The Long Read is a series of posts that began life as Twitter threads, in which I read through an RPG text for the first time and write about my thoughts and reactions to it in real time. You can read all the other posts in this series here. Patrons get access to these posts a week before they hit the blog.

Today I’m looking at Daggerheart, the new game from Critical Role and Darrington Press. It’s been in “closed beta” for a few weeks and has just launched its “open beta”¹ so this seems like a very good time to take a look at the quickstart for the game. As with all of these posts, this isn’t a “review” in any meaningful way. I’m only spending a few hours reading the text and I’m not playing it. I’m interested in looking at how readers approach texts and how we can present information to on-board new players in the best way possible. During this process I’m likely to make mistakes, miss things, and just plain get things wrong. I may also make predictions about how things are likely to work that turn out to be way off base. That’s all fine and part of the process.

I always like to start by thinking about what I already know about a text or what assumptions I’m bringing to the table before I start reading. I know that this is being produced by Darrington Press and Critical Role, and my hunch is that this system will replace D&D 5e in the next season of Critical Role. It makes a lot of sense for an entertainment company to cut ties to Hasbro and to own every part of their own production, and running a “house game” feels like a logical next step.

To that end, I think I can make some predictions about what we’re going to find in this game based on that assumption. Critical Role’s audience has come to expect a game that looks a certain way in play. Moving away from 5e – and moving their audience away from 5e – will be much easier if the game they move to at least looks a little bit like what they’re familiar with. I think we’re going to find a light modern trad game, with a simple resolution mechanism that probably involves rolling a die, adding modifiers, and comparing to a target number, plus lots of character options and a fairly in-depth character creation process. I think it’s going to be built around grid-based combat, and will encourage you to use minis and terrain – visual elements that will look good both on the table at home and in a streamed game.

Other than that I don’t actually know anything about the game, so the best thing to do now is to simply dive right in. 

The open beta splash page tells us that this is “designed for long-term campaign play and rich character progression”. I think we’re going to be looking at characters with levels that unlock new abilities. Interestingly it also mentions “picking cards” and rolling “Hope and Fear” dice, so it seems like my assumptions about how the system is likely to work may be wrong. And that’s a good thing! I hope they’ve done something new and different rather than replicating D&D.

There’s a character creator on the digital platform Nexus, which I’ll likely play around with for a Naming The Faceless post in the coming weeks but that I’m not going to look at today.

I’m immediately happy to see that the game provides videos to help onboard new players. I’ve been very vocal about the fact that different players approach learning games in different ways, and I think the ideal way of presenting a new game is through a combination of well-sequenced text (in multiple versions – pedagogical, reference, etc), examples of play in text plus in visual/aural actual play, “editorialised” actual play (i.e. something like the old Geek and Sundry show Tabletop that attempted to actively teach the game while it was being played), and instructional videos. Most publishers don’t have the resources to produce all of this, but Critical Role absolutely do. They have also built their company around actual play, so it would be a real missed trick to fail to produce videos to support this release.

That said, I’m not going to watch them right now because while I think producing them alongside text is the ideal way to teach new games, I don’t actually learn well from video content myself. So I’m just going to stick to the PDFs, and trust that they’ve done a good job with the videos. Maybe I’ll come back to them if I find myself stuck on anything. That means that the first step is to head to DriveThruRPG and grab the playtest materials (which are weirdly not linked to on the Open Beta page – the link just goes to the main DTRPG site).

The download contains five files:

• _START_HERE.pdf
• DH_v1-2_Playtest_Manuscript.pdf
• DH_v1-2_quickstart_Adventure.pdf
• GM_Materials.zip
• Player_Materials.zip

It’s nice to see a clearly-labeled “START HERE” file, which I assume is going to give us an overview of what’s in the other files and what order we should approach them in. It will probably repeat the marketing material from the Open Beta splash page, too.

That START HERE document is just one page and, strangely, it doesn’t mention the Playtest Manuscript. Instead it directs us to the QuickStart Adventure as “a great place to begin”. 

This approach is one that I really like. Rather than expecting anyone to read the rulebook, get everyone to the table and teach the game through a well-designed introductory adventure. (This is something I’m still working on for A Dungeon Game). 

After the QuickStart we’re also directed to the GM folder – which contains “all of the sheets you’ll want to reference for character creation, campaign maps, […] and a folder with every card in the game.” The Player materials contains “a folder for each class [with[ all of the […] play materials you will need”. We’re told that there are instructions covering which materials you need from Levels 1 to 10. I’m counting this as one correct prediction – we’ve got character levels and classes.

I’m going to start by looking at the introductory adventure, as recommended. I want to see how it introduces mechanisms and game rules and how it’s structured. We’re told that it’s a 3-hour adventure. In my experience “adventure length” is a very difficult think to accurately predict, because every group is different, and it’s largely just a marketing thing. I’m interested to see if this game is structured in such a way that they can more accurately predict how long a given adventure will take to play.

There are a couple of interesting things on this materials list. The game uses the standard set of polyhedral dice that you’d expect in a D&D-alike, which isn’t a surprise. What’s interesting is the need for players to also have additional d12s of different colours, as well as multiple tokens for GMs and players. I assume these are the Hope and Fear dice the marketing page made reference to.

The quickstart throws us in immediately, with a section of boxed read-aloud text for the GM to read to the players to get things started. It’s at this point that the players are given brief descriptions of the pre-generated characters and asked to pick one. 

The actual adventure pitch is very straightforward. You’ve been given a carriage and a map, plus a mysterious package, and told to deliver it. “You all work as caravan guards” is up there alongside “you meet in a tavern” as a classic way of starting a first adventure, and I actually prefer it to the tavern scenario because it immediately gives you a reason for all of these characters to be together and a goal to work towards. Interestingly here, one of the characters – Marlowe Fairwind, who we’re told “must be played during this adventure” – is the one who has brought the others together and is presented as the de facto leader. Each player is handed a four page character packet to go with their character, and I’ll be interested to look at Marlowe’s and see if her player is given any additional information about what’s going on here.

The pre-generated characters themselves do some more work to reinforce the idea that this is a very D&D-derived game. We’ve got race² and class happening here: a Loreborne Elf Sorcerer, Underborne Ribbet Rogue, Highborne Human Warrior, Wanderborne Giant Guardian, and Wildbone Katari Ranger. I’m assuming that “Highborne”, “Wanderborne”, “Loreborne”, etc. serve some of the same purpose as character backgrounds in other games, but we’ll see.

The next 20 pages of the Quickstart Adventure reproduce the four page character packets for each PC. There’s some interesting stuff going on on these, and we can glean some information about the mechanisms of the system from them. I’m just going to look at the first one – Marlowe Fairwind – in detail, and then jump forward to the rest of the Quickstart.

“Loreborne Elf Sorcerer” tells us this character’s Community, Ancestry, and Class. We’re also given her Subclass – that is, she’s a “Primal Origin Sorcerer”. So far this is all pretty standard stuff. This first sheet also gives us a breakdown of some of the core mechanisms of the game. Players roll two d12s – one representing Hope and one representing Fear. They add them together, plus any modifiers, and tell the GM the result. So far that’s as predicted. The quirk here is that the result is also impacted by which die rolled highest. If your Hope die rolled highest, you mark a Hope on your character sheet. It looks like this is a meta-currency that allows players to “aid future rolls”. When you “roll with Fear” (i.e. your Fear die is the highest), the GM takes a Fear point. This is another meta-currency that allows them to “instigate or accentuate challenges in the scene”.

The interesting stuff here, and the point where it diverges from D&D the most so far and brings in some design sensibilities from PbTA/BoB-style games, is in the questions and connections. The sheet asks the player to answer a question about their character’s place in the adventure – for Marlowe it’s “Why do you think King Emeris trusts you more than anyone else to deliver this package?” – and we’re then asked to create connections between the party. We’re given a set of relationships and asked to assign each of them to another PC.

The second page of this packet is the character sheet itself. It immediately reminds me of a D&D character sheet visually, and we can definitely see more of that DNA in the mechanisms.

We’ve got six stats which broadly map to physical and mental attributes – Agility, Strength, and Finesse being physical, Instinct, Presence, and Knowledge being mental. I quite like the splitting apart of Dexterity into Agility and Finesse in lieu of a Constitution-style stat.

On the left of the page we can see some influence from Forged In The Dark-style games. The main things that jump out at me from that school of design are the Stress track, plus the abstracted Gold (i.e. we’re not collecting individual coins with specific values as in classic D&D but are instead saying “you’ve got bags full of gold”).

To jump back to the first page of this pack for a second, because I skipped over this earlier, we’re told that Marlowe “has the experiences “Royal Mage” and “Not On My Watch” which she will be able to utilize in play when they apply. Looking at this page we can see them written under the heading “Experience” alongside a couple of modifiers. I assume that these will modify action rolls when appropriate, but I wonder also if relying on these lets you mark experience towards advancement in the same way that Blades In The Dark and many PbTA games have XP “triggers”. I can’t see anything like an experience or advancement track on this page, though, and I strongly suspect that advancement will be tied to story beats and milestones rather than individual actions.

The next page is what I’ve seen described as the “side car” – a quick reference sheet designed to be placed beneath your character sheet that explains each section and gives us some more insight into the way this system works. 

The Experience section is described as “narrative tags that you create to reflect what your character is skilled in”. When they apply to any given scene you can spend Hope to add their value to a roll as a modifier.

The HP/Stress section is also described. Rather than taking an amount of damage to hit points equal to whatever your enemy rolled you instead have damage thresholds. If the damage falls inside one of your thresholds, you mark a set amount of hit points. I expect that this exists to reduce the “swinginess” of enemy damage, thus reducing character vulnerability and keeping PCs alive for longer. It’s a nice change to the system if you want to run a heroic fantasy game where player characters get into fights a lot but aren’t in any real danger of dying, which is very much the kind of game that lends itself to streaming.

The stress track exists to soak up damage that’s so small it falls below your lowest damage threshold. Instead of taking hit point damage you mark a stress, and when your stress track is full you mark one hit point. If you ever mark your last hit point you must make a “death move”, and I’m interested to see how these differ from 5e’s death saves. (Observant readers will know that I actually really like these sorts of systems, which is why I wrote Scars for A Dungeon Game).

The next page of this pack is the character’s “level 1 loadout”³, a set of abilities on cards that you begin play with. I know that some of the Critical Role cast have been using playing cards to keep track of their various character abilities for a while at this point, so I’m not surprised to find it here. It certainly looks better on a stream than having players hunting through books and sheets of paper looking for rules text, and as a player it’s much easier to know which abilities you have access to when they’re right there on the table in front of you. It also opens up the option of doing things like flipping the card upside down to indicate that it’s been used and can’t be used again, or placing tokens on cards to power spells. It’s board game/CCG tech that’s been adopted to RPG needs, and I think that’s a smart decision for this style of game.

As I said earlier I’m going to skip past the rest of the pre-generated characters and get to the rest of the Quickstart. It begins in earnest on page 22, which gives us 17 pages for the adventure. That’s pretty short, and seems in line with the claim of it being a 3 hour session.

The next section is a little disappointing if I’m being honest. I’d hoped that this QuickStart would each the game through play, and that it would be structured in a way that introduces mechanisms in encounters as and when you need them. That may still be the case, but before we actually get into the meat of the adventure we’re given a “Teaching the Game” section. This is a lot of read-aloud boxed text for the GM that requires you to literally teach the players the game before you actually start playing. I think this is a bit of a missed opportunity – a quick start should be aimed at getting people playing as quickly as possible, and delivering a lot of rules content up front is (in my view) a good way to get players to zone out. This section goes on for 5 pages, and includes giving the players a short break while the GM reads another section of rules to themselves about how to set difficulties of rolls (static DCs, as expected), how to use Fear tokens, how to run combat, and how to read a stat block.

