This is a mirror of this Twitter thread, which was written in real time as I read the Symbaroum Starter Set. It hasn’t been edited in any way. You can pick up Cypher System from Amazon. You can also leave a tip at Ko-Fi if you like this kind of content and want to see more of it. I post these tweet mirrors to Detritus at least a week before they go live on Loot The Room. This post isn’t affiliated with or sponsored by Free League in any way, though the Amazon link above does use an affiliate code. Thanks for reading.

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I didn’t get a chance to sit and read a game this weekend, but today is clear so I’m going to take the opportunity to read the Symbaroum starter set from Free League!

As always this will be a long thread with no real aim in sight, just me reading the book(s) and musing about it as I go. It’s not a review.

I may get things wrong. I may not like things you like. I may like things you don’t like. That’s all fine.

Here’s what I know about Symbaroum going in to this read:

Absolutely nothing. Literally nothing. I picked it up because I’m a sucker for a boxed set (I grew up in the AD&D 2e era of boxed sets) and because the art looked cool.

I haven’t even read the back of the box. My assumptions based purely on the front cover and the tag line “treasure hunts in Davokar” are that this is a dungeon exploration game.

We’ll see, I guess! The back of the box gives us a bit of lore/history/flavour/fiction/whatever you want to call it. I immediately get big THIS GAME IS ABOUT ARTEFACT CAMPAIGNS vibes and I love that. The Rod Of Seven Parts and Axe of The Dwarvish Lords are part of my DNA as a gamer.

We’re promised an “easy to learn and highly flexible ruleset”, two adventure locations and rules for making our own, some dice, two maps, and some character sheets. Everything you need to start playing.

Let’s dig in. Before I even open the box I’m struck by the fact that I don’t actually know who wrote this game. With things like Pathfinder and 13th Age I could make some assumptions about what I was going to find based on the past work of the writers. That’s not the case here. I don’t know if you know this about me but I really like green, and this is a lot of green. This is very pleasing to me.

Let’s see what we can figure out before we crack open the books.

We’ve got a set of the 6 standard polyhedral dice, so I suspect we’re in “familiar if you’ve played D&D territory” as far as basic mechanisms go. Obviously I could be wrong about that. On the character sheets we’ve got what looks like 8 ability scores – Accurate, Cunning, Discreet, Persuasive, Quick, Resolute, Strong, Vigilant.

Sometimes the order of abilities can tell you something about what a game is interested in but these are alphabetical. We also have Toughness, Pain, and Corruption. I can make some guesses about how this works and what it’s purpose is but I’m not going to spend time trying to reverse engineer the game from the character sheets when I could just read the book.

Other things I can learn from the sheets:

Player races include Human, Goblin, Ogre, and ‘Mystical Being’

Occupations (classes?) include Knight, Witch Hunter, Treasure Hunter, Wizard, Bodyguard, and Theurg.

It also looks like we use XP as a currency? We’ll see. To the book!

Two things: first, the art is gorgeous.

Second, the book is organised in a really interesting way.

The very first thing in the book is an example of play and I think I love that? Sequencing a rulebook is hard. There’s this constant back and forth about whether it’s best to put rules text or character creation first. One goal is always to reduce page flipping and make a book usable. But it’s hard for players to make decisions about their characters without knowing how the game works, and it’s often hard to take in rules without the context of what characters look like and what they do. Putting the example of play up front before anything seems like a really smart thing to do and I’m surprised I haven’t seen it more often. It seems obvious now I’m looking at it.

Hopefully it’s a good example of play. Back to the contents.

We then have chapters on the setting, characters, races and traits, tradition and powers (which I guess is the classic divine/arcane magic split), combat rules, and then “Other Rules”.

There’s going to be fighting in this game.

I really love this typeface.

The example of play is really short, and interestingly it takes over from a section of fiction which is a conceipt I really like.

Here’s what it looks like as narrative. Here’s what it looks like in play.

Things we learn from the example of play:

It’s a d20 roll under stat system.

And that’s about it. That’s a little disappointing if I’m being honest. I was prepped to go into the rest of the book with a decent idea of how the game works.

But that’s fine. It does a good job of setting up the tone of the game, at least. It’s also made it clear that if something is easy or your have a skill that’s relevant then you don’t need to roll, which is something I really like. We’ll see how that’s borne out by the rules as we get into them. (I will say that I love reading fiction in rulebooks but that I wish it was more common than not for the fiction to be really good)

I’ve sort of grown tired of reading “What is a role-playing game?” sections in books because most games aren’t going to be someone’s first RPG. That said, I think it’s totally fair to include them in something that’s explicitly a Starter Set and the Symbaroum one is pretty good

I particularly like this paragraph that says, “yeah, you’re going to have to go off script and make shit up, you can’t account for everything”. A lot of new GMs struggle with that and often don’t even know that’s something they’re meant to do, so this is good.

Earlier it describes the GM as “something of a real-time director” and I much prefer that to, say, descriptions of the GM as some kind of god figure. The next section gives us details about the world. Personally I tend to bounce of in-depth worldbuilding in game texts. I just struggle to take it all in when I’m reading it in a big chunk; I prefer to develop it organically during play.

But there’s a good thematic core here. The world is in a state of massive upheaval that’s happened quickly, but one thing remains true: the forests of Davokar contain secrets, treasures, and the ruins of ancient Symbaroum, and the deeper you go the more there is to be discovered – but also the more danger there is. I like the emphasis on rumour, the fact that the stories about the forest – and the reasons you don’t venture there – can’t be trusted. That’s a nice juxtaposition to the truths of the world at large, and means you don’t need to worry so much about ‘canon’ as you play. I sort of love this added level of infuriating bureaucracy on top of the game, too. Of course the powers that be place a tax on people exploring the forest. This is a nice source of external conflict aside from the monsters etc in the forest.

One thing I’ll give the large Setting section is that it’s packed full of hooks (which should be a given, but isn’t always the case). I particularly like, “the elf wardens of Davokar claim that the human race consented to leaving the forest in their care and swore never to set foot in the depth of Davokar again.”

We’re onto the chapter on Player Characters, and this is where I’m held back by the fact that this is a starter set. The box comes with 5 premade characters but doesn’t actually contain character creation rules – they’re in the Symbaroum Core Rulebook. Which isn’t a criticism of the starter set. It’s not just designed to get you playing the game, it’s also designed to sell you the main rulebook, so it makes sense that some stuff would be missing.

It’s frustrating for me today but that’s just the nature of starter sets. As an aside, I really like these glyphs dotted throughout the book in sidebars. They do a better job of selling the idea of an ancient, lost civilization deep in the forest than 10 pages of history ever could.

The text explicitly calling out that it’s not just the job of the GM to provide fun to the players is something I really like and I wish I saw more often.

Because we’re not learning about how to make characters, we get straight into how the game works on a mechanical level. It sounds like the GM doesn’t roll dice, which surprises me and I’m not sure I can quite explain why

At its core it’s d20 under stat with situational modifiers

I bounce off the way this is described hard. Something about the way my brain works means that the second I see square brackets, letters for variables, and even the most basic of mathematical symbols (i.e. ±) my cognitive abilities just turn to mush.

Oh, Symbaroum, it was going so well. I was liking you so much. And then you went and ruined it with point buy and standard arrays.

(I’m mostly kidding but also I’m deadly serious)

(I just like rolling for stats don’t @ me)

Okay but if weret being serious I do like that all creatures in the game work the same way in theory. It depends how much additional detail is needed for monsters. If I need a full character sheet for every enemy then that’s too much but on the surface, this is nice and easy. Your other stats – Toughness, Pain Threshold, Defense, Corruption Threshold – are derived from your core stats. I don’t yet know if monsters and NPCs also have these stats but I’d guess that if they do, they work in the same way. I do appreciate them pointing this 80 points thing out in the starter set, too. Even though there’s no explicit rules for character creation, you could probably piece them together from what’s here. This art of the Mystic absolutely fucks, I love it

We’re moving on to abilities now, and picking up some more stuff about how the game works even though we haven’t hit the rules for combat yet. You get two Actions each Turn, you act in Initiative order, and you also have Free actions, plus Passive actions that are always active. The sentence “Passive Actions are always active” bothers me because something can’t be both passive and active at the same time, but here we are.

Note to self; don’t call things Passive Abilities in my own games. I like the Mystical Power ability. Obviously I don’t know how abilities are gained yet etc. but if I’m reading it right it seems like all characters have access to magic, and I always enjoy that. I like magic being tied to Corruption, too. A lot of the stuff I like about this game so far reminds me of Trophy Dark, weirdly, even though they’re very different games in terms of what they set out to do. I really like that the core races in this game are ones that are usually treated as being monstrous in other dungeon games. The starter set gives you Human Ambrian, Goblin, and Ogre. The core rules expand this to include Human Barbarian and Changeling. The Advanced Player’s Guide also includes Troll, Dwarf, and Undead. (I won’t get into my rant about publishing models again).

