have a topic for the episode. If I were to organize a game of this, I'd suggest we pick out in advance that a character is trying to do a thing, and end play when the character has successfully done the thing or failed to do the thing in a conclusive way. i.e. "Ika wants to buy groceries."
In conclusion: Holy shit this game is amazing.
Example of play for Shinobi Village:
You're playing Ika, trying to buy groceries at the village market. I'm playing Sayuri, trying to sell my groceries.
I say, as Sayuri "I'm very sorry, but I cannot sell you groceries unless you first defeat me in single combat." This is clinging to tradition, being unyielding, I throw rock.
You, playing Iga, can decide how to respond to that. You could make your own appeal to tradition "well that's just not how it's done!" which is to say, you could make your own rock throw and we'd be at an impasse. You could try to trick me or steal the groceries, which is to say, make a scissors throw, which will lead to my winning the engagement. Or you could try to be passive and understanding, which will lead to you winning the engagement.
All of these decisions are intimately tied into the fiction situation. I'm not sure what's unclear about it?
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#threeforged review: 10 million AD.
Holy shit what a great concept this is.
The concept is: Humans, having fucked up the world, put themselves in stasis for 10 million years while the world heals and regenerates. Now out of stasis, they're going to take it back, something which the current sentient species of the world object to rather strongly.
You play the current sentient species of the world, trying to fight off the human threat.
The implementation is a Apocalypse World clone. I feel like, ultimately, it loses a lot of the greatness of Apocalypse World, but if I instead understand it as a sketch for how to tweak AW to run this setting, I think it's pretty great.
Good Stuff:
* I love this setting a lot.
* There's a part, in the character creation, where it says "If the group discussion isn’t creating a Species of Sapient that you’d like to play, create one yourself" and I said "YES" out loud while reading it.
* The difference between Peoples and Sapients: oh yes. (basically, a people is a nation, a sapient is a species. Not all nations are a single species, not all species have a single nation. Brilliant and overlooked in SF.)
* I like the existence of the "Sapient Politics" section a great deal.
* Apocalypse World mass combat! Nice to have.
Bad Stuff:
* Way too many basic moves, and a lot of them seem fairly passive.
* It's frustrating to me that we have this world full of amazing species and peoples and God-Knows-What-Else and the entire social structure is basically a combined forces military dictatorship. That annoys me. Non-humans should have other social structures, other concerns. Rendering them as just another military coalition makes me way less sympathetic to them. Part of this might just be my personal politics: a military is, to me, a symbol of humanity's failures as a species.
* The Campaign seems like a really simplistic view of how military operations work. Which is, I guess, fine, just sort of annoying to me.
* The Trust and Sapient Politics sections have way too many questions. By the time, in Trust, I get to "for everyone else" I have answered 8 questions. Which means 9 PCs, 10 players including the MC. How many games have you played with over 10 players? This should be 3 questions, with an "everyone else" section at the end.
* I feel like a lot of the choices end up making the game bland, vis-a-vis Apocalypse World and many other PbtA games. Part of this is, of course, due to space constraints, but the lack of playbooks, for example, really hurts.
I like this a lot as an idea for an AW campaign. As a stand-alone game, it's going to need a lot more work and detailing before it's done.
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review: Village Council.
Ho boy. I don't really know how else to say it: This game is a mess.
There's a few germs of good ideas here:
* The idea of playing a bunch of village elders trying to figure out how to deal with fantasy threats is pretty cool.
* Also, but not entirely related, the idea of playing an adventurer's guild is pretty cool, ala the early computer RPGs like Bard's Tale.
But, ultimately, none of these are developed, and the game spends an inordinate percentage of its word count describing a trick-taking card game and then saying "also, do some role-playing."
(Additionally, it meshes not at all with the rough mechanical outline sketches out in the beginning of the text.)
This is the worst form of bad story game design. The imaginary parts of your game have to matter. If they don't, it's just a card game with some boring character-acting that makes it slower and less interesting.
(obligatory link to an article on this topic: http://lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/427 . The most important thing is the cloud-to-dice arrow MUST ACTUALLY EXIST.)
I think, ultimately, this is a failure of the concept of the contest. Whoever wrote the card game rules simply didn't want to design the game the other designers had set forth, so wrote their own game on top of the others. Which means that not only is the text incoherent, it's also not very good.
The entire thing is extremely frustrating.
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review: In the Shadow of Ares.
This isn't really a game so much as a pile of notes. I mean, there is a resolution system, and a setting, but it's not coherent enough to actually become a thing. That said, it's a pile of pretty great notes.
The premise is: A catastrophe in the Apollo program leads the Soviets to be the first to the Moon. American competitive drive plus the discovery of rare minerals on Mars creates a push to Mars colonization and, by the time a 1979 nuclear exchange destroys civilization on Earth, there is enough of a population on Mars to survive on their own. Barely.
It's a great premise.
Unfortunately, it doesn't cohere. But I'm not going to dwell on that, I'm just going to hit on some notes I liked and didn't like.
Notes I liked:
* There is a casual one-sentence drop about "radiation causing people to develop powers" which is never followed up on. I love this.
* I love the idea of having to deal with the abrupt transition from an export-focused frontier mining economy to a subsistence economy, and dealing with that culturally.
* Lots of great little details and things you might find in the setting.
* A really intriguing equipment and device system -- it doesn't hold together but there are the bones of something interesting there, namely, that you can take apart things for their components to make new things. It's a great match for the setting, where desperate Martians are trying to figure out how to survive with what they have at hand.