This is a lot to take in when you’re sitting at the table with your group waiting for you to finish so that they can actually play the game, and it seems at odds with the stated aim of streamlining play. If we were going to make the GM read up on the rules before running the game I think we would have been better served by having them do that reading in their own time and at their own pace without the pressure of an expectant group sitting at the table.

That said, there are a few additional rules introduced in this section that are interesting. We’ve already learned about “rolling with Hope” and “rolling with Fear”, which is determined by whether your Fear or Hope die is the highest when you make a roll. This has an impact on the outcome of your roll that introduces some PbTA-style mixed success into the equation. The outcomes are:

• Success with Hope is a full success
• Success with Fear introduces a complication or consequence. A mixed success.
• Failure with Hope is a soft failure, but “things don’t go as badly as they could”. The GM “makes a move in line with the fiction, and then [turns] things back to the rest of the table”.
• Failure with Fear is a miss. “The situation goes very badly”. The GM gets to “make a move and […] probably raise the stakes to highlights the consequences”.

This is very much PbTA, including the language about “making moves in line with the fiction”. The game also features critical successes on top of this, which occur when you roll doubles. It doesn’t actually matter what number you roll when this happens. Even if the roll would normally be a failure, doubles turn it into a critical success. You get what you wanted, mark a Hope, and clear a stress. You also deal maximum damage if you’re attacking. Critical successes are pretty impactful here.

This system of comparing dice and looking for matches to interpret the result reminds me a lot of the way Ironsworn does things. It’s not identical, and Ironsworn itself draws on the language of PbTA games so it’s also not surprising. It also reminds me a little of the Genesys System.

One thing that does surprise me here is how combat works. There’s no grid, and it instead revolves around an “action tracker” and combat ranges. Individual weapons have attack ranges that they work within – we’ve already seen some on the character sheets, though I didn’t comment on them earlier. When players make an action roll during combat they place a token on the action tracker. It sounds like players can do as many things as they want until they roll a failure or roll with Fear, at which point the GM uses a move to spend the tokens on the tracker to activate enemies. This is a really interesting way of doing things and I think it’s designed specifically with fast, seamless, streamed play in mind. Rolling initiative and keeping track of who’s up next doesn’t actually take that long but it can kill the pace of a performed game, and this does away with it. I assume players can freely take turns in combat, which kills any “oh it’s my turn and I don’t know what to do” moments, though I haven’t actually got to a full explanation of how it works yet so I could be wrong.

The game also uses advantage and disadvantage. Rather than rolling twice and taking the best (or worst) result, you instead roll 1d6 and either add it or subtract it to your roll. If the GM has advantage it works the traditional way with 2d20, and I’m now realising that I haven’t seen anything about when or how the GM rolls dice yet. It sounds like on the GM side of things it’s a much more traditional d20 + modifier vs. target number system, and that the 2d12 Duality Dice system is only used for non-GM players. Maybe this will turn out to be wrong, but I’m very interested in this asymmetry between how GMs and other players interact with the mechanism of the game if this is the case.

We get some more clarity about combat, too. GMs can spend tokens on the action tracker to activate enemies and give them a turn, but each enemy only gets to activate once per GM move. So when the GM takes a turn in combat they can use as many enemies as they have tokens for once, and then things go back to the players. If I’m right about players being able to take as many actions as they want until they roll a failure (or a success with Fear) then this seems designed to make fights largely winnable by PCs, which seems in line with the way damage and hit points work, too.

We do get some guidance for how Fear works here, too, which is very useful. It looks like this:

I like that the GM can always spend Fear to give themselves advantage on a roll or to deal more damage in combat, and that enemies have specific Fear moves. One thing I wish this also had was some guidance about what a “GM move” looks like, though maybe (hopefully) that’s contained in the core rules or the GM packet that I haven’t yet looked at. “Interrupting a scene with a GM move” also puts me in mind of Cypher System’s GM Intrusions.

Jumping back to rolling dice again (this is the nature of reading this thing in order and reacting to it as I go), we get some clarity about how GMs do that. As I expected it’s d20 + the adversary’s attack modifier vs. a target number, which is dictated by the PC’s Evasion value. 

We also get some guidance about ranges for people who want to play with grids and minis, which is useful. Melee is what you’d expect, Very Close is 5-10 feet, Close is 10-30 feet, and Far is 30-100 feet. Characters can move anywhere in close range when making an action roll, and if they want to go further than that then they need to make an Agility roll to see if they succeed – with failure handing control back to the GM for a moment.

After we’re done with the rules we move onto the “narrative overview”, which provides a breakdown of the “Acts” that the adventure is split into. There are five of them for what is seemingly a very linear adventure – which is fine for an introductory module that’s presumably going to try and get us to interact with all the different rules in the game within a few hours. 

When we get into the meat of the adventure itself, it looks quite a lot like a traditional D&D-style adventure. There are big chunks of boxed text and an expectation about how encounters are going to play out. Hidden in and amongst that though are some hints at a more narrative, PbTA-inspired means of play. One section prompts the players to contribute to worldbuilding, for example:

Here we get exposed to the idea of Daggerheart having “GM Principles”, this one being “Ask Questions and Incorporate the Answers”. Then we get straight into rolling dice, with some light guidance for what a “GM Move” might look like.

I know that when I was first picking up PbTA games I got quite confused by this terminology. PCs have explicit Moves on their play sheets that do specific things, but often GMs are given a set of principles and some suggestions without any explicit, set-in-stone Moves that they can use. Because the terminology used the same word to describe two similar but different things, I struggled to understand exactly what I was being instructed to do as the GM. Here I’m definitely feeling the urge to look at a list of GM Moves for situations like this, and I again hope that the core rulebook has some firm guidance.

This one encounter – finding a wagon and interacting with some flying wolves – is the entirety of “Act One”.

Act Two takes place in the same location, with the PCs exploring the ruined wagon and learning some things about what’s happened before being ambushed as they begin to wrap up. As with a lot of traditional adventures, this ambush is written in a way that definitely involves combat.

I think there’s an interesting tension here between what I’ll call High Player Agency narrative gaming and a game that wants you to interact with combat and have fights. There’s no opportunity or allowance in the text for the PCs to choose not to fight and to instead try and talk to these people or find out what’s going on. The GM announces that they’re taking out the action tracker and we move into combat in the same way that Matt Mercer will often say “roll initiative!” on Critical Role. It’s a style of play I used to be very much into and one that I’ve moved away from in recent years, so it’s interesting to me to see it written so explicitly here. (To be very clear, this isn’t really a criticism. Part of looking at games is meeting them where they are and understanding that what they’re doing might not be for me. There’s a lot to like in Daggerheart so far, but this specific aspect of play where players are pushed into combat is something I don’t really enjoy anymore).

The combat ends when it ends (“when all adversaries are defeated”). We’re then told to encourage the PCs to “describe a montage of the remaining travel time to Hush”. This leads us into Act Three, which gives us another set of planned encounters. I’m so removed from modern 5e-esque play culture that I don’t know if this is what adventures look like now – skipping the slower travel stuff to get straight to the GM’s planned encounters – or whether this is just a concession to the format of trying to write a 3 hour quickstart adventure.

This section lets the players do some roleplaying and interact with some NPCs, and it also gives us more of the shared worldbuilding prompts that we’ve seen before.

The rest of the adventure continues along these lines, with specific people to speak to and a couple of combats. We’re introduced to the rules for Short Rests that allow PCs to tend to their wound, clear stress, or repair their armour, and we meet some enemies with group attacks. We’re also introduced to the idea of encounters having their own Fear moves that give the GM specific things to do. This one adds more enemies to the battle, which is an interesting twist. There’s also a fun counter on the final encounter which marks the completion of a ritual. It ticks down every time the player defeat an enemy, ticks up every time an important NPC is injured, and the encounter doesn’t end until the counter hits 0. There’s also a cool enemy ability that interacts with the counter. This is a really cool piece of encounter design, though I do wonder about the utility of these enemies outside of this specific encounter. I wonder if this game is going to have anything like a generic bestiary, or whether GMs are encouraged to create unique adversaries for each adventure? The latter is very cool in theory but does create some work for GMs in terms of session prep, and I wonder how that would impact GM enjoyment. (Of course, maybe these are just cool enemies created for this published adventure and GMs will also be given access to a more traditional bestiary as well).

I mentioned earlier that I’m interested in how Death Moves work. Unfortunately the quick start doesn’t actually teach us that. Players who mark their last hit point instead fall unconscious until they’re healed or until the danger passes. I’ll have to look to the main rulebook for Death Moves.

My initial impressions of the quickstart are that I think Daggerheart is doing some interesting things, and that it’s clear that it’s been built in a way that lends itself to being performed on stream – the streamlining of combat (especially with regard to initiative), simplification of hit points, and the attempt to share some of the workload of building the world between everyone at the table while also still allowing GMs to prep things and plan “story arcs” (which, while it’s not a way I like to play, is definitely important for the Critical Role style of game).

Since this is getting very long, and since the core rulebook is nearly 400 pages long, I’m going to stop here. I may look at the core rulebook in more depth in a later post, especially as I’m interested to learn more about how some parts of it work – especially Death Moves.

All in all I’m pretty impressed with Daggerheart initially. It feels to me like it sits in a similar space to a game like 13th Age, which I also really like and which I think does a lot of things that modern 5e players who were introduced via Critical Role wish that game was doing. I’m interested to see where this goes and how it develops.

1. There’s a whole rant in how I feel about tabletop games replicating the language – and often alongside the language, the culture and practices – of video games, but that’s for another time. ︎
2. I suspect we’ll find that this game uses a term other than “race”, but we haven’t been exposed to it yet. I hope that we’ll also see a diversion from any ideas of bioessentialism in the way these races are presented. ︎
3. See 1. ︎

This is a transcript of a Twitter long read thread. It was made available to Patrons a week before being posted publicly here. Supporting me on Patreon starts at as little as £2 a month and gets you access to posts like this one, sneak peaks at works in progress, early drafts, essays about the craft and art of writing RPGs, and much more!

At some point in 2022, I forget when exactly, Hachette announced they would be producing a D&D magazine as part of their Partworks line aimed at introducing new players to the game. It was initially going to be just 4 issues as a trial to test the market.

Onboarding new players and teaching games is something I’m hugely interested in, and so I signed up for the trial to see how this was being approached in the magazine format. Jump to November 2022 and I had only ever received a single issue – issue 2.

I forgot about it after this, frankly, but last month I received two parcels. The first contained issues 1 & 2 (now with a different cover) and the second containined issues 3-6. So now seems a very good time to finally dig into these things and take a look at what’s going on in them.

If you haven’t seen me do these sorts of threads before, you can check out my others here.

This isn’t a review in any meaningful sense. It’s me looking at a product and talking about it in real time. (Yes, I’ve precomposed the thread so that I can post a transcript of it, but it’s still “live” reactions). Here I’m looking specifically at what this magazine does to teach the game to new players and to onboard people who may be new to roleplaying in general.

I’m interested in Games As Products, so I’m probably going to talk about this from a productisation perspective as well. My interest in this stuff is very much motivated by my desire to do the best job I can at introducing new players to my own game, A Dungeon Game (available free here).

