Star Wars RPG: Campaign Start

We are in the middle of running a joint three-book campaign with the Star Wars RPG, and things are going along well. We are building out our characters, running through a sample plot, and the larger plot is just starting to form up.

Despite the voluminous system and the large amount of character archetypes, character customization feels a little soft and many character feel and play like each other. As experience points come in, this is improving, but some of our characters feel a little too samey for our liking.

I am not a real big fan of the character generation system, which puts a premium on getting your starting ability scores as high as possible at the cost of skills and other customization. Your ability scores are very difficult to change, and the difference between starting with a 2 or a 3, or even a 4 is huge. You end up min-maxing in a few key scores and forgoing the cool things that make your character special. I would rather place a rack of preset scores (4, 3, 3, 2, 2, 2) and then be given 20-30 points to customize the character rather than have to make a choice between good scores and a unique character. Yes, this would make starting characters a bit more powerful, but I would rather have that and knock down XP rewards by 5 points than what we have currently (which feels like it is being gamed in favor of ability scores).

Less rolls doing more is the way to play this! I ran into a situation where one character tried to open a storage box with an electronic lock, and I ruled "only one try per skill" on the attempt, and it worked beautifully. We have been so trained by the "then I do something slightly different and re-roll" sort of soft-ruled gaming that we immediately fell into that, trying a rock to bang it open, a prybar, and a this and a that. Nope - all of those attempts were part of the same "force it open" roll, and you failed - try another skill. Mechanical, perhaps? Another character with skulduggery skill was able to save the day, and we avoided having a player buffalo their way through a task by throwing the dice so many times they just succeed.

If this was a d20 player I would expect to hear "I take a Triumph" and then I would begin to rub my temples in a mock headache.

I swear letting players "try something slightly different" and reroll the same task is some sort of dice-rolling tantrum. In Star Wars, it doesn't work that way. I am not going to sit here and adjudicate fifteen borderline horrible rolls of random selections of threats, despairs, and advantages until you get the roll you want. The dramatic situation happened when you tried to bang the lock open, it didn't work, and it is time to move on. There is no "let's do a second take" here. Maybe in Hollywood, but in this world you get one shot and then you need to change your tactics.

That said, things are going well, and we are capturing that Star Wars feeling. We are getting a wonderful low-level game as well with very relatable characters, including the bad guys, so I expect the fights and conflicts coming up to get very gritty and personal. This does not feel as light and flippant as the d6 and d20 versions of the game, there is a lower-level grit and realism here that I love. Things are broken, the galaxy itself is broken, and every item, vehicle, character, and societal structure is coated with a level of dirt and grime. I plan on keeping things that way, and forcing some hard choices on the character's behalf.

There are no heroic and clean decisions in this world, there are just bad choices, and worse. Only sacrifice and heroism can turn the tide.

Thesaurus Classes

Thesaurus Class? Let's define this as a derivative character class from a role-playing game from one of the four base classes that specializes in one function rather than covering a field different from the existing classes in the game. Usually the increase in the specialized field is offset by a reduction in the other abilities of the base class. Examples?

Assassin

Role: A rogue that kills people. Wait. I thought rogues killed people? No, this one kills them even better, plus they specialize in poison. Wait. I thought rogues could use poison? So now my rogue can't be an assassin-for-hire? Well, no, you still can, no one's going to stop you, it's just now there is this class that does it better. So I have to re-roll an assassin now?

Ranger

Role: A fighter that uses bows. Now, some games do rangers right and give them combat pets, dual wielding, and specific nature powers, but many games do not do ranger right and we get a sort of fighter sort of rogue that sort of maybe can use magic powers that feels like a mash -up between three classes. Good rangers are a lifestyle choice. Bad rangers are fighters that can't wear plate and are limited to bows.

Cavalier, Knight, Swordsman, Guardian, Battlemaster, etc

Role: See fighter or paladin. Yes, you can use a thesaurus! Good job game designers, and thank you for making the base fighter class so unappealing. Thank you also for making me a buy a splatbook just to get a power-creep fighter class that makes my original book less valuable now. I absolutely do not need a splatbook knight thesaurus class, if you would have done your job in the base book you would have covered a knight option in fighter. If it is even needed. A knight is a fighter that belongs to an order of...fighters. Seriously. Choice? I don't need choice, I need less choices in class selection that matter more. Not more choices that matter less.

