Cypher System: Fantasy

So I tried spinning up a few fantasy characters, loosely modeled after Pathfinder iconic characters, using the Cypher System plus the Godforsaken PDF.

I am in the notoriously-delayed Backerkit for this book, but I got the PDF since I am sick of waiting. I understand they likely have supply-chain issues getting that many books printed since the campaign was huge (OGL-disaster-related game refugees). The game is great, so I don't mind grabbing a PDF of something I am getting a little early. Also, not having this was holding me back, so it was either buy now or keep waiting and let my ideas go stale.

What struck me about my characters was how many options I had to create what I wanted. I did not have to "wait for the next Paizo or Wizards book" to get more options - I have more than I could ever imagine using, with plenty of options that were incredibly cool. The characters were built without any problem, and the ideas translated from concept to rules exactly how I wanted.

And the characters came out better than I ever imagined. They are better than the Pathfinder iconic characters, and all of a sudden I was imagining dozens of other cool combinations.

The rules do not limit my imagination, and it feels like a GURPS, Champions, or Savage Worlds, I have infinite pieces to build characters with. I can flavor those options however I want. Also, since the characters are built out of pieces like plastic building blocks - my ideas and concepts of "what is a fantasy hero" get dramatically changed, and my entire view of "who can be a hero" changed.

Do I want a mage who throws seeds and instantly grows mushroom minions? I can do that. A teleporting battle paladin who zips around the map? That can be done. An acrobatic gnome thief with magic? That works. A rock and roll bard who rages? That works.

If you play too much D&D, Pathfinder, and OGL - your view of "what fantasy can be" narrows down to this tiny box. We can be fighters, mages, thieves, or clerics. All our ideas have to fit into those boxes. We are not really allowed to color outside the lines or invent things. Clumsy constructions, such as multi-classing, need to be invented just to patch the game's problems and give players more options (and these get exploited and broken quickly).

Unlike the business models of Paizo and Wizards, I am not waiting for books I need to buy just to have the next few "approved" options. That is another terrible limitation of following games built around those business models, and the retro-clones that seek to emulate them. Why do I want to emulate a 1980s business model that forced me to buy more books? Why do I want to play a game that keeps that outdated design model around today?

I have all the options now.

Plus I can make my own.

And combine them however I want.

Previous Editions to the Rescue!

I see a few D&D YouTube channels doing this, and I get why they are doing this. They are pushing going back to previous editions as some sort of "fix" for the revisions to D&D 5, some pushing 4E, others 3.5, some 2, and quite a few hyping AD&D.

And you can be sure when the new D&D 5.5 rulebooks are out, those channels will be all over that and telling you to switch to the new edition; come on!

I am not buying any of it.

Sorry, D&D is dead to me, and there are too many other incredible games worth my time than current, in-patch, or previous editions of the world's most popular fantasy game I used to play. If I want an easy retro game compatible with everything, I got Castles & Crusades. If I want Gonzo 3.5-eqsue, I got Dungeon Crawl Classics. Most anything OSR is better, even the 5E clones. Swords & Wizardry will base their next game on the Creative Commons SRD Core, which is 100% like earlier editions - sans drama. There are plenty of better games than previous editions (that play just like them), and I feel some channels need to "keep you in the D&D mindset."

If you switch to having a game with a tremendous and sizable community, go to Pathfinder 2 (revised 2.5).

If I want a modern, structurally sound, and more enjoyable universal d20 game than 5E, I got Cypher System.

I can invest in all those games, support communities, and be sure my purchases stand the test of time.

I don't have the time to waste playing editions I have already played and being in the "What did Wizards do this week?" YouTube clickbait circus. When I stopped watching those "whoopsie Wizards" videos and put my 5E books away (and sold them), I was a lot happier and could focus on games I could invest time and positive energy into.

When Wizards can stop making mistakes for a year straight, I would possibly consider them an option. But as it goes, it is always "0 weeks without a community screw-up" with them this year.

The Divine Comedy in The Strange

I see what you did there.