So no Dwarfs as standard. No playable Elves. No halflings or gnomes.

I like this. I also like that some of the racial traits are optional – you don’t have to purchase them at character creation. You’re not tied to one view of what these ancestries look like. We’re on to Tradition and Powers, and so far my favourite sentence in the book:

“The powers not only manipulate but also violate the fabric of the world, something which makes the world strike back – in the form of Corruption.”

It’s also confirmed that characters don’t need to belong to or practice any of the traditions to learn magic and I genuinely love that. More games give magic to everyone, please. I’m learning so much more about the world by reading about the various schools of magic than I did from the chapter specifically designed to teach me about the world. I really love the different attitudes and aporjaches to Corruption specifically. According to the Starter Set there are only 25 powers in the Core Rulebook, and only 4 are included here.

And I’m torn on that. 25 doesn’t seem like many, but also how many of the hundreds of spells in a game like D&D do most players ever actually use? Of course we also have Rituals – which take longer to cast – and I have no idea how many of those exist in the full game. Onto the Combat Rules chapter, and it’s reiterated very clearly this time that the GM doesn’t roll dice. Enemies instead do static damage that’s modified by players rolling an Armor die.

We start with a Narrative Tutorial, and then the rules follow. The way rolls are modified when rolling against other creatures (the example given is of a guard) makes use of modifiers attached to the value of the enemy’s stats. I remember seeing a sidebar with these modifiers listed earlier in the book, but they aren’t listed elsewhere. This is the kind of stuff that would be really handy on a rules reference, something that’s missing from this box set. It’s also what I tend to use GM screens for. (Having flicked back to the list of modifiers, they’re actually very easy to remember. 10 is ±0 and then the modifier goes 1/1 with stats, with 15 being -5 and 5 being +0. Still, that would be nice to have in this chapter.)

We get another example of play here, this one written less clearly than the one at the start of the book but showing how combat works. It seems pretty straightforward, although there’s lots of rolling happening that’s all on the players to do. I’m always interested in the way games that don’t use grids for combat approach movement when they have specific Movement actions (in Symbaroum you have two action per turn – one for Combat Actions and one for Movement Actions).

In this case they basically just don’t care. “Normally, the exact distance is not of any great importance.”

Nice and easy, and that’s my preferred solution. It does go on to say that the Movement Action represents 10 paces, which is 10 metres – or about 30 feet – if you need it to be more specific. But the game doesn’t care, it doesn’t think distances are important, you just need to know if you’re in melee range or not. And that, I think, is the best way of dealing with it. It’s not a game about positioning and tactics, really. Interestingly, a sidebar says that the Core Rulebook also includes rules for Line Of Sight and Flanking, so I wonder if the full game is a little more concerned with grids and exact positioning than the Starter Set? That wouldn’t surprise me, since the aim of a Starter Set is to get you playing and having fun quickly, rather than getting you bogged down in lots of rules. One thing I really like – the Pain Threshold.

If you suffer damage that exceeds it you’re basically staggered, and you either fall to the ground or your enemy gets a Free Attack against you. That makes big hits feel big and scary and I love it. “Monsters and non-player characters die as soon as their Toughness reaches 0, unless the GM wants something else to happen.”

One thing this book does really well is in simple things like this, that acknowledge that GMs are going to fudge things for dramatic effect sometimes. We also have Death Tests for players which are functionally identical to Death Saves in 5e except that you want to roll low, not high, so I don’t need to spend much time talking about that. We’re moving on from combat now and into the section helpfully titled Other Rules.

The first thing we learn is that the basic unit of time in Symbaroum is a Scene. All situations have to include a challenge – and, hence, some risk – to count as a Scene. PCs earn Experience for each Scene they survive, so this is important.

Scenes without risk are called Interludes, and they don’t bring XP awards. We get a very brief section on Problem Solving – i.e. non-combat challenges that require die rolls. Extended Problems especially are very similar to 4e’s Skill Challenges, where the group as a whole must make multiple checks to succeed at something. There’s no mention here of abilities negating the need to roll, which was sort of implied by the example of play at the start of the book. I’m going to take a second to go back to that and take a look again, and also to look at the Ability it used. Okay, so the example in question showed a character rolling Quick to quickly run away from some enemies and start climbing some rocks, and another character following them. They said, “I have Acrobatics, do I have to roll?” and the GM said no. I strongly suspect that what we’re seeing here is rulings vs. rules, where the GM just said “sure, you can do that” because it makes sense and failure wouldn’t be as interesting as allowing the success and maintaining the pace of the encounter. Which is a cool thing to see in an example of play – the GM going off script and making a ruling that isn’t necessarily supported by the RAW of the game in order to keep things flowing. Moving on, it’s time to learn about Shadow and Corruption – which the start of this chapter tells us are “one of the elements that make Symbaroum unique”. Reading this section, I feel like it should have been much further forward in the rulebook because it speaks directly to the central themes of the game.

This section ends with the rules for Experience. You gain 1XP for each scene you complete. Purchasing a new Novice ability or power costs 10XP, upgrading one to Adept costs 20XP, and from Adept to Master costs 30XP. I’ve become really fond of level-less games recently, where players upgrade their characters as they see fit rather than a predictable linear progression. This is nice and straightforward and I think it would be really satisfying to save XP and upgrade abilities you want. The final chapter (aside from the one giving details about the pregen characters) is equipment. It’s pretty short and the equipment listed is fairly basic – again, starter set – but I like what I’m seeing.

I really like the Jointed property for flails.

There’s also a sidebar about using equipment to solve problems, telling GMs to reward creative play with a temporary +1 to the relevant attribute for that test. And that brings us to the end of Book 1: Starter Rules.

As a game it seems really straightforward. I like the setting, I like the weirdness and the inherent danger of magic. I’m going to take a look at Book 2: Setting & Adventures, though I probably won’t go as in-depth here. It opens with some good general tips for GMs – things to do before a session, best practices for running games (including “Say YES”) and things to do after the session.

It’s fairly basic stuff if you’re experienced but for a beginner GM it all seems pretty useful. After a chapter detailing the starter town of Thistle Hold – described as the heart of the setting – we get into ‘Expeditions in Davokar’. We get guidelines for handling travel in the forest, and I love that it refers to “excavations”.

Archaeological horror LET’S GO. The section on Excavations – a system of rolls to determine what you find after uncovering a Ruin in the forest – is a good example that a game is more than what’s contained in its text. If you played exactly as written then your game would be little more than a roll and write. The game is what happens in the spaces around the text, what happens in play, at the table, when you’ve set the rules aside and are just engaging in shared storytelling.

After this chapter we get Monsters & Adversaries, and with that come our first stat blocks. I’m glad to see that even though enemies use the same stats as characters, they’re expressed as modifiers. No need for thet chart after all.

The end of the book contains two short adventures – some crypts to explore, and an expedition to a ruined tower. They do a good job of setting up the world, the various factions in Davokar, and of showing you what Symbaroum exorcts players to be doing. All in all I really like this Starter Set. It’s done a great job of hooking me and making me want to run the game, and I’m very tempted to pick up the core rules. It seems designed explicitly to run a West Marches style game, pressing into the forest and discovering weird shit.

Based on the starter set alone the game doesn’t seem to be doing anything wildly innovative, but that’s fine. The Corruption mechanism does a nice job of reinforcing the themes of the game and the setting, and I can see it being a lot of fun to engage with long term. I really like the non-standard races and classes, and I like that the scope of the game is quite tight and focused. It doesn’t really care about the world at large – it’s just the forest, and the things within it.

And that’s…really all I have to say about Symbaroum? It’s a gorgeous product, I definitely want to play it, and I’m going to buy at least the Core Rulebook and probably the bestiary as well at some point. Thanks, as always, for sticking with me with this thread.

If we don’t already know each other, you can find out more about who I am and what I do here.

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If this post entertained you or was valuable to you I’d very much appreciate it if you left a tip on Ko-Fi.

This is a mirror of this Twitter thread, which was written in real time as I read Cypher System. It hasn’t been edited in any way. You can pick up Cypher System from DriveThruRPG. You can also leave a tip at Ko-Fi if you like this kind of content and want to see more of it. I post these tweet mirrors to Detritus at least a week before they go live on Loot The Room. This post isn’t affiliated with or sponsored by the publishers of Cypher System in any way, though the DTRPG link above does use an affiliate code. Thanks for reading.

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Okay then. It’s midday on Saturday. It’s time to take a look at Cypher System.

Some caveats etc up front, for those who don’t know the deal by now.

This isn’t a review. This is just me reading through the book and talking aloud about my thoughts about it. I’m not pretending to be any kind of expert about…anything. I might get things wrong. I might be confused about things that are cleared up later.

If I don’t like something you like etc, don’t be a dick about it.