Swashbuckler, Pirate, Corsair, etc

Role: Rouges that live on boats. See also, cavalier, dragonrider, or knight in some games, which are basically fighters that fight from mounts. Since dungeon masters typically do not design dungeons for boats or mounts, these vehicle-limited classes do some things related to their home really well, and then everything else on dry land kinda less well.

Investigator, Brawler, Blacksmith, Sage, Guard, Archaeologist, etc

The old job-as-class qualifies as a thesaurus class, because these are either trade skills you should be able to purchase or just some sort of alternate-world "aren't town guards just fighters" thing. This really applies to classes like investigators and archaeologists, because in an ideal game, I should be able to buy a job specialization in those types of jobs and have a mage-investigator or a rogue-archaeologist and be able to combo a job and a class without all of a sudden having to multi-class and be forced to make the choice "do I want to be less of a mage or less of an investigator" every level. When you design a game, there are the important roles in the game that deserve to be primary classes, and then the everything else stuff that should be job specializations. While some jobs should be classes (depending on your world and story), not every job should be.

Thief-Acrobat, Shield-Fighter, Specialist-Mage, etc

Another thesaurus class exists when game designers give you an option to do one thing really well at the expense of everything else. Aka, the specialist class. It is silly, because really, you should make the base class flexible and able to do a variety of things well to keep thing interesting and give a player more choices during combat. Picking a specialist class limits you to doing one thing really well, and that one thing often becomes the only thing your character does. These appeal to min-maxers, make the base classes less appealing to play (because they are not the best at this one thing anymore), and force you to pick them because you know content will be balanced for thge specialist and not the general class. As a game designer, if you know the ultimate defender is the shield-knight, you will balance all of your game's boss monsters against that class and not the generic fighter. In doing this, you have just put everyone who picks generic fighter at a disadvantage and forced all fighters into the specialty class. A base fighter should be able to pick up a shield and be the best defender in the game.

"Other Games Have Them" Classes

Druid, ranger, paladin, warlock (witch), bard, and a bunch of other classes tend to creep into fantasy gaming because other games have them. This is okay if you put the design effort and time in to make these classes unique, special, and fun classes to play. If you are going to just make a warlock a variant mage and give them a special spell list of spells that wizards can use also I am going to be one pissed-off warlock and say you cut game-design corners and cheated me of a unique and exclusive spell list. You shouldn't add classes that don't belong in your world either, if your world doesn't have paladins, don't feel pressured to put them into your game.

Sword-mage, Holy-fighter, Spell-blade, Divine-mage, etc

Hybrid classes! In games with multi-classing, you don't need classes that  have multi-classing built in. If you can already make the choice of playing a level 5 fighter and a level 5 mage, why do you need a hybrid sword-mage class that is part fighter, part mage? This is not technically a thesaurus class, but you will often see a thesaurus name slapped on these to make them more palatable. Either multi-classing is going to work and be the way you do multi-classing, or you need to ship a complete set of hybrids to fill the roles you have in your game world. It is sad, because you know when the hybrids come out they are usually better than a multi-class kludge solution. Hybrids have some design behind them and typically work better (unless you are exploiting multi-classing because the low level classes have scaling powers and those are really all you need).

The Moral of the Story

Ask anybody involved in MMO design, your base classes matter. Pen-and-paper games typically think they live in a world where they can ship unbalanced designs and multiple classes to chase the holy-grail of 'choice' - but really, less is more. I don't want fifty or sixty classes in the game, I would love eight classes that do what those sixty do equally well. When I go to design a character, I want less choices that matter more. Let me specialize as I level up, but don't make those specializations things that limit me into one role. Good design matters, and doing what everyone did before is not an excuse to abdicate your choices as a game designer.

It is important for referees as well, if all you want to do is play basic Pathfinder or D&D 5 without the splatbooks, say that is what you are doing and don't let the tide of popular opinion force you into playing your game somebody else's way. Realize that splatbook classes are typically power-creep filled affairs to get you to buy a book, but in doing so, you make your original books and classes less desirable. Choice is not always a good thing to chase as a designer, or as a consumer, to reward. It is great if you are trying to sell books, of course, but as a referee or player, it is the inevitable drip-drip-drip of power creep that makes you say, "I hope they clean this all up in the next edition."