So, Hell Frozen Over, a recursion in the main rulebook, is essentially the Divine Comedy, or a version of Dante's Inferno. Only it is all ice. With carnivorous demons. And ice that heals you. And a mastermind demon named Treachery who lies to you. And powerful artifacts under the ice.

It is a strange "meta version" of Hell that sidesteps having Hell in The Strange and also from forcing everyone in the setting to deal with those concepts (and religion) when the game took the more middle-of-the-road path and sidestepped the issue. I get why not everyone wants Hell in their games, and this could turn into the Doom video game far too quickly with a "heavyweight" topic like that intruding on every other idea, work of fiction, and fun idea that can happen in The Strange. This was an intelligent dodge, but the concept of Hell being a fictional place sucked into The Strange is too good of a story to pass up for me.

It also brings up some reasonably dark topics. First, you get something like Event Horizon combining Hell and high technology.

Would Hell, even a fictional version, become a significant force in The Strange? Honestly, this would be a game I play once, and once only, as "The version of The Strange that ended up with Hell." It is a concept that is primarily all-or-nothing but could be done well. Better than most fantasy games have treated Hell, most notably the horrible job D&D has done with the concept as a sort of suburbanized and isolated place that never influences anything and the merging of demonic heritages with the planar background soup (and how they took the succubus and incubus out of the demonic heritages).

But this is The Strange; you could have a serious "Hell as a recursion" and have it exist, possibly influence several associated recursions, and still firewalled off from the rest of the central "The Strange" game universe. You could firewall it off and have it be a significant force in its sphere of influence. So honestly, you could have the best of both worlds - keeping your primary Strange Cosmos-verse book standard while creating a separate "server cluster" for Hell and its associated recursions.

This is imagination we are dealing with, and The Strange is a place where you can define the structure - or not - and just say how things will interact.

So firewalled off, I could do this and have it take over and spread influence through several recursions. I would also use this firewall structure for other "high pollution" ideas, where the spillover from crossing recursions could seriously change the game's narrative.

Or say the entire game universe, The Strange and all, is a recursion; run it once and see how it ends up, possibly have it destroyed, and then reboot the whole game again and start fresh.

Once your mind opens up and you can imagine all the possibilities, you will understand that The Strange is not a "metaverse framework" but more of a way of thinking and managing imagination and how it blends and interacts.

The Strange

The Strange (along with its Cypher System core) is one of the best "collected reality" games. What the Strange does, that Cypher doesn't, provides a framework for a million different ideas and imagination-based mini-worlds that may not be strong enough to stand alone but should be explorable by sentient beings.

This is a "what if an ancient alien data network was in space and absorbed imagination to create fictional worlds to visit" setting. It lets you "slot in" any idea into it and makes that piece of fiction - or just a strange place - visitable by outsiders. Each micro-world can have its own inhabitants, and those living there can gain self-awareness and sentience.

This is like a world based around the events of one Sherlock Holmes movie, and those events - and the actions in it - keep repeating themselves exactly as the movie plays out. If someone went to a store and bought two oranges one day, it happens the next time the recursion is reset. People live in them thinking they are entire worlds, and these places can stay locked in those loops of action and reality.

Then, the population starts getting sentient, called the spark, and more "free will" is introduced. Different things can happen, and the story can diverge. The world can expand from a few visitable locations to an entire city or larger. The story can change, and the world can progress or stay locked in an era. It could morph into a Steampunk world; who knows?

And as characters visit these places, they can assume the identities and roles (and looks) of those that live there. A muscle-bound Conan-like barbarian in a fantasy world could become a burley, bowler-wearing, handlebar-mustached street boxer in the Victorian era of Sherlock Holmes.

A lot of the problems of other generic systems are solved with this framework. Can a world stay locked in a particular piece of fiction, repeat, and never change? Yes. Do I need a "new Earth" for every fictional world I visit? No. Can a world be relatively small and focused yet still seem like an entire planet to those who live there? Yes. Can the world's inhabitants stay "locked" in their reality, and could they find a way to gain self-determination and break free? Yes, and yes.

Can you recycle your old gaming systems and settings and slot them in as recursions into this framework? Of course, yes! Do they need some messy, infinite, silly-structure "multi-verse" that is ultimately unmanageable and ruins your game? No.

