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I'll start this the simplest way I know how: I want to say, go buy Deliria. If you love anything remotely related to urban fantasy, to myths, to faeries, to world where certainty is anything but real...go buy Deliria. However - some of the things that I consider nuisances or even the pieces I love, might kill it for another person. So there's a more detailed review below, even a nit-picky one. I just want you to understand that none of the nit-picking below means I don't like the game. Actually, it's there because I like it very, very much. I don't care if there are minor problems in White Wolf's new system, or if there are any problems in its books, because the major problems have already led me to hate and avoid it. I care passionately about what I see as smallish flaws in Deliria, because I like it so very very much.
The Setting/Tone
In a lot of ways, I think this is what people will take away from their first exposure to the book...as I think it's what they're meant to. The system is further back; the world, the view of the world, and the tone are right up front. They are maintained with information, vignettes (many of which weave a pattern through the chapters they occupy, masterfully), and art.
The world of Deliria is our world, seen at a skew or an angle that the rational work-a-day world denies. A world where the fae - and things stranger - walk the streets, hidden or partly hidden, confused or aware. A world where other worlds lie just a bit that way - or very far this way - or a jaunt that way - in directions most humans could not name. A world in which pictures, crossroads, and other tools might let you step through directions you couldn't name. A world where magic might be learned, or simply possessed. Where it might be a blessing, or a curse, or just as likely both.
In short, a world of faerie tales - not the nicey-nice ones that are nowadays the rage for telling to your two-year-old, but the ones where there is salt of blood and sweat and tears, the ones where fears and dreams are intertwined like ill-bred lovers, drawing you in the wake of their passion. Where respect, and hope, and ingenuity count for more than your bank account - most days - and where power is a thing that has rules less logical and more visceral. Where the madman on the corner may be right...or he may just be mad...and which one it is may change tomorrow.
There are those who notice more the fae presence in our world - or is it that the fae come more often, and so draw notice? Meanwhile, others step into the faerie Otherlands, and some of them put the shoe on the other foot, becoming - often all unknowing - legends and horrors for the fae.
Deliria is not a game of urban fantasy. When played in a setting that begins on Earth, our Earth or its close shadow, it is a game of urban myth. If you do not understand what I mean by this distinction, pick up the game and read a bit of it. There is nothing that can say it quite so clearly as the tone and the way the game presents itself.
I find no flaw or nit to pick with the setting. There are surely other ways it could have been done; but I can think of nothing that would make it more that is not within the scope of what's already there. This is a setting that inspires, far more than it constrains.
System, or 'the crunchy bits'
System is where my reservations with Deliria, such as they are, lie. And they are not so great as I feared, when I viewed Laughing Pan's description of the game, and the stuff at the Mysterium, before seeing or playing the game. A game that can be run diceless, or with cards, or with dice? That can be done wrong so many ways, and the presence of dice was only small reassurance to me. Unknowing of the system behind it, I found the character sheet ugly and confusing - all little bubbles for the attributes, it appeared an affectation, overdone and annoying. I like neat little lists; I like things tidy. This was none of that, and I knew no reason for it, but I withheld judgement as best I could in case there would be a reason, when I tried the system.
There is. It's not perfect, and I don't think it's needed, but it at least makes sense as an approach. The four values along each arc are tied to the larger circle that's closest to them on the inside. What I do not get is the other three values being along the outside of the circle, other than as an affectation. Vitality is the sum of the three values in the center; to place it within them I could understand, but to place it between Body and Mind on the outer circle, when it draws just as much from spirit, I do not. Fortune, between Mind and Spirit, always starts at 3 and can be bought up; it has nothing at all to do with the graces (the name for the body/mind/spirit values and the twelve aspects that lie beneath them). Deliria, which lies between body and spirit, is based on either the mind score (basic rules) or the imagination/wisdom scores (advanced rules; both are subsets of mind). The only thing I can think is that it was placed opposite mind because adjacent was too confusing. None of these three have any particular reason to be where they are, that I can see; but I suppose it got them into the circle, and gave dividers for the three arcs. I'm tempted to try my hand at creating a character sheet I prefer, however.
It's better than the character sheet in the book. There are two character sheets (the larger of which comes in both color and black and white) on the web site, the larger of which is two pages. The character sheet in the books is three pages, and full-color. The stats page is unnecessarily large and - to my eyes - unattractive. But that's not its biggest flaw. Its biggest flaw is that it's not USEFUL. You cannot photocopy it. Even if you got a color photocopier and copied it, the colors of the background are too dark; reading your character stats upon such a background would be a NIGHTMARE. Those who do not have access to a computer from which to print a copy of the black-and-white sheet of their choice, or a friend who will do so for them, will probably be using notebook paper. The "character sheet" must be part of the interior art - as a character sheet, it's worthless, and a bigger disappointment in some ways than if they had simply forgotten to supply one at all. I'd rather have more pages of text than an elaborate "tool" that is as useless as if it were a paring knife that had had its blade snapped off.