Here’s what I know about Cypher System before I crack the spine and dig into it.

I know Monte Cook’s work from Planescape back in the TSR days, and from 3e. I think he wrote the 3e DMG? And that’s a good book. I know Bruce Cordell’s work from lots of Forgotten Realms modules and the Return To The Tomb of Horrors boxed set and Die Vecna Die!, which is a firm favourite of mine. I think he was on Sunless Citadel as well? Sean K. Reynolds is one of those names I know but can’t think of anything that he worked on. Maybe the 3e Monster Manual? I’m actually not sure. So there’s a good pedigree on this thing. I’m expecting it to be pretty trad, but we’ll see.

I know it has something to do with Numenera, but I don’t actually know what that is. And the reason I picked it up is because I started designing something with fluid, changeable stats, and somebody told me it reminded them of Cypher System. So I’m expecting that. And that’s… honestly everything I know about this game.

Time to dig in. This is a cracking bit of art to put on the endpapers.

I’m always interested in what we can learn from a table of contents.

That we have a whole chapter on Genres tells me this is a generic system. Historically I’m not a huge fan of systems that try to do everything. That’s just personal preference.

We’ve got creatures in the book, though. Which is interesting when you’re trying to cover 9 different genres. I’m very curious about what’s in those 60 pages, but there’s a long way to go before we get there. Monte Cook starts off by telling us that, “It’s my goal to give you the tools to have your best game ever.”

That’s a lofty goal

“What you’re choosing here is the experience you want to have – and that you want the players to have. This is such a fundamental decision that perhaps the whole group should be in on it.”

Perhaps? PERHAPS? The book opens by basically saying, “You, the GM, are going to have to do a lot of work before you’re ready to play this game.”

That’s one of the things I dislike about generic systems. Having to flesh out a setting beforehand so that you can know which character options to include is something that probably means I wouldn’t run this.

The book does say, “hey, we publish complete settings too” but that’s back to the problem of needing more than one book to play.

Obviously if you’re the kind of GM who builds big, sprawling, detailed worlds for fun even when you’re not playing in them, this is probably perfect for you. You can take the system and drop it into a setting you’ve already developed.

That’s not for me, though. “because… the Cypher System are so simple, tweaking things here and there is a breeze. This is not the kind of game nowhere changing one thing creates a domino effect that has a lot of unintended consequences.”

That’s an interesting statement at the front of a 450 page book. Looking back at the contents, the rules themselves only take up about 30 pages. The bulk of the book is character options – specifically, abilities.

This is the kind of thing where if it were a small indie game I’d maybe expect it to be split across zines? A 30 page rules zine, and supplementary Genre/Setting zines where you get the abilities, setting elements, etc for a genre and you can just pick up what you want. I’m thinking explicitly of 2400 right now. But obviously we’re in trad game land here, so we get 450 pages and the option to buy more big hardbacks to expand on what’s here.

Anyway. Let’s continue. (just taking a second to say, again, that this is all informed by my own personal preferences. I’m not saying anything is good or bad and it’s fine for me to like or not like something that you do or don’t like.

Okay. Moving on.)

I want to take a second to call out something I do really like so far, and that’s the layout. It’s super clear, the art is nice, and I really like the sidebar running through the entire book that acts as an in-situ index. That’s really nice.

The system itself seems very straightforward.

To do things the GM sets a difficulty of 1-10. The roll target is always 3x the difficulty, and characters use their training, gear, and fictional positioning to reduce that target number before rolling. Nice and easy. It also mentions easing the difficulty of a task by applayong Effort and, while that isn’t explained yet, I think that that’s the dice pool system with the stats that people were telling me about last week. We shall see. “

If you can ease a task so its difficulty is reduced to 0, you automatically succeed and don’t need to make a roll.” Yes, please. More of this.

The GM doesn’t roll in this game, which is…fine? I have no preference either way on that matter tbh. I think I marginally prefer games where the GM also rolls but it’s not something I lose sleep over. I’m not about to get into the eternal “what should Armour do in a game” debate.

In this one, Armour reduces damage, and weapon damage is always a fixed value. Personally I don’t like fixed damage purely because I like rolling dice and I like swinginess in games, but I think the combination of fixed damage, GM doesn’t roll, and Armour as damage reduction is a good one. What that’s saying is that it’s the player characters who are important here. Everything that happens mechanically relates back to the characters and what they’re capable of.

I may not like some of the individual elements but I like that consistency and clarity of theme. We’re onto weapon types. Most weapons are Medium and deal 4 damage. Heavy weapons are 2 handed and do 6 damage, and Light weapons deal 2 damage and ease attack rolls (so you’re more likely to hit). I wonder how important a weapon being 2 handed is? Is there any reason not to always use a Heavy weapon?

I’ve talked in the past about equipment in games and how I don’t like it when there’s an Obvious Best Choice so I’m interested to see what we learn later. I always laugh a little at passages like this tbh.

The way you sequence your rules text says a lot about what you think is important in the game, and combat rules are front and centre here. So it seems silly to equivocate and say, “you don’t have to play a combat game”.

Again, this is something I see in generic systems (or in systems that aren’t generic but want to pretend they can be, like 5e). I much prefer a game to say, “this is what I’m about”.

Imagine Blades saying, “heists will be important for some people, but they don’t have to be”. We’re on to Special Rolls.

We have additional effects on a natural 19 or 20, and in combat – and only in combat, and only when attacking – on a natural 17 or 18.

Interestingly, we’re told that Special rolls inflict more damage but aren’t told what happens if you’re defending. I assume you could choose to take less damage? There’s that index coming to the rescue. There’s probably an answer to my question there, but we’ll find out later.

We’re onto range and speed and honestly I’m still chuckling over “this game doesn’t have to be about combat, honest” when all the examples to illustrate the rules so far are explicitly about fighting people. The XP system is interesting. XP is rewarded for GM “intrusions” – which I guess tend to be complications. And when you receive XP you also have to immediately give some to another player, which I expect is there to stop one player hogging all the spotlight and getting all the XP

You can also reject an intrusion, but that costs you XP and if you don’t have the XP to spend you can’t do it.

I’m unsure about that because that had the potential to interact with safety tools in a weird way. If I X card an intrusion but don’t have XP to spend, is it okay for the GM to just go ahead and do it anyway?

Obviously this is one of those “play with people you trust and who respect you” things, but if I were playing a pick-up game at a con I’d be wary of that. Being able to spend XP for rerolls is cool. I don’t really have much more to say on that. It’s a cool mechanic. And now we find out why it’s called the Cypher System.

Single use abilities that function as treasure is really fun. I do wonder if games suffer from players hoarding them for “the right time” and never using them, but in theory I like that players always have new toys to use. Obviously I’ll have to wait and see what these Cyphers actually look like to know whether I like how it’s implemented – and I worry that the GM is going to be forced to keep inventing new powers – but we’ll get there when we get there. Time for character creation.

Every single generic system I’ve fooled around with has lost me at character creation, because you need a solid idea for what kind of game it’s going to be. I’m going to read this with the assumption that I’m playing Generic Dungeon Fantasy. Character creation on the surface sounds simple enough. Give three stays values, and choose three aspects that determine your character’s capabilities.

I’m sure there’s actually more to it than that but we’ll see. We’ve got three stats. Might covers all the physical stuff including your health. Speed is basically dexterity and agility. Intellect also covers stuff like charisma, charm, wit, etc. Intellect seems a weird name for that one tbh, but whatever. Okay, so we’re onto the part where people were telling me I was designing something similar and I do see where they were coming from (though it’s not the same).

Your stats have two components: Pool and Edge. If I’m understanding this right, Pool is the value of your stat and can be reduced either by taking damage to it or by you choosing to spend points from it to apply Effort to ease a roll. Edge is something that reduces the cost of spending points from a Pool. This is something I’ll need to see in use to know how I feel about it tbh. Any time you apply Effort to ease a roll (at first) you have to spend 3 points from the appropriate stat Pool to ease it by one step (i.e. reduce the DC by 1).

Your Edge reduces this cost. So in theory, a low Intellect character with a higher Intellect Edge might actually be better at performing Intellect actions than a character with a high Intellect Pool but an Edge of 0. It’s really funny to me that when I was designing my fluid stats thing I simultaneously had people saying “this is far too complicated” while others were saying “this is Cypher System”.

This is definitely more complex than what I built. Oh god it gets more complex still!

You also have an Effort score, which tells you how many times you can apply Effort to a roll. Beginning characters have an Effort of 1, and I guess you can use XP to increase this. Character advancement reminds me a lot of PbtA stuff where you’re choosing playbook advancements (you spend 4XP to gain a character benefit), but it’s also got a very trad-influenced leveling system in the form of Character Tiers.

Once you’re purchased 4 benefits you gain a tier

We start building our character by playing madlibs.

“I am a [adjective] [noun] who [verbs].”