I’m also going into this intending to be very critical, in both a positive and negative sense. This is a big, commercial product, aimed at introducing players to the biggest RPG in the world, with the biggest budget and the most resources. If anybody can get this right, it’s Hachette and WoTC. This isn’t a “5e sucks” thread – I like 5e and frankly I’m not interested in slinging shit around, I’ve got better things to do with my time. If this magazine does things well, or does things I think I and other indie designers can learn from, I’m absolutely going to highlight them. But the flipside of that is that I’m also going to talk frankly about things I *don’t* think it does well or places where I think it could be doing things better. Often I think looking at how something doesn’t work is more useful than looking at what things do well (which is why it’s just as important for fiction writers to read bad books as it is for them to read masterpieces).

As always, everything I say here is going to be entirely coloured by my own philosophies on games and games texts, my own likes and dislikes, and my own experiences as both a player and a game designer. You’re free to disagree with me, but if you’re a dickhead about it I’ll block you immediately.

If you get something out of this thread and want to help support me, you can join my Patreon or you can throw money at me via Ko-Fi. Any money this specific thread makes me will probably go towards another month of this magazine so I can look at how it develops.

A note before we start. Traditionally these threads create a lot of notifications for me, so I tend not to interact with people while I’m writing them until I’m done. Because of the “live” nature of them I also often make mistakes. That’s just part of the process. Please be patient with it.

So, let’s talk assumptions etc. before we jump in. I’m very familiar with D&D 5e but haven’t kept up with releases over the past year or two. I’m also going to assume this is aimed at people who don’t know anything about the game, and I’m going to try and read it from that perspective.

Starter Sets and beginner boxes often simplify rules, and I suspect we might see some of that in the early issues of Adventurer. It wouldn’t surprise me to see concepts be introduced in a basic, stripped-down form and later expanded upon to get closer to how they’re presented in the core rulebooks.

One assumption I’m making, that may prove to be wrong, is that some of the text here might not match the current edition of the game. We all know there’s a new edition coming next year, and I have a suspicion that Adventurer might contain some of that content. But we’ll see.

I’m also interested to see how this gets stretched out in a magazine format. The goal on its face is to introduce the game to people, but the goal of any individual issue of a magazine is actually to sell the *next* issue. In an ideal world you subscribe every single month, forever. So I’m curious to see what that looks like here.

Okay. Let’s jump in. Issue 1. We’ll take it a step at a time, looking at the cover and back cover (i.e. what’s visible without opening the plastic) before we open it up and see what’s inside. (I opened it already just for the purposes of taking photos but let’s pretend I didn’t).

I think the front cover of issue 1 is really interesting because in a lot of ways it tells us what the magazine wants us to think are the important parts of the game. It’s what sets your initial expectations, as someone who potentially knows nothing about what’s inside. So let’s take it step by step.

First, that subtitle: “Learn. Play. Explore.” This is going to teach us the game and it’s going to get us playing. I expect that I’ll be able to sit down and play this game with just this issue in my hand. We’ve got a set of dice, too, so I presumably don’t need anything extra.

Something I’ve come across when introducing new players who lack genre literacy in heroic fantasy to D&D specifically is that they struggle to visualise events in the game because they have no frame of reference for it. It’s easy to say “the Lord Of The Rings films exist and everyone’s seen them” but I don’t think most 5e games look much like the events in those films – especially if you run a more traditional dungeon-based game.

So the illustration here really interests me, because I think it’s evocative of a different film that most people have seen and are familiar with that in my mind is much more representative of what a D&D game looks like. This picture of a group of adventurers fighting hoards of skeletal soldiers reminds me very strongly of Pirates Of The Carribbean.

In the side banner we have a few things. The first is that there’s a “new and exclusive adventure” in this issue. We can “learn the lore”, “become a dungeon master”, and treat ourselves to some “expert D&D play tips”. We also have a red circle (hidden by the dice box initially) telling us that we’re going to learn the combat rules.

There’s some interesting managing of different sets of expectations going on here. We’re trying to appeal to a broad audience, from those who know nothing about the game to people who know what it is but are put off by the perceived complexity of it – whether that’s in there being lots of “lore” to remember, or the hurdle of actually knowing how to run a game. This issue is promising to fix all of that.

When we flip the thing over we see advertising materials for the next few issues. This is basically just “here are the toys we’re going to give you”. A dice tray, a DM screen, a binder to store your issues in, and a “dice jail”. The dice jail especially is, I think, aimed at people who have existing familiarity not just with D&D but with specific actual play streams of the game.

Interestingly issue 2 comes with both another set of dice and “your exclusive adventure map”. Now I’m wondering if this issue actually contains a playable adventure (I assume we’re going to be playing on a grid, which means the map is a core part of the adventure). If it doesn’t then that feels like a real miss for issue 1. But we’ll see.

Inside the bag we get not just the first issue but also a set of pregenerated characters and a small booklet titled “Introduction To Combat”. The character sheet doesn’t actually look simplified at all, which is really interesting.

Opening up the main book, we get a good introduction that tells us exactly what this product is and what to expect. Initially I thought that this ToC didn’t have page numbers but of course it does – each section is numbered individually, because we’re going to be pulling this apart and putting it in a binder (assuming we subscribe for long enough to actually get the binder and, presumably, the section dividers that come with it). So if we want to read about the “Structure of Play” we’re directed to page 3 of the Sage Advice section rather than page 3 of the magazine itself.

Issue 1 is split into 3 sections, plus the adventure. We’ve got “Sage Advice” (a term D&D has been using in publications at least as early as issue 31 Dragon of magazine in November 1979), which contains an overview of what the game is and a section explaining the role of the DM; Character Creation; and “Lore” (my least favourite word in gaming/fiction). Future issues will presumably expand on these section (and possibly add additional sections? Who knows).

It’s really nice to see that Will Doyle (@beholderpie) wrote the adventure in this issue. His name won’t mean anything to a new player, obviously, but it makes me feel confident that it’s going to be pretty good.

The Overview section opens with the always-contentions “what is an RPG?” section. A product like this absolutely needs it, and here they’ve taken the smart option of writing “what is *this* RPG?” rather than a description of the hobby as a whole. This is a pretty solid introduction to the basics of D&D without overwhelming anybody. It keeps things short and sweet.

(Obviously a lot of the work indie designers, and myself specifically, do is involved in making sure that people are aware there’s more to RPGs than D&D but I don’t think we can fault a D&D product for not doing that.)

I’m obviously not about to share photos of every single page, so from here on out I’ll just comment on interesting things.

This is, I think, the first missed opportunity. Personally I think the goal should be to get players moving as quickly as possible. Good starter sets have figured out how to do that, and I think a magazine format is an ideal place to do it. You want to capitalise on a reader’s initial excitement while it’s still fresh. Obviously a reader probably isn’t sitting reading this with their friends anxiously waiting to start playing, but you want to give the impression that you could still play if that were the case.

There’s an argument to be made that what we’re doing here is building a rulebook in sections. This isn’t really a starter set. But that’s the purpose it’s marketed as serving, so I do think some thought should have gone into getting people moving quickly. The first 20 pages of this magazine are overviews, and once you actually get to the encounter you’re then guided to read the additional “Introduction To Combat” section before you can play.

This magazine actually quite neatly illustrates something I (and others) have talked about for a while, which is that RPG texts are often trying to serve multiple purposes at the same time. They need to be a pedagogical text, a reference text, and something that inspires your imagination and makes you want to play. That’s hard to do in a single book (and it’s why Ironsworn Starforged works so well, because Shawn recognised this and produced multiple different texts aimed at doing all of these things separately), and it’s proving difficult to do here in this magazine format as well.

In theory the “pull out the pages and reorder this book” format we’re seeing here makes this task easier, because you can sequence the text initially in a way that onboards players quickly (pedagogy) and then have people reorder the text themselves to create a reference manual they’ll use once they know how to play. That, unfortunately, isn’t what we’re seeing in D&D Adventurer.

Anyway. I’ve jumped ahead here, so let’s continue working through this issue.

From this section it looks like each issue will provide a single encounter from one larger adventure, which certainly makes sense as a way to spread out the content and maximise revenues but seems incredibly frustrating if you’re a player who just wants to get on with the game. We’ll see how this develops.

Obviously we’re all familiar with the traditional set of polyhedral dice, and D&D Adventurer comes with a set of 7 (1d4, 1d6, 1d8, 2d10/1d%, 1d12, 1d20). I think it’s really interesting that the decision was made to include percentile dice, since they’re really not used very often in 5e. And if I’m a new player reading this section about dice, I’m probably wondering why I have two dice of the same size in my set that are numbered slightly differently.

Presumably we get a 7 dice set because it’s very easy for Hachette to source them in branded tins in massive quantities, and that’s not the case if you only want a set of 6. It’s an entirely commercial/financial decision, but it’s one that has ramifications (albeit small ones) when the text doesn’t quite match up.

This is where I start to enter nitpick territory, but I think any product aimed at onboarding new players deserves to be nitpicked because absolutely anything can be a stumbling block. Take, for example, this text, which refers to “stat blocks”. Imagine you’re a new player with no context or genre literacy. What’s a stat block? How do I find out the answer to that question? There’s no index here, no way for me to find out what this piece of text means by consulting the magazine I’m holding in my hand. It’s a small, probably fleeting moment of frustration, but these things add up and if you have too many of them you’ll eventually bounce off. If I’m a writer interested in making a text that’s approachble and welcoming for new players (which I am), I want to minimise these moments of friction.

Part of onboarding new players to complex games involves reassuring them that it’s not actually as difficult as you might have convinced yourself it is. That can be true of anything, from rules mastery to doing silly voices for NPCs. I like that Adventurer has taken the time to reassure DMs that this is actually just a goofy game and it doesn’t actually matter if you’re terrible at voices. I’m also interested to see how they expand on this in future issues (and that’s where they get you with this sort of publishing model. Commercially, this section is doing exactly what it needs to do).

That reassurance is also carried through to the following pages, where DMs are told that they don’t need to memorize or even read all of the rules before play starts. It’s also super interesting that the magazine tells us to refer to the magazine for rules questions rather than the core rulebooks. We haven’t actually been told that D&D exists as a complete game you can already buy anywhere at this point (though we were directed to DnD Beyond earlier).

I guess there are some competing commercial interests here. Wizards Of The Coast want to sell D&D books, obviously, while Hachette want to sell copies of this magazine. Hachette certainly doesn’t benefit from directing readers to WoTC’s books, so it’s not surprising that there’s no mention of the books here. We’ve had some reference to other D&D products in talking about campaign settings and “decades of D&D lore”, but nowhere have we shown players how to find out more about that. I wonder if we’re going to see WoTC moving to a more digital, DnD Beyond-based model for rules text (i.e. phasing out physical books), or whether it’s simply the case that this magazine is intended to stand alone. (I obviously don’t know what sort of financial arrangements exist to produce products like this, either, so there are probably other considerations here that I know nothing about).

One thing I’m picking up on here that doesn’t surprise me but that is a little disappointing is that the text is assuming a base level of knowledge that I don’t think the (assumed) target audience will necessarily have. Take this section, for example.

The concept of what “a balanced party” means hasn’t actually been explained here or anywhere else, so what does this sidebar achieve? It’s introducing a partial concept without any elucidation, which creates uncertainty and questions for a player that they don’t have immediate answers to. This can be a stumbling block and, as we’ve already touched on, too many of them can become a real problem that sees players drop off without actually playing the game. Personally I would be avoiding things like this.