Make no mistake, though, the character sheets on the web site (also on the included CD that comes with the book) are quite usable. As long as you have a computer with a printer, or a buddy with same, you're fine.
Character creation itself encourages strongly something that I think should be done in all systems - and that many of the players I know do, whether the system requires it or not - and that is to design the concept before you design the stats. In this case, tell a story, describe, and write the backstory. After that, you begin putting the stats together....
1. Graces.
(Body, spirit, mind - what I would, by habit, call attributes.) You get 15 points for these, which makes you around average if you distribute them evenly; very few likely will do so. No particular comment here - this is straightforward, makes sense, and works. Characters who are weak in one area or another will tend to excel in something else - standard point-based RPG fare. Once you've assigned points to body/spirit/mind, if you're playing advanced, you will get a number of points to put into the aspects (subcategories) such as imagination, perception, etc.
2. Vocations.
(Skills, by any other name.) You get 15 points for the keys of these as well - keys are things like academics, art, athletics, domestic, martial, technology.... This is probably the most broken part of the system.
The single biggest flaw here is that 15 points is a lot for some concepts, when you look at the meanings of the different values! For most, 15 points is right. But for some - particularly the talented but untrained - 15 is too many. There are wyrds, but there neither is nor should be one that drops this - wyrds are an ongoing problem. Being unskilled is a situation, not a state of being. The poverty wyrd, for example, does not mean that presently you have no money - it means that until you get rid of it somehow, any money you come into, you lose! So you could do something similar for someone who could not learn, but there's no effective way to "trade in" unneeded vocation points. You could choose not to allocate them, for the concept, but then there is every reason to try to find squirrelly ways to spend them, even if the concept bends a bit. I would keep a concept through such temptation, but I'd also wince when I thought about it. It would be easy enough to house-rule this one way or another, but some GMs are only comfortable if it's in print. It would be nice to see it published as an official 'optional rule' to do something about this. Personally, I'd suggest that for every key you take below 15, you get 1 favor point; for every 5 keys, you get 7; and you must spend at least 5 of them (maybe 10). Since keys cost 4 favor points a piece, you're clearly getting the short end of the stick here - but you are getting something in tradeoff for living the concept, and that's not bad. Otherwise, if you created a character by dropping a few keys with no compensation, the net result is that someone else could have an identical character - with a few more skills. (If that actually happens in your game, your group has problems, but....)
Vocations have aspects as well (in advanced usage; in basic, you ignore them), which are really what I would call skills. This is where you might be good at 'Spanish' and 'English' instead of merely 'languages'. This is where 'athletics' becomes 'Soccer' and 'Track'. Whatever you bought the key to, you get that many aspects, at that level. So if your Art key is 3, you get 3 art aspects at level 3. You can later buy more aspects or even buy up your keys with favor points, but you get 3 at 3 initially. If your art were 2 or 5 it would be 2 at 2 or 5 at 5.
So far, so good. However. What if I should have a general knowledge of art 3, but I'm specialized in only two areas? Whoops! The rules say I must have a number of aspects equal to my key score, all of which have the value of the key. That is, if my art is 3, I must have a minimum of 3 art aspects at level 3 - neither more nor less. I can have additional aspects at 1, 2, 5, 7...but I must have at least 3 that are ranked at 3. Pardon me while I tear my hair out; the higher your key value goes, the less sense this makes. There are people in this world who speak only two languages, but both of them are spoken fluently...you can't represent that in this system.
The GM who ran our game just handled it that you could drop some of your initial ones for free, raise others for points. The system allows you to raise the others for favor points - but you still have to end with at least N at value N - where N is the key value - if you follow the official rules. It makes sense to me to have art 3, where appreciation is 4, painting/drawing is 3, and sculpting is 2. I do not see why it should not be so - or why taking the key to 4 should require me to learn photography. Proposed house rule (that I think should be an official optional rule some day):
If your key's value is N, you start with up to N aspects, none of which may be higher than N (prior to spending favor points), and which must average out to N - or at least more than (N - 1). So you could start with Art 3, and take appreciation 3, painting/drawing 3, sculpting 2. Then you could buy up appreciation when you got to favor points.
3. Accords and Legacies.
The only way to get these is with favor points.
Accords are magic you learn, magic you impose on the world; Legacies are inborn magic. (This is not to say you don't have to try to use legacies - for some you do! - nor that either lacks costs. This is a faerie tale, of course they have costs.) Actually, more accurately, accords are magic you learn; legacies are traits you have, and may include inborn magic, acquired gifts, or things like 'wealth'.