Fantasy Age 1.1 PDF Released

News flash, they just released the version 1.1 of the Fantasy Age PDF. It looks like they just made some minor errata fixes, but I sure do like having PDF update notices delivered to my in-box.

Paizo, take note. This is cool. Unless I messed up some setting somewhere. And oh yeah, Fantasy Flight and that Star Wars RPG, please, please PDFs!

On second thought, now my Fantasy Age printed book is out of date. I give up.

Still, this is cool. Props for entering the digital age, Green Ronin.

Free-to-Play: Wildstar

DarkgarX and I tried the Wildstar free-to-play game recently, and yes, the servers were jammed nearly impossible to log into. A couple thoughts:

The graphics and factions are fun, and impossible not to like if you are a fan of Guardians of the Galaxy, and other similar out-there space opera style depictions of the universe. It is a wacky, pun-filled, silly, serious, and crazy place with a charm all its own. It is a fun place, full of in-jokes and whimsy, and I wish I could buy a pen-and-paper game based on this universe.

Seriously yes, I could play this on the tabletop if the humor was kept intact, kind of like the old Paranoia game with its frequent fits of black humor and outright and random fits of uncontrollable laughter. I wouldn't want black humor for this one, just that free-wheeling space exploration and danger with humorous and uncontrollably silly moments. They did a great job with the world, and it is worthy of a pen-and-paper game that captures the irreverent and silly high drama of this universe.

I liked the classes, and I felt they were imaginative and they broke the boring tab-target standard of the last generation of MMOs. Every ability is AoE or self, and you don't need to fiddle with a target indicator and end up healing the thing your fighting by accident. You just play, things move quickly, and it feels like an action game. They did a nice job here, the combat is fluid and dynamic, and the powers are cool and different.

What were they thinking following the old bang-to-bang quest model? Seriously, it feels like MMOs have got stuck in this Facebook game model where you just search a 3d world for exclamation marks, skip the quest text, and run off blindly chasing the next quest objective. I feel it hurts an otherwise fun and interesting game, and it doesn't really play to the game's strengths. In a game about freewheeling space adventure, putting the chains and cage of a traditional questing system on everybody locks down the fun, tells players "only quest content is important" and sucks the life out of the natural conflict the wonderful world has between these two factions.

It feels like MOBAs are so popular because they took the funnest part of MMOs (PvP) and just made a game around that. Everything else that MMOs traditionally do, from the slow grind to the endless questing, is unfun, and MMO designers feel they need to keep shipping this rote, uninteresting, copy-and-paste between games, honestly lazy content and they keep trying to improve it and wonder why a square wheel doesn't roll.

Wildstar is fun and cool-looking, and I love the world. I do not like the locked-into-it questing content. I hope this is just the introduction, but honestly, I wish it wasn't there and we were free to pursue player-created goals and user-created content. Yes, kind of like EVE, but with people instead of 3d starships. I want to fly a grav-ship around the planet as an explorer and discover new lands, to ply traderoutes with my atmospheric cargo ship, to participate in PvP wars as a soldier, or craft my butt off and discover and build things as a scientist to support the war effort.

I want to be forced to be a part of something bigger driven by the community, not be a mouse in a maze driven by developers. Yes, I know, EVE again, but I love that personal connection and 3d avatar-ness of Wildstar, especially in a sci-fi setting.

We shall see how this breaks out, and I am hoping it does, and my character can be a part of this larger struggle for freedom and independence of this far off world.

Playtest Report: Fantasy Age

Fantasy Age is an interesting game. It is sort of a spiritual successor to True 20, minus the d20 and many of the fiddly d20-ish based rules. We sat down and playtested the game the other night, and these are our first impressions.

3d6 Fantasy is Fun!

It has been a while since we used a 3d6 system for fantasy (since SBRPG 1.0), and it was cool. I loved the break from a d20, and getting a bell-curve back made modifiers meaningful again. There is a big difference between a +1 and a +3 with 3d6 versus 1d20, and it felt good.

v1.0 Skills

Why are separate "search" and "sight" skills needed? Where is the survival skill? We ran into a bunch of problems with skills, and players started attempting actions the skill system was unclear about or did not have the skills to cover.

