The Inside Scoop on Gaming

My Bias, or "When designers enter the industry 15 years late and invite us to make fun of them"

Imagine is a high fantasy RPG...of the class/level model...released in year 1999 of the Common Era.

I bring this up because...well, I probably don't need to mention that we've only seen about 10 million "old school" high fantasy RPGs by now. Did I say "By now?" Hell, even at the end of the 80's they were getting damned trite. Mercifully, I think the flow of new ones slowed to a crawl after that. The most recent one that comes to mind is SenZar, something best left as a horror story one would tell to young game designers to keep them in line. No wait, there was also Lejendary Adventures and Sovereign Stone. Hmmmm...no comment.

It's an understatement to say that we've beaten high fantasy to death. It's Winston Smith at the end of 1984 – a pathetic wreck, humiliated and broken by one bad idea after another, eagerly hoping for the long-awaited bullet that will finally end it all. All I can do now is go back and forth from remembering how cool it all was in the beginning...to bitterly wondering why I ever felt that way (maybe because I was 12). I realize that's a real grim metaphor, but it might tell you how I feel here (and thus, the kind of bias I'm coming from). I like swords and sorcery as much as the next gamer, but designers need to stop spewing out new games when they have nothing worth adding to the genre.

Thus, my bias is established. In other words, if I'm to take a new fantasy RPG seriously this late in the game (no pun intended), it's gotta be something pretty damned special.

It needs to have ingenious, easy, fun rules. Dream Pod 9's Silhouette rules were good. FUDGE and CORPS could be, too, if someone would ever take a publishable stab at adapting them to the genre. But even class/level systems are good if they're fun enough. Rolemaster, for example, was tolerable, if only because I loved seeing the gruesome results we could roll on the critical tables ("Ha, ha, loser! I rolled 100 on my 'D' lightning critical! Suck it and die, superconductor boy!").

At the same time, the new game needs to have setting. And when I say setting, I mean setting. Its world needs to be startling and fantastic, enough to once again make fantasy feel magical. The next Middle Earth would work (as opposed to yet another pale imitation of it). Tekumel and Glorantha, I'm told, were laudable efforts. So were the worlds of Dark Sun and Planescape, if I can disgust the hardcore role-players a moment by saying so. But even if the new game doesn't have a setting, it could still triumph through a groundbreaking approach. Aria had this potential (oh, if only the authors had written concisely!).

Imagine, sadly, has none of these factors going for it.

Its creators, though, are very good at pretending it does. I'll just say this: they went to the same RPG marketing school that the SenZar and Multiverser people went to.

Put another way: they appear to think Imagine is an epic masterwork that represents the next evolution of role-playing.

Take the book's back copy, for example:

"Never before has anyone combined fun, creativity and playability into a role playing game of this caliber. Imagine a world limited only by the bounds of your mind. Imagine a game unlike any you have ever played before. Imagine no more, we have made it a reality.

Now if you dare, discover what role playing is all about."

While we're busy imagining stuff here, imagine me rolling my eyes.

Yes, a class/level high fantasy game. Claiming to be "a world limited only by the bounds of your mind" and "a game unlike any you have ever played".

This would be funny enough from any game, but when the game's genre has suffered almost more imitators and clichés than every other RPG genre put together, it becomes a satire worthy of the ages.

Did Imagine's creators have any conception of the magnitude of what they're promising here? After actually reading and running this game, my sense of disbelief is absolute. It's been a while since I've been this overwhelmed by ludicrousness, or amazed that anyone could be this lacking in common sense and know so little about the field they're going into.

I also think that a game's creators are not the best judge of its "fun, creativity and playability", let alone its "caliber". Call me democratic, but isn't that the buyers' job? It's practically a law of physics that the greatness of a work is directly inverse to how much it proclaims itself.

For example, how hard is it to find someone to tell you that Dream Pod 9 constitutes "greatness"? I can count on one hand the number of bad DP9 reviews I've ever seen and still have three fingers left. Their level of fan support would be almost cult-like if its praise wasn't so understandable (as opposed to the "Yeah! This game rules! All these other games suck compared to it! You haven't role-played until you've seen this one! Style 5! Substance 5!" reviews RPGnet's lesser reviewers sometimes spew). Myself, I don't really enjoy Dream Pod 9's games, but I can still see their good points. Yet, for all this, the company seems to have a surprisingly unassuming attitude. There isn't any of this "our game will blow your mind" crap, as much as their fans might be inclined to agree.

Unfortunately, if Dream Pod 9 is great, it's only because they've proven themselves. Imagine's creators haven't, and at this rate never will. That they assume they've automatically brought role-playing to some lofty new level is either sickening or laughably sad, depending on your bent.