Mostly, these are well-balanced. They have two major flaws. The first is that legacies should be nearly infinite in possibility, and beg creativity, in a system that is itself supposed to allow extreme flexibility - and yet, there is only a short list of the things in the book, a few extras on the CD, and no rules for creating and balancing them - nowhere I could find, anyway. This doesn't prevent the GM from just making them up, of course. But it's a key missing element - personally, I think the need for that to be considered should be explicitly stated, and there should be guides to help the GM do it, or at least encourage them to consider it. One of the things I dislike immensely about Changeling: The Dreaming is that it is based around creativity and smothers it, by making all the characters alike. Here I find a similar nuisance - a system in which the world is wider and stranger than you know, in which many things are possible that most men might never know...whose system doesn't allow for that explicitly, but locks characters into a few limited patterns! It's no fun watching a character's power change because the system has no way to express it. (I got really lucky - yes, that's sarcastic - this happened to my character in the game I played at Gencon. She became somewhat a different person than I intended, because the power was forced into a form that did not suit the concept I had, because nothing in the rules fit.) "There are more things in heaven and earth...." So can we give them a place here, if only by stating that sometimes you must make things up, or better still, by offering guidelines?
(I gather, from a brief exchange with Phil Brucato at GenCon, that in fact there are plans in the works for a Legacies and Wyrds book which will have many additional of each - and rules for creating your own. I sincerely hope so, but I submit that failure to include at least a brief paragraph in the main book, encouraging GMs who are comfortable enough with it to create their own or let players do so, was a major oversight and mistake.)
The other big problem is the scale. Accords, Legacies, and Wyrds have a 4-level scale, each level of which is characterized by a phrase. Each level costs 3 favor points (or, in the case of Wyrds, gives you 3). The problem with this is that when you talk about using the level of the thing, because the descriptives are used so often, some people use the cost instead of the purchased level. (Our GM did so. I think it's cool, but it's not the intent of the system. The examples in the book seem to make that pretty clear.) Having a phrase for each level is a nice conceit in terms of flavor, but it damages playability pretty badly. The levels need to be emphasized as numbers, as well as descriptions, if this is to work. This is not a systemic flaw, but an informational flaw, a presentation flaw. But it's a big one. The difference between a +4 to something and a +12 is immense!
4. Wyrds.
Wyrds are the negative side of things. Traits you carry that are not to your advantage, that give you points back. If you have the Wyrd Poverty, it's not just that you lack money now. You will continue to lack money, and lose any you come into, until you lose the Wyrd - and that is not just a matter of spending XP to strip it off, but of telling a story wherein you conquer or overcome it. The same is true for most other Wyrds, though some few cannot be gotten rid of.
All the comments that applied to Legacies, including the extras being on the CD, apply to Wyrds.
5. Favor points.
After you've got your graces and vocations, you get favor points. The number you get varies depending on the level of story you want to tell; there are three levels, and the two higher levels come with required numbers of wyrds (that you don't get points for!). The reality is, any GM worth their salt (whether in the form of pretzels or more traditional offerings) is going to adjust favor points as needed for the flavor of their game, once confident with the system, and that's as it should be.
Favor points bear an entirely too-close resemblance to White Wolf's freebie points; there's only so many ways you can construct an RPG, though. The real problem with favor points is that what they will buy you is exquisitely hard to determine - and it seems obvious when you read it. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, there are three "obvious" readings of it (each different), and some people hook onto one or another - we saw all three in our group. Going back through the examples helps, but the fact is that the text is unclear and the example is not mixed in with the text and is therefore not adjacent to the material. Argh! There's no question with accords, legacies, and wyrds. 3 times level is pretty straightforward. But as for keys/aspects...well, here's what the text says in the little chart (I should note that what I've been calling "levels" are here called "degrees" - a fact it's easy to forget since I have no idea why the term was chosen):
Grace Key, Vocation Key: Four points per degree.
Grace Aspects, Vocation Aspects: one point per degree.
Heart Traits: One point per degree.
Fortune: Three points per degree up to 3, three points per degree over 3.
(By the way, on page 235, it sas that "Graces, Vocations, or Hearts (except Fortune): These traits cost one point per degree." It explicitly addresses favor points with aspects in a separate section below that. I assume this is an older rule; the chart on page 228, which is quoted in part above, makes more sense; after all, aspects should be cheaper than keys, being as keys give you aspects.
I omit here "Favors" (legacies and accords) and wyrds, because they are clearer-cut and I have no issue with them. I list the last, Fortune, mostly to laugh at it. It starts at 3 no matter what, so the first sentence is irrelevant. In addition, the first and second sentences give the same cost, so why not just say "3 points per degree" and have DONE with it?
Then there's the lovely question of what "per degree" means. This section is confusing, and that's not good. Here are the interpretations I've seen (all of which were seriously believed to be right by at least one person I spoke to at Gencon - and there weren't that many, mostly in the game I was in):
a. If you raise an aspect from 3 to 4, it costs one point: one point per degree. If you raise it from 2 to 4, it costs two points: one point per degree.
b. If you raise an aspect from 3 to 4, it costs four points: one point per degree. If you raise an aspect from 2 to 4, it costs seven points: one point per degree to go from 2-3 (3 points) and one point per degree from 3-4 (4 more points).
c. If you raise an aspect from 3 to 4, it costs four points: one point per degree. If you raise an aspect from 2 to 4, it costs four points: one point per degree. (This one doesn't make sense to me, but I heard it.)