It goes on to say that the Noun is your Character Type – effectively your class – and that there are 4 in the book. Those 4 types are Warrior, Adept, Explorer, and Speaker.

Two observations here.

Firstly, it’s not clear to me at this point whether you have to choose one of these four types or whether you could pick a different Noun. Secondly, for a game that has made a point of saying “this doesn’t have to be a combat game”, it’s certainly a decision to lead that list with Warrior rather than alphabetising it.

I’m going to come back to this combat thing a lot tbh. Reading further:

We can choose from 4 character types.

Our adjective (‘descriptor’) has to come from a list in Chapter 7.

We choose our verb (‘focus’) from Chapter 8.

This feels like a bait and switch in the space of a column of text. It starts out by saying “describe your character using an adjective, a noun, and a verb” and gives the impression that you can be anything. And that’s reinforced by Chapter 2 being titled “Anything Goes”.

But you can’t. You’re picking from lists. And that’s not in itself a problem, because that’s how games work, but it’s not how it was sold to me 200 words ago.

I’d much rather it just said “pick a Descriptor, a Type, and a Focus” instead of fucking around with the madlibs. Special Abilities generally cost points from your Ability Pool and can be affected with Effort and Edge. We’re really leaning into the idea of Stats As Currency, which is cool. There’s no definitive list of skills, though we get a suggested list that looks a lot like 3.5 and d20 Modern stapled together. This character creation chapter is sort of all over the place tbh. I feel like I’m still being introduced to key parts of the system rather than being shown how to make a character. I’m 6 pages into it and I still don’t actually know how to generate my stat Pools. Oh. We’ve finished the character creation chapter and are into Types (classes).

And I…haven’t actually started making a character yet? The first example given for the Warrior Type in modern games is Cop.

Cop.

In 2019.

Fuck off. Laughing at “they’re more likely to overcome a challenge using force than by other means” though because yeah, that does sound like a cop. I’m so confused as to why we’re just now learning about Player Intrusions from a sidebar in the Type chapter. Huh, okay. Player Intrusions use the same language as GM Intrusions but they’re not the same thing really. They’re abilities that cost 1XP to use. Players can invent their own, but the GM gets to refuse them. It’s interesting that it costs players XP to reject a GM intrusion, but the GM can outright say no to Player Intrusions with no cost.

On the one hand we’re handing over some narrative control to players. On the other hand we’re reinforcing a very trad “GM as God” paradigm. We’re also told in a sidebar that “player Intrusions should be limited to no more than one per player per session” and my question is, why?

They cost XP to use. Let players use them. That’s fun. We’re finally learning how to allocate points to Stat Pools and they’re just…based on the Type you choose. And then you get 6 additional points to divide among your Pools however you wish. Tap tap tap.

Types also tell us how many Cyphers we can carry at once, which answers my questions about hoarding them. You want to use them so that you can find new ones. That’s cool. The Warrior only gets to carry 2, so either they’re not as common as we’re led to believe or you’re expected to use them regularly. Hard to tell really. I’m going to show you the Special Abilities available to the first class listed in this book and I want you to tell me what kind of game you think this is.

(For people who don’t know me: I like games about combat. I don’t have a problem with them, and I don’t think it’s bad that this is a game about combat. I’m not complaining. I just find it amusing when combat games say “we promise we’re not about combat”.)

I do like the examples of creating each kind of character. They do a lot to show how you can build out a concept from these very generic bases, and they also do a good job of illustrating how the decisions the GM has made about the setting influence your decisions. I like the Flavor section, too. Replacing the generic abilities for each Type with more varied and specific ones is a nice way of customising things and makes it feel less like you’re just picking from one of 4 classes. You can basically build your own class, which is cool. I feel like the Types are there just because the designers have that trad/d20 background, the game is aimed at those kinds of players, and they decided against going fully class-less.

Personal I think I’d prefer to just drop the Types and let players build their own thing. The Types could instead function as examples of “here’s how you can build a Fantasy Warrior” or whatever.

But anyway. That’s not how it was written and saying “I would have done it differently” isn’t useful for anybody. Descriptors basically function the way Backgrounds do in 5e. They tell you a bit about your character’s personality and outlook, they tie you to the world, and they give you a minor change to your stats.

Nothing revolutionary, but there’s a lot of them and they’re fairly varied. So far this is my favourite thing in the book

We have a little note about Species that basically says, “it’s cosmetic, and the differences between Mysterious and Virtuous are more important than Elf or Dwarf”.

Fair play. Another observation: when we looked at Advancement the game went to great pains to tell us that Character Tier isn’t really about mechanics, it’s about narrative progression, but now we’re looking at Foci and you absolutely get new abilities as you increase in levels. Some of these Foci are really cool and – to be fair, because I’m often hard on generic systems – I can see how they’d apply to multiple genres. Abides In Stone, for example, is rad and has just as much place in a fantasy game as supers or sci-fi. We’re on to the hundreds of pages of abilities now and I’m not about to read them all because my eyes will just glaze over. Just flicking through, though, there’s some fun stfft in here. I’m going to pause this thread here because my body is screaming at me to put food in it after that 10k this morning and also my house needs cleaning. I’ll pick this back up this evening. Initial thoughts, though:

There’s some things I like in here, but I’m not sure it’s something I’d run. I can absolutely see why the people who love it love it but I think, ultimately, it’s not really offering me personally anything I can’t get elsewhere. The main question I want to answer for myself when I come back is, how does this game play? What does a session look like? What happens during a turn? When do your Stat Pools replenish?

I’ll be back later. I’ve returned after an extended break to…have a Saturday?

Anyway it’s time to look at the Equipment section and the next 250 pages of Cypher System. I suspect that most of what this chapter is going to say is “the genre chapters will have more specifics dependant on the setting” tbh, and I’m not sure I’m expecting to find much of interest in here. Immediately a little baffled by this sidebar because I don’t think equipment levels have been mentioned anywhere else, and this is just sort of floating here without any context.

Artifacts seem cool. I like the idea of an item having a Depletion number that you roll against rather than a number of charges. That retains some mystery around powerful items and not knowing exactly when they’ll stop working. The level of an artifact is explicitly called out as being what you’d use to set the difficulty of identifying it so I guess that’s why equipment might need levels as well? I still feel like I’ve missed something tbh, but whatever. I’m not going to get too hung up on it.

After all of that, we’re on to Chapter 11 and the Rules Of The Game. Now I’m going to get an idea of how this all functions at the table. Honestly, when you break it down like this? It’s What’s So Cool About Outer Space but trad and with some additional moving parts like Pools and Effort.

It’s sort of bugging me that we have this core mechanic of modifying the difficulty of a task, but also that we have +1 and +2 modifiers to rolls. I feel like we should just pick one form of modifier and stick to it? Maybe that’s just me. I’m now learning that a natural 1 is a free GM intrusion that doesn’t get an XP award. I’m pretty sure this is the first time this has been mentioned – which is fine, really – but it reinforces my belief that players should be allowed more than 1 Intrusion per session. GMs are going to get a free Intrusion 5% of the time on top of all their other Intrusions.

Let players spend XP to Intrude whenever they want. Okay cool – the suggested Minor Effects for natural 19s make use of item levels. That makes more sense now. I think if I were to run this, that would be a house rule straight out of the gate.

Players can intrude as often as they want assuming they’ve got the XP, and players also get to choose a free Intrusion on a nat 20 as one of their possible Major Effects. There’s rules here about some tasks having an Initial Cost that comes out of your stat Pool before you even attempt the task and I hate this with the fury of a dying sun. It’s arbitrary, there’s no real guidance for when GMs should use it, and I just feel like it’s giving dickhead GMs an excuse to discourage players trying cool stuff. The Timekeeping section and the distance section both bug me for the same reasons. They give specific times and distances but then say “don’t worry about specifics, it’s not important”.

If that’s the case then just don’t use them in the rules?

It’s a very trad game thing to have specific distances and rules and to expect that people are going to want to argue about those specifics, and it’s really shit to put them next to passages that say, “but don’t sweat the details”.

You can’t have both, I’m afraid. Okay, so during the introduction I got the impression that your Might Pool also doubles as your health. That’s not quite the case. You also have a Damage track.

When your Might Pool hits 0, you move down the Damage track and Effort costs more. Any future Damage comes off Speed. When your Speed Pool hits 0 you move down again and basically can’t do anything. Future damage goes on to Intellect, and once that hits 0 you die.

Again I’m thinking about all the people telling me I was designing a game with too many variables to track and laughing. Resting to recover your Stat Pools is interesting and I’m not sure how I feel about it.

You roll 1d6, add your tier, and divide that many points between your Pools. You can do this as an Action on your turn.

You can basically only rest like this 3 times a day. There’s a delicate action economy going on here, because you need to use your Stats to do things and you’re taking damage to them. And I’m not sure if an average of 3.5+Tier points recovered each time you rest is enough?

