RPGPundit Reviews: Other Worlds

This is a review of the "Other Worlds" game, written by Mark Humphreys, published by Signal 13 press.  Its a review of the print edition, which features a full-colour cover with a variety of multi-genre people and things (zombies, high tech babe with a gun, swashbuckler with a cool scar, some kind of mecha/battlesuit, a zeppelin, a superhero, spaceship, galleon, etc).  The cover art is not of bad quality, but its the classic cover that screams "this is a multi-genre game" of the sort you used to see a lot of in the 90s (obviously, it reminds me a bit of a GURPS cover), and so it feels just slightly corny, though I guess it gets the point across. The interior is sparsely illustrated with black-and-white drawings, mostly of fairly good quality, again covering a variety of genres and mostly consisting of heroic or villainous figures in a variety of heroic or villainous poses.

The game sells itself as a "roleplaying game of heroic action and adventure for any genre".  Sadly, the part I take issue with there is "roleplaying game", as it seems pretty clear on reading it that this book is a storygame; and an odd choice of one at that.  It isn't about dying holocaust victims or sexually-repressed Victorian university professors, so I guess it qualifies as some kind of attempt to make a storygame that bridges the gap into a territory that isn't trying to be edgy for its own sake.  Unfortunately, that does nothing to stop it from still very much being a game about creating story, rather than roleplaying in an emulated world. This isn't just speculation on my part either, the very first sentence you get from the author in his description of "how to play" the game says it explicitly: "the purpose of playing Other Worlds is to tell a story".

The layout of the game isn't bad. The writing isn't bad, in the sense that it isn't technically poor; nor is it full of excessively byzantine description or jargon. It isn't even wrong. Its just not good, really not good. I can't explain why, but for some reason I struggled massively with the writing in this book; my eyes just kept wanting to slide off the page. I can't explain the "why" of it, it wasn't any single thing; I'd never experienced anything quite like it in a reading for review.  Omnifray or Alpha/Omega were difficult because of the complexity of their rules, for example, or a game like Dread (the Jenga one) because of how unspeakably pretentious I found it; but this one was for no real discernible reason.  It was an experience I only had similar context with in reading technical manuals, microsoft "help" files, or occasionally university textbooks on subjects I really didn't want to take. Nor would I attribute this to it being a storygame; I've reviewed plenty of worse, more pretentious, more ridiculous storygames without this problem.


So, the book starts by talking about how Other Worlds is an exercise in collective story-making, thus proving its misappropriated the term "roleplaying game". It goes on right after that with an explanation about how its "really not fair" if the GM can just do what they like with the rules. Its noted from that point that in the book, for pronoun purposes, the players will be referred to in the masculine, the GM in the feminine. Make of that what you will.
The game then proceeds to provide a rule synopsis that I really had to struggle through reading, and that failed to explain the rules appropriately at all, except in the sense of "you choose the stakes, the group collectively decides if its worth bothering with, and then in some way you work out some kind of rating that is not explained in the synopsis, and roll a d100 to determine the winner".

Let's see if "Key Principles" are any better at explaining things: we're told in this section that "anything can be an ability", "anything can be a conflict" and that the "group owns the setting" (as opposed to the GM), and that these are sort of the holy trinity of the game, I guess. It sounds dangerously like a game about nothing, but I stopped caring after the rules synopsis.

The chapter on Worldbuilding makes it clear that the GM is not to choose the setting of the game either (though the author generously concedes that the GM can make "suggestions"... and just to clarify, what would happen if the rest of the group outvoted him? Does the author expect that the GM will run a campaign setting he despises?).  After a basic concept is chosen, the whole group works together, in the classic idiotic notion held dear by college academics and soviet bureaucrats alike that design-by-committee always produces the best results; working step by step as a group to create a setting where everything must be agreed upon collectively: the setting, history, geography, technology, magic, factions, conflicts, characters, character power levels, how long the game will be, what supporting characters will be used, what future adventures will look like, even the opening scene; everything is decided jointly by the Political Commisarry, presumably while a gun is fixed to the GM's child's or pet's head, to make sure he or she will run whatever the players fucking well tell him or her to run.  Because of course, we all know that the best "stories" have always come from the work of steering groups with individual veto power, and never by the evil creative genius of selfish individuals with a vision.

Apparently there are some kind of mechanics for characters; one of these decisions of the Comintern are the "power level" of the PCs, which can range from 10 (for child characters) to 50 (for legends and demigods).  At this point in the reading, I still had no idea what those numbers meant. They can also have "trademarks", or not. Trademarks are what are used for special abilities and powers, and you can have between 0 and 2 of them.