You could say The Strange is a "multi-verse," but it is not by definition since it provides a framework for collecting ideas that are inherently limited in scope and size. Multi-verse in the current context implies "the connecting tissue between multiple complete worlds." The Strange is a framework for expressing fictional worlds in a limited context.

You have far more control in a framework like The Strange than you do a messy, too-bit-to-imagine multi-verse. And worse, a multi-verse also implies multiple versions of the same person exist, infinite versions of Earth at every moment across time, whereas The Strange does not.

The Sherlock Holmes recursion does not need its own Earth, nor does "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein."Alice In Wonderland does not need an entire world to get lost in. Things can be "just what they are" and not go beyond that.

There is one "you" in The Strange, one life; spend it wisely and carefully. You can't "jump a timeline" and rescue another version of yourself somewhere else cheaply and ignore narrative context and consequence. Like the modern do-anything MacGuffin nanites and sci-fi, the multi-verse in modern entertainment has become synonymous with "crap writing." We will get to Nanites when we talk about Numenera. They are done right there compared to how they are used as lazy sci-fi plot putty these days.

The fictional places you create are "boxed in" and under control. The critical topics of self-awareness and self-determination are central to the setting. This isn't a "lazy collection of game settings and Earths" and some "funky planar soup" between them; it is a thoughtful framework of how the mind and imagination work and how these places can be explored in a larger context with an overarching narrative - and the smaller, individual stories are important too.

And an interesting backstory here explains everything, yet it doesn't. You are free to take it in any direction you can dream of.

The Strange is everything, yet it is very few.

Nostalgia, Part 2

I like my nostalgic experiences but know how bad they are for me. I limit them like I limit my junk food intake. It pains me to see another version of "fantasy game" released.

Is D&D 5 a good game? Yes. Is it D&D? Not really; the current edition is more of a superhero game. The original is still better. Given that both editions are dead to me (corporate mismanagement and community behavior), I play Castles & Crusades for my faux-nostalgia hit. It is good enough, throws out a lot of rules, and frees me up for that original edition hit point and combat difficulty scale.

But I don't play too much of it.

I would prefer to invent new games with Cypher System and play things I have never done before.

Every time  I sit down to play something based on nostalgia, a classic module, or a familiar setting, it never lasts. The "want" to play it is always more potent than the desire to "keep" playing it. The nostalgia games and settings don't hold water for me. I may love them for the good times they represent, but my future games will come from my imagination.

And I need a system that isn't tied down to lists of junk I will never use and isn't a shelf full of books to reference.

In my entertainment, I don't watch nostalgia movies. If I like the original, I watch that. The word nostalgia has become "the remake" and not "the original." I don't like the remakes. They are empty calories, weak, and never live up to the originals.

What I do watch are the new things they make today. New ideas and stories.

I am done with the reinterpretation of the past.

It is empty at best and a constant argument at worst. And I am not tuning in for an argument anymore. That is a more enormous waste of time, worthless in every way.

The argument means nothing if you don't "buy into" the remake.

So, don't buy in.

Consent in Gaming

I may be an old-school fan where anything goes, but this book has a place.

This is a free download over at Monte Cook Games, and it goes through many topics that may upset people at a gaming table. I heard some criticism of this book along the lines of, "This is not needed," or "Sit at my table, and you consent to anything!"

I wish I had this checklist at a few of my games in the past, it would have set the tone for the game, and we would have avoided many problems. You can laugh at "needing a book like this" all day, but after you know all the trouble this game agreement saves you from - you will know.

In short, this is an informal agreement the group makes of what everyone expects at the table. Everyone fills them out, and it can be anonymous, and the GM goes through them and sets the game's parameters. This can also be used for world design and what players can expect from the world's history and events.

The book also has advice on resolving problems and includes a few good suggestions on apologizing and checking in later with both sides of a disagreement to ensure the "later feelings" are all right.

