#RPGaDAY 25: Aria

There are several games on my “to play” list that I’ve not gotten to play, and some of these are because the other players weren’t interested. But I’ve usually not pushed the matter, either. And then there are the games that I don’t even propose because I know they won’t fly. I’m not even sure I’m interested in playing HōL or Burning Empires, so it doesn’t matter that my friends aren’t. (Not because they’re bad games, but because they’re just not my cuppa.)

But there is one game that I’ve repeatedly proposed and almost always had shot down: Aria. Once, I got people to play it for a bit, and Ogalepihcra was the result. But most people take one look at the rules and have no interest. In particular, the fact that you basically have to create not only your setting but the equivalent of races and classes* and even perhaps the skills they’re built out of is too daunting to many. Aria is a system designed to create worlds and tailor the rules to fit them. Instead of trying to fit the world you envision to a predetermined set of classes—or even skills—Aria believes that the rules should be tailored to the setting. And it does an excellent job of them.

Then there is the next obstacle: the dice rolling system. It’s well explained, but nonetheless one of the more complex I’ve run into, open-ended in a slightly odd way that gives a large range and a lot of possible results on every roll, while still only using a single d10. I think it’s a welcome trade-off of extra complexity for extra detail in the results, but I completely understand why others don’t. 

And if you want magic in your setting, you’ll have to build it yourself—even moreso than the rest of the setting. The non-magical parts of the rules could be used on the fly, much like using just the core book of Hero System for your game, by just building each thing you need as you go. Not the magic. 

I love the system—I think that, for what it gives you, the necessary effort is perfectly reasonable, even modest. And this is coming from someone who normally eschews any system that’s crunchier than Savage Worlds, so it’s not just that I like my games complex. But it is a lot more effort than most other games. And much of it is unavoidable effort—you can build a simple game with Fudge, but Aria is always detailed and at least somewhat complex. 

*n.b.: Aria doesn’t use classes in the RPG sense. Characters are built up out of skills and access to skills, similar to a lifepath system like Traveller or Cyberpunk or Burning Wheel. 

#RPGaDAY 18: Over the Edge

I’m an RPG hacker, tinkerer, and designer. Most RPG systems have at least some appeal to me, and tons of systems have bits of them that are my favorite implementation of that bit. On top of that, even clearly flawed systems are often my right-now favorite while I’m playing them. So picking a favorite RPG system is quite possibly even harder than picking a favorite RPG. I’ll exclude anything I’ve designed, just on principle, and try to narrow it down at least.

A couple of my favorite games are such in part due to their systems. I’ve used the core of Ars Magica to build a general fantasy game, but I think most of what makes it appealing to me is specific to the setting—once you strip all that away, it’s a pretty simple system, which is mostly good, but also doesn’t make it very distinctive. Underground is a more novel core system—a human-scaled version of the system from the old DC Heroes game. It breaks DC Heroes’ lovely 3×3 stat symmetry (three each of mental, physical, and social/spiritual, each split into power, finesse, and resistance), but is otherwise an excellent refinement and expansion, turning it into a very elegant gamist/simulationist system that handles a wide range of numbers and facilitates easy conversion between units (i.e., from speed to distance or strength to mass, and the like).

Aria is another old system, quite crunchy and detailed, that I continue to love for the clevernesses in how it all comes together. A lot of people found the book “pretentious” due to its insistence on eschewing the traditional RPG jargon in favor of using standard dictionary words in accordance with their conventional definitions, but once you get past that to the underlying system, it is one of the better systems I’ve ever encountered. And it’s magic-building rules are probably the only thing to out-do both The Primal Order and Ars Magica.

Though these days, if I wanted a crunchy system, it would probably be Burning Wheel. It’s probably the only crunchy system I’ve actually enjoyed running. While it has a lot of detail, it all falls together very elegantly, all makes sense, and the numbers work out mathematically, do what they claim to do, and both make sense and are fun in play for the most part. No boring can’t-lose fights; no whiff-filled endless challenges. If I ever run it again, I’d like to try some sort of abstracted system for wises, like the Circles system, instead of tracking them individually, but that’s my only complaint. And the way all the bits interact just perfectly is amazing, and makes running and playing it fun. It’s probably the only game I’ve found that could handle a Cyrano-style simultaneous duel of wits and rapiers, and make both halves equally interesting and equally fraught with peril.

Generally, however, I go in for less-detailed systems. For a long time, Story Engine (originally used in Maelstrom Storytelling) was my favorite system. It uses an interesting structure, focused on scenes and narrative control rather than either simulation or difficulty, and pioneered a lot of the play style that was reinvented by the rise of Narrativist indie RPGs nearly a decade later. It’s also unusual in being structured such that cooperative rolls are the norm—typical difficulties are out of reach of a typical character acting by themselves.

Story Engine RPG (courtesy of RPGNow)

In that vein, Primetime Adventures and The Shadow of Yesterday (TSoY) might be the best examples yet of two different developments of that Narrativist structure. I prefer Primetime Adventures, which is about as far as a system can go in focusing on authorial control while still having any character-differentiating mechanics at all. It’s the game system I choose when I have an interesting setting in mind and don’t want to create my own rules—it has replaced CORPS, Fudge, and Savage Worlds for me as my default generic system.