Seriously, I really love how this guy writes about planning things like the length of the campaign; it really makes me believe the guy has never actually participated in anything even vaguely resembling an RPG in his life.  Maybe he's played some story games, but aren't their "Campaigns" usually an average of 1 session long?  I guess that would explain it.

The "Character Generation" section continues with the assertion that "you can be pretty well anything".  Let me say, in most generic games, there are two serious problems with that kind of claim; first, any generic game worth shit is only going to be worth shit within a certain range.  Its true of GURPS, it was true of D20, its true of BRP.  Of course, games not worth shit aren't worth shit within any range of genre or power level, which is already pretty well my conclusion of this non-roleplaying game.  Second, though, the claim itself "You can be anything!", or the broader "what kind of campaign can you play with Other Worlds? ANY kind!" is pretty well a pointless statement.  It provides no guideline at all that translates into something feasible in terms of useful information transmitted to the reader.  Its like if I were to ask you "How could I become a millionaire?" and you said "you could do it all kinds of ways!", possibly true, but useless as data.  
Anyways, I guess one typical storygame trait I can't accuse Other Worlds of having is that of being a "micro-game".  I suspect that the Forgies wouldn't approve, but I really don't think I'm who to judge about the value of any Storygame as a Storygame.  I review RPGs; which this game, by virtue of not being one, fails pretty miserably at.

So what you do, in any case, for creating characters is to choose concept and personal details first of course, and then pick a set of "Templates", general abilities, personality traits, relationships, goals and flaws to fit that concept.  These various abilities all begin at the "assigned power level" (10-50 as mentioned above) and then a few of them are modified up or down a bit.

Finally, you create a "supporting character" that the GM is obliged to use in the game, and prologue that the GM must use to introduce the character into the Story, and finally you start with 3 Spotlight Points.  Of course, these last points are the REAL mechanic of the Storygame, the points you spend and gain in different ways to allow you to control the Story itself.  The rest is all purely descriptive.

The back cover claims that the book has "Over 100 ready-to-use Character Templates", these "templates" are not sample characters, or even semi-complete character packages like you see in some games; they're just archetypes listed with a number of possible abilities, traits and relationships for the player to choose to add to his character.

"Conflict resolution" is generally handled with a broad brush, with the stakes widely determined, the final goal of the player being stated, the cost of failure being established beforehand; in other words everything an RPG is not: deciding before anything is rolled what is happening, how its going to be resolved, explicitly, and only then rolling some dice to see whether the story told is of "failure" or "success".  We are additionally told not to even bother with dice-rolling if the group (again, we're explicitly told its NOT the GM's call) thinks that it would be more interesting if the player just succeeds (the one bone a GM is thrown is that they can try to call for an automatic failure if the thing the player is describing would be "objectively impossible" in the story).
Anyways, in the event dice are to be rolled, the scene is resolved by various abilities being added in different ways (50% of one score plus 10% of two other abilities, just to be stupidly complex about it), plus various possible circumstantial modifiers, plus a d100 roll, compared to the "opposition rating" which is usually either a value between 1-3 times the "base power level" of the game, or a roll calculated as above if the opposition is from another active individual. The higher result wins, with different possible margin of victory available.  Note that any player who's character loses a conflict gains a spotlight point.

Its generally assumed that most conflicts will be resolved by a single roll to determine the whole thing (ie. the stakes being "I shoot the three guys in front of me dead" or something like that).  However, the option also exists to do a "set piece scene" where you break everything down into a series of much smaller conflict rolls (ridiculously termed "sub-conflict rolls"), like the kind of combat sequence you might find in a real RPG.  The chapter ends with the sage advice that you should never let things like "tactics or realism" be what determines the events of the story, but rather "dramatic logic".  

Aside from losing conflicts, you gain spotlight points whenever the group feels you have entertained the group with your story-making skills, or when a supporting character of yours is removed permanently from play.  You can spend Spotlight points to improve character abilities, but this is detailed only secondly to what seems to be the main raison d'etre of the mechanic: to let you control the setting (that is, the "Story").  You can spend spotlight points to let you use way more ability scores for resolving a conflict than normal, to let you switch around the die roll result (that is, a 35 becomes a 53 or vice-versa), or to re-roll a conflict that you failed.  The player advice section which follows tell the players that they can certainly play out their characters, but that its also important to "be the active AUTHOR of your character's story rather than merely a witness to it", and that they should try to "construct your character's actions from an omniscient point of view". Players are also reminded that they have "narrative authority" and should use it to create the world they are "actively exploring".