Also, the regularity with with stunt rolls came up forced us to the stunt tables with a pretty regular frequency, and players started dreading rolls with stunts because nobody wanted to reference the book. We adopted a system where if you rolled doubles "something good happened as determined by the referee" and we ignored the stunt die's magnitude. It was a patch and ignored one of the game's key mechanics, but it sped up play and kept players from searching the tables and trying to invent something cool happening after the fact.

Three Main Classes

We didn't mind having three main classes that could specialize into different areas. It felt like a good balance or fighter, mage, and rogue with mages being able to fill in for a dedicated priest class with a healing specialization. I don't mind this sort of structure in a world where this is the norm, and it worked for us.

We wanted some sort of official world (other than Dragon Age) that supported this three class structure. It is different enough from Dragon Age to support a unique world, though making one wasn't a part of our playtest (nor did we want to check out the worldbook mentioned in the rulebook).

Four Spells per School?

While I like magic to be meaningful and not take over the game, only having three mastery levels and four spells per school felt really thin. Mages get two schools (start with four) and they can get new schools and spells as they level, but four spells under fire and the other various masteries felt like mages couldn't really do too much with spells and magic. We want more spells, deeper schools, and more stuff for mages to do.

It hurts, because this is one of the big things we felt would hurt the long-term interest in the game for us. A game like Pathfinder gives you a reason to stick around and play with spells and magic until you just don't want to read anymore. This is admittedly a more simple game, but we felt the lack of the high end magic options and selection would keep us interested at the lower levels and not the higher ones. yes, the classes have build options and choices at every level ,but there is something to be said for a great spell selection as well.

Action!

The game worked well in play, although 3d6 per combatant initiative dragged down the start of combat. There is something to be said for one-die-per-combatant initiative, because before you know it, with just 10 people in the battle, you are rolling 30d6 just to figure out who goes first.

Stunting dragged combat down, but other than that, the system worked. We enjoyed some of the options that classes gave at level one, but we didn't get a chance to level up before the night ended, so we need to keep testing to get a feel for levels and powers as you advance.

We liked the simple combats, but we felt the gravitic and realistic pull of Legend hovering over us. The games are enough alike. Once you experience Legend in its brutal and visceral glory, it is hard to want to play a simple game with stunts like this and not compare the two. This is more lighthearted, fast and easy adventure more aimed at a audience looking for a simple and quick game. We also thought of Savage Worlds when we played, and how that game has the same sort of adventure and simple system feel.

It is faster and easier to learn than D&D 5 or Pathfinder however, and it does get the job done for fantasy roleplaying.

What Would Hurt This?

For us, what would hurt this becoming a go-to game for us is the lack of character options, spells, and magic items. It is a simple-enough system, but the game feels like a really basic fantasy game that doesn't have a really great depth of options for supporting long term play. As a pick-up-and-play game, it is great and good for groups new to roleplaying and fantasy gaming. It does share some of the 'shallow class options' problems that D&D 5 has, but this is a lot more straightforward that D&D 5, so it feels like a better fit for new gamers or those looking to simplify.

This was a game I wanted to like and had higher hopes for, especially since it will be used for the Blue Rose reboot coming next year. I have a slight bit of remorse, but I am hoping to houserule that away and then convince others the changes are needed. With roleplaying, anything can be fixed, the work comes when you try to convince others that these things need fixing. Some games are more difficult than others to houserule, since there is a lot of 'by the book' play and fandom out there in tabletop gaming. Stunting would be one I house-rule, as we shall see.

Stunted Post-Roll Stunting

I like Legend's take on post roll stunting, but Fantasy Age's implementation leaves something to be desired. Let's begin by describing post-roll stunting.

With post-roll stunting, after you roll if you roll good enough, you get to perform a special stunt based on the roll's result. This is something like do extra damage, push an opponent, stun them, or do some other cool extra special effect.

In Fantasy Age, stunting is done through rolling doubles on any of the dice, and the magnitude is determined by the random result of the "stunt die." You don't really announce your cool stunt before you roll, you announce an attack, roll, and then if the dice come up doubles, you then describe your stunt.