Similarly, confusion can be caused by not paying close attention to the terminology we use when talking about things, especially when we’re discussing terms that have actual meaning in the game rules. Take this, for example:

This is just a simple editing issue, where the term “skills” is used in place of “ability scores”. This wouldn’t be a problem if the game didn’t also have rules elements called Skills, but it does. Again, just a small potential stumbling block, but an important one.

Similarly, we’re in danger of overloading players with information before they know what they’re looking at. Do we really need this explanation of Ability Modifiers and how they’re calculated in Issue 1?

I think we would have been much better served here with just introducing the things you really need to know in order to play in issue 1, and bringing this extra stuff in later. Realistically, new players don’t need to know what the difference between Strength 12 and 13 is. They just need to know that they get a +1 bonus as a result of it. We could either add to the complexity of information in later issues, or else sequence this issue so that this stuff comes later, after you’re up and running and have played for a bit.

We’re told a little later in the Character Creation overview that the campaign presented in Adventurer will carry characters to 5th level. Since the first ability score increase comes at 4th level, it feels to me like that would be a better place in the sequence of the magazine as a whole to talk about how ability scores and modifiers are linked. Provide the information when it’s needed, and then give people the ability to reference it later after the fact.

We’re already simplifying things elsewhere – presenting only 4 Species (Human, Lightfoot Halfling, Hill Dwarf, Wood Elf) and 4 Classes (Fighter, Rogue, Wizard, Cleric) – so simplifying the rules to make learning them easier seems like an obvious option. (I realise I keep banging this drum and I’m sorry if it’s getting old).

Reaching the end of both the Overview and Character Creation sections in this issue, I’m not fully convinced that someone new to the game would really know how to actually play this thing or even what play looks like. Looking at the “Introduction To Combat” book, there *is* a small example of play, but a) it’s geared explicitly around combat and b) it’s sort of implied that only the DM should read this book. I think the Overview section especially would have been better served by dedicating some space to an example of play to show what all these moving parts look like in context.

Section 3, Lore, gives us a two page introduction to Phandalin, which is going to be the starting point for the first adventure and the base for the overall campaign. If we look back to my three form model for what RPG texts need to do, one of those things is to inspire players and make them want to engage with the game. I don’t think this brief section achieves that, and that’s more of a problem with RPG writing as a form than with this magazine specifically.

Without providing a photo of it (because that would just be reproducing the text entirely), what we get here is a fairly dry overview of Phandalin in the manner of RPG gazetteers going back 50 years. It’s a frontier town built on the ruins of an older settlement. It was a thriving town that was destroyed by orcs hundreds of years ago. Now it’s being reclaimed by settlers drawn by stories of gold and platinum in the mountains, but it explicitly hasn’t experienced a gold rush. There are a few small businesses. And that’s it.

I guess I’m just not personally very inspired by this. The only reason players would want to visit the place is because there are rumours of gold to be had, which is a perfectly adequate adventure hook. What I think it’s missing is a real hook to make it stand out as an interesting location in its own right. Even just dialing up the gold rush aspect would be more interesting, I think. It’s also the fact that the sidebar of “Nearby Landmarks” doesn’t really provide much that makes me, as a player, say “oh wow that sounds really intriguing, I want to find a way to go there”.

It’s very possible that I’m being overly critical here, but it just feels a little bland to me. The adventure we’re about to start looking at is, presumably, going to inject some drama into this place, but the players don’t get to see that until they’re sitting down at the table ready to play. It would be nice for the text that they read beforehand to get them excited to do that.

The adventure itself (described as an Encounter rather than an adventure) takes up just over 4 pages, with the remaining space given over to stat blocks and a couple of magic items. It’s mostly a combat encounter, with the innkeeper and his patrons help captive above the inn by a group of cranium rats attempting to dig up an ancient tomb buried in the cellar. It’s the classic “rats in the cellar of an inn” opening adventure that’s been subverted in an interesting way by making the rats intelligent cranium rats, but unfortunately I think it’s hampered by a lack of space.

The room keys for the inn are incredibly sparse. This is the kind of very terse room entry that I actually prefer to see in adventures that I run, and you see this very limited information (that asks the DM to do a lot of the work to bring it to life) in OSR adventures. I think this would be great if that was the style of play we were introducing here, but this is a 5e product aimed at new players and I think a little more hand-holding (even just through a little more boxed text to describe the rooms) might be helpful here, and a little guidance to the DM as to how to actually run this thing.

There’s an interesting change to the 5e combat rules buried in the “Introduction To Combat” section about the way damage works. In the section headed “Average Damage”, it reads as though we now see players rolling for enemy damage when they’re struck in combat (and being given the option to instead choose the average result) rather than having DMs roll. Maybe this is a change that occurred in recent 5e books that I haven’t read, rather than something new to this magazine? This is something that’s been happening in other games for a long time, but it’s really fascinating to see it come to D&D. It seems like a small thing but it’s actually a very big shift in the role of the DM and the power dynamic between DM and player here. (Please don’t chime in with “DMs are also players”, we all know that, and we all know why I’m making a distinction between the roles here.)

The stat blocks for the monsters in the encounter aren’t simplified in any way (aside from omitting CR and XP values), but since they’re low level creatures they’re already quite straightforward. They’re also annotated to point out the pertinent things for a new DM, and we’re assured that future issues will explain stat blocks in more detail.

Where I’ve been critical of this lack of simplifying rules earlier in the magazine (and the failure to simplify the character sheets), here I think it’s probably fine? All the important bits are highlighted, and it does a good job of indicating “there’s more for you to learn here, but don’t worry about it yet”.

There’s not much more for me to say about this issue, really. I think it’s a mixed bag in a lot of ways. I’m not wholly confident that players who are entirely new to D&D or RPGs as a whole will feel confident knowing what they’re doing when they sit down to play, and the adventure isn’t given enough space to provide the tools and guidance a new DM might need to run it. I think if I were putting together something similar I’d cut out a lot of the Character Creation section and replace that with things like examples of play and guidance to the DM, alongside simplified character sheets and a breakdown of what everything on those sheets means so that players fully understand what they’re looking at.

I’m definitely interested to see how this develops over the future issues, and I fully intend to look at Issue 2 in depth. I was planning to do that as part of this thread but it’s got very long and I wasn’t anticipating how much time it would take to look at a relatively short text! Let me know if you’d actually be interested in seeing me dig into that in a thread like this.

You can check out other threads like this one here.

And if you’re interested in having me consult on your rulebook, drop me an email at chris@loottheroom.uk and let’s talk about what I can do for you.

Thanks for your time and attention.

This is a mirror of this Twitter thread, which was written in real time as I read 4th Edition D&D. It hasn’t been edited in any way. You can pick up Fourth Edition 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 Wizards of the Coast in any way, though the DTRPG link above uses an affiliate code. Thanks for reading.

Sitting down with the D&D 4e Player’s Handbook to read it for the first time. This will be a very long thread that will last a few hours.

This isn’t a review, this is me looking at a game for the first time and reacting to it. I may misunderstand things or get things wrong and that’s okay. I’m interested both in reading lots of games and in exploring the ways in which people approach new texts. I will talk about the things I like and don’t like. If I don’t like things you love, that’s fine. Don’t be a dick about it.

I may also phrase things as questions. 99% of the time these are rhetorical.

With that out of the way, let’s dive in! Here’s what I know about 4e going into this: weirdly, not a lot?

I’ve played every edition of D&D extensively but skipped 4e. I started with 2e in the early 90s and graduated to 3e and 3.5 when they were released. I got back into RPGs after years away in ~2015 with 5e. The 2e I played as a kid was actually a weird blend of B/X, AD&D, and 2e using whatever books we could lay hands on, and in the past few years I’ve been playing a lot of B/X and OD&D plus retroclones. So my experience of D&D as a holistic thing is large and varied. But 4e specifically? Not so much. I was very active on the WoTC forums towards the end of 3.5 and I remember staff at the time saying “there are no plans for a new edition”.

And then 4e got announced. And Dragon & Dungeon magazines got cancelled and rolled into D&D Insider. And everyone was big mad. Including me

So I was honestly already primed to not like it.

My memory of what exactly happened next is hazy because it was 2007/2008 and it’s all a bit of a blur, but I bought the Races & Classes preview supplement.

I don’t remember exactly why I bounced off it but I know I did. I think that I didn’t realise this wasn’t the full Player’s Handbook, that it was just a preview, and I was annoyed that it only contained a handful of classes and that the rest were going to be in another book. Looking at it now this is unambiguously a preview and not the full thing so I’m not sure where my confusion came from, but whatever happened I bounced off it. This was the only 4e book I bought. I do clearly remember it arriving and me being annoyed, and throwing it on a shelf and immediately ordering the first volume of Rise Of The Runelords and deciding I was going to play Pathfinder from now on instead. In the years since I’ve heard lots of things about 4e, both good and bad. People either love it or hate it. I’ve heard it’s more like a board game, that it’s “an MMO in a book”, that the way monsters work is great, that the Delve format for adventures is either good or bad. But I know nothing concrete.

Today we’ll change that. (For the record I’m still salty about losing Dragon and Dungeon magazines)

The contents page is interesting. The Combat chapter looks to be the biggest at first glance but it’s actually only about 30 pages long. The ‘Adventuring’ chapter is only 7 pages, though.

I’ve heard people call 4e a skirmish game before and that’s how this reads.

There’s a lot of familiar stuff here but there are things I have no real context for. I assume a Paragon Path is like a Prestige Class, but maybe I’m wrong.

There’s also no magic chapter (unless that’s Rituals?) That’s interesting. I’m used to a PHB being mostly spells. But the Rituals chapter is only 4 pages long.

This is… Really fascinating. This art style is such a huge departure from 3e and I think I love it.

There’s a “what is a roleplaying game” section which is fine, it’s D&D, the expectation that people new to RPGs will start here is objectively sound. The section repeats itself a lot though. It could be half as long and just as effective.

Troika! still has the best one. I do remember loving ‘points of light’ as a central conceit for the campaign world and that hasn’t changed.

“[Settlements appear] as a point of light in the widespread darkness, a haven […] in the wilderness that covers the world” is a really good, evocative sentence. “Monsters […] prowl in the dark places between the points of light.”

Seriously, you’re selling me on this setting even though you haven’t actually told me anything specific about it yet. The History of D&D section claims 4e “firmly established D&D for the next decade” which is hilarious given that 4e came out in 2008 and D&D Next happened in 2012. I guess 5e didn’t officially drop until 2014 but that’s still only 6 years. I don’t know what the launch of 5e looked like but knowing how mad people were about the short life of 3.5 I can’t imagine they were happy about a 6 year edition.

The book has referred to characters as being “like the protagonists of a novel or a movie” a few times already. That’s not phrasing I remember from 3e or earlier (though it may be there) and I think that’s an interesting shift in attitude. I grew up knowing that my character’s life was tenuous and that a poor decision or bad roll of the dice could mean curtains and it’s still how I play a lot of games today. But generally you expect a protagonist to survive the story, and I think that expectation has carried to modern 5e play culture.

This isn’t a criticism. They’re just different play styles, nothing more. I’m just interested to see it here and I wonder where that shift happened. This is a decent summary of what it means to be a DM in D&D. Nice and clear.