Okay, so which makes sense? C doesn't. It flat doesn't. Because it means if you know you're going to have to pay to raise that stat to 4, it behooves you to put as little as possible in it, shunting points to other stats - after all, the cost in C is the same for 1 to 4 or 3 to 4, so.... A or B could each make sense. A makes 1-2 and 6-7 equal cost, which is maybe not so good - but if you want people to be able to make flexible, faerie-tale concepts in character creation, it could maybe work. However, the per-degree phrasing is also used in XP spends, where it wouldn't make sense, so A is probably ruled out - though you could use it as an optional rule in character creation for a more-powerful-character game. B, then, seems our most likely - but even B has a drawback, in that you want to short your lowest traits, because raising them will be cheapest. That's sort of an odd thing to have happen in character creation, to be playing the numbers game at that level.
So we do have an example in the book, even if it's not right at the same spot as the rules. Let's go look at it and see which of the above seems to apply. It's on pages 238-239 (well, rather, the crunchy numbers part of it is).
The heart traits are Mind 4, Body 5, Spirit 7. This is stated to be base 15, plus 12 favor points to raise Mind 3 to Mind 4. This conforms to either option b or c, listed above. It also shows the flaw of both those systems - leaving one trait low and raise it. A player who buys mind 4, body 5, spirit 6, and then decides to raise spirit, is hosed...even though they may have structure the bare minimums, then looked at where to add. Instead, you have to look at what you want and then min-max it, with a system like this. (At 28 points, spirit 7 is unattainable without taking wyrds for a starting character...if you try to buy it after-the-fact.)
The character's vocations are "base 15, plus 16 favor points" - the vocation keys total out to 18, which would be 15 + 3, which means 12 of those 16 points were spent on keys (this is explicitly stated in the 'show me' section - all were level-1 keys - again with the min-maxing). That leaves 4 to account for in the spects. The aspects are listed at the far right of the second page. The key that has extra aspects are art (piano 2, wordcraft 1). Wordcraft cost 1; that leaves 3, and therefore piano cost 3: 1 + 2. So, case (b) above applies.
Not quite as insane as case c, but still very heavy on the min-maxing being encouraged, which is disappointing. What's more disappointing is having to go dig up the example and dissect it to figure this out, all for want of a simple note where the costs are first mentioned, such as, "Raising spirit from 2 to 4 would cost 28 points: 12 to go from 2 to 3, and 16 more to go from 3 to 4." That is all it would take to make this clear.
6. Resolving things: cards or dice?
The system offers three options for resolving the question of "does X succeed?" One is GM decision - what's good for the story.
Another is by drawing cards, by a rule that may add to or subtract from your score based on the color of the card (it's really pretty simple and easy to deal with) or result in a disaster or a triumph on the spot based on the card (kings). A regular deck of playing cards is used. It does, of course, require a deck of cards. And it has some minor confusion. The GM of our game had red subtract - red is the color of blood and is bad. On the second night, he was sure he had mis-handled it and had black subtract when it should have been red; we assured him that no, this had not been the case, he'd taught us 'red subtracts'. Later, when I read the book, I found that officially, black cards are misfortune and subtract; red is good. Practically speaking, it does not matter which is which - the odds are the same - just as long as your entire group is playing one or the other. However, an argument can be made for either, and without a reason that makes it memorable, that makes it confusing.
Ah, but there's another method of resolution - dice, using two ten-siders. I thought I would be thrilled with this - I am used to dice-based systems and I usually have dice with me. Dice are easier to haul along than a deck of cards, and you don't have to wonder about the question (never addressed clearly) of how often/when to shuffle the deck. (They say to shuffle it as soon as the king of hearts or spades is drawn - the automatic triumphs and failures. But they don't say otherwise. I assume, therefore, that you only shuffle after those are drawn - since they'll definitely be drawn before all cards are gone.)
Right. Dice. So what's the dice rule? Oops. The dice are more complex, because they're not being used as dice. They're being used as surrogate cards! You have two dice. One is the suit die, the other is the value die. If the suit die is 1-4, you subtract the value die from your attempt. If suit is 5-8, you add the value die. If suit is 9 or 10, you read the value die as follows:
1-4: Jack - even chances. No modifier applied.
5-6: Black Queen - automatic failure.
7-8: Red Queen - automatic success.
9: King of spades - automatic disaster.
10: King of hearts - automatic success.
Note that if using a true deck, the kings of clubs and diamonds are removed. (I'm sure someone, somewhere, will kick up a fuss when their GM removes the king of hearts and leaves diamonds in, even though the results are statistically identical.)
The odds are, on a quick glance, identical with cards or dice. I can't fault that. What I can fault is that you still have to be thinking in terms of cards, and now you need a freaking table to work it out. Also, after you spent that long saying "this color bad, that color good" - ignoring the jacks is really hard, and the gut instinct is to take them as good/bad, not neutral. That's an uncomfortable little piece, and something I don't think we necessarily realized in our game. But regardless, the dice mechanic is functional, but useful only if you don't have a deck of cards and feel like translating; its main purpose seems to be to confuse and to lever you out of the game, since last I checked my ten-sided dice are not a deck of cards, and translating them into one is truly bizarre.