With Legend, it works like this, at least for us. With Legend you start with a base percentage to-hit. You describe your stunt to the referee before you roll, and the referee modifies your chance to-hit. You roll the dice, and your opponent may make a defensive roll. The difference in success level of the roll (success vs. success, success vs. failure, crits vs. failure) determines the power of the stunt. Now, if you are being really cool and swing across the pirate ship on a rope to deliver a kick to the Pirate King, the referee will likely reward you with a +10 or +20% chance to-hit, which will raise the chance to stunt and likely the level of stunting success. If you just succeed normally, no stunt happens, but you still connect and do some damage. Otherwise, it is obvious what happens, and the Pirate King goes flying.

In short, what you do before you roll matters. Players push it and try crazy things to get roleplaying bonuses. Those bonuses matter and increase the chance for something cool to happen.

What you put in increases the chances for cool stuff to happen.

Fantasy Age takes the English out of the stunt attempt, and does not really allow a player to pre-declare a stunt. Sure, you could give the rope-swinging player a +3 to-hit in Fantasy Age, but that does not affect the chance for the stunt to happen, nor does it affect the magnitude. When it happens is random, and what happens is point-bought off a Chinese menu of effects, further slowing play down. With Legend, there is still a list of effects to choose from, but they are simple and what you want to do is usually one or two of the picks from the list. It is a simpler system, and it does not force you to the charts every time you stunt.

In short, roleplaying bonuses do not contribute to post-roll stunting. Stunting happens at random. You are not encouraged to do cool stuff before the roll (only to-hits), and the cool stuff happens at random.

What you put in only increases your success chance, and not the cool things.

The Sample Adventure

We didn't enjoy the sample adventure as much as we would have liked. It was a Hunger Games style sort of 'young adults on an isle of mystery' sort of thing, and it made some balance and motivational missteps that we struggled with. There didn't seem to be a great motivation other than 'sit out the night' and when the fun started, the fight was with a magic creature that couldn't be hit by normal weapons. Guess what most starting characters start with? You got it. There was a stunt (costing 3 stunt points) that allowed you to 'hit' this incorporeal shadow creature, but it took a lore roll (thank you, smart players) to figure out. I don't think an average group would have had an easy time with this, so it came off poorly for us.

There was no real motivation to get out and explore the island, so the NPCs went off like lemmings to explore while the PCs built camp for the night. Trouble happened, they handled it, and a ghost appeared with part two of the mission - kill five other spirits. Five is a lot, especially without magic weapons, but a quick temporary enchant by the ghost solved that in sort of a 'make things easy' way. It wasn't rewarding or really cool, so we have a group now with depleted resources and health going down to take out five other ghosts they really are going to have problems with. Three felt like a good number and would have been a great challenge without wearing out its welcome, but we are now stuck with taking out five ghosts by sun-up or it is the end of the world.

The sample adventure also had a lot of fluff text describing things that we would have never encountered, and lots of little irrelevant detail on the valley that we found a bit on the fluff side. Yes, this sort of detail is good to know if you are planning a campaign here, but the 'walled valley' wasn't interesting enough for us to want to, so we would have rather had more adventure and a little less background trivia.

We also wanted a more classic style of adventure, with some rescue the princess, swing from the chandelier, and smash the orcs stuff going on. You know, a basic game needs a good basic adventure with some meat-and-potatoes fun to it. We also compared this to the Star Wars Beginner Sets' adventures, and would have loved for a tutorial to have been written into the encounters.

Character Sheets Needed

We didn't find the printable character sheets all that useful, and we wanted dedicated places for all the different aspects to a character. This kinda got in the way as we designed characters, and we wanted a sample filled-out character sheet in the book to crib from on what goes where.

Immediately we wanted to make our own character sheets.

Other Bits

There are enough monsters to have fun with, and the equipment selection is good and fits the needs of characters. I wanted more in the way of magic and magic items, and we also wanted some great survival rules. A couple more level-up options would have been cool as well.

There are no paladin options, but you can buy an expansion PDF with these and other builds. My feeling? Make it all fit withing the three class system, and put those options in a basic fantasy style game at the start. There was a chance here to break from the traditional Dragon Age style of game, and it did not feel they went far enough to support some of the non-Dragon Age standards, such as paladins, druids, bards, warlocks, and others. These classes would have complicated the basic three classes in options and rules, but I feel they would have provided a great break from Dragon Age's feeling and catered more to the MMO and D&D crowds.