I’m trying to force myself not to skim anything here because I know D&D as a concept so well and it’s hard. My brain is going “you already know all this” but I want to be sure I don’t miss anything crucial to 4e that doesn’t exist in other editions. We get an example of play and it’s…fine? It uses pretty natural language that mostly sounds like how people play, which is good, and it introduces the concept of Perception checks, the DM making decisions based on secret information, and Initiative.

I feel like it could be better, but I’m not sure how exactly. I’m glad it’s there before we’ve interacted with any rules text though. We get the core mechanic – d20 plus modifiers Vs a target number, roll equal to or higher – and “three basic rules”.

I really like the framing of character powers as “little ways of breaking the rules”

The other rules are “specific bests general” and “always round down”, if anybody is curious

This just got difficult.

Chapter 2 is making characters. I’m very used to character creation being stats first, and IIRC 3e still worked that way. It’s interesting that we go Race and Class first before ability scores here. I think that marks a shift in the philosophy of these games

Speaking of shifts in philosophy, here’s a passage that butts head first into a lot of current sensibilities about the games we play and the kinds of stories we tell.

We’re only on page 14, but the change to the way characters are made (i.e. stats being less important), the emphasis on characters as protagonists, and the inclusion of Eladrin, Dragonborn, and Tiefling as core races tells me that this is a D&D that wants to change things. It’s not just doing the same things that have always been done simply because “that’s what D&D looks like”. I’m not surprised that opinions on this are so divided. Explicit character roles are new to me. Saying “this character class can stand in for this class to create a balanced party” is interesting. It’s obviously a game that cares about ‘balance’ and optimisation. They’re things that eventually drove me away from 3.5 and PF so I’m interested to see how I respond to the rest of this.

I’m also interested to finally learn about the Warlord that people talk about so often. We’ve got our first mention of attack, at-will, and daily powers in a sidebar here. I’m beginning to wonder if the reason there’s no spell list is because spells have become Wizard powers, so that every class functions in the same mechanical way? I don’t really have a basis for that assumption other than that the game obviously cares about ‘balance’ and at-will powers made me think of cantrips, and this is the conclusion my brain jumped to.

We’re on to ability scores after a brief description of the four character roles. It does a good job of explaining what each ability is for and how they’re important to new classes.

I’m reading about defenses – the 4e term for Saves, I guess – and it strikes me that this is only making sense because I have the context of all the other editions of D&D to draw from. When I read “Fortitude defense” I know what it means because I played 3e. I wonder how jarring this new term would be without any context? There’s a page reference given, but this is one of those moments where I think rulebooks should embrace redundancy of information. Yes, I can turn to page 275 to learn about Fortitude defense, but tell me more here.

Similarly, we’re told that sometimes we add Dex or Intelligence to our Armour class and that term is in bold, but there’s no page reference given and it isn’t explained further. I know what it means, it’s common parlance in RPGs, but the book opens with a “what is an RPG?” section.

Obviously this book is 15 years old but… Let’s do more to onboard new players smoothly. We’re given 3 options for generating ability scores: standard array, point buy, and rolling. The section on rolling definitely has an air of “we know some of you are going to do it so here it is but we don’t want you to” and this feels like the first concession to old players. I think I’d respect it more if it simply didn’t entertain the idea of rolling for stats, to be honest. And I say that as someone who hates point buy and will always roll for stats if given the choice. The text mentions to RPGA and tells us we can’t roll for stats for a character we’re going to use in an RPGA game.

Every character begins play with 100gp to buy equipment. Hello, attempts at game balance.

“D&D is a roleplaying game but not necessarily an exercise in improvisational theatre” is a sentence I adore. It welcomes new players, tells them it’s okay to just want to roll dice and hit things if that’s where they get their fun, and removes any burden of being good at acting. That’s a sentence I wish had carried over to 5e.

There’s definitely a section of modern play culture that has forgotten it or was never told it in the first place. The Alignment section is weird. It’s halfway between alignment as it was (i.e. it represents your relationship to universal forces of chaos and law and not your outlook on society) and alignment as it is (i.e. nobody cares about it). It’s completely optional, only contains Good, Lawful Good, Evil, Chaotic Evil, and Unaligned, and it’s prescribed that PCs must be Good or Lawful Good if they choose an alignment.

This again feels like a concession to older players who would absolutely lose their shit if a D&D didn’t contain alignment, even though it really does feel like the writers expect and almost encourage you to ignore it. We get a few pages about deities and developing your character’s personality and background that I don’t find particularly inspiring. I like that the background section is short and says “hey, this is fun to consider but what’s more important is what your character does in play”.

After this it’s another, longer, explanation of the core mechanic, and then the three main types of interactions with that mechanic – ability checks, skill checks, attack rolls – in detail. The language is casual and clear and does a good job of explaining everything. What we see here is the first step towards 5e’s Proficiency Bonus. The Base Attack Bonus in 3.x varied depending on your class but here it always includes half your level. I’ve said before that I bounced off BAB initially coming from 2e to 3e. I don’t know why, but I did.

4e is immediately easier for me to understand, though of course I’m coming to it with 20 years more experience of these games than I had when 3e released.

Holy shit, how many levels does this game have?!

At 11th and 21st level we get to pick a Paragon Path or an Epic Destiny. I don’t know what they are, but we’ll learn about them in chapter 4. It also looks like we gain new powers at most levels and that we always get a choice, which I like. IMO one of 5e’s biggest sins is “dead levels” with no choice.

I obviously haven’t seen the powers yet but “you can take each power only once (you can’t choose the same power multiple times)” tells me there’s going to be lots of choice and I like that. I could well be way off base here but that phrasing makes me think of generic systems where you essentially build your own class. Obviously we have classes here and are going to be picking powers from those lists but I like the idea that they might be very customisable. We also learn new feats at every even numbered level.

It sounds like characters are going to have a lot to do here. I’m thinking back to how short the Adventuring and Combat chapters are and how brief the rules explanation at the front of this book is and it seems like 4e is really mechanically simple? I get the impression that the complexity is going to happen within individual powers. I obviously could be wrong but if I’m right about that I think I really like that? There’s no need to learn a super crunchy system, you just learn what your character can do and all the unique ways you get to break the rules.

Let’s see if I’m right. I also like that retraining is built in to levelling up. Every time you level you can replace a single feat, power, or skill that you previously selected. Retraining baked into the rules is something I liked about PF2 as well. Sometimes you’re not happy with choices you made that turn out to never get used etc. and some GMs can be dicks about it. It’s nice to just have changing your mind as an option in the book. We now have an answer to the question I posed here and the answer is 30 levels, split over 3 tiers: heroic, paragon, and epic.

30 levels. Wow.

It’s fun that the three tiers are defined in some part by the kinds of dragons you might fight, and the kinds of dungeons you explore. D&D being true to its name. Here’s more evidence of that drive towards ‘balance’ that I’ve been picking up on. Everyone advances at the same rate and has the same number of feats and powers, regardless of class.

Earlier during the character creation there was a brief passage that said “now fill out the rest of your character sheet. The calculations you need are in page 30”.

This is page 30.

The calculations you need to complete the character sheet aren’t actually on this page. Each step directs you to another page in the book.

This is another example of rules as reference text Vs rules text intended to be read in sequence. I think character creation in most games would benefit from very clear step by step instructions that tell you exactly what to do and don’t make you flip through pages. If I’m trying to make a character here, this is a lot of page flipping to things I haven’t read yet. (I will say that the character sheet diagram is still better than the one on Pathfinder 2)

Chapter 3 is Races. I may not read each race in detail here. I’ll comment on anything interesting that sticks out to me though. Of immediate interest is that Speed is measured exclusively in squares. This is a game that demands a grid and minis or tokens. I’ve found the first part of the text where I’m reading it and I don’t know what it means and don’t know where to find the answer. The terms ‘bloodied’ and ‘healing surge’ haven’t been explained yet.

What’s interesting is that I already know what ‘Bloodied’ is just through cultural osmosis. And I can make an educated guess at what healing surge is (my guess is that it’s a power characters can use to heal themselves in combat). But yeah. If I’m a new player trying to pick a race to build a character, the first section of information about this race talks about things I have no context for.

There’s an index and I could look it up, obviously, but I don’t think I should have to? Once again we’re back to my point about rules as reference vs. rules to be read, and about the benefit of quick starts and starter sets.

I actually bought the 4e quickstart with Keep On The Shadowfell last week so maybe I’ll compare it to this some time next week. Anyway.

“Play a Dragonborn if you want to look like a dragon” is the most honest sentence I’ve ever read in a rules text.

We see the same thing with the dwarf, where it says, “when an attack would knock you prone, you can immediately make a saving throw to avoid falling prone”. This is the first time the words ‘saving throw’ appear in the text, and we’ve ostensibly already learned about the core mechanic and the three types of rolls.

I like that each race only takes up two pages, and I like that we get three example adventurers of each race. Lidda & Tordek, two of the 3e iconic characters, make brief appearances. I’m very curious to know why it’s just those two and not e.g. Regdar or Mialee. Maybe the others show up as example characters in the classes section, or maybe it’s just a little nod to the old edition and nobody felt the urge to take it further.

The introduction to the Classes section gives us a breakdown of what mechanical elements a class has. One of them is how many Healing Surges you can spend in a day, so I think I might be right about what they are. Still no explanation though. We also get a sentence that brings back horrible memories of the 3e forums: “The next section of a class entry describes each class build in more detail. […] The build you choose (if you choose one) suggests what abilities you should prioritize”. I’ve never been a powergamer or a min-maxer. I just don’t get any enjoyment from figuring out “optimal” character options and planning character advancement ahead of time. If you do that’s cool, but it’s not for me and it’s one of the things that made me put 3.5/PF down. Having it explicitly called out as a thing you can do in the game text says that this game maybe isn’t for me. But we’ll press on, because so far I do like what I see and an emphasis on ‘builds’ is largely a table culture thing anyway. The final part of a character is Powers. “The longest section of a class description contains full descriptions of all the class’s […] powers, as well as its utility powers.”

I suspect this is where we’ll find spells. Which… Don’t exist using that terminology in 4e. This is a strange experience so far because so much of it is familiar as being D&D but little things like that are completely different. There’s lots of “referring to new concepts that haven’t been introduced yet” going on in this chapter.

Paragon paths sound cool, like a second class on top of your normal class. But the concept of spending action points to take extra actions in combat is just thrown in there. We move on now to the different types of powers (at will, encounter, daily) explained in more detail. I like that daily powers always have some effect even if they fail. Having an ability you can only use once fail and do nothing would suck so mitigating that is nice. The section about how to read a power is good, and I think it was smart to use a relatively high level wizard spell as the example because that has completely answered any lingering questions I had about how spells work. They work just like other powers. The keywords on powers are nice, and the explanation of how they interact with the rest of the rules is very good. Pathfinder 2 does the same thing but doesn’t explain them very well (it just says e.g. “this has the Concentration tag” and leaves you to figure out what that means)

So far I’m very impressed with how clearly this is written. The Implement keyword is interesting and I’m really curious to see how this works in practice. Hopefully I’ll remember to look up a power with this keyword when I get to them.

This section – How to read powers – is the longest continuous section of the book so far. I think it would really benefit from ending with a sample power printed in full so you can look at all this information in context, but that’s a minor quibble.