There's a section on GMing as well, that explains that the GM's job is mostly to help develop the supporting cast, set up initial plot threads and story hooks, and do all the prep work. He (or "she", I guess) is commanded to "give the character's leverage"; the author seriously suggests that it is best if "dangerous secrets and powerful weapons should just fall into their laps" and "they should always seem to be at the right place at the right time", because we wouldn't want the little divas to have face any meaningful challenges, right? That might lead to roleplaying! Heavens forfend!

The GM is told to "present the players with hard choices", usually where they have to compare and conflict certain themes of their character against one another to help decide what they really value (classic Forge bullshit), but the GM is warned to "always leave some way for characters to turn things around" because "your job at this point is simply to take the player's decision and run with it".  The GM is ordered in big letters to RESPECT PLAYER AGENCY, even though the players are regularly told to shit all over any illusion of control the GM might have (seriously, what the fuck is the point of being a "GM" in a Forge game? I suppose its an exercise in masochism). He's also told, I shit you not, to "LET THEIR PLANS WORK", and that you must not let "your hang-ups about verisimilitude or challenge get in the way" as "this is a game about stories and characters, not strategies or tactics".  There's even a deeply ironic section about the "GM's veto", where its made explicit that the GM doesn't actually have one, and must only act in accordance to what the group allows him to judge (being told "yours is a position of trust, not authority").  Again, making it abundantly clear that THIS IS NOT A ROLEPLAYING GAME.  Sadly, that last bit in all capitals is my own, and does not appear anywhere in the book itself, the author being too much of a chickenshit to dare to try to have the game survive on its own when its so much simpler to try to parasitically leech off of a more successful hobby.

Right. At this point I'm officially sick of this game; there's a few other sections about adapting character creation and conflict-resolution to particular genres, and some guidelines to that, but who really gives a fuck? I know I don't. The game amounts to a bullshit system that's meaningless in the light of the meta-rules that reduce everything to a collectivist circle-jerk where story overrules everything. Why even have a goddamn system, then?  I guess that's the part I don't grasp about Storygames: RPG mechanics are meant to provide a set of internal rules that govern the functioning of an emulated world and the characters in them, but what the fuck are storygame mechanics for?! If the goal is creating a story and not emulating a world, wouldn't the best way of achieving that be to just tell stories together without any kind of a mechanic at all?  I guess that's why Twilight Fan-fiction is immensely popular, and Forge games are immensely not.

So, to sum up.  This is not an RPG in any way, but the author insists on misrepresenting it as such.  So if he sent this to me to judge it as an RPG, I'd have to give it a rating of Absolutely Fucking Horrible.  As I already mentioned, I don't think anyone would believe I'm qualified to judge it as a storygame, but I strongly suspect that most Storygamers would find this game insufficiently pretentious (though they'll probably enjoy the constant appeals to design-by-committee and the ceaseless GM-bashing of the text), and I really think from what I know about Storygamers that "generic and universal" is not really their cup of tea. So I suspect Other Worlds would fail on that front too, but that's for a gang of pretentious fuckwits to decide; over in whatever rock the last of this fortunately endangered breed of Swine are waiting it out until the next attempt to subvert our RPG hobby with pseudo-intellectual drivel should rear its ugly head.

If you're a roleplayer, rather than a storygamer, don't buy this game. Enough said.

RPGPundit

I'm always surprised when these guys send you storygames to review. They have to know what you're going to say.

I think there's two possible motivations.  In the first place, there's guys who are sure I'm going to give them a terrible review, but they are banking on the Pundit Bump nonetheless, figuring anything that brings attention to their product is good (and if you base it on the comments of some of the people who I've given negative reviews to, that's in fact true).

Then there's the other guys, who are convinced that their game will be the exception, that I'll think its actually a great game somehow and that it does a good job of being an RPG in spite of being based on Forge theories or whatever.

I think in this case, it was the latter situation.

RPGPundit

This game is similar to many simple microgames I bought and played something like 10-20 years ago (I mostly remember Syndicate by Kalle Marjola). Basic system was that anything was supposed to be average with exceptional attributes and skills marked with special bonuses. It works here in the same way with Abilities and Traits).

However, what worked in "Cinematic" game by Marjola has been an utter failure here. Reason is that there is no real description or list of typical abilities. Thus system is very open to abuse by vague abilities (I'd like to be "very smart" with ability level 50 and then drive GM crazy). Similarly the stereotypical traits are not really skills either. "Fight Dirty" of Sheridan Heist does not really tell what to do in "fair fight" or ordinary meatgrinder called combat.

The consensus world and character building does work (I do this a lot by listening players) but only if group has strong vision and GM holds ultimate veto. Otherwise we are going to see wildly different power levels and thus plenty of headaches to poor GM (not to mention whole idea of giving candy to players all the time?!).