More to Come, I Hope

Fantasy Age is a fun game and we like it, it just has some v1.0 feeling issues and a lack of options to make this a go-to system for us. I am hoping we get to finish the adventure, perhaps I will level up the characters pretty quickly to keep things going and players coming back. The game needs a worldbook and an expansion to provide some better options, and the stunting needs to be rethought to provide more of an incentive to say what you are going to try first, and then roll. Stunting after the roll feels like an afterthought, and it plays like one too.

I want the players to be pushing me for bonuses, trying silly stunts, and taking chances and rolling the dice to see what happens after the dice are thrown. Getting a stunt when you didn't even want it feels very strange and backwards to us, and that forced to stop play and sift through charts asking, "Well, what can he or she do?"

I like the system though, it is 3d6 and simple. It gets play started quickly. It creates interesting characters. It levels up nicely. It is straightforward and focuses on action and story. It is a strong system, but we feel it has a couple issues that a second version needs to work out. Hopefully by the time Blue Rose rolls around, some of the depth and other sticky issues will be worked on and the game shines as much as it deserves to.

A great simple system, it is just a little sticky and underdeveloped in some areas. I have high hopes for this one, but I want to see more. I also want to see an open license so some of the rough spots could be filled in by the community and others. But overall, a great beer-and-pretzels RPG wthat is simple enough to grasp the basic concepts for quickly, and get you adventuring within 10 minutes of prep. Not bad, and a fun one I look forward to seeing more games from.

Preview: Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide

This is an interesting product. Green Ronin is teaming up with Wizards to produce the Sword Coast Adventurer's Guide. This is a book that brings the "adventure area" of Faerun to players with an up-to-date guide, sort of like a soft reset on the Sword Coast area to bring it up to date with the videogame releases of Neverwinter and Sword Coast Legends.

The spellplague, second sundering, time of trials, crisis of the gods, and all the other game rule inflicted disasters are covered, and that has always been a sore point with me and Faerun, all of the world-changing disasters have been inflicted on this world for game-related reasons. It feels very direct and the "we're changing things" disaster 5.0 always feels like it is around the next corner.

Contrast this with Lord of the Rings, or even Pathfinder's Golarion. Those worlds feel stable, and we don't really need huge changes done to them repeatedly to account for another rules change. The settings are what they are, and even in the case of Golarion, I doubt Paizo would feel it necessary to 'change the world' with a disaster if a new version of Pathfinder came out. Even in the Lord of the Rings videogames, if a game's interpretation of the world is slightly different, it is no big deal and not something worthy of a global change to the lore.

Will I be getting this book? It is hard to say because I really don't know what the value is to me. I am a fan of the lore and world, and it would be good to keep up with things, but I haven't played those two videogames yet so my interest is a little dampened.

I don't really want the D&D 5 classes or rules, and "purple dragon knight" sounds a bit silly to me and I have no idea what that is supposed to be. A swashbuckler class, okay, but really, that is a rogue to me. Pathfinder is guilty of this too, taking a thesaurus to the list of classes and coming up with new classes just based on a slightly different version of the base class. What this does is weaken the base class, and complicate character design. And you know any "thesaurus class" will come with extra added power creep to sell the book - it is inevitable with RPG designers to do this. What that does is it destroys the value of the original book's content, and weakens the game overall.

A fighter with a bow is a fighter. Not an archer, non-magic ranger, bow-ist, crossbowman, target shooter, bow-slinger, marksman, field archer, bowman, arrow-slinger, sniper, bow master, fletcher, close-quarters bowman, or any other word meaning the same thing. Rangers? Maybe, but they have to be more than "a slightly weak fighter who can use some low-level magic user spells." Some games do ranger right, and others don't put the effort in.

As for the other content? I will need to wait and see. I have enough background data to run a campaign in this area, but I don't feel the need to go out and gather more background data without a current campaign running. Part of me hopes with is more like a Dragon Age style hintbook thing that gives you great background data on the world and factions.

Of all things, I want a strong world with strong characters and factions. That gets me interested, and that is driving my interest in games and worlds like Dragon Age and others. The book has to answer the question, why not just get videogame hintbooks for Neverwinter and Sword Coast Legends and play with those? If they do the "let's water down important NPCs so the players feel important" thing I am less interested. I like strong characters, and I am not afraid of them.