The next section lists all the classes with their powers, so it’s not like I have to wait ages to see a real power on the page. Class entries follow the same format as races, with a boxed section listing traits and key information right up front. It’s familiar and easy to follow after the races. The identical formatting for races and classes is a nice mirror for the idea that all characters interact with game mechanisms in exactly the same way and as I’m reading it I really like it. This is all really easy to parse. If they could have fit every class onto a two page spread like the races that would make it even better but that is asking the impossible really. Immediate answer to the Implement question I had earlier, which is nice. It’s cool that the bonus is implement-specific rather than power-specific. I wonder if there’s a variety of implements or if in practice it’s just a static bonus?

It looks like at level one you know both Turn Undead and Divine Fortune under the umbrella of “Channel Divinity” and that you can use one per encounter. You can learn other uses for Channel Divinity with a divinity feat. The sentence “The Channel Divinity class feature encompasses multiple powers, two of which are presented below” really tripped me up for a minute because it read to me like you get to pick one of these and that there’s a longer list somewhere that I’m not being directed to. After reading the whole section a few times I’m pretty sure it’s just referring to clerics learning new uses from gaining feats, but I definitely stumbled here.

This is the first time in the book that unclear writing has caused me issues.

Anyway, Turn Undead. I like when Turn Undead can potentially destroy low level undead outright based on cleric level, and this can’t do that. Maybe we can gain a better version at a higher level? I do like that it has an effect even when it misses, though.

Something 4e has solved simply by turning spells into powers is removing the confusion of caster level vs. spell level. Your spells are just powers and their level is the character level you can gain them at. It’s actually annoying that 5e undid this change, because it’s good. Spell level distinct from caster level but using the same terminology sucks and I’ll die on this hill. I’m not going to read through lists of powers because that’s just not a particularly useful or enjoyable use of my time, much like how I usually don’t read through spell lists.

What I am going to do is skip forward and read the Warlord because I’ve heard a lot about it. (A quick note here to say that I really like the Pit Fighter paragon path for Fighters.)

Also it looks like the Paladin shares Channel Divinity with the cleric but has different uses of it, which explains (but doesn’t forgive) that weird wording that trips me up earlier. Yeah okay the Warlord is cool and I see why people like it. On first read, and without looking at any powers yet, it feels somewhere between a battle master fighter and a bard (if we’re talking in 5e terms even though this game obviously predates 5e). I’d play a Warlord for sure

Wizards are fun as well. I like that you choose whether to specialise in wands, orbs, or staffs at level one. That really stands out from other editions of D&D that are more about schools of magic (which makes sense when spells have been turned into powers)

Wizard powers do work slightly differently to other classes in that you select two daily powers but can only actually use one of them. So you still have that classic wizard thing of having to prepare spells and decide what to use, but under 4e’s mechanical framework. I like it.

You get Ghost Sound, Light, Mage Hand, and Prestidigitation as cantrips that you can cast as at-will powers at first level, a little clutch of classic utility spells. And you also have some other classics to choose from as at-will powers, like Magic Missile and Ray of Frost.

Looking at the spell list, they’ve done a good job of porting classic D&D spells over to 4e. And you still get Fireball at 5th level, as is tradition.

Oh shit one of the paragon paths is blood magic, and I love blood magic as a trope. It’s a big surprise to see something like that in the core book.

After wizards we get into Epic Destinies and learn about levels 21-30. We’re told that this “describes your character’s exit from the world at large”. It’s cool that there’s an explicit end game to this edition. I do wish the “Destiny Quest” was described more thoroughly in this book rather than the Dungeon Master’s Guide, since it seems like it’s something the game is aimed at and wants you to engage with. We do get some brief examples of what to expect, though. Epic level play isn’t something that’s ever really appealed to me and I think that’s because I’m used to the end game being domain play. Epic levels become a bit like playing superheroes for me and that’s not something I’m into, but I do see why people enjoy it.

I do wonder where that shift from domain play to epic levels happened. I’d guess somewhere during 2e, but maybe it was 3e? I’m unsure. After all of this we move to the section on skills, and we get back into some mechanical rules stuff. Take 10 (do something slowly with no pressure and assume you rolled a 10+modifiers) exists in 4e but Take 20 is gone. We also get passive checks, where you’re assumed to be taking 10 for opposed checks when you’re not actively using a skill. This obviously carried forward into 5e with Passive Perception etc

Skill Challenges are something that I get the impression are a very popular feature of 4e that a lot of people still use in 5e and other games. It is infuriating that the rules for them aren’t in the PHB at all. They’re hinted at, and you’re instructed to buy the DMG for them. The next chapter is Feats, followed by multiclassing rules. It’s interesting that multiclassing is just taking a feat which then allows you to take feats from the class you’re dipping into, and that the multiclass feats themselves also have a benefit so it’s not wasted.

Balance. Even magic items use the same format as powers. I’m willing to bet that monster stat blocks look similar as well.

Of course there’s no way to know because there are no monsters in this book, because of my old favourite “the 3 core book model”. Magic items work in slots – arms, feet, hands, head, neck. I’ve seen people refer to 4e as feeling like a video game and this, I think, is the place where that’s most apparent. I don’t have any feelings either way about this, to be honest. (I missed rings and waist slots but whatever, it’s not important)

The fact that magic items are in the PHB and have very fixed pricing for both buying and selling them tells me the game expects you to have lots of items. Is this a looter shooter TTRPG? Maybe. The combat rules are not hugely dissimilar to 5e (or more accurately, I suppose, 5e combat isn’t hugely dissimilar to 4e). There’s nothing here that’s surprising or that I feel any real need to comment on. We do get an explanation about Action Points, which let you take additional actions and also trigger some feats and paragon powers. You gain one at the start of every session, after an extended rest, and after reaching a milestone. 5e has got rid of these and has largely replaced them with Inspiration. I like them a lot. Pathfinder 2 styles them as Hero Points and uses them for rerolls, and I really enjoy them. Using them for extra action is nice and I like it. We finally learn about healing surges, which can be used once per combat and as many times as you like up to your healing surge max during short rests. The heal you 25% of your max HP.

5e replaced this with rolling hit dice and doesn’t let everybody just do it during combat. I understand the need for it to be a fixed value in a game like 4e, and I also understand why 5e went back to rolling. I think I prefer it being tied to hit dice, as a matter of personal preference. I also like the way healing surges interact with death saving throws. I think I’d possibly house rule that into 5e if I were to play it again (although obviously 25% of max HP is a much better heal than rolling 1HD)

The final chapter is rituals, which are (largely) utility spells that take extended amounts of time to be cast. Stuff like enchanting items, animal messenger, locating secret doors, etc.

And that’s it. That’s all of 4e. For a game that people talk about as being super crunchy, it’s actually very simple. Most of the complexity comes from individual powers and so it doesn’t feel like it’s overwhelming to learn. I like that.

I definitely understand why people were so annoyed that the original plan was the release the DMG and monster manual months after the PHB, because right now I can’t actually play this game. I don’t know how to award XP, I don’t know what monsters look like, I don’t know what traps and hazards look like, and I have absolutely no basis on which to start building those things. And that’s very annoying.

I actually really like what I’ve just read, I’d like to play it, but I literally can’t. And all it would have taken would be another 10-20 pages in the PHB with some sample monsters and sample traps, maybe a one page dungeon as an introductory adventure.

Every time I read a 3 core book trad game I make this complaint and I’m not going to stop. Put everything people need to play in one book, and then build on that with supplements. Anyway. I enjoyed that, I’m glad I read it, and at some point I’m definitely going to run it. First I’ll need to check out the DMG and MM, though. And I’ll be looking at the quickstart and Keep On The Shadowfell in the near future to see how that goes about onboarding players.

If you’ve stuck with me this far I appreciate it. If you’ve enjoyed this thread, I always appreciate donations of coffee (Ko-Fi.com/chrisbissette)

Thank you for your time and attention. 

(I came back to this thread a little later as I read the Monster Manual and Dungeon Master’s Guide. Rather than post those tweets as an individual post, I’m attaching them here.)

Tacking this on here. I’m going to dig into the Monster Manual and Dungeon Master’s Guide as well. I’m not going to go as in depth on twitter as I did with the Player’s Handbook but I do feel like I’m missing a big chunk of the game having only read that.

This is immediately one of the best sections in any DMG I’ve ever read. When I play I am definitely a combination Instigator/Watcher depending on my mood.

So one of the reasons the PHB felt so light on rules is that a ton of what I’d expect to find in there – rules for flying, mounted combat, strange terrain etc – are all in the DMG. There is a lot of really good advice about how to run the game in the first couple of chapters of this book, though. I’ve heard people say the 4e DMG is valuable even if you don’t run D&D and they’re not wrong. I’ve finally got some stuff about monsters. The monster roles are really interesting and a good way of building encounters, and I like the symmetry between monster roles and character roles. Specific solo monsters designed to function like groups of 5 monsters is a really nice touch, too. The big solo enemy is a fun concept that often falls flat at the table. Obviously without playing the game and seeing stats I don’t know how well this worked but in theory I like it

This copy of the DMG is pre-owned and I just found this slip of paper from Gencon UK inside it marking the Encounter XP budgets tables.

4e does something that makes complete sense that isn’t repeated in many other games for reasons I don’t understand, and that’s (basically) matching monster power to character power. Monster level = character level and so 5 level 7 monsters is a good challenge for 5 7th level PCs. The encounter templates using different combinations of monster roles are really good, too. Honestly if this section and a handful of monsters was in the PHB you’d be good to go. I often see people complain that D&D spends so much time on rules for combat and doesn’t have mechanisms for anything else and the Skill Challenges seem like a good response to that. The example given, of PCs trying to convince a Duke of their trustworthiness, is a good example of social conflict interacting with mechanisms. The more I read of 4e the more I’m seeing how much Pathfinder 2 drew from it. Look how similar the format for hazards is in both games, for example

There’s a little chapter about artefacts, with some samples. The Hand and Eye of Vecna are here – unsurprisingly, since Vecna is in the pantheon – but I’m surprised the see the Axe of the Dwarvish Lords here. I have good memories of running that campaign in 2e

Monster design steps starts with “Choose the monster’s level”, as it should. I’ll never figure out why the 5e DMG fucked this up so badly by making calculating CR the last step. Random enckuntera are the last thing before we hit Fallcrest and the Nentir Vale, which I’m looking forward to reading.

All I’ll say is that any procedure for random enckunters that doesn’t account for surprise, distance, and reactions is rubbish. I take back everything good I said about 4e, there’s no Black Pudding in the monster manual

(another thing the game gets right is monster stat blocks being short and easy to parse, and putting monster ability scores at the bottom where they belong because you very rarely need them)

If you’ve enjoyed this post or found it useful I always appreciate tips on Ko-Fi.

This is a mirror of this Twitter thread, which was written in real time as I read Paranormal Inc. It hasn’t been edited in any way. You can pick up Paranormal Inc from Itch. 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 Alicia Furness in any way. Thanks for reading.

I don’t have it in me to read a 200+ page trad game today, but last night we finished our Brindlewood Bay campaign and now feels like an excellent time to sit down with @AliciaFurness‘ Carved From Brindlewood game, Paranormal Inc.!

If you’re new here, here’s what’s going to happen.

I’m going to read the game, and I’m going to talk about it while I do it. That’s it.

It’s not a review, it’s just a first look. I may get things wrong. I may ask rhetorical questions.

Here’s what I know about Paranormal Inc going in.