All and all this looks like something that works as slim 24 page pamphlet intended for a rainy night game with friends in a summer cottage. It does not work beyond that.

Thanks for the review!

Covers for generic games are always tricky. There are basically two ways to go - something symbolic, like the HERO system, or some kind of collage. I went with the latter option primarily to show off Storn Cook's art skills; for a small publisher 'symbolic' covers look dangerously close to 'I have no good art' rather than being a deliberate design choice.  

I'm not sure I understand what your issue was with the writing style. I've not had any other feedback along those lines and in fact a lot of people have been very complimentary about the quality of the writing. I spent a lot of time on the writing and editing (seriously, find one single typo in the whole book, I dare you!) so I'd be interested if you could expand on that point.

Quote from: RPGPundit;543878a game about creating story, rather than roleplaying in an emulated world.

I think this is entirely accurate. I don't buy into the idea that storygames are not roleplaying games, I think that they are a type of roleplaying games. But either way Other Worlds certainly does fall into that category. World emulation is a part of the game, and different groups will focus on this to different extents, but it is secondary to creating a story.

I want to address the issue of my gaming experience. I'm primarily a D&D player and I'm in a weekly group with other primarily-D&D players. We've been playing the same characters in the same ongoing campaign since 1991, having switched from 2e to 3e to 4e in the process. We tend to do an adventure or so of this, then switch to another game for a while, then go back to the main campaign. Usually this side game has been Other Worlds, but recently we've also played AD&D 2nd edition and Shadowrun. This week we did some playtesting for D&D 5.

I think this is the context Other Worlds should be seen in. It's a storygame that's designed to be played by normal, regular roleplayers in short to medium-length campaigns (about 12-15 sessions) as an occasional detour from their other games. It's specifically a game to break out when you want to do some storygaming with your friends, only you want to do it about fantasy, science fiction, and Hollywood action movies rather than the holocaust, poverty, and animal cruelty. I've never found 'design by committee' to be a problem; on the contrary, my players love being able to make up things about the gameworld and decide what the consequences of a failed roll might be. And I love GMing it too, it creates a very different experience from the more traditional 'top-down' style of roleplaying that we normally enjoy.

For those of you who might be interested in knowing more about Other Worlds, you can download a free preview PDF from DriveThruRPG here

Interesting, I came to a slightly different conclusion to you Pundit.

I bought the PDF mainly because of chatter about the games which got me intrigued in the character creation elements. (I'm a sucker for create your own ability/stat character creation, I'm constantly searching for the holy grail of balanced mechanics which don't suffer from the imbalance of too broad/too narrow choices that most of these types of games suffer from).

After reading through it a few times, my feeling was it is a fairly traditional RPG with a thick veneer of storygame advice and terminology. Once you scrape that stuff off, there is little mechanical reinforcement of a story game agenda. You could, if you really wanted to, play a fairly traditional game with the mechanics pretty much as written.

I got little impression that the 'setting the stakes' mechanic was pre-deterministic or was story game orientated in any sense. While it can certainly be used that way (and the play advice pushes that agenda), the actual mechanic, isolated from the advice on how to use it, does not promote a story centric approach in my opinion. I'd say, from a storygamers perspective, its probably quite weak sauce, (I wouldn't describe myself as a fan of storygames by the way so my perspective on that may be out of whack, maybe a storygamer would think its a strong storygame mechanic... who knows?)

Its no more pre-deterministic as far as I could see, than a d20 combat roll (you fail the roll and miss, or succeed and hit, now apply a damage roll), the difference here, in Other Worlds, is its applied to a macro conflict rather than individual blows.

Setting the stakes simply sets the baseline of failure and success conditions for the roll. The GM has carte blanche, according to the rules, to interpret that once the roll has been made and you have the margin of success to apply to it. So if the margin of success was high the GM is free to interpret the 'stakes of success' agreed in that context, if the margin of success was low then the character may not get all that they negotiated with the GM in 'setting the stakes'. The same applies for failures. The rules are pretty explicit about the GM having carte blanche to interpret the stakes in the context of the margin of success and failure, so its not really as story orientated as you represent in your review, at least in my opinion, but maybe I'm just splitting hairs!

I don't see a great deal of difference, mechanically, between the micro conflict  'blow by blow' resolution of DnD and the macro conflict resolution of Other Worlds. In the former most of 'the stakes' to use the Other Worlds terminology are already set to some degree until you resolved the to-hit roll and rolled damage dice etc. In Other Worlds the 'stakes' are negotiated between player and GM but again aren't really set until you have rolled the conflict and have a margin of success or failure and even then its down to the GM to interpret that. While you may like or dislike the mechanic of 'setting the stakes' and the macro level of resolution, I don't see that mechanic as pushing a particularly storygame agenda. The advice that goes with it is another story (no pun intended! ).