Obviously that’s hard to tell without playing. I do like that you can spend an Action to recover, though, even though you can only do it once. (The second recovery of the day takes 10 minutes, the third an hour, and the fourth takes 10 hours). Okay, there’s a Healing action that it looks like everyone can take and with the addition of that I feel like the recovery d6 roll is probably fine?

Back to distance for a second.

The fact that we’re told not to worry about exact distance but then also told that if we’re using minis without a grid we should cut lengths of string for each distance range and measure – like in wargaming – is absolutely hilarious to me.

Again, this is a case of the game not knowing exactly what it wants to be. It wants to do everything and be everything for everyone, and that’s just not possible.

Design with intent and you’ll write better games, I promise. (That’s not to say that Cypher System is a bad game. I’m just saying it feels like it could be more intentional in what it says and does.)

On to the XP chapter, and a section about Intrusions that advises the GM should intrude at least once per session but no more than once or twice per character. This guidance would have been more helpful earlier tbh. It’s informed a lot of my response to the parts about Player Intrusions.

That said, I still think players should be able to do it as often as they like.

Why is this the first time we’re learning about Character Arcs and how they’re tied to XP? If this is something you should be choosing at character creation then why wasn’t it in the character creation chapter?

Anyway, we’re moving on to genres. I probably won’t read all of these – I’ll check out Fantasy and maybe Horror. I’m also curious to see if Fairy Tale swings more Disney or Grimm. Games talking about fantasy in the 21st century reference modern fantasy books challenge 2021

It bugs me that Tolkien, Leiber, and Moorcock are still the touchstones tbh. And mentioning Piers Anthony and Xanth is…honestly a weird choice. Honestly I don’t have much to say about the Fantasy genre section. It does basically what I expected it to do and shows you how to skin Cypher System into something that resembles D&D. I do like the “spend 3XP to learn a spell no matter who your character is” thing. “Any setting can be horrific. Horror is more of a style. An approach. A mood.”

Even Cypher System knows that systems can’t create horror on their own. I quite like the Horror section tbh. It could do with a more robust discussion of safety – especially as this book is from 2019 – but it does an ok job of covering consent and setting boundaries, and some of the advice for running horror games is decent. Mechanically I particularly like the Horror Mode optional rule, where GM Intrusions happen on a natural 1 or 2 and then it escalates, rising to 3 and 4 &c

Loss of character agency is a big part of horror and this does a good job of making things feel out of the PC’s control. I’m glad the book has a bestiary. It covers a lot of ground because it has to, and it’s definitely wide rather than deep. The creatures are all pretty standard fare because it’s a generic system and they have to be.

They’re easy to read, though, and seem simple enough to use. I particularly like the inclusion of a GM Intrusion to go with each creature. That’s a nice touch.

Yeah I completely rescind that comment. Some of the monsters hidden in here are awesome. The final chapter of the book is basically a condensed Game Master’s Guide. It’s tips and guidelines for running the game, including stuff about how to run the first few sessions, how to pace adventures, adjudicating rules, and building encounters. It seems solid. I don’t have much to say about it really. It’s nothing you haven’t seen before, but it’s good to have it here and it sits nicely alongside a decent example of play to close out the book. And that’s it. That’s Cypher System.

I’m not sure how to describe how I feel about it, tbh. I don’t dislike it but I can’t see myself running it, if I’m being realistic. I guess I’m underwhelmed, given how often I hear people talk about it. Maybe I’d have got on with it better if I’d read it in the context of Numenera or one of the other Cypher-based games, rather than as a generic system trying to be and do everything? Who knows.

There’s definitely more that I like than that I don’t like, but it hasn’t grabbed me in the same way as Pathfinder 2 or 13th Age. And maybe that’s just because I’ve been a D&D player for 27 years and they both feel like D&D, whereas this doesn’t? Anyway, thanks for sticking with me as I went through this!

If we don’t already know each other, you can find out more about who I am and what I do here:

This post was originally a Twitter thread, which you can find here. It was posted in this form to Detritus before making its way to the main blog.

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On Rules Texts & Teaching Games

I’m gearing up to do a first impressions thread of D&D 4e at some point this week, and it’s got me thinking about why those threads are valuable to me personally. About the lessons I take away from them.

You may think that the value is in reading a lot of games and seeing how different designers approach and solve the same problems, and that is a benefit. But I’ve realised today that while that’s where the enjoyment comes from, it’s not the main lesson for me.

The value in those threads comes from me getting a first hand lesson in how new players come to these texts. How they read them, where they get stuck, how we can best present information to seamlessly teach our games to people.

And you may be thinking “But Chris, the only thing you’re learning is how you read a text,” and that’s completely true. But that’s also more than enough for me, if I’m being honest.

In Stephen King’s On Writing – which, whatever your thoughts about King as a person and a writer, is one of the best books about the craft of writing in existence – he talks about writing for an “ideal reader”. You can’t please everyone, so try to please one specific person.

King’s ideal reader is his wife Tabitha. He writes with her in mind. Call me a narcissist if you want to but my ideal reader is… Myself. I write the things I want to read and play that I don’t already see in the world.

So the fact that I’m getting a better understanding of how I engage with new rules texts is invaluable to me, and I think it’s inevitably going to lead to me writing better books.

And as I think about this stuff, I want to share some of the thoughts I’m having about how best to approach rules texts.

In a conversation yesterday @trebuchetops made a distinction between “read to learn” and “read to reference at the table” and I think that’s a crucial thing a lot of us – me included – have been missing.

In my experience the best way to learn a new game is to play it with someone who already knows how to play. To learn through doing. Reading the rules on your own is a distant second.

This is something the board games world already knows. @shutupshow have a very good video about how to introduce and teach board games to new players.

It’s also largely expected that only one player will have read the game. They’ll know it well enough to teach it, and the rulebook exists as a reference text that – hopefully – doesn’t need to be consulted during play.

We sort of have this expectation in RPGs already, especially in trad games like D&D or Pathfinder where at least initially the GM is expected to know more about the mechanisms of play than the players.

I’m obviously not saying board games are perfect. Some rules texts are just awful both as a teaching aid and as a reference during play (I’m looking at you, FFG and particularly Blood Bowl Team Manager)

But one thing board games do get right is in going further than just a rulebook in order to teach.

Shows like Tabletop, for all its many and varied flaws, did a great job of being entertaining while also teaching the rules (even if they often got them wrong).

I have bought many games I saw played on Tabletop. And when I read the rules I had a better time with them than with many RPG texts, because I’d already seen it played. So if I hit a part where the text wasn’t clear, I could largely fill in the gaps with knowledge I already possessed.

Which leads me to my first point: we should be using Actual Plays as a teaching aid. The Gauntlet are leading the pack in this regard. If I want to learn to play Trophy, there are videos and podcasts that will teach me. Same for Brindlewood Bay etc.

Now, obviously we don’t all have the resources to produce actual play podcasts and videos. And especially not to produce good, well edited ones. So what can we do instead?

The two games I had the least trouble learning from the text were Symbaroum and Pathfinder 2. And the thing these two both have in common is good examples of play that come early in the rulebooks.

Symbaroum’s is the first thing in the book (which is possibly because I read the Starter Set, and we’ll get to those in a minute assuming I remember to circle back to this point). Their example of play isn’t brilliant, and at the time I think I called it “a good idea but a little disappointing.” But it exists and is helpful.

In fact give me two minutes and I’ll find a link to the tweets where I talked about that example of play.

Here’s me reacting to it at the time: One and Two

The Pathfinder 2 one is better, IIRC. It certainly cemented the multiple attack penalty as a concept in my head without ever using the words “multiple attack penalty”, and that’s really useful. That’s something that separates PF2 from other trad games I’m familiar with, and I didn’t have to read a section of rules text to learn it.

So how can we write a good example of play? Well, the first idea that springs to mind is to simply teach your game to new players and transcribe the session. You should obviously spend time cleaning it up and making it fun to read but that real experience on the page? Invaluable.

Bear in mind I’m talking about you sitting down and teaching the game to someone who’s never read it, here. There’s also value in giving your rules text to a new group and asking them to play it without your input. That said, I’m not about to get into “should I playtest” discourse and I’d appreciate you not bringing it here.

An example of play should do a few things. First, introduce key concepts of the game in a logical sequence that resembles the way they come up in play. Second, sell the tone of the game and some philosophical stuff that isn’t necessarily “rules”.

The Symbaroum example does that second part very well. It especially sells the idea that if something is easy or without meaningful consequences, you don’t need to roll to make it happen. That’s a philosophy of play thing, and it comes across on the first page of the rulebook.

PF2 does the first part very well. In a game where most of the rules are concerned with combat and exploration, it shows you exactly how combat works without saying “here are all the many and varied rules for combat”. It also (IIRC) introduces some edge cases, where creatures might have different rules for their multiple attack penalty.