The Setting/Tone
In a lot of ways, I think this is what people will take away from their first exposure to the book...as I think it's what they're meant to. The system is further back; the world, the view of the world, and the tone are right up front. They are maintained with information, vignettes (many of which weave a pattern through the chapters they occupy, masterfully), and art.
The world of Deliria is our world, seen at a skew or an angle that the rational work-a-day world denies. A world where the fae - and things stranger - walk the streets, hidden or partly hidden, confused or aware. A world where other worlds lie just a bit that way - or very far this way - or a jaunt that way - in directions most humans could not name. A world in which pictures, crossroads, and other tools might let you step through directions you couldn't name. A world where magic might be learned, or simply possessed. Where it might be a blessing, or a curse, or just as likely both.
In short, a world of faerie tales - not the nicey-nice ones that are nowadays the rage for telling to your two-year-old, but the ones where there is salt of blood and sweat and tears, the ones where fears and dreams are intertwined like ill-bred lovers, drawing you in the wake of their passion. Where respect, and hope, and ingenuity count for more than your bank account - most days - and where power is a thing that has rules less logical and more visceral. Where the madman on the corner may be right...or he may just be mad...and which one it is may change tomorrow.
There are those who notice more the fae presence in our world - or is it that the fae come more often, and so draw notice? Meanwhile, others step into the faerie Otherlands, and some of them put the shoe on the other foot, becoming - often all unknowing - legends and horrors for the fae.
Deliria is not a game of urban fantasy. When played in a setting that begins on Earth, our Earth or its close shadow, it is a game of urban myth. If you do not understand what I mean by this distinction, pick up the game and read a bit of it. There is nothing that can say it quite so clearly as the tone and the way the game presents itself.
I find no flaw or nit to pick with the setting. There are surely other ways it could have been done; but I can think of nothing that would make it more that is not within the scope of what's already there. This is a setting that inspires, far more than it constrains.
System, or 'the crunchy bits'
System is where my reservations with Deliria, such as they are, lie. And they are not so great as I feared, when I viewed Laughing Pan's description of the game, and the stuff at the Mysterium, before seeing or playing the game. A game that can be run diceless, or with cards, or with dice? That can be done wrong so many ways, and the presence of dice was only small reassurance to me. Unknowing of the system behind it, I found the character sheet ugly and confusing - all little bubbles for the attributes, it appeared an affectation, overdone and annoying. I like neat little lists; I like things tidy. This was none of that, and I knew no reason for it, but I withheld judgement as best I could in case there would be a reason, when I tried the system.
There is. It's not perfect, and I don't think it's needed, but it at least makes sense as an approach. The four values along each arc are tied to the larger circle that's closest to them on the inside. What I do not get is the other three values being along the outside of the circle, other than as an affectation. Vitality is the sum of the three values in the center; to place it within them I could understand, but to place it between Body and Mind on the outer circle, when it draws just as much from spirit, I do not. Fortune, between Mind and Spirit, always starts at 3 and can be bought up; it has nothing at all to do with the graces (the name for the body/mind/spirit values and the twelve aspects that lie beneath them). Deliria, which lies between body and spirit, is based on either the mind score (basic rules) or the imagination/wisdom scores (advanced rules; both are subsets of mind). The only thing I can think is that it was placed opposite mind because adjacent was too confusing. None of these three have any particular reason to be where they are, that I can see; but I suppose it got them into the circle, and gave dividers for the three arcs. I'm tempted to try my hand at creating a character sheet I prefer, however.
It's better than the character sheet in the book. There are two character sheets (the larger of which comes in both color and black and white) on the web site, the larger of which is two pages. The character sheet in the books is three pages, and full-color. The stats page is unnecessarily large and - to my eyes - unattractive. But that's not its biggest flaw. Its biggest flaw is that it's not USEFUL. You cannot photocopy it. Even if you got a color photocopier and copied it, the colors of the background are too dark; reading your character stats upon such a background would be a NIGHTMARE. Those who do not have access to a computer from which to print a copy of the black-and-white sheet of their choice, or a friend who will do so for them, will probably be using notebook paper. The "character sheet" must be part of the interior art - as a character sheet, it's worthless, and a bigger disappointment in some ways than if they had simply forgotten to supply one at all. I'd rather have more pages of text than an elaborate "tool" that is as useless as if it were a paring knife that had had its blade snapped off.
Make no mistake, though, the character sheets on the web site (also on the included CD that comes with the book) are quite usable. As long as you have a computer with a printer, or a buddy with same, you're fine.
Character creation itself encourages strongly something that I think should be done in all systems - and that many of the players I know do, whether the system requires it or not - and that is to design the concept before you design the stats. In this case, tell a story, describe, and write the backstory. After that, you begin putting the stats together....