The main other storygame elements are;

the fact players characters would rarely, if ever die, according to the rules, unless the player chose to. If I did play this game (thats a big if!!!) thats the first thing I would change.

and the auto success rule which you mention, this works similar to the Take Twenty rule in DnD3e without any die rolling! Essentially if there is no real consequence to failure then you automatically succeed. The exact circumstances in which this rule is invoked is:

Failure would be extremely unlikely, or
Failure would not be interesting, or
you want to push on to with the story and get to other, even more exciting conflicts.

That's the rule books words, not mine by the way. Again this is dressed up in story games terminology and philosophy (the use of the word 'interesting' and 'story' being the main culprits here), but if we stick with a traditional RPG interpretation, its not too difficult to interpret in a traditional sense similar to the taking twenty rule. Again, it very weakly pushes a storygame agenda, I find it hard to believe a real storygamer would find this a very compelling storygame mechanic in use!

The rest is mainly advice on how to use the mechanics, which is pretty much all written through a storygame lens.

I have bigger beef with the actual mechanics of the RPG. Its a d100 + modifiers, opposed roll system for every 'conflict', whether that conflict is 'climbing a cliff' or 'fighting an ork', the GM rolls the opposed roll based on the difficulty of the cliff or the abilities of the ork. So lots of statistical granularity.

Most of the modifiers are from the characters Abilities which are almost always a multiple of 10, so simply 1d100 +30+10+10-10 etc so the addition isn't complex. However why would you choose a d100 mechanic when your abilities and modifiers are simple multiples of 10 (most of the time). Why not get rid of the granularity and the additional complexity and use a d10 or d20? OK you might need to adjust some of the other rules, the flip-flop Spotlight point mechanic for instance, but still, why use a d100 mechanic? The mechanics make no use of that level of granularity. You could easily use a d20 or d10 and get pretty much the same result. I think this is poor design.

I quite like the freeform 'player creates their own stats' style character creation, and I think the way those abilities work mechanically is interesting. The author has tried to tackle the issue of too broad/too vague abilities syndrome that such a system can suffer from with, what seems on paper, a nice mechanic, though I'm not sure how well it would work in practice. I may crib this for an RPG idea of my own.

In summary I think its a fairly rules light RPG with some deep flaws and omissions in mechanics and a very liberal slathering of story-game terminology and advice. The game suffers from being pulled in two directions, most of the mechanics are fairly traditional but its all dressed up with storygame terminology and storygame play advice.

You could play this as a fairly rules light traditional RPG, but... well, why would you? You could play this as a storygame if you were so inclined but again... with very weak storygame orientated rules why would you? The actual mechanics to support story driven play are pretty weak and amount to reinterpreted traditional RPG mechanics with the storygame orientated advice, rather than any strong storygame orientated mechanic.

Ultimately it suffers from not being one or the other regardless of your preference.

What do you think Pundit?

Quote from: It was all a mistake;544940Most of the modifiers are from the characters Abilities which are almost always a multiple of 10, so simply 1d100 +30+10+10-10 etc so the addition isn't complex. However why would you choose a d100 mechanic when your abilities and modifiers are simple multiples of 10 (most of the time). Why not get rid of the granularity and the additional complexity and use a d10 or d20?

Hi, thanks for the post.

The game uses a d100 so it can accommodate a high level of granularity. One of the foundations of the game is that characters have lots of abilities and, at least on the more important conflicts, all of them can come into play. However statistically insignificant they are, they can all still make some small difference to the final result (thus incentivising players to use them).

If you used a d10 or a d20 the issue you would get is that the smallest possible modifier is +1. If every single ability is worth at least 5 or 10% of the overall dice range, it becomes a lot easier to just lock the other side out of the conflict altogether by simply accumulating more relevant traits than they can. Close matches would become automatic successes or failures at the drop of a hat, particularly in conflicts where one side already has a significantly higher rating than the other.

The alternative to this would be to put in some kind of restriction on which abilities can contribute, either by making the '3 supporting abilities' rule a fixed and unavoidable part of the system or by setting some kind of minimum height requirement for which abilities can contribute. Either way you are greatly restricting the number of abilities that can be brought into play at any one time, which is directly counter to one of the explicit design goals of the system.

Hi Soviet,

Sorry, I missed your comment in the thread when I was writing my comment. If its any consolation, while I have my own doubts about the game in general (see my post above), I thought the writing of it was top notch. I liked the style and the tone immensely, a very easy read and didn't have any of the problems RPGPundit did.

Just out of curiosity why did you go with the d100 mechanic, is there something I'm missing?