It doesn’t explain exactly why these things are different, because that’s not the purpose of an example of play. The purpose is to prime you with the basics, so that when you read the actual rules text later you’re prepared for what you see. You already have a grounding in it, so there’s more space for things to maybe not make immediate sense.

In writing this I now can’t remember if the example of play in PF2 is from the core rulebook or the Beginner Box, but that’s not important. It is useful as a segue to talk about starter sets, though.

A starter set is an interesting thing because it’s explicitly designed to simplify the rules so that new players can get onboarded and start playing fast. It’s less concerned with being a complete reference to the rules of the game and more concerned with being a catalyst for play.

They’ll often use a slightly simplified ruleset. They come with pregenerated characters, or simplified rules for making your own. And they’ll usually include a starter adventure or two that teach the GM the things they need to know as they need to know them, and explicitly say “don’t read this whole thing in advance.”

I love starter sets.

Now, as with podcasts and actual plays, we can’t all afford to produce a Beginner Box with our games. But we can write a quickstart. I wrote one for Dice Souls (available for free here) and writing it made me a better game designer.

The Dice Souls quickstart is modelled after the tutorial level I wish Dark Souls had. It guides you step by step through exploring the world, having a fight with an enemy, gaining Soul Dice, exploring (and generating) the world, dying, and retreating to rest and spend Soul Dice.

It’s one step away from being a transcribed “I teach you to play the session” – in fact it started as an example of play before I say “let’s make this interactive and have people actually play the game instead of reading about it”.

It uses a simplified ruleset (i.e. there are fewer classes to choose from at character creation, fewer things to spend Soul Dice on). It introduces mechanics as and when you need to know about them. And it gives you a vertical slice of what the game is all about.

I think it’s some of my best work, if I’m being honest. (Ignoring the layout, which is awful and will be revisited once the full game is finished.) And I’ve heard from a lot of people that it did a really good job of teaching them the game.

It was very hard to write. It required me taking a step back from the game and saying, “okay, what’s important here? What do new players absolutely need to know?” and discarding the rest. When you write a quick start you distil your game down to its essence, and you very quickly learn what works and what doesn’t work.

This thread is a monster and while I’m sure I had other points I wanted to hit when I started it, I’ve forgotten what they are. So rather than ramble I’m just going to end things here.

This isn’t meant to be a thread that says “YOU MUST DO THESE THINGS” and I hope it doesn’t come across this way. It’s partly me digesting what I’ve learned from reading a lot of rules texts, and partly me suggesting ways we might make learning new games easier for people.

We’ve all heard the refrain of “I don’t have time to learn new games”. And I think rather than shouting “yes you do”, we should maybe look at ways we can facilitate making it easier and quicker for people. My hope with this thread is that I’ve provided some ideas for how we might start to do that.

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This is a mirror of this Twitter thread, which was written in real time as I read Mausritter. It hasn’t been edited in any way. You can pick up Mausritter from Itch.io, or pre-order the new print edition through BackerKit. You can also leave a tip at Ko-Fi if you like this kind of content and want to see more of it. This post isn’t affiliated with or sponsored by Mausritter/Losing Games or Games Omnivorous in any way. Thanks for reading.

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Okay then. It’s that time.

Mausritter. Let’s go.

If you’re new to the party, here’s what’s about to happen.

I’m going to read Mausritter, and I’m going to tweet my way through it. This isn’t a review. It’s just me reading a game for the first time and talking about how I feel about it.

I may meander. I may get things wrong. I may not like things that you like, and vice versa. That’s okay. Don’t be a dick about it.

Here’s what I know about Mausritter going in to this:

It’s “sword-and-whiskers” role-playing. You play mice – and maybe other small furry creatures? I think just mice but I could be wrong – in a big, scary world. You have adventures.

That’s it. That’s all I know. I know that it interested me enough that I’ve accidentally bought it twice. This is a genre I like a lot. Watership Down and The Animals of Farthing Wood were very formative for me. I’ve got signed copies of a ton of the Redwall books. I think “small animals in a big scary world” sits alongside “tiny people in a big scary world” quite comfortably, and I have a deep and passionate love for The Borrowers as well – so much that I wrote a game based on it 18 months ago. I haven’t played many games in this genre, though. I’ve played two sessions of Mouse Guard and… That might be it, actually.

So this will be new to me, but I’m already primed to like it. The other reason I’m primed to like it is because it’s a boxed set.

I grew up in the TSR era of AD&D 2nd Edition and to me, box sets = RPGs. My first ever experience of D&D was the First Quest box, and some of my favourite memories are of going to the tiny hobby shop in Wigan and grabbing whatever box set they had that I could afford. I didn’t even care what it was most of the time. I still own 90% of them. So, that’s all the pre-amble out of the way. Let’s dive in. Holy shit this is gorgeous, and it tells me so much about the game already.

@GamesOmnivorous always publish beautiful stuff but wow. This is something else.

I love a ludography. I actually haven’t read Into The Odd but it’s interesting to know it’s effectively a hack. Knave inventories are great and the item cards make a lot of sense now.

I also didn’t realise that Isaac did all of the art himself as well as writing this. Amazing.

Splitting the columns into ‘all the player stuff’ and ‘all the GM’ stuff is a really nice little touch. Not something that I’d notice if it wasn’t there but it IS there and I like it.

Also I’m seeing the word HEXCRAWL and holy shit yeah I’m excited. Hexcrawls on the scale of mice are great fun. So I’m looking forward to getting to that point.

Also there’s magic in this game but it only takes up a page? Interesting. You really can tell a lot from a table of contents. There’s a section on recruiting hirelings and warbands. That’s some proper old school stuff. I’m into it. The basic premise of the game is less Mouse Guard and more OD&D. You’re setting out into dark and dangerous places to wrest wealth from the guts of an old world. Literally my favourite genre of game…with mice.

We get a fairly standard “what is an RPG?” section that I usually don’t think indie games need because its unlikely that people who don’t already know what RPGs are will pick up something tiny, but I think Mausritter gets to have one. Thematically this is the kind of thing someone might buy as a present for their kids without knowing much about what it is, especially if they see the box set rather than the book.

Know your audience and write for them, is what I’m saying. Character creation is RAPID – and is made even faster by the URL (and QR code!) printed at the bottom of the page. That’s such a nice touch.

My little dude is called Juniper Butterball and holy shit I love him

We have weapons and armour, and my favourite thing – Improvised / Light / Medium / Heavy and implied permission to just… Decide what that looks like for your character.

Electricity exists in Mausritter and that is an interesting bit of information. That has ramifications for the kinds of adventures you can build, and it’s just hidden in the equipment page.

Love. It.

I genuinely love these Best Practices. They tell me that this game is basically built for me and that’s always fun to discover.

I particularly like “Dice are dangerous. Clever plans don’t need to roll.” and “Fight dirty. Run. Die. Roll a new mouse.”

Making it about finding treasure AND useful stuff for your community, and tying XP to spending pips selflessly, is really nice.

I really like Grit. It makes complete sense fictionally for experienced mice to be more resilient to conditions.

Sounds easy, but what else is in a beetle graveyard? What might be digging around? The phrase “a pair of helping paws” just melted me.

Anyway we’re on to hirelings. I don’t have much to say about this section tbh.

You can hire mice. They have morale and if you treat them badly they’ll abandon you.

You can also form a warband, but you need to be a rich mouse to do it. I really like the phrase “warband-scale creatures” to refer to things like cats and boars and I think we should port that back into dragon games for things like… well, dragons. This single page about Warbands and Construction does a lot to tell you about what kinds of games you might be expected to play in Mausritter. We start off small, killing things and earning money and getting stronger, as expected

But the game definitely points at raising armies and constructing new homesteads for yourself and says, “This is possible, should you live long enough and gather enough power and wealth”. And that’s fun. Weirdly, domain play never interested me when I was growing up playing D&D, but the second you tell me I can build a little mousey empire I’m SOLD

The example of play is really good. It does a great job of conveying the style of play Mausritter expects – doing smart things to negate the need to roll, getting the drop on enemies, and running away when things go bad – while showing off the mechanics. A bad example of play is worse than no example of play. A good example of play is priceless. And that brings the player-facing section of the book to a close. I feel like it gives you more than enough to be able to play the game, so I’m interested to see what’s in the GM section.

The best practices section is nothing new if you’re used to OSR style games but, as with the rest of Mausritter, it’s written clearly and concisely and I can see how it’s useful for people not used to these kinds of games (see my tweet about 5e play culture last week)

One thing I’m noticing is that there are a few additional resources linked to – like the turn tracker – that it would have been really nice to have in the box. But that’s a tiny criticism and it’s not at all detracting from my enjoyment of the game so far.

I knew we would, but we have a bestiary in the core rulebook.