So I am tossed up about this one, and I will wait for the non-5-star reviews to come in so I can make my decision. I am not buying expansion splatbooks for D&D 5 because I am sticking to the original three. If I am going to buy books to collect, they will be Pathfinder because I am bought in already and following along. With D&D 5, I don't have the interest or shelf-space to start collecting again. This book feels like a D&D 5 splatbook that you buy for new rules and the background and world data feel like add-ons. I would be surprised if they made this highly useful with NPCs, places, maps, plots, and other high-value content.

But this is a different company, Green Ronin, and I like their stuff, so I may be wrong and in for a pleasant surprise. We shall see, and this comes out in early November.

The Michael Bay Effect: Magic

We met sci-fi author Charles E. Gannon at Salt Lake Comic Con 2015 and he used the term "The Michael Bay Effect" during one of the writing action panels we attended. To paraphrase:

It is like a Michael Bay movie where you have explosion, explosion, explosion, and all of a sudden, explosions are the new norm. They aren't special anymore. You now have to do something bigger to wow an audience.

It is a fun statement, and true. If all you show people are explosions, they aren't special anymore. It is a theory of keeping the special events rare and unique, so they continue to have their power and impact over an audience when they do happen.

Mr. Gannon is a cool guy, and he actually got his start writing role-playing game supplements for the old GDW and MegaTraveller. We chatted endlessly about GDW, Traveller, his books, and sci-fi - and nowadays, he writes the most awesome hard sci-fi books you can get your hands on. We left the convention with autographed copies, so we are happy sci-fi readers for the next few months.

More on his books later, I want to get a chance to read them before we share a review. They look cool, and from what I read, they will be cool.

Now, the "Michael Bay Effect" in regards to magic?

Let's think about magic in fantasy role-playing gaming for a moment. With D&D 5 and Pathfinder, you typically get a "high fantasy" experience where magic is commonplace and everywhere. To be fair to D&D 5 and also Pathfinder, they have options for creating low-magic worlds, but to me, that does not feel to be the norm. If you look at the massive lists of magic spells, magical monsters, and magic items in this world and the page count which they cover - magic feels like a large and important part of both Pathfinder and D&D 5's assumed worlds.

You can't devote two-thirds of your page count to magic spells, items, and monsters and then turn around and say "people can run low magic games" - that does not compute, nor will it be what the average player expects. You also can't give magical classes infinite "blaster" spells to use to satisfy damage-per-second concerns of mages, as it is in D&D 5 (and to a lesser extent Pathfinder). If a wizard is walking around in D&D 5 like he is in a Gauntlet videogame blasting magic at everything in sight, you have lost me with the whole "low magic" feeling thing - even if you say "oh no, magic really is rare!" If it was truly rare, it wouldn't be used like that.

As a sidebar, D&D 4 really turns the magic up to 11 for all classes, and this rule is probably more appropriate for that setting as well. With that game, everything and everybody has magic and none of it feels special.

As a strange comparison, the old-school retro-clones actually have a lower-magic feel to me. Basic Fantasy and Labyrinth Lord go back to the rarer magic feeling more than the D&D 3 and beyond games do, in my feeling. I feel you can run a low-magic game in those better than modern games because there isn't that much magic to begin with, the spells are simpler, and the balance between non-magic classes and magic-classes feels better.

Half You, and Half the Game

So the "Michael Bay Effect" does apply evenly to both world design and the game itself, so half of this problem is how you handle magic and the other half is how important magic is to the game. If the game supports dozens of magical classes, monsters are balanced against players equipped with an assortment of magic items, monsters themselves use or are created by magic, and the spell lists are long and cover every possible situation - the game is a high-magic game.

Contrast this with a lower-magic game such as Legend or Runequest, where the game assumes you are a normal person good with weapons and armor, and magic is so rare it is not the norm. In those games, you rely on steel and sword, and magic is something rare - even in a typical adventure you are lucky if a spell or two is cast. Here, magic is rare. It feels special. It is not being used every turn for even the most minor of problems, or a quickie one-shot attack spell. If magic is used, it is used for something big and noteworthy.

What the game expects is key here. If the game expects you to kit yourself out with level appropriate magic items or you can't keep up with the bestiary, like D&D 4, you have a situation where you get a Michel Bay effect with magic. It doesn't feel special. You need it to keep up. It is everywhere and everybody uses it. Magic isn't cool, it is a part of this videogame inspired balance thing to make play exciting and who cares what happens to the feeling and lore of the world?