1. Graces.
(Body, spirit, mind - what I would, by habit, call attributes.) You get 15 points for these, which makes you around average if you distribute them evenly; very few likely will do so. No particular comment here - this is straightforward, makes sense, and works. Characters who are weak in one area or another will tend to excel in something else - standard point-based RPG fare. Once you've assigned points to body/spirit/mind, if you're playing advanced, you will get a number of points to put into the aspects (subcategories) such as imagination, perception, etc.
2. Vocations.
(Skills, by any other name.) You get 15 points for the keys of these as well - keys are things like academics, art, athletics, domestic, martial, technology.... This is probably the most broken part of the system.
The single biggest flaw here is that 15 points is a lot for some concepts, when you look at the meanings of the different values! For most, 15 points is right. But for some - particularly the talented but untrained - 15 is too many. There are wyrds, but there neither is nor should be one that drops this - wyrds are an ongoing problem. Being unskilled is a situation, not a state of being. The poverty wyrd, for example, does not mean that presently you have no money - it means that until you get rid of it somehow, any money you come into, you lose! So you could do something similar for someone who could not learn, but there's no effective way to "trade in" unneeded vocation points. You could choose not to allocate them, for the concept, but then there is every reason to try to find squirrelly ways to spend them, even if the concept bends a bit. I would keep a concept through such temptation, but I'd also wince when I thought about it. It would be easy enough to house-rule this one way or another, but some GMs are only comfortable if it's in print. It would be nice to see it published as an official 'optional rule' to do something about this. Personally, I'd suggest that for every key you take below 15, you get 1 favor point; for every 5 keys, you get 7; and you must spend at least 5 of them (maybe 10). Since keys cost 4 favor points a piece, you're clearly getting the short end of the stick here - but you are getting something in tradeoff for living the concept, and that's not bad. Otherwise, if you created a character by dropping a few keys with no compensation, the net result is that someone else could have an identical character - with a few more skills. (If that actually happens in your game, your group has problems, but....)
Vocations have aspects as well (in advanced usage; in basic, you ignore them), which are really what I would call skills. This is where you might be good at 'Spanish' and 'English' instead of merely 'languages'. This is where 'athletics' becomes 'Soccer' and 'Track'. Whatever you bought the key to, you get that many aspects, at that level. So if your Art key is 3, you get 3 art aspects at level 3. You can later buy more aspects or even buy up your keys with favor points, but you get 3 at 3 initially. If your art were 2 or 5 it would be 2 at 2 or 5 at 5.
So far, so good. However. What if I should have a general knowledge of art 3, but I'm specialized in only two areas? Whoops! The rules say I must have a number of aspects equal to my key score, all of which have the value of the key. That is, if my art is 3, I must have a minimum of 3 art aspects at level 3 - neither more nor less. I can have additional aspects at 1, 2, 5, 7...but I must have at least 3 that are ranked at 3. Pardon me while I tear my hair out; the higher your key value goes, the less sense this makes. There are people in this world who speak only two languages, but both of them are spoken fluently...you can't represent that in this system.
The GM who ran our game just handled it that you could drop some of your initial ones for free, raise others for points. The system allows you to raise the others for favor points - but you still have to end with at least N at value N - where N is the key value - if you follow the official rules. It makes sense to me to have art 3, where appreciation is 4, painting/drawing is 3, and sculpting is 2. I do not see why it should not be so - or why taking the key to 4 should require me to learn photography. Proposed house rule (that I think should be an official optional rule some day):
If your key's value is N, you start with up to N aspects, none of which may be higher than N (prior to spending favor points), and which must average out to N - or at least more than (N - 1). So you could start with Art 3, and take appreciation 3, painting/drawing 3, sculpting 2. Then you could buy up appreciation when you got to favor points.
3. Accords and Legacies.
The only way to get these is with favor points.
Accords are magic you learn, magic you impose on the world; Legacies are inborn magic. (This is not to say you don't have to try to use legacies - for some you do! - nor that either lacks costs. This is a faerie tale, of course they have costs.) Actually, more accurately, accords are magic you learn; legacies are traits you have, and may include inborn magic, acquired gifts, or things like 'wealth'.
Mostly, these are well-balanced. They have two major flaws. The first is that legacies should be nearly infinite in possibility, and beg creativity, in a system that is itself supposed to allow extreme flexibility - and yet, there is only a short list of the things in the book, a few extras on the CD, and no rules for creating and balancing them - nowhere I could find, anyway. This doesn't prevent the GM from just making them up, of course. But it's a key missing element - personally, I think the need for that to be considered should be explicitly stated, and there should be guides to help the GM do it, or at least encourage them to consider it. One of the things I dislike immensely about Changeling: The Dreaming is that it is based around creativity and smothers it, by making all the characters alike. Here I find a similar nuisance - a system in which the world is wider and stranger than you know, in which many things are possible that most men might never know...whose system doesn't allow for that explicitly, but locks characters into a few limited patterns! It's no fun watching a character's power change because the system has no way to express it. (I got really lucky - yes, that's sarcastic - this happened to my character in the game I played at Gencon. She became somewhat a different person than I intended, because the power was forced into a form that did not suit the concept I had, because nothing in the rules fit.) "There are more things in heaven and earth...." So can we give them a place here, if only by stating that sometimes you must make things up, or better still, by offering guidelines?
