[RPG REVIEW] Grim reviews Alas Vegas by James Wallis

Fellow Steem user @grimjim (a.k.a. James Desborough) has another of his video reviews posted on an indie RPG that was a long time in coming, Alas Vegas. In fact, it was five years in coming, having missed several target dates along the way. In and of itself, that was no small saga and you can follow quite a lot of it on the original Kickstarter comments – and I suggest doing so, because it's interesting.

People who are active on Steem know that Grim and I approach role-playing games from very different angles. Surprisingly, given the tenor of a lot of his work, he is interested in a lot more traditional RPG design than I am. He likes heavily quantifiable skills and ranks; I prefer narratively-defined traits and abilities. He likes GM-centric game narrative design; I commit things from a very strongly GM-less architecture preference.

All that said, I think that ultimately we are in agreement on the final analysis of Alas Vegas, both in the representation of the tightly targeted system and the overall value of the scenarios included in the book. I am absolutely on board with assessing the scenarios as interesting and useful, but certainly not truly justifying the cost of the book. Likewise, I find that the system itself is interesting and worth studying in and of itself but probably too focused on creating a specific mode of response from players than would make it really flexible enough to use in many of the places I would like. It is very much specifically driven by starting from the "you start with nothing, including your memory" kicker even mechanically and while I could probably strip out all of those mechanical touch points – I have a dozen lightweight, rules-scant systems on my shelf that I don't need to do that much work to bring to a place that I would find more playable.

Like Grim, I don't think that that is a reason not to be interested in the system or not to buy the book if you are or want to be a game designer, interested in the field of RPG design, or just enjoy thinking about narrative fiction through the lens of gameplay. It's just that going in, you need to know that Alas Vegas wants to tell one general kind of story and does so with a very single-minded focus. If you're on board for that, you're in the right place.

Definitely check out Grim's review video because it's worth your time.

That said…

Allow me to go on at some length about the difference between how he and I think of narratively-empowered attributes on characters. You might be more comfortable or familiar with referring to them as Skills, Abilities, Traits or whatnot. They are the game mechanical expression of saying "your character can do this thing."

Grim prefers attributes to be scalar, that is to represent a single niche descriptor with an attached quantifying tag which describes its intensity. (I almost wrote "number" there, but then I thought about one of my favorite systems – Fudge. It provides a scalar measurement which runs from Terrible to Superb with steps along the way; explicitly non-numerical but still descriptive of intensity.) The usage of binary descriptors, either you have it or you don't, he finds difficult to work with and uses as the specific example "First-Aid" versus "Doctorate in Medicine," with no particular difference in execution between the two because they are strictly binary.

I would rebut that in practice, beyond GM fiat (or table consensus), most uses of attributes are un-differentiatable between skill levels. If the question is "can you successfully set this broken arm?", Both the guy with first-aid and the guy with a doctorate in medicine have roughly an equal chance of getting it right. You either do or you don't and it's not truly meaningful to the experience of play if you do so by a margin of one point or 15. The question comes in before that, when you start asking "does this descriptor applied to the situation?" If we are talking about a difficult thoracic surgery, the guy with first-aid is not going to count as having an applicable descriptor. The guy with the doctorate is going to count as having an applicable descriptor. After that determination is made, there is nothing particularly meaningful to really grind on, you might as well just move on to a rapid resolution interaction and go on working the experience for the players.

In a real sense, that happens all the time in traditional RPG play, except it happens on the other end of the Fortune determination. Instead of GM fiat determining whether or not you have an applicable descriptor, GM fiat sets the difficulty. It's the same kind of reasoning and it has the same kind of result, it just happens on the other end.

Personally, I'm generally okay with binary descriptors in most of my play. In fact, and a lot of games that I've been playing recently there aren't individual descriptors at all as such. Simply saying "I can do this thing" as long as "this thing" is reasonably well defined more than suffices an actual play.

Now, Grim is absolutely correct when he says that such mechanics are not generally amenable to long-term play in which skill acquisition and development is one of the cores of the experience. There are really only so many descriptive traits that you can drop on your character sheet before it becomes an experiment in creative checkbox layout. That's absolutely true. This is not the kind of system that you want for the "zero to hero"/Hero's Journey play experience. There are ways to model character evolution and development inside this kind of context, however; focusing on and expanding network of relationships and agreements which are themselves to some degree mechanized is one approach that you could take. I think it is an underserved approach in gaming and always has been, but it's certainly doable.

Regardless, check out his review of Alas Vegas and the one that he posted a couple of weeks ago for the new edition of Over the Edge where we once again found ourselves in violent agreement. If you're interested in role-playing games, it should satisfy.

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This has been part of the ongoing Tabletop Role-Playing Steem platform Community and we would be more than happy to have you join us on a regular basis if you are fascinated by playing or creating tabletop role-playing games. Pop on over to the Community on Steemit and follow along.

Interestingly, the design of Communities on the platform provided me a certain difficulty, because Grim has posted the link to his video reviews on his own Steem blog. Simply linking within my own post seemed a little sketchy, so I've set him to be a beneficiary on this post at 25%. 1/4 of anything that I receive will go directly back to him. That seemed the fairest solution I could come up with given the mechanics we have at hand.

Steem Community designers (like @steempeak), it would make my life a lot easier if there was a reasonable way to re-Steem posts which already exist on the blockchain into a Community, allow additional commentary, and automatically set the beneficiaries so that the originator is compensated. Do I expect anyone to actually read this far? No. Do I feel better for having said it? Yes.