But I have to admire the amazing balancing act TSoY pulls off, sneaking authorial directives into its Keys under the guise of character motivations, and basing rolls on character capabilities but using the results of those rolls to determine narrative control rather than success. It’s the game system we just chose when we were playing something else and loved the game but the rules were not gelling for us, and it has been used as the basis for more than a few other games, most notably Lady Blackbird.

I also need to mention two systems that are amazing, but a bit tied to their settings. Zero has a very clever system that inherently trades off specialization and breadth: by using a fixed skill list of just the right length, the d6 x d6 roll perfectly scales such that the more skills you have the less good you are at each of them, without needing to fiddle with skill points or any other bookkeeping. While other parts are specific to its setting, that core is something I’ve reused elsewhere, because there’s really nothing else that does that so smoothly.

Meanwhile, Everway is simply in a world of its own. Every part of that system is awesome, from chargen based on inspirational images, through metaphorical primary traits, to the best way yet to quantify an infinite variety of special powers. [Is it frequently useful? versatile? powerful? Total the yeses up and you have your cost.] I’ve adapted it for space opera, and others have adapted it for supers, and I’m sure it could form the core of any number of other fantastical (as opposed to more realistic) settings, though with a little more work than for adapting a more traditional system.

Over the Edge 2nd edition

But if I had to pick just one system to use from now on, I think it would be Over the Edge. For me, it’s the perfect balance of words (mostly) and numbers (just a few). It’s focused on character capability, but boils everything down to a small number of stats, with an easy default roll built in. The way that it uses dice is also genius, providing bonuses and penalties that don’t change the range of the roll and don’t require complex—or really any—math (beyond the basic addition you need for an unmodified roll). It’s much like TSoY in feel and goals, though without the excellent Keys mechanics, but simpler and more free-form, so easier to adapt.

#RPGaDAY 7: Nobilis

Intellectual and “intellectual” are two different things. If you actually mean “intellectual”, which is to say, not actually intellectual but making pretense at it, or possibly accused of it, that would probably be either Vampire: the Masquerade (with it’s many misused sesquipedalian words and overblown claims of uniqueness) or Immortal: Invisible War (which really wants to be Deep and Sophisticated). 

With that out of the way, I’m going to assume the real question is about games that actually are intellectual, without the scare quotes. It really depends how you measure this. Aria: Canticle of the Monomyth had some serious research baked into the game rules & structures, though most people miss this because they’re so busy complaining about the nonstandard—and sometimes overblown—terminology.

Sign in Stranger and Shock: are both amazing, thought-provoking translations of real science fiction to the RPG medium—something that is rare among so-called scifi literature, even. It’s hard to play a game of either without stretching your point of view a bit.

Freemarket, Eclipse Phase, and Transhuman Space are all exploring transhumanism and the future of society, and some of the ideas of humanity are mind-stretching. 

Continuum is the RPG that has best tried to take the ramifications of time travel seriously, and not in a wibbly-wobbley, timey-wimey sort of way. As such, the mere act of playing looks to be mental exercise, keeping track of all the out-of-order events and how the characters relate and in what order those interactions occur. 

HiT, which only ever made it to an “alpha limited” edition, as far as I know, is a different kind of intellectual. It attempted to build a fractal game system, with varying levels of detail & complexity, around the Threefold model of RPGs. It largely succeeded, and surprisingly made for a very approachable and playable game—unlike some discussions of game theories.

However, I think that the game that best fits my notion of what intellectual means in the context of RPGs would be Nobilis, the game where you can play the sentient embodiment of an idea, ideal, or concept. So your character might be “the embodiment of rain” (easy to imagine appearance and powers—but what’s your motivation?) or “the embodiment of the ideal of trust” (now personality and maybe motivation are easy, but what does that look like?) or “the manifestation of acrophobia” (good luck!). 

#RPGaDAY 6: Underground

“Favorite RPG I never get to play” is a tricky question. Is that literal, or figurative? My reflex answer to this is Ars Magica or Over the Edge, but both of those I have played on multiple occasions. So while it feels like I “never” get to play them, I actually have—in the case of Ars Magica I’ve had 2 or 3 long-running, awesome games over the years (one using Redhurst as the setting). A few other games that I’ve “always wanted to play”, I’ve actually played, if only once: SkyRealms of Jorune, Time & Temp, Earthdawn, Iron Heroes, Doctor Who: Adventures in Time and Space, Cat, Everway, Aria: Canticle of the Monomyth. I’d love to play any of them again, with Iron Heroes and Everway tops on the list. But they can no longer go on the list of games I’ve never gotten to play.

If I take the question absolutely literally—only games that I have never played at all—there’s still quite a list. Deadlands and The Babylon Project are very high on that list, as are Don’t Rest Your Head, Castle Falkenstein, and Dead Inside. Particularly notable is Deadlands: we created characters when the game was new, and then the game fell through before the first session.

But of games that I’ve never gotten to play, I guess I’d have to say that Underground is the never-played game that I most want to play. It beats out the others by virtue of its genre and mechanics. The unique blend of dystopia, cyberpunk, and supers, used to foment social commentary, is something I’ve not found even half of in any other game. The mechanics are not as novel as some games, but still provide some nice touches. I’m particularly fond of the character creation, which puts the player in an impossible situation that mimics the impossible situation their characters are in, and the rules for how characters’ actions change society, always with unintended consequences—I believe Underground was the first commercial RPG to have formal mechanics for this.