The only warband scale enemy in the book is a cat, which tells me that although warband rules are there you’re not necessarily expected to ever engage with them. I almost feel like they’re there because you can’t write a game about mouse without including cats. The selection of enemies is limited but it’s really cool, and there’s enough variance in the creatures that

A) you could run a good game without ever straying from them, and
B) you’ve got enough examples that making your own creatures should be really easy

I really like that instead of lots of abilities and things they can do, creatures instead have an alternate Critical Damage effect – so it only comes up when things are going poorly for the mice. That’s really neat. I like that the game just says, “You’re going to be doing a hexcrawl”.

The advice is to start the campaign at the door to an adventure sight, have the adventure, then show the players a blank map with the dungeon and home marked on it and say GO.

It’s good, fun advice.

You also get some really good guidance for populating a hex map if you need it, and a nice table of landmarks and details about them. The tools for building out the world here are really good. In fact, the back half of this book is mostly given over to very good tools for building both hex crawls and adventure sites within those hex maps. The example hexcrawl – The Earldom of Ek – is great, as is the adventure site Stumpsville. To close things out we get treasure tables, trinkets, and magic (and cursed) swords, followed by a ton of useful tables like names, NPC generators, adventure seeds, gear lists, and a quick reference for the rules. And that’s it! It’s small and concise – as you’d expect from a game about mice – but it does a great job of packing pretty much everything I love about OSR dungeon games into a game about brave little mice. I really like that it doesn’t really make any assumptions about the tone of your game. You could just as easily run Scampering Hijinks as Dark Gritty Dungeon Delving using the stuff in the book with no changes. This is one of those games where it’s not necessarily doing anything new or particularly unusual – and it’s quite open about that, citing influences and sources at the beginning – but what it does is package all those elements up in a way that’s novel and makes me excited to play

I have very, very minor criticisms that I’ve touched on in the thread but all in all I really enjoyed reading this and I can absolutely see a future where I play a lot of it and enjoy every minute of it. I think I remember seeing that there’s a Kickstarter coming up for a new edition or a new printing of Mausritter (Isaac, if you’re still reading, feel free to chime in here) and if that’s true then I’d highly recommend picking it up.

Anyway, thanks for reading. It’s been nice to dip into something that isn’t 600 pages long today.

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This is a mirror of this Twitter thread, which was written in real time as I read 13th Age. It hasn’t been edited in any way. If you decide to pick up 13th Age from Amazon or DriveThru I’d appreciate it if you considered using one of my affiliate links, which let me earn some money from your purchase. You can also leave a tip at Ko-Fi if you like this kind of content and want to see more of it. Thanks for reading.

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I’ve had 13th Age sitting on my shelf for a long time now. I picked it up because Eyes Of The Stone Thief is one of my favourite adventures and I wanted to dig into the system. I’ve never opened it.

Today I’m going to take a look at it.

As with the Pathfinder 2 thread the other week, this is just my initial impressions. It’s not a review – it’s reading the book and reacting in real time. I haven’t done any prep for this. I’m going to talk about what I like. I’m going to talk about things I might not like.

I may get things wrong. Don’t be a dick if that happens. Here’s what I know about 13th Age before I open the book:

Rob Heinsoo was the lead designer of D&D 4e, a game I’ve never played but am very interested in.

Jonathan Tweet was the lead designer of D&D 3e, a game I know very well. I know it’s a d20 game. I’m expecting to see a lot of stuff I recognise, because it’s got D&D in its DNA.

I’m actually really curious to dig in to this. (If I don’t reply to you, that’s because I’m reading. I’m already seeing a lot of “this is my favourite D&D” though, which is encouraging!)

This TOC is BIG, stretching on to two spreads. I have no idea what Icons are yet, obviously; my immediate thought was “this is what we’re calling Classes” but I see the word Class under Character Rules so I guess not. Curiosity piqued.

And we’ve got monsters in the core rulebook.

13th Age, I already like you.

“It used to be that if you wanted to play a game that intentionally engaged the players at the level of character and story, you had to play a non-d20 game” is a sentence I wouldn’t dare write on twitter.

I feel like they’re positioning this as a d20 story game. We’ll see. Okay, we’ve got our first hint at what Icons are in the introduction.

It’s an interesting decision to lead with the big, powerful characters in the setting before we get to character creation or rules. The chapter overview is really good. It’s got me excited about the stuff in this book.

In particular I’m interested in “one unique thing” – which I vaguely remember oeolle mentioning to me before – and the way magic items work, which sounds very fun. And we get an intro adventure in the core rulebook, too!

Good work, 13th Age. I love these two paragraphs. Just straight up addressing the pair of elephants in the room.

There’s some personality in the writing in this book, too. I don’t feel like I’m reading dry rules text. I feel like I’m reading something written by someone who’s excited to share it with me. I’ve seen the word “hellhole” twice now and I can’t wait to find out what they actually are, given I also know that living dungeons exist in this setting (because Eyes Of The Stone Thief)

The Dwarf King gets done dirty here. I feel like his entry is half as long as the others.

It sort of feels like he’s only here because people expect dwarves in a trad fantasy setting and so the designers put them in it, but had nothing interesting to say about them. This is just really boring, isn’t it?

Which is a shame because the stuff that came before it is making me really interested in this setting and the kinds of adventures you could have in it.

The True Danger section of the Dwarf King is fun, though.

“Everything will be all right provided the Dwarf King doesn’t unseal the Hall of Vengeance and retrieve the legendary Axe of Seven Bloods.”

Why? What’s that’s about? I’m in. Give it to me. (Stray thought that I’ve had Axe Of The Dwarvish Lords on my shelf for about 20 years and still haven’t ever had a chance to run it.)

Same thing with the Elf Queen on the next page. It feels perfunctory, like there has to be an Elf Queen so they just wrote one up quickly.

These are the NPCs that define the setting so it’s strange to see some of them given short shrift. I’m sort of enjoying the page that basically says, “yeah we don’t like alignment either but if you’re going to use it we can’t stop you”.

It’s clear the designers know what D&D players are like. We’re on to character creation. I was expecting crunch, but looking at the character sheet I don’t think that’s what we’re getting (though obviously I haven’t read any further yet).

This is not at all intimidating, though, which is very nice.

“Races work like normal, except that you have an option as to which ability gets your racial bonus.”

Have we done away with bioessentialism? In 2013? Surely not.

I suspect it’ll be “pick one of these stats” rather than “put it anywhere” but I’m ready to be surprised. I assume I’m not the first person to realise that you can immediately make a 13th Age game super queer by making your One Unique Thing “my character is cishet”. Mildly disappointed by the fact that the classes are standard D&D fare BUT it’s also completely understandable because this is just a version of D&D. Not everything has to be new and exciting and it’s obviously important to the designers that D&D players can pick this up easily. Twice in as many pages the book has said, “roll for abilities or use point buy, we literally don’t care and neither should you” and I respect that.

I like this paragraph about it a lot.

I’ve mentioned this already but I really like the tone of this book. It’s literally just saying, “Hey, we made a game and we think you should play it. Let us tell you about it.”

This system of finding the middle value among three stays to determine your AC and defences is weird and I can’t decide how inferlt about it.

It’s definitely not very intuitive or easy to remember. I wonder if the value you use changes as you level and your scores change or if you always use the value from the same stat once you’ve selected it at character creation? I guess I’ll find out. Ahh okay, you increase it by +1 at each additional class level. So you only need to work it out once, which is straightforward.

Still an unusual way of doing it but I guess it helps balance characters out when there’s a wide spread of stat values at first level. Back to One Unique Thing.

One of the examples is “I am a former cultist” and I’m going to spend some time thinking about the ramifications of that for a campaign world. Backgrounds present themselves as “instead of skills” but, let’s be honest here, they’re just skills under a different name and made vaguer or more broadly applicable.

Which is fine, and I prefer it to an endless list of very specific skills. And obviously I’m reading this with the benefit of nearly a decade of games that have come after this. I don’t know how novel this was at the time – I was still playing 3.5 and Advanced Fighting Fantasy and hadn’t really branched out. But anyway, yes, skill lists do one of two things: either the continue growing and getting more and more specific as you try to account for more things, or you shrink it and make them broader and more widely applicable. That seems to be what 13th Age has done. I do enjoy that they’re encouraging players to just invent their own backgrounds, though. That’s not something I expected to see in a d20 game, especially not one this old. I like it, though I can see people who only know 3e etc bouncing off it at first. I say that as I picture me, ten years ago, coming to this straight from 3.x and being told, “There’s no skill list, just make something up”.

I love it now but it would have taken some adjustment for me then. And that’s fine!

Tell me you’re reading a decade-old book without telling me you’re reading a decade-old book:

It’s always funny when I see people coming up with convoluted homebrew systems to introduce degrees of success to D&D and I like the fact that 13th Age doesn’t bother with trying to make it granular. It’s just tacking “add a complication” on to how to interpret a failed roll. One of the examples of this gets very close to saying “play to find out what happens” in fact.