Also, apart from the play and GM advice, there seems to be little mechanically, in my reading, that pushes a story based game.

What I mean is, it seems to me the likelihood of getting a good story (which is I assume the purpose of a storygame) thats any better than fan fiction is just as likely or unlikely as a traditional game based on the mechanics. There is nothing mechanically that would objectively improve the likelihood of a good story being the result fo the game, at least as far as I could see.

I've always felt, that if its story your interested in, you could use just about any RPG you were comfortable using and simply use the approach and methodology you describe in the GM/Player advice, but maybe I'm wrong.

Thanks for dropping by, its a tough audience here! Especially for self described story games

Edit: Bugger just posted after your response!!

Quote from: soviet;544956Hi, thanks for the post.

The game uses a d100 so it can accommodate a high level of granularity. One of the foundations of the game is that characters have lots of abilities and, at least on the more important conflicts, all of them can come into play. However statistically insignificant they are, they can all still make some small difference to the final result (thus incentivising players to use them).

If you used a d10 or a d20 the issue you would get is that the smallest possible modifier is +1. If every single ability is worth at least 5 or 10% of the overall dice range, it becomes a lot easier to just lock the other side out of the conflict altogether by simply accumulating more relevant traits than they can. Close matches would become automatic successes or failures at the drop of a hat, particularly in conflicts where one side already has a significantly higher rating than the other.

The alternative to this would be to put in some kind of restriction on which abilities can contribute, either by making the '3 supporting abilities' rule a fixed and unavoidable part of the system or by setting some kind of minimum height requirement for which abilities can contribute. Either way you are greatly restricting the number of abilities that can be brought into play at any one time, which is directly counter to one of the explicit design goals of the system.

I'm not totally convinced of that, though as I stated I've not played the game. If your paying a spotlight point to go 'all in', which I presume would then elicit a similar response from your opponent (if they have points left) then your both working to the same scale and again the additional modifiers are all multiples of ten. I'm not convinced that the extra granularity would gain you much that would be greatly noticeable in play, as opposed to simply rolling a 1d20 and adding 5,3,1 etc to the result. There is an increased chance of a draw admittedly, but I don't see that you would notice a great deal of difference in play. Maybe I'm wrong...

Anyway thanks for your response, and good luck with the game.

Quote from: It was all a mistake;544958Sorry, I missed your comment in the thread when I was writing my comment. If its any consolation, while I have my own doubts about the game in general (see my post above), I thought the writing of it was top notch. I liked the style and the tone immensely, a very easy read and didn't have any of the problems RPGPundit did.

Thanks!

Quote from: It was all a mistake;544958Also, apart from the play and GM advice, there seems to be little mechanically, in my reading, that pushes a story based game.

What I mean is, it seems to me the likelihood of getting a good story (which is I assume the purpose of a storygame) thats any better than fan fiction is just as likely or unlikely as a traditional game based on the mechanics. There is nothing mechanically that would objectively improve the likelihood of a good story being the result fo the game, at least as far as I could see.

I've always felt, that if its story your interested in, you could use just about any RPG you were comfortable using and simply use the approach and methodology you describe in the GM/Player advice, but maybe I'm wrong.

I think it's basically right that you can make a storygame out of any RPG just by approaching it a little differently. The mechanics of Other Worlds are more about facilitating that kind of play than directly forcing it. When you think about it the core mechanism of the game is to make characters that are big lists of descriptors and then provide different ways for players and GMs to mash those descriptors together in different kinds of conflicts, deciding amongst themselves what modifiers apply and what consequences might occur.

The thing I always loved about older, simpler versions of D&D was those moments when something weird happened that wasn't quite covered by the rules and the group started making up rules on the spot. 'OK, so you want to swing off that chandelier and kick the spell components out of the enemy wizard's hand, make a Dex check then an attack roll and if you succeed the spell is automatically disrupted. If you fail you fall flat on your face and take d6 falling damage.' 'Cool, hey do I get a +2 bonus because of my character's circus upbringing?'. Other Worlds is sort of a formalised version of that.

Quote from: soviet;544975Thanks!



I think it's basically right that you can make a storygame out of any RPG just by approaching it a little differently. The mechanics of Other Worlds are more about facilitating that kind of play than directly forcing it. When you think about it the core mechanism of the game is to make characters that are big lists of descriptors and then provide different ways for players and GMs to mash those descriptors together in different kinds of conflicts, deciding amongst themselves what modifiers apply and what consequences might occur.