Notes I didn't like:
* Obviously, this is just a personal bugaboo, but if China is going to be setting up a Mars colony in the 70s it's going to be pretty damn weird, because China was going through some shit in the 70s.
* People use data as currency? That sounds stylish but makes literally no sense: the whole point of currency is that it is fungible, the whole point of data is that it is not fungible. Fortunately this idea is abandoned later.
* Are there, like, a dozen people on Mars? A hundred? A few thousand? Some of setting elements (criminal gangs, barter economy) could only exist at a fairly large scale of settlement. But the text seems really confused about this.
* The setting options. The setting is so amazing and strong, it doesn't need options, it needs the designer to make some strong choices.
There's the makings of a good game in these notes. I hope someone does it.
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review: Tales on the Weird Seas
This game has a fantastic concept and some brilliant mechanical ideas and falters badly in the execution.
Good things:
* OMG it's Thomas the Tank Engine but boats.
* Let me reiterate: It's THOMAS THE TANK ENGINE. BUT WITH BOATS.
* This is so cool.
* The way classes are first described as working is so brilliant I am kicking myself for not having come up with it earlier. It's "pick whatever abilities you want, if you pick three from the same list, you get an extra class ability for being that class." So good. So smart. Everything about this is great.
* A lot of the game gets the whimsical tone and anachronism totally right. (don't worry about how an anthropomorphic boat picks things up.)
Bad Things:
* The HP / damage does not scale at all. Let's say two first level boats are fighting. Each hit does 1d6+1 to the target and 1d4+1 to the attacker. That's an average of 8 damage a hit. They have 220 HP between them. On average, it's going to take 28 hits to finish this fight. Each attack has a 50% chance of landing. So 56 rounds. There is no combat system in the world entertaining enough that I want to go 56 rounds.
* The concept of class is used inconsistently. As described in character creation, boats may well have no class at all, or multiple classes, but as described in advanced, they have "a class" that they belong to.
* There's a list of monsters and places but very little idea about what to actually do in the game. I guess I can interpolate some D&Desque "fight monsters, get treasure" assumptions, but some of the abilities imply that there's other interesting stuff to do (i.e. science and exploration) but I don't have a strong sense of how to integrate that into the game.
Unfortunately I don't have any ideas about how to fix these problems. This is a game I want to see a developed version of, particularly if it keeps its sense of whimsy, but as of now, between the grinding combat and the unclear structure, I can't really make that happen.
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Imperial Measure is a #threeforged game I just read.
I love the concept of this game but I think that the execution is somewhat lacking. The coolest things are:
* You play a character with seven lifetimes worth of experience.
* The mechanics are pretty slick.
* It has really strong adventure design component.
* I want more career choices, which means that it's a really compelling character creation set-up.
* Love the reroll / reward mechanics. Your character advances if you have a good death!
* Setting is totally boss, reminds me of Aristoi, one of my fav SF settings.
The problems are:
* The sample adventures, and the challenges, seem pretty beneath you. I mean, you are oligarchs of an immortal space empire. You should be initiating things or, if you're receiving commands, they should be about doing great and glorious deeds: discovering new physics, shaping planetary politics, reinventing artforms. The missions feel like something someone with a single lifetime of special forces training could do.
* Likewise, I don't feel like the difficulty scale is right. Someone who has a lifetime of experience as a chemist should not have a hard time storing a dangerous chemical (~25% success rate, by my count). I think that the way that the dice work is fine, but it should start with the really difficult things, and work their way up to totally amazing things.
* The goals and memories are cool but I didn't feel like there was much to do with them, in the game. I wanted them to tie into the missions, but I didn't feel like they did, at least, not strongly.
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If I were to run the game I would
* Raise the difficulty scale, basically subtracting 1-2 from the difficulties listed, adding another tier.
* Tie the missions into the goal + memory. Probably make it so that each mission was instigated by one of the players, and had to be based on their goal + another player's memory.
For example: Su-lan's goal is to study republican forms of governance. She sets the mission to "Overthrow the Tyrant of Kesh," using the memory of Hassan's fourth life, where he led a regiment in the war against the Tyrant's father.
With those emendations, anyone want to play?
More thoughts on Imperial Measure.
I'm not 100% happy with the careers. I like the specificity of them, but I don't like how limiting they are. I want to add two more.
Artist:
* Compose: Writing, drafting, creating art on its own.
* Empathy: Emotional understanding of others and, more generally, of the human condition.
* Perform: Displaying art -- including your own -- in public
Historian:
* Research: Finding out information you don't have.
* Synthesize: Putting together disparate ideas and facts into a cohesive narrative.
* Inuit: Understanding the patterns of human history to predict future events.
I feel like there's room for one more, which would neatly bring the total to seven, but I'm not entirely sure what.
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The Prophet's Price
This is a cool game about weird Crowleyistic Tarot Shit in the modern world, ala Promethea or other such stories. It has a lot of cool elements (magic is neat) but ultimately it feels disconnected, like something is not quite right and I can't put my finger on it.
It's probably that the game is really strongly connected to fatalism, as in, there's a prophecy and all of you, including the GM, are trying to make it come true. And there's no real meaningful opposition to that prophecy. So there's not a lot to find out via playing, or to struggle with. I feel like good stories about prophecy the prophecy is problematized, and something the protagonist struggles with. Here, there's none of that, which makes the whole thing feel mucky and flat.
Maybe if I played, I'd find something to care about in the game. But for now I can't see it.
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