Something that’s come up in our Brindlewood Bay game is that some players used to trad ganes really bounce off the idea of the GM not having all the answers and the world not really existing until the dice hit the table and define it. And that’s now, in an age where PbtA games have been around for a decade. Apocalypse World was only 3 years old when 13th Age was released.

I bet some people bounced off this. (And, again, this isn’t a criticism of the game. I’m just musing about things.)

We’re up to the races section and no, we haven’t done away with bioessentialism yet. (And again, that’s fine, this is a decade old and it’s still in 5e so, yknow.)

Players gain a bonus to one of two stats based on their race, with another bonus coming from their class.

Where the bonuses fall for each race is very unsurprising. It’s a trad fantasy game. You largely know what you’re getting. I really like the elven racial feats a lot. They do a great job of selling the idea of supernatural grace and speed.

I also really like how a lot of these racial feats interact with the escalation die (which hasn’t been explained yet in the text but I’m passingly familiar with)

Okay, I’m putting this down for half an hour while I get some food and then I’ll jump back into the classes.

First impressions: I like the tone and the clarity of writing, and I’m surprised by how little crunch there is so far. It’s like a d20 story game. I like it. And I’m back.

Time to dig in to Classes. The section on Spell Progression is, obviously, very useful but I feel it would be better served by using clearer examples – e.g. this paragraph about how resist energy changes at higher levels would be much more useful if we saw the lower level version of the spell earlier

I really like the class-specific damage dice. Weapons tend to go one of two ways in trad games – either you have a big list of things that are all largely the same and so picking a weapon is mostly flavour, or they’re all different and there’s a clear Best Choice. Saying “you use weapons! Here’s how much damage you do with them; skin its appearance as you see fit” is basically my favourite way to handle weapons so I’m glad to see it here. With the caveat that I haven’t yet read the combat rules, the Barbarian’s attacks indicate that you still deal damage even when you miss. Always a fan of that tbh

What was the first game to codify the word ‘Advantage’ for rolling two dice and picking the highest result?

Anyway we’ve got that here with Rage, but also you crit if both dice roll an 11+ and you hit. That’s real nice. I’ve just seen the words “non-mook mob” for the first time. That’ll be some of that 4e DNA coming in to play.

Earlier I said this felt like a d20 story game. That little phrase has done a lot to suddenly make this feel like a tactical combat game. That’s interesting. I’m very curious to see what this game looks like mechanically once I get past the classes. One of the suggested background for Bards is “necropolis drummer” and yes, please, I will take one of them

Battle Cries tied to the natural attack roll seem cool, and I’m intrigued by the concept of flexible melee attacks.

I know it’s only been two tweets since I said it but I’m really curious to see how this game actually works. Tempted to skip ahead but I won’t

I love Bards and 13th Age has a really good one

I have complicated thoughts about the Songmaster that I might try and talk about later. I’m not sure I can adequately express what I’m thinking about it right now.

The other way the 4e bones are showing through is in the language used for class abilities – Powers – and the fact that they generally just work. I like that most of the standard utility spells wizards tend to have – Alarm, Knock, Light, Mending, etc – are Cantrips. Nobody likes wasting a memorised spell on something that might only rarely come up (especially Knock) and I like that we just assume wizards are competent. Obviously there’s an argument to be made – especially in more OSR style play – that picking the right spells is as important as taking the right gear with you, and that’s true. And I think this is where some of the storygame aspects come through in this again. It’s not a game that’s overly concerned with tracking minutiae – in fact it straight up says “we assume you have all these spells in your spellbook, we don’t care” – and it assumes a base level of character competence.

Some people won’t like that. I’m fine with it. If I want to play B/X and track arrows and how much rope I have and spend time making sure I memorise the right spells – and I often do – I’lll play B/X

Cyclic spells tied to the value of the escalation die are really neat. That’s something I haven’t seen before. Can we also take a second to thank the designers for making spell level and class level basically the same thing?

Spells are level 1, 3, 5, 7, or 9, and that corresponds to the class level at which you get access to them.

THANK YOU. More storygames style stuff in the form of Vance’s Polysyllabic Verbalizations, which encourages you to come up with over the top names for your spells in exchange for minor unspecificed bonuses at the whim of the GM.

It’s daft and I love it

Aha! I knew I was right about the way the designers view utility spells. This is nice.

The Escalation Die is really neat. How do we stop combats becoming long, drawn-out slog fests? Easy. Give players stacking pluses to hit each round, and deal damage even when attacks miss. It’s honestly very refreshing to read a d20 game that doesn’t nitpick rules and actively encourages you to be imprecise. I’m enjoying the use of “campaign losses” as a currency for things.

Yeah, you can retreat from a battle safely, but it has narrative consequences.

Yes, you can stop and heal up fully before you should technically have a chance to, but it will cost you. “We both presided over editions of the d20 game…”

One step away from calling it the dragon game, there. I cackled.

I hate that WoTC have made it impossible to refer to D&D by name tbh. We’re onto monsters and stat blocks, and we’ve inherited monster roles from 4e as well. That’s a really helpful thing to have an I really wish 5e had stuck with it. There’s not a lot to say about the monsters really. They’re your expected dungeon game standards. The game is light enough that they don’t take up much room and the stat blocks are super easy to parse. It’s a shame there’s not a more interesting selection of monsters here, but that’s okay. I’m glad they’re in the core book, and I strongly suspect that there are bestiaries with more varied creatures in them. The guidance for creating your own monsters seems really straightforward, too. They don’t have a lot of moving parts so it’s just a matter of getting the numbers right and giving them a few cool things they can do, then balancing on the fly. I’m going to skip the chapter about the world itself for now and get to the magic items and the introductory adventure. One of the things I think 5e got really right was balancing the game with the assumption that players wouldn’t necessarily have magic items. Personally I like them to feel rare and special and while that’s not how most people play 5e, it’s how it’s designed. And that’s explicitly true of 13th Age, too. Consumable magic like potions is fairly common, but true magic items are very rare.

I really love that they’ve gone one further than them just being rare and given them all personalities, too. They’re not just rare, they’re special. (If you don’t know this is how I feel about magic items, you haven’t played Go Alone)

I’m not sure why we’re calling item slots Chakras. That feels weird and appropriative. Weird language aside, I like how intuitive it is. You can have a number of magic items equal to your level before their personalities start to overpower yours, and you can only have one of any particular kind of item at a time. Easy. On to the introductory adventure, and again I think this is an area where people who are used to trad games might struggle. There’s really only so much prep you can do for this game when you’re using icon relationship rolls at the start of a session to guide the events. The adventure does a decent job of helping you figure out how those rolls might influence the events of it and accounting for different occurances. It’s presented as a situation and a series of scenes that might occur, relationships between factions and characters, etc

It feels different to a normal d29 style adventure, but it’s also got a linear progression underpinning it that should hell GMs adjust to this style of game.

It’s hard to comment on an adventure without playing it (for me, anyway) but this seems like a good intro to the game

So, 13th Age. Thoughts.

I like it! It’s not at all what I expected, in a good way. I think if I’d tried to read it when it first came out I’d have bounced off it a bit. With the benefit of having played a lot of storygames I’m more prepared for the stuff it’s doing. It’s impossible not to compare this to D&D because it’s written by two D&D designers and is positioned explicitly as a version of D&D. A lot of people at the start of this thread told me it’s their favourite D&D, and I totally see why that would be the case. 5e as a text – in terms of its mechanics and how it’s presented on the page – is a game about combat.

When we say that, we often get pushback because 5e’s current dominant play culture has eschewed that in favour of story and emotional beats and arcs. And I can’t help thinking that a lot 5e players would actually really like 13th Age. It seems designed to help facilitate the kind of play that modern 5e players are looking for. I actually would go so far as to say that if you’re looking for crunchy, tactical combat and lots of character options you should play Pathfinder 2e, and if you’re looking for cinematic combat and a heavy emphasis on story and character relationships, then check out 13th Age. Some stuff in here is a little dated, and I think that the last decade of development of both d20 games and story games would have a lot to offer a new edition of 13th Age. And if one materialised I’d absolutely check it out.

As it is, I’m going to look for an excuse to run it. Hell, Eyes Of The Stone Thief has been one of my favourite adventures for years. It seems daft not to run it again in the system it was actually written for. If you stuck with me through this then thanks for reading! And if you got sick of seeing my tweets about this game you don’t care about… They’re done now.

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This is a mirror of this Twitter thread, which was written in real time as I read 13th Age. It hasn’t been edited in any way. If you decide to pick up 13th Age from Amazon or DriveThru I’d appreciate it if you considered using one of my affiliate links, which let me earn some money from your purchase. You can also leave a tip at Ko-Fi if you like this kind of content and want to see more of it. Thanks for reading.