I’ve worked with Alicia a lot and we talk regularly. We wrote our own Brindlewood Bay hack – Bed, Breakfast, and Beyond – and we’re working on another one. I’m obviously primed to like this. I’ve read an early, pre-layout draft because I’m supposed to be writing a mystery as a stretch goal for the Kickstarter (I’m very late and that’s my fault). So I’m passingly familiar with the game already, though I haven’t dug into it in depth. I really love Brindlewood Bay, too. Last night was our finale and it was the most fun, satisfying end to a campaign I’ve ever had.

So yeah. I’m going into this expecting the like what I see.

Let’s go. First up, the art is fantastic. It just sells the tone of the game immediately.

Oh shit that’s my name in the credits. I should really finish that mystery.

Those little ghosts along the bottom of the pages are amazing.

The introduction does exactly what it needs to – it tells us what the game is about, and it sets the tone we can expect. I think especially with ghosts, that’s super important.

This Discord Has Ghosts In It has a really good section about the tone of paranormal activity, and the difference between a ghost and a poltergeist. Poltergeists bring violence, rage, and aggression to your game in a way that other ghosts don’t. So these pop-culture touchstones do a good job of telling us that this game should be light-hearted and spooky for the most part, not heavy and dangerous. The next page tells us about the history of the world – why there are ghosts here, how the industry of paranormal investigation came to be, and how it was undercut by massive corporations like Definitely Not Amazon.

You have a bare-bones crew – a Scientist, a Medium, a Skeptic, and a Bookworm. Because I’ve read it before I know that these are the main playbooks players will choose from. There’s also a resident Ghost and an Intern.

We also learn that all your gear is 20 years out of date. I’m so drawn to the idea of a bunch of scrappy ghost hunters with aging tech desperately trying to keep the lights on. I love the idea that ghosts have just become a pest. We’re rat catchers with lasers and spirit traps.

I also like the explicit framing that this is a sci-fi game. Sure, there’s supernatural shit happening, but there’s probably an explanation for it.

Our next section introduces us to the idea of GMless games, as well as pointing us to the things we’ll need to play and talking about safety tools.

There’s no “what is an RPG?” section. The game assumes you’re familiar with the medium, and I think that’s totally fair. On to The Basics, which are very straightforward.

You read a mystery, answer the establishing questions, then draw cards to generate Locations, Clues, NPCs, and paranormal events.

A game is played in three phases: Introduction, Investigation, and Resolution. Each mystery tells you how many Clues you need to solve it in the Resolution phase (in Brindlewood Bay terms, this is the Complexity).

And that’s it, aside from a brief note that characters have Moves that they’ll use during play. It’s very, very straightforward. Brindlewood Bay uses the trad setup of a GM with a mystery and a group of players who discover it through play, but Paranormal Inc. is GMless. Alicia has basically turned a deck of cards into the GM, and that requires some (very easy) setup. Before you play you’ll take a deck of cards, remove all the face cards, and split it into 4 shuffled piles of A-10, one for each suit.

These form your Location, Paranormal Event, NPC, and Clue decks.

There are also tips for how to play online, and a link to online cards. After set-up we get the basics of how the dice work, which I think most people reading this will already be anticipating because it’s PbTA – you roll dice when a Move is triggered, and it’s generally 2d6+Ability. 7+ is generally a hit and 6- a miss, but Moves are more specific. You also might sometimes roll with Advantage (roll 3 dice and keep the highest 2).

Most of the time you get Advantage by using equipment (which comes from your Backpack), or because a Move gives you advantage. The same goes for Disadvantage, which may be imposed by conditions or by card prompts listing temporary disadvantages. The next section tells us about Personal Hauntings, which replace Brindlewood Bay’s Crowns. These are a fictional currency that let you increase the result of a roll by one band (i.e. a 6- becomes a 7-9, a 7-9 becomes a 10, etc).

We aren’t yet shown exactly how Personal Hauntings work, other than that you can use them to experience death and violence without fully committing to it (because once you see the outcome you don’t like, you take a Haunting and raise your roll to a more beneficial one). If they’re anything like Brindlewood Bay’s Crowns, though, Personal Hauntings will involve narrating a specific scene from your character’s life and then marking it off on your sheet, and each character will have a limited number to use. We’ll see when we get there.

Before we find out more about Personal Hauntings, we’re given the structure of play. Most of the game takes place in the Introduction and Investigation phases. Players draw a Location card, answer the Establishing Question, and then draw a Paranormal Event for that Location. This basically kick-starts a scene, which you play out by investigating the room, talking to each other, and using Moves as appropriate. If it makes sense to draw an NPC card you do that, and when someone succeeds on the Discovery move you draw a Clue.

We haven’t fully been shown this yet, but one thing I really like about how the game works is that each Clue cars (and, IIRC, each Paranormal Event card) has three prompts on it. You always have choices in a scene, & you’re never stuck trying to force something to work that won’t.

The next section is an example of play, and it’s really good because – having played a lot of Brindlewood Bay – it very accurately represents what play actually looks like rather than an idealised version of it. One thing my group struggled with in Brindlewood Bay was expecting me to have all the answers already. They’d want to talk to a character to ask specific questions, rather than with the goal of gaining a clue, and it took a couple of sessions for them to adjust to that. This example of play shows us how it’s actually meant to work.

I also think the GMless angle helps with this, too. Nobody is going to cling on to the trad mindset that the GM knows everything because there’s no GM and everyone has the same level of information to hand. After a more detailed description of what to expect when you draw cards (i.e. look up the card on the prompt table and integrate what you’re told into the narrative) we move on to General Moves. These are the bread and butter of character action. The Risky Move maps almost exactly onto Brindlewood Bay’s Day and Night Moves, and it’s the main thing you’ll be using to resolve actions that aren’t linked to trying to find clues. You try to do something risky, and you either succeed or succeed with consequences.

The Ghostly Encounters move is a nice twist on the Cozy Move from Brindlewood, and something that I think will come up way more often. You use it to clear conditions, to deepen your relationships with other characters, and potentially to find clues. The Cozy move didn’t come up much for us, but because triggers when you encounter a ghost it feels much more useful. The Discovery Move is basically identical to The Meddling Move, and that’s 100% okay because that move does exactly what it needs to do to uncover clues.

The main difference is that we don’t have Void Clues here, so on a 12 or above you instead find 2 clues. (For those who don’t know, the larger framing device of Brindlewood Bay is that there’s a dark conspiracy involving a secret chthonic cult linking all the murders. As you uncover Void Clues in your investigations, you learn more about the conspiracy that’s unfolding.)

This piece of art is wonderful.

The Handbook Of The Recently Deceased move replaces the Gold Crown Mysteries move. Mechanically this is just a once-per-session 12+ on any roll, but fictionally it’s the most fun move in the game because you get to just make shit up that becomes fact in your world. It’s triggered by a player saying, “Inrwad about this in the Handbook of the Recently Deceased!” and then you work together to figure out what was in the book and how it’s relevant to the current situation.

It’s magic. The final general move is my favourite piece of PbtA tech, the real magic that makes Brindlewood Bay what it is.

The Theorize Move.

The text here is exactly the same as in Brindlewood Bay and that’s fine because as a move it’s perfect. Theorize happens when the Investigators have “an open, freewheeling discussion about the solution to a mystery based on the Clues they have uncovered and reach a consensus”. As a GM running Brindlewood Bay, I was always a little worried when we got to Theorize because I’d look at the list of clues and think, “how the hell can they link all of these into a solution?”

And every single week I was amazed at the things that the group came up with. Theorize took our games into places I never could have predicted or come up with myself. It’s the magic of group storytelling in one move – and when you roll and hit and your mad theory is right, it’s really satisfying. And that’s all of the basic moves! It’s nice and simple – the game doesn’t ask anybody to memorize loads of abilities or subsystems. The next section gets into The Anatomy Of A Mystery. I’m going to take a quick break from this to grab some lunch, and then I’ll get back to it. Okay we’re back and it’s Anatomy Of A Mystery time.

Mysteries are the core of the game. You can either play one of the pre-existing mysteries, or else write your own. With a traditional GMed game it’s fairly straightforward for a GM to just wing a session, but with a GMless game that’s not possible – which means you always need a mystery, so there will always be a base level of prep.

One thing I really like in Paranormal Inc. is the instruction to split up the work of prepping a mystery between all the players (if you’re writing your own mystery). This ensures that the task doesn’t fall to just one person, and that everyone can still be surprised.

Moving on to character creation, we find our first real difference between Paranormal Inc. and Brindlewood Bay – playbooks! Brindlewood Bay doesn’t have playbooks in the traditional sense. Instead, players choose an individual Maven move to distinguish their character.

We have four stats – Science, Wits, Vigour, and Intuition. We assign +1, 0, 0, and -1 to each stat, and then we modify one of them with a +1. Each playbook also has its own unique Personal Hauntings as opposed to the shared crowns of Brindlewood Bay, and I really like that. The way the playbooks are presented is really evocative. We get a two word description of what role each playbook fills, and an excerpt from the Book Of The Recently Deceased about them. Here are the playbooks:

The Scientist – Tests Things
The Skeptic – Doubts Things
The Medium – Senses Things
The Intern – Fetches Things
The Bookworm – Knows Things
The Ghost – Possesses Things

Let’s talk for a second about the way these characters are presented in art, too. We’ve got real variety in terms of body type, age, race. And the art is amazing and evocative all the way through this book, too.

Every playbook gets to choose 2 moves from a selection of 3 and they’re all great. Favourites include Experimental Technology, which gives you some untested tech that may or may not work; I Know Just The Person! that gives you a helpful NPC you can call on; and Filled With Regret

Filled With Regret is from the Ghost playbook, and says, “When you have a ghostly encounter, you may allow yourself to be possessed by the other ghost. Narrate a regretful memory for the ghost’s past. Then, mark a Personal Haunting to discover a Clue.”

Love. It. I haven’t really talked about the Personal Hauntings, but each playbook gets its own track and they’re all very evocative and really get into who these characters are. This is the Personal Haunting track for the Ghost.

The fact that the mysteries have lower complexities than Brindlewood Bay, there’s no Dark Conspiracy, and each playbook only gets 5 Personal Hauntings tells me that this is intended to be a shorter-lived game than Brindlewood Bay. And that’s fine! My Brindlewood campaign was very compressed – it lasted 6 sessions, which was too short for Brindlewood Bay really (we had to accelerate the dark conspiracy) but I think it would be perfect for Paranormal Inc.

The final section is Midnight Feast, a complexity 4 introductory mystery by Alicia. It takes place in the alley behind the Paranormal Inc headquarters, and involves investigators trying to make their new neighbours move on – either to the next world or another part of town. It’s a fun mystery with some really cool prompts and clues that I’m not going to spoil here, because this is likely to be the first mystery people play – and you should absolutely play Paranormal Inc. I really like this game.

If there’s one thing I’d like to see in it that isn’t there, it’s more stuff around the Paranormal Inc. headquarters itself. Brindlewood Bay centres itself around the room at the top of the Candlelight Booksellers, and I found that fleshing that space out and returning to it often really grounded the characters in the world. BUT most of that work of fleshing out that space is done by mysteries, not the game text itself, and so this is only the most minor of…not even criticism, really, just vague wish for something else. And it’s easily fixed in play by asking a few questions about the space. And that’s the game! There are more mysteries available, and more to come in future (whenever I turn mine in – sorry Alicia )

You can grab it in print here (and you should, the zine is gorgeous).

Or in PDF here.

If you enjoyed this post please consider leaving a tip at Ko-Fi.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Enjoyed this post? Buy me a Ko-Fi!

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.

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.

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.