(I gather, from a brief exchange with Phil Brucato at GenCon, that in fact there are plans in the works for a Legacies and Wyrds book which will have many additional of each - and rules for creating your own. I sincerely hope so, but I submit that failure to include at least a brief paragraph in the main book, encouraging GMs who are comfortable enough with it to create their own or let players do so, was a major oversight and mistake.)
The other big problem is the scale. Accords, Legacies, and Wyrds have a 4-level scale, each level of which is characterized by a phrase. Each level costs 3 favor points (or, in the case of Wyrds, gives you 3). The problem with this is that when you talk about using the level of the thing, because the descriptives are used so often, some people use the cost instead of the purchased level. (Our GM did so. I think it's cool, but it's not the intent of the system. The examples in the book seem to make that pretty clear.) Having a phrase for each level is a nice conceit in terms of flavor, but it damages playability pretty badly. The levels need to be emphasized as numbers, as well as descriptions, if this is to work. This is not a systemic flaw, but an informational flaw, a presentation flaw. But it's a big one. The difference between a +4 to something and a +12 is immense!
4. Wyrds.
Wyrds are the negative side of things. Traits you carry that are not to your advantage, that give you points back. If you have the Wyrd Poverty, it's not just that you lack money now. You will continue to lack money, and lose any you come into, until you lose the Wyrd - and that is not just a matter of spending XP to strip it off, but of telling a story wherein you conquer or overcome it. The same is true for most other Wyrds, though some few cannot be gotten rid of.
All the comments that applied to Legacies, including the extras being on the CD, apply to Wyrds.
5. Favor points.
After you've got your graces and vocations, you get favor points. The number you get varies depending on the level of story you want to tell; there are three levels, and the two higher levels come with required numbers of wyrds (that you don't get points for!). The reality is, any GM worth their salt (whether in the form of pretzels or more traditional offerings) is going to adjust favor points as needed for the flavor of their game, once confident with the system, and that's as it should be.
Favor points bear an entirely too-close resemblance to White Wolf's freebie points; there's only so many ways you can construct an RPG, though. The real problem with favor points is that what they will buy you is exquisitely hard to determine - and it seems obvious when you read it. Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, there are three "obvious" readings of it (each different), and some people hook onto one or another - we saw all three in our group. Going back through the examples helps, but the fact is that the text is unclear and the example is not mixed in with the text and is therefore not adjacent to the material. Argh! There's no question with accords, legacies, and wyrds. 3 times level is pretty straightforward. But as for keys/aspects...well, here's what the text says in the little chart (I should note that what I've been calling "levels" are here called "degrees" - a fact it's easy to forget since I have no idea why the term was chosen):
Grace Key, Vocation Key: Four points per degree.
Grace Aspects, Vocation Aspects: one point per degree.
Heart Traits: One point per degree.
Fortune: Three points per degree up to 3, three points per degree over 3.
(By the way, on page 235, it sas that "Graces, Vocations, or Hearts (except Fortune): These traits cost one point per degree." It explicitly addresses favor points with aspects in a separate section below that. I assume this is an older rule; the chart on page 228, which is quoted in part above, makes more sense; after all, aspects should be cheaper than keys, being as keys give you aspects.
I omit here "Favors" (legacies and accords) and wyrds, because they are clearer-cut and I have no issue with them. I list the last, Fortune, mostly to laugh at it. It starts at 3 no matter what, so the first sentence is irrelevant. In addition, the first and second sentences give the same cost, so why not just say "3 points per degree" and have DONE with it?
Then there's the lovely question of what "per degree" means. This section is confusing, and that's not good. Here are the interpretations I've seen (all of which were seriously believed to be right by at least one person I spoke to at Gencon - and there weren't that many, mostly in the game I was in):
a. If you raise an aspect from 3 to 4, it costs one point: one point per degree. If you raise it from 2 to 4, it costs two points: one point per degree.
b. If you raise an aspect from 3 to 4, it costs four points: one point per degree. If you raise an aspect from 2 to 4, it costs seven points: one point per degree to go from 2-3 (3 points) and one point per degree from 3-4 (4 more points).
c. If you raise an aspect from 3 to 4, it costs four points: one point per degree. If you raise an aspect from 2 to 4, it costs four points: one point per degree. (This one doesn't make sense to me, but I heard it.)