The thing I always loved about older, simpler versions of D&D was those moments when something weird happened that wasn't quite covered by the rules and the group started making up rules on the spot. 'OK, so you want to swing off that chandelier and kick the spell components out of the enemy wizard's hand, make a Dex check then an attack roll and if you succeed the spell is automatically disrupted. If you fail you fall flat on your face and take d6 falling damage.' 'Cool, hey do I get a +2 bonus because of my character's circus upbringing?'. Other Worlds is sort of a formalised version of that.

OK, thats interesting. You see, I would say that's simply a more narrative approach to roleplaying, an approach with emphasis on the description of whats going on rather than the mechanics of it, but still roleplaying rather than story making.

I think its fairly impossible to design an RPG that creates a truly good story with a beginning, a middle, an end that's still a roleplaying game. I'm pretty much on the same page as RPGPundit on that. That would simply be collaborative storymaking (and even then it won't necessarily guarantee a good story, as it really depends on the quality of the authors!).

Any roleplaying element would need to be so de-emphasised in that game as to almost make it  meaningless. (I say this as a budding author as well as budding rpg designer).

What you're describing to me, in that last paragraph, is what seems to be my general approach to roleplaying. My group and I, since about 1978, have been playing in that kind of mode, as you describe in that last paragraph with DnD (Basic, Advanced and third ed.), Traveler, Top Secret S.I. amongst others, and now Starblazers/Legends of Anglerre.

A storygame as I understood it, is a game where the end objective is to get a coherent story, beginning, middle, end with some kind of coherent plot and thread holding all together, that may or may not be predetermined to some degree, but would certainly have mechanics to support the creation of it. While you've used a great deal of storygames terminology and you state that as your end objective I'm not now convinced that it is your objective. Perhaps its simply different definitions of the terms, and maybe when I (and perhaps even RPGPundit) is reading 'storygame', 'story' etc in Other Worlds we're reading one thing, where as you mean something different.

It seems to me Other Worlds, as you describe it, has the objective of encouraging better narrative in roleplaying, rather than the collaborative creation of a story in real terms (despite some of the terminology and advice as written). If a coherent story emerges out of the roleplaying, it is in my opinion, purely incidental to the game and the roleplaying itself. It might emerge by accident, but then again it might not... that's the nature of roleplaying.

While we've certainly had some really good roleplay sessions that could conceivably have then been rewritten as a coherent story, and they were great fun, we've also had plenty that were totally nonsensical, disjointed, incoherent and plain nuts as a story,and they were just as fun. I don't really distinguish between them, any story that might emerge out of those RPG sessions was incidental to the fun of roleplaying. They pretty much all used a, for want of a better term, narrative roleplay approach as per your last paragraph (and I'm using narrative in a non GNS or any other so called rpg theory sense) but it was totally hit and miss as to whether it created a coherent story (more often miss in my experience, but then that's not what we were aiming for, at least not consciously).

Is my reading of your design objective correct or am I misreading you?

Quote from: It was all a mistake;545006A storygame as I understood it, is a game where the end objective is to get a coherent story, beginning, middle, end with some kind of coherent plot and thread holding all together

I think that's a misconception. At least, that's not what I want out of a storygame, and it's not what Other Worlds is trying to facilitate.

A storygame to me is an RPG that prioritises the active creation of a story over other elements such as verisimilitude, challenge, etc. But the key here is the active creation part; the fun is in the process, not the end result. I don't imagine that a transcript of any of my games would be at the top of many people's reading lists, but we sure had a lot of fun getting there. Not meaning to press any buttons here but you could almost say it's a kind of immersion - immersion in the story rather than in the character. It's like watching or directing a really good film rather than acting in a really good play.

Story in this context doesn't mean 'three-act structure', it just means 'some cool shit happened that was meaningful to the people involved'.

Thus, Other Worlds is a storygame in the sense that it defines characters in terms of story fuel - how well do you fit in with your culture, what people do you have relationships with, what are your goals, what just changed in your life, and so on. The worldbuilding notes, conflict rules, and GM advice sections are all about creating explicit opportunities for players to stress-test these parts of their character's personalities and mash them together to create interesting dilemmas. Stake setting in particular is about identifying two different, dramatically-exciting directions that the events of play could go in and seeing which one happens. This element of suspense and unpredictability, as well as the immersion thing described above, is what makes storygaming different from co-writing a novel or a screenplay.

Quote from: soviet;545025I think that's a misconception. At least, that's not what I want out of a storygame, and it's not what Other Worlds is trying to facilitate.

A storygame to me is an RPG that prioritises the active creation of a story over other elements such as verisimilitude, challenge, etc. But the key here is the active creation part; the fun is in the process, not the end result. I don't imagine that a transcript of any of my games would be at the top of many people's reading lists, but we sure had a lot of fun getting there. Not meaning to press any buttons here but you could almost say it's a kind of immersion - immersion in the story rather than in the character. It's like watching or directing a really good film rather than acting in a really good play.