This is a mirror of this Twitter thread, which was written in real time as I read Pathfinder 2nd Edition. It hasn’t been edited in any way. If you decide to pick up Pathfinder 2e I’d appreciate it if you considered using my affiliate link, which lets 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.

Saw a thread a few days ago talking about 5 strengths of Pathfinder 2e that took me from “not at all interested” to… Well…

Going to peruse it and maybe leave some thoughts in thread as I read but

A) this isn’t a review and
B) I don’t have the spoons for a discussion so while you’re welcome to reply, I might ignore it

Immediate thought: I hate D&D model of calling something a core rulebook but not including everything you need to play the game. Put monsters in your core rules if your game features monsters heavily.

Especially Pathfinder, where the monster designs are so cool. Show that off! You gain a level every 1000 XP. I’m curious to know what XP is awarded for, in that case. My guess is that it’s no longer tied to killing things or that the CR/monster xp system has been drastically reworked. That’s interesting. And we’ve dropped Race in favour of Ancestry.

Good. Crit successes and failures on skill checks exist which is an interesting decision. I like the pass/fail by 10 or more as a crit thing. I already don’t like “not all checks have a special effect on a crit”. We’re on page 10 and already introducing edge cases and complexities. We’ve got the Proficiency bonus and since it’s Pathfinder there’s maths involved.

Your Proficiency bonus = your Proficiency rank (2, 4, 6, or 8) and your level. And then you add your ability modifier, too. So that’s 3 modifiers to every roll. Part of me hates this and part of me loves that you immediately get better at things just by levelling up. I’d have to play it to know how I actually feel

We’ve got three Actions per round, plus a Reaction, and Free Actions. I’m a fan of three Actions per round; two can often feel limiting, and in 5e terms most characters get a bonus action of some kind anyway and functionally do 3 things per round. Little quality of life things I like: Attack Actions are called Strikes. So much confusion is caused by the capital-A Attack action Vs ‘attack’ as a verb so this is a nice adjustment. Proficiency affects AC.

Yay, more maths. Multiple Strikes on a round incur increasing penalties to hit which…okay, fine. I’m sure there’s classes and feats that don’t do this so you get to feel special.

BurnBryte still has the best system for handling multiple actions each turn. Downtime mechanisms being right up front in the rules is fun, and I like that it’s got retraining built into it. Pathfinder has always had a culture of RAW among its player base so this heads off dickhead GMs forcing you to stick to choices you aren’t happy with. Very interested to get to the downtime section and see what’s actually going on but I’m not going to skip ahead. We’re still using Level to refer to character levels (and monster levels – I guess CR is gone) and Spell Levels and I hate that and will always hate that.

Pick a new name for spell levels. It’s needlessly confusing for people. There’s a lot to be said for the visual consistency of Paizo’s products over the years, btw. If you showed me a random page of this book I’d know it was Paizo. If feels like I’m reading Dragon magazine again. They buried the lede when they were talking about Actions. “Casting a spell is an activity that usually uses two actions”. WHY

I really hate this whole “you can only cast one spell per turn” nonsense and don’t have the energy to get into why right now. But I hate it. Something in the example of play that hasn’t been mentioned yet: secret checks that the GM rolls for the players.

Looking for traps is a secret check & tbh I like that. It immediately that nonsense of someone failing a roll and everyone else immediately making the same check. This is actually a cool example of play as it’s introducing rules concepts we haven’t encountered yet in an organic way. Initiative isn’t a straight Dexterity check, it’s based on what you’re doing at the start of combat. So you can roll Stealth for initiative if you’re hiding. Okay, had an extended break to do chores but I’M BACK BABY

I really like these symbols, they’re nice and clear and I can imagine having your character’s abilities on a deck of cards and just playing them on the table each round to keep track of what you’ve done.

My only gripe is that I know I’d get that Free Action symbol confused with Single Action. The stat blocks for actions, feats, etc really remind me of the way Powers were presented in 4e. Nice and clear and, in theory, unambiguous

On the other hand, this crowded character sheet breaks my brain:

“All the steps of character creation are […] Marked with a number that corresponds to the sample character sheet […] Showing you where the information goes. If the field you need to fill out is on the 3rd or 4th page of the character sheet, which aren’t shown…”

Show them. If you’re going to give a visual example of something like a complex character sheet it’s not good enough to only give visuals for half of the sheet. Don’t do half a job

So we changed Race to Ancestry but we still have bioessentialism in the form of heritage-based Ability Boosts and Ability. Cool. Cool cool cool. Very interesting that rolling ability scores is relegated to an alternative method. Abilities as standard are built by plugging in numbers from your Ancestry, Background, and Class, and then boosting another 4 of your choice. I can definitely see the benefit in a game so obsessed with maths and balance of having everybody start on a level playing field like this, and I prefer it to a point buy system, but you’ll never get me to stop rolling ability scores where I have the option.

I can’t begin to explain the extent to which is this diagram breaks my brain.

I’m skipping this section because if my short-lived Naming The Faceless series taught me anything it’s that I can’t parse character creation instructions just by reading them, I need to physically male a character, and that’s not something I’m about to do. I do like how many Ancestry Feat options you get at first level. There’s a lot of variance here outside of class abilities and that’s really cool. I really like the Titan Slinger feat that Halflings can choose and I don’t know why I like this one specifically. It’s fun though

Interesting that Half Elves and Half Orcs are subtypes of Human

Very weird that there’s only one 1st Level half elf feat Vs five for half orcs

In fact the number of half elf feat seems really, really limited compared to every other Ancestry. One 1st Level feat and two 5th Level and that’s it. Weird.

Pathfinder art is just fun, isn’t it?

I like that the Class entries explicitly call out what role these classes play in combat, in social encounters, while exploring, and in downtime. One thing I’ll say for 2e is that it’s doing a good job of telling me what they expect a standard Pathfinder game to look like. D&D doesn’t really do that – it often reads like it’s built with the expectation that you already know how to play. Pathfinder doesn’t seem to be making that assumption here. I also really like how many sample builds they give you for each class so you can get an idea of how to take these abilities and make something interesting.

As much as it’s maths-heavy and rules dense, I think this book does a good job of hand-holding players. Personally I find it easy to feel overwhelmed by big games and I’m honestly not really getting that here, which is nice

Lol I say “all these sample characters are great” and then I hit the Bard, generally my preferred class, and there’s only one sample.

The lack of consistency with this stuff bothers me. Either I’ve missed something, or this Concentrate tag hasn’t been explained anywhere yet. This is the first time I’ve hit something where I’ve bounced off because I don’t know what it means. To the Glossary!

“Concentrate [trait] An action with this trait requires a degree of mental concentration or disclipline.”

That’s not helpful. Is this a mechanical effect? Is it just flavour? I have no idea.

Having looked everywhere I can conceivably think of for a definition of “Concentrate” in game terms…there isn’t one. I assume it doesn’t have a mechanical effect and it’s just there to tell the GM “this can’t be done under pressure” but that isn’t spelled out anywhere. This is one of those things where in a rules light game, it wouldn’t matter. But Pathfinder is crunchy. It has rules for every eventuality. It expects you to play RAW. And the fact that this tag exists but isn’t defined is a problem. Still, it took 200+ pages for me to hit something like this, so that’s good going really

If you’re about to roll into my replies [or my comments on this blog] to explain something to me: Don’t.

I hate this paragraph, to be honest. It’s the “just homebrew it” thing all over again. This is a mechanically complex game. Why are we meant to accept “these rules might not work” 440+ pages into a 600 page book?

This is always the problem with dense games and it’s one of the reasons I don’t play them often. The more rules you have the more weird interactions there are. There’s simultaneously less room for interpreting rules as you see fit but also more need for it when they fail. Feeling a need to slap a big IN MY OPINION sticker on those last couple of tweets despite that being self-evident

I’m onto the Playing The Game section now. I’ve heard from a few people that they struggle with the +10 over DC crits because they need to account for two possible degrees of success (and similarly for fail) and that’s really interesting to me. As someone who’s played a lot of FitD and PbtA games, degrees of success isn’t something I struggle with but I remember finding it a bit weird when I first started playing those kinds of games having only been used to binary success/failure in D&D. What helped me was the PbtA phrasing of mixed success and full success, and I wonder why PF2e has gone with Success and Critical Success Vs mixed success and full success.

(Obviously the answer is “because Crits are already a thing in PF1e”)

But I wonder how much easier this would be for people who are only used to binary pass/fail if it was couched in terms that are closer to PbtA, rather than using the language of Critical Success and failure. Anyway, back to the actual mechanics.

I like that a natural 1 or 20 isn’t an instant pass/fail but rather just changes the result by a degree of success. I bet there’s a learning curve with that for people used to 1e and D&D, though. Three pages to explain how to deal damage.

Ahhh, Pathfinder. I’m honestly not sure why the game needs both Emanation and Burst effects. Bursts go from the corner of a square, and Emanations go from each side of your square, so they’re slightly different (Emanations are slightly bigger) but… Yeah. I don’t see the need, to be honest. It seems like needless complexity. I guess an Emanation is contingent on the size of the creature creating it – a Large creature Emanates from 4 squares and a Medium creature from 1 – whereas a Burst always goes from a single spot.

But still. I don’t like it. I do quite like the death mechanics in this game. The push/pull of increasing and decreasing your Dying condition feels way more gripping than e.g. 5e’s Best Of 5 Death Saves. Yes, it’s more bookkeeping, but I like it. I do question why it took until page 460 to learn about Hero Points, though.

Got to the Downtime section that I was so interested in. It’s a single page that basically says “you can swap equivalent feats and Skills that you aren’t happy with during downtime”. Which is fine, and refreshingly light on rules for this game. It’s a shame that Downtime is explicitly called out as one of the three modes of play at the start of the book and only gets a page, though. All the interesting stuff is under this one paragraph that just says, “Ask your GM”

The Game Mastering section opens with safety tools, stuff about the social contract and discussing what kind of content will be in the game, and explicit instructions that Pathfinder PCs should never engage in torture, rape, sexual assault, harm to children, or slavery. That’s good

There’s also sidebars about safety tools and about including characters with disabilities. I’m not qualified to speak on whether that sidebar is any good or not, but I think it’s fair to say that it’s good that a major game like this bothered to include something like that. Finally my questions about XP and encounter building are answered. This isn’t too dissimilar to the way encounters are built in PF1 and 5e, really. Without a bestiary in the book, though, this is all largely academic. I am aware that the book points you to a website with monsters, which I haven’t looked at, but again I’m saying PUT A BESTIARY IN YOUR CORE RULES IF YOUR GAME IS ABOUT KILLING THINGS. And before anyone tells me this game isn’t about killing things, I direct you to page 488:

“The most common type of encounter is a combat encounter, where the PCs face other creatures.”

The book explicitly tells us that most of the time we play we’re expected to be interacting with this specific part of the game, and then doesn’t give us everything we need to run that part of the game. You will never convince me not to hate that. I’m glad that magic items and traps are given so much space in here. Honestly if this book had some monsters it would be everything you need to run the game and that’s great. It’s a big improvement over the 3 book D&D model. But still not quite there.

Anyway I think I like Pathfinder 2e? I’ll have to play it to be sure but there’s very little in here that I immediately bounced off, so that’s cool. Maybe I’ll fuck around and build a character at some point.

This is a mirror of this Twitter thread, which was written in real time as I read Pathfinder 2nd Edition. It hasn’t been edited in any way. If you decide to pick up Pathfinder 2e I’d appreciate it if you considered using my affiliate link, which lets 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.