That Escalation Thing

Now yes, games like Pathfinder and D&D 5 work well, and you can play them while ignoring the Michael Bay Effect and have fun. Magic is supposed to be common. We have fun upgrading our magic items like an MMO and accept the power curve. So what if every class can use magic and feel like they are contributing?

Well, there is typically a problem where the game's designers failed to account for the power of non-magical classes and solutions versus magical ones, and you get the whole thing in D&D where mages turn out to be end-game gods. Spells are king. They can solve every problem any other class could. They can wish away problems and do absolutely everything. Some games re-balance non-magic classes to compensate, but with the D&D lineage games, this has never really worked well.

But, with common magic, all of a sudden you need magics better than magic to create a sense of power and wonder among players. This isn't just ordinary magic, it is ancient creation magic, or metamagic, or somehow godly super magic! It is more magic than magic. You see the same thing in campaigns infested by common and interloping gods, all of a sudden, you need beings more powerful than the gods, like ancient gods, god-gods, or somehow nether-realm beings even more powerful than the supreme rulers of the universe.

You get escalation because what was supposed to be special is commonplace, and you need something to attract the audience's attention once again. And sooner or later...

"How can we top that?"

Is There an Answer?

It is up to you if you want one, of course. You may be happy with how things are, but you need to realize that the way a game is designed sets expectations for every player coming into it. The game's design may limit how far you limit magic because the game is designed around a particular set of assumptions and levels of magic present in a party. Players may come into the game with their favorite "build" based on high-magic assumptions, and saying "low magic" will disappoint them and unfairly limit something which they believe should be allowed since "everyone else plays that way."

I like games that start at a lower-magic base and let you scale up to high-magic, rather than a game that starts at high-magic and suggests you can play with low magic. With magic, it is hard to put the horse back in the barn and pull it back. The game has to be designed with a lower-magic base in mind, and balanced for a party of heroic normal non-magic classes. Then we add magic, and then we balance from there as powers ramp up and become more commonplace. The referee's guidelines then suggest how you balance for a higher-magic game, and the system supports everything equally well.

To be honest, the current and most popular games out there feel like high-magic designs with roots in the world of MMOs and character builds with an emphasis on magic and magic items as a part of the design process. For us and the groups we play with, we like magic (and those who use it) feeling powerful and special. As a referee, I don't want to have to justify more powerful magics just to get people to pay attention to the new threat. It gets tiring after a while, and in a high-magic world with commonplace casters, there is always someone else around to solve the extra-magical problem you face.

Personally...

I like low magic. I like magic feeling rare and special. I like players who use magic to have that sense of awe and wonder, and also that sense of secret and unlocked power.

I dislike the MMO arms race. I dislike magical powers feeling like blaster powers out of videogames. I dislike games that take away options by printing 1001 spells and magic items and setting player expectations that all of that stuff will be present and used in character builds. I dislike games that do not provide great and balanced options for non-magic characters.

As a referee, I like presenting normal challenges to players, and non-magical solutions work and are good options. I like not having to constantly escalate to get people's attention. I like normal enemies to be seen as threats, and not having to use magic to make something 'more threatening.' I like magic to be the 'wow' answer to a normal problem, not the expected answer.

I am in a mood right now where I am rolling back on magic in my games, and looking for games that provide better options to non-magic characters. This is not because I dislike magic, but because I love magic and I want magic to be special again. Honestly, the current big-name fantasy games are not doing it for me, and I am looking for alternatives.

It sometimes feels like a superhero game could do D&D and Pathfinder better, because that is where all of this is going anyways. Why mess around with the old-school d20 veneer of rules and systems when my archer could use the same rules a Hawkeye character is using, or my tank something more suited for Iron Man? There comes a point in fantasy gaming where you really what you are doing is playing a superhero game and the built-for-dungeons d20 system holds you back - with escalation in play. Without escalation, we are back to the good old realistic dungeon crawl, and d20 works well.

But yes, the Michael Bay Effect is real, and it is something you should think about when creating worlds, playing games, and most importantly, choosing the game you want to play. Game design matters, and how the designers expect magic to be used is something you should consider when playing in order to align your expectations with what the game delivers.