Okay, so which makes sense? C doesn't. It flat doesn't. Because it means if you know you're going to have to pay to raise that stat to 4, it behooves you to put as little as possible in it, shunting points to other stats - after all, the cost in C is the same for 1 to 4 or 3 to 4, so.... A or B could each make sense. A makes 1-2 and 6-7 equal cost, which is maybe not so good - but if you want people to be able to make flexible, faerie-tale concepts in character creation, it could maybe work. However, the per-degree phrasing is also used in XP spends, where it wouldn't make sense, so A is probably ruled out - though you could use it as an optional rule in character creation for a more-powerful-character game. B, then, seems our most likely - but even B has a drawback, in that you want to short your lowest traits, because raising them will be cheapest. That's sort of an odd thing to have happen in character creation, to be playing the numbers game at that level.
So we do have an example in the book, even if it's not right at the same spot as the rules. Let's go look at it and see which of the above seems to apply. It's on pages 238-239 (well, rather, the crunchy numbers part of it is).
The heart traits are Mind 4, Body 5, Spirit 7. This is stated to be base 15, plus 12 favor points to raise Mind 3 to Mind 4. This conforms to either option b or c, listed above. It also shows the flaw of both those systems - leaving one trait low and raise it. A player who buys mind 4, body 5, spirit 6, and then decides to raise spirit, is hosed...even though they may have structure the bare minimums, then looked at where to add. Instead, you have to look at what you want and then min-max it, with a system like this. (At 28 points, spirit 7 is unattainable without taking wyrds for a starting character...if you try to buy it after-the-fact.)
The character's vocations are "base 15, plus 16 favor points" - the vocation keys total out to 18, which would be 15 + 3, which means 12 of those 16 points were spent on keys (this is explicitly stated in the 'show me' section - all were level-1 keys - again with the min-maxing). That leaves 4 to account for in the spects. The aspects are listed at the far right of the second page. The key that has extra aspects are art (piano 2, wordcraft 1). Wordcraft cost 1; that leaves 3, and therefore piano cost 3: 1 + 2. So, case (b) above applies.
Not quite as insane as case c, but still very heavy on the min-maxing being encouraged, which is disappointing. What's more disappointing is having to go dig up the example and dissect it to figure this out, all for want of a simple note where the costs are first mentioned, such as, "Raising spirit from 2 to 4 would cost 28 points: 12 to go from 2 to 3, and 16 more to go from 3 to 4." That is all it would take to make this clear.
6. Resolving things: cards or dice?
The system offers three options for resolving the question of "does X succeed?" One is GM decision - what's good for the story.
Another is by drawing cards, by a rule that may add to or subtract from your score based on the color of the card (it's really pretty simple and easy to deal with) or result in a disaster or a triumph on the spot based on the card (kings). A regular deck of playing cards is used. It does, of course, require a deck of cards. And it has some minor confusion. The GM of our game had red subtract - red is the color of blood and is bad. On the second night, he was sure he had mis-handled it and had black subtract when it should have been red; we assured him that no, this had not been the case, he'd taught us 'red subtracts'. Later, when I read the book, I found that officially, black cards are misfortune and subtract; red is good. Practically speaking, it does not matter which is which - the odds are the same - just as long as your entire group is playing one or the other. However, an argument can be made for either, and without a reason that makes it memorable, that makes it confusing.
Ah, but there's another method of resolution - dice, using two ten-siders. I thought I would be thrilled with this - I am used to dice-based systems and I usually have dice with me. Dice are easier to haul along than a deck of cards, and you don't have to wonder about the question (never addressed clearly) of how often/when to shuffle the deck. (They say to shuffle it as soon as the king of hearts or spades is drawn - the automatic triumphs and failures. But they don't say otherwise. I assume, therefore, that you only shuffle after those are drawn - since they'll definitely be drawn before all cards are gone.)
Right. Dice. So what's the dice rule? Oops. The dice are more complex, because they're not being used as dice. They're being used as surrogate cards! You have two dice. One is the suit die, the other is the value die. If the suit die is 1-4, you subtract the value die from your attempt. If suit is 5-8, you add the value die. If suit is 9 or 10, you read the value die as follows:
1-4: Jack - even chances. No modifier applied.
5-6: Black Queen - automatic failure.
7-8: Red Queen - automatic success.
9: King of spades - automatic disaster.
10: King of hearts - automatic success.
Note that if using a true deck, the kings of clubs and diamonds are removed. (I'm sure someone, somewhere, will kick up a fuss when their GM removes the king of hearts and leaves diamonds in, even though the results are statistically identical.)
The odds are, on a quick glance, identical with cards or dice. I can't fault that. What I can fault is that you still have to be thinking in terms of cards, and now you need a freaking table to work it out. Also, after you spent that long saying "this color bad, that color good" - ignoring the jacks is really hard, and the gut instinct is to take them as good/bad, not neutral. That's an uncomfortable little piece, and something I don't think we necessarily realized in our game. But regardless, the dice mechanic is functional, but useful only if you don't have a deck of cards and feel like translating; its main purpose seems to be to confuse and to lever you out of the game, since last I checked my ten-sided dice are not a deck of cards, and translating them into one is truly bizarre.
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