Story in this context doesn't mean 'three-act structure', it just means 'some cool shit happened that was meaningful to the people involved'.

Thus, Other Worlds is a storygame in the sense that it defines characters in terms of story fuel - how well do you fit in with your culture, what people do you have relationships with, what are your goals, what just changed in your life, and so on. The worldbuilding notes, conflict rules, and GM advice sections are all about creating explicit opportunities for players to stress-test these parts of their character's personalities and mash them together to create interesting dilemmas. Stake setting in particular is about identifying two different, dramatically-exciting directions that the events of play could go in and seeing which one happens. This element of suspense and unpredictability, as well as the immersion thing described above, is what makes storygaming different from co-writing a novel or a screenplay.

Thanks Soviet, that makes more sense. Thing is, I've never seen a great deal of difference between what I've been doing since 1978 with just about any RPG and what you describe. So maybe the terminology is simply distracting and/or misleading. When someone says 'story' to me it means well 'story' to me! What your describing seems like narrative to me, which may or may not lead to dictionary definition 'story', and in my 34 years roleplaying we've always had a narrative emphasis whether it was DnD or Starblasers. I'm not sure that the self categorisation and terminology actually helps, it seems to create a great deal of division, where for many there probably is none or little.

However based on this chat I may give Other Worlds a go as written and see how our group likes it. I'm still not keen on the lack of player character death, unless the character chooses it or some of the depowering the GM elements (though I think RPGPundits interpretation overblows/over emphasises them). But I think I could easily use the 'raising the stakes' rules to bring in more danger to the character.

Like you my campaigns have always, to some degree, been collaborative with input from the players, however I've always kept the power of veto to make sure it didn't completely derail or make a nonsense setting.

I'll see how it goes, but may put in a more authoritative GMing style... well see.

Thanks again for your time and your measured response to criticism!

Quote from: It was all a mistake;545045Thanks again for your time and your measured response to criticism!

No problem, thank you for an interesting discussion. Enjoy your game!

Quote from: soviet;544924Thanks for the review!

Covers for generic games are always tricky. There are basically two ways to go - something symbolic, like the HERO system, or some kind of collage. I went with the latter option primarily to show off Storn Cook's art skills; for a small publisher 'symbolic' covers look dangerously close to 'I have no good art' rather than being a deliberate design choice.  

Yeah, I'm not saying it was bad, and I agree with what you say about the options for generic games.

QuoteI'm not sure I understand what your issue was with the writing style. I've not had any other feedback along those lines and in fact a lot of people have been very complimentary about the quality of the writing. I spent a lot of time on the writing and editing (seriously, find one single typo in the whole book, I dare you!) so I'd be interested if you could expand on that point.

As I said in the review, its not about typos. There's nothing inherently wrong with it.  Neither is it about it being storygame, I've reviewed lots of storygames that had writing that I could follow easily.  I suspect it just has something to do with your style of writing and that it doesn't jibe well with my style of reading.

QuoteI think this is entirely accurate. I don't buy into the idea that storygames are not roleplaying games, I think that they are a type of roleplaying games.

Unfortunately, you're wrong.

QuoteBut either way Other Worlds certainly does fall into that category. World emulation is a part of the game, and different groups will focus on this to different extents, but it is secondary to creating a story.

I want to address the issue of my gaming experience. I'm primarily a D&D player and I'm in a weekly group with other primarily-D&D players. We've been playing the same characters in the same ongoing campaign since 1991, having switched from 2e to 3e to 4e in the process. We tend to do an adventure or so of this, then switch to another game for a while, then go back to the main campaign. Usually this side game has been Other Worlds, but recently we've also played AD&D 2nd edition and Shadowrun. This week we did some playtesting for D&D 5.

I think this is the context Other Worlds should be seen in. It's a storygame that's designed to be played by normal, regular roleplayers in short to medium-length campaigns (about 12-15 sessions) as an occasional detour from their other games. It's specifically a game to break out when you want to do some storygaming with your friends, only you want to do it about fantasy, science fiction, and Hollywood action movies rather than the holocaust, poverty, and animal cruelty. I've never found 'design by committee' to be a problem; on the contrary, my players love being able to make up things about the gameworld and decide what the consequences of a failed roll might be. And I love GMing it too, it creates a very different experience from the more traditional 'top-down' style of roleplaying that we normally enjoy.

For those of you who might be interested in knowing more about Other Worlds, you can download a free preview PDF from DriveThruRPG here

Well, fair enough. I think design-by-committee is generally a horrible way to do almost anything; and certainly to make an RPG campaign.

RPGPundit