I also look at a book like this as an enabler. If you plan to play a "Friday the 13th" style game, and everyone accepts what happens in those movies, this pre-game checklist is good. This sort of understanding can enable handling a lot of sensitive topics that you are not 100% sure everyone at the table may be comfortable with. You never know if Bob from Accounting is a horror movie fan, and this sort of discussion is good to have just an ice-breaker. This applies to sex as well and includes the smart "fade to black" way of handling things many games recommend, and this technique can also be applied to too-violent scenes. 

The killer raises the axe, and...

Fade to black.

It works, and in some games, this is a far more potent and effective tool for horror than rolling 1d6 damage plus STR mod and realizing the blow wasn't that deadly.

I do not see this as a "tool for wussies" but as a good starting point to set expectations and also "clear the way" for allowing even more sensitive topics at a table that most games would sweep under the carpet because, by default, most all games are made for a younger audience. Having a tool to "open the door" to mature topics for a group of mature players is a good thing, and it can expand your game more than the typical "sanitized out of the book" settings and adventures we get these days.

This is a good thing for more reasons than avoiding hurt feelings, but that is where this book starts, and you can take it so far from there and have a better game that fits your group's expectations as a result.

The Effect of Charts on Imagination

Over-reliance on random charts is the current fad-de-jour in pen-and-paper game design, and worse, it harms our imaginations. This can also extend to in-game systems, combat charts, crit charts, and over-reliance on chained dice rolls to determine special effects.

I recently had two experiences with this: my Road War game using the Cypher System rules. My cinematic, dramatic vehicle combat in Cypher felt much better than trying to "sim" everything using a vehicle combat system like Car Wars. I did not need that level of detail, and the results I got using Cypher System felt more realistic and engaging than "boiling down" and using a full-vehicle combat game.

And I got a result that, for a story-based game, felt right, fit into my story narrative better, and did not take four hours to conclude.

The second was my consideration of running a "hard sci-fi" game using the same rules but using the gear, ships, and overall feeling of the Cepheus Deluxe setting (an excellent game on its own). The feeling of "just use Cepheus Deluxe" was strong in this project. The breaking point was ship combat. Would I use the Cepheus ruleset or abstract it with Cypher System and use a variant of my Road War rules (cars as monsters with weapons)?

The Cepheus Engine ship combat system looks fun, with charts and tables for particular damage results that seem like out of a starship combat simulator. It is tightly integrated into the game's engine, which is nice, but the number of rolls and tables you need to work through seems daunting. The ship combats also seem complex, with one taking some time to simulate through and ensure all the rolls are done correctly to get the best results.

But to what result?

In Road War, I proved my imagination was better than any chart, and I had some great results in determining what happens on damage rolls, critical hits, and critical failures that made the entire game feel more like "Mad Max" than a complete vehicle combat sim could ever give me. If I applied the same logic and procedure to a "hard sci-fi" game, I bet I could come up with some memorable moments far better than any set of charts could give me. Some moments and things in my mind make space combat "hard sci-fi" - far better than any chart in any game.

I can do better with a generic system and a few guidelines.

So why do I need the charts and rules?

Random charts and detailed systems are excellent when you have no clue or need inspiration. But relying too much on them or creating monolithic "game systems" based on random charts feels wrong. Mainly when I had limited time, and I had played "chart games" before that went nowhere, with me rolling on random charts, getting results that did not excite my mind, and then rolling again and again, each time getting less and less excited about the following result.

Yes, rolling through a Cepheus Engine ship combat chart and "playing that game" would be fun as a "sim." But I must answer, "Is that what I want to do for my game?"

This is a tricky question. For those that don't have a massive frame of reference for what can happen in a "hard sci-fi" game and those who want to be surprised by chart results, the complete systems and charts can be a great experience. They take time and an understanding of the rules and leverage the game's design systems to create better fighting machines.

For those who want to tell a story, the detailed and complete combat systems and books full of charts will likely be a hindrance and drag on the game. I can get many of those "oh crap" moments in Cypher System with GM Intrusions, and the critical hit system works well to turn that around in the players' favor. Do I give up being surprised by a chart result? That is one weakness to 100% using your imagination, in that there will be things you will not think of on a chart.

But on the flip side, there are millions of things in my head that can happen, and one chart could never hold them all.