And trust me, we're still lost in SenZar territory here. If the June '99 press release for this book was any indication, its creators think they're greatness in a bottle. A few quotes:

"When asked what this new release means for role playing enthusiasts, W. Michael Tenery, III, CEO of Imagine Role Playing, replied, 'We are giving gamers what they have always wanted; a fun, flexible, creative system. Not only do players have the ability to try anything they want in the game, but they also have the mechanics to back it up. It marks a new day for role playing games'."

"With this book as its flagship product, Imagine Role Playing, Inc. will take the role playing industry by storm."

"Dedicated to the ideal of producing high quality products, Imagine is raising the bar for other companies in the gaming industry. Imagine will lead the role playing game industry into the new millennium with a new and greater degree of excellence."

Now, to some degree, I can sympathize here: any RPG that actually makes it to print is the product of months and years of toil. Who wouldn't feel proud at the big moment, when the arduous project is finally complete and the book is on its way to the printers? Your company and everyone else who's supported you is all excited, and now gamers nationwide will have a chance to enjoy your RPG, one that probably already entertained you for years as a constantly evolving, lovingly crafted home-brewed game. In the rush of the moment, surely you can get just a little carried away when announcing yourself to the industry, and maybe say a thing or two that you wouldn't really think at a more..."ordinary" time.

On the other hand, why do all these game designers have to have something to prove? Do they have to announce their games like they're starting a revolution, saving the industry, or defining the millennium?

I haven't managed to raise my "RPG Lore" skill to Superb yet, but I'm pretty sure there was a point when game designers weren't this full of themselves. What happened to all the ones who could write press releases like "Okay, we're about to ship [insert RPG name here], a game of [insert world description and/or genre elements here], so genre fans ought to check it out. Hope you all enjoy it"? Maybe I'm being kind of naïve here, but I think that's the kind of designer attitude we need to encourage.

Oh, well. Since Imagine's creators are so sure of themselves, surely they won't object if I keep all their claims of "a new and greater degree of excellence" and "a game unlike any you have ever played" in mind while I'm reviewing their game.

Finally, The Review Of The Actual Game, or "Man, I could have been playing SenZar now"

First, I'll list the things I enjoyed about the Imagine system.

Some of the alignment and skill ideas were cool.

Okay, now that we've got that out of the way, on to the rest of the review.

Imagine, like so many other games before it, is a clear and direct re-write of AD&D.

Unfortunately, like many of those games, it is also a needlessly complicated and unintuitive re-write. I don't doubt that, at the core, Imagine has the skeleton of a fun system, but - far from being a "never before" combination of fun, creativity, and playability - anything that might have been good about it is quickly buried under reams of poorly implemented details and rules.

Attributes

We have the typical AD&D attributes here, except that a) the usual range is 5-20, b) it's not Constitution, it's Vitality, and c) we now have Appearance, Will Force, Aura, Piety, Knowledge, and Social Class, too. As with AD&D, all the attributes provide modifiers to lots of other things. In addition to all the modifiers that were in AD&D (Augh! Strength is still the sole determinant of our Melee Attack bonus!), we also have weapon speed adjustments, initiative adjustments, social rank (cool – you can get a 20 and be a "king - family of"), magic resistance, a few morale adjustments, "piety control" and "aura control" adjustments that go with Imagine's magic system, and memorization points for spells and priestly invocations, to get most of it out of the way.

(I'll give them this much, though – at least they made encumbrance load more straightforward. You get your "load limit" from your Strength, which will be a factor in the range of .05 to 2.0. Then you just multiply this by your body weight. A snap! And no "Open Doors/Bend Bars" ratings to get in the way, either!)

Each attribute also has an "attribute save", a percentage the attribute charts invariably list as the attribute rating x 5 (maximum 90%).

This is the first of many pointless bits of complication – why not just have the players try to roll under the attribute on a d20? It's same probability range, especially since everything modifies the saves in factors of 5% (aka factors of 1 on a d20) anyway. Instead, the "attribute saves" are just one more thing to keep track of in a game already well laden with miscellaneous traits.

The attributes themselves are self-explanatory, except possibly Aura, which is just your magical potential. Interestingly, if your Piety is over 13, you have a (tiny) base chance to commune with your deity. Asking for signs and visions takes a base of 1 and 5 minutes, respectively, but if you have 10 minutes, you can try for direct intervention!

So how do you get your attributes? Come on, I bet you can guess.

All together now: RANDOM ROLLING!

Basically, you roll 5d4 once for each attribute, although for most of them, you're allowed to roll 6d4 or 7d4 and drop the lowest excess dice.

That's for "adventurer" characters. You can also be a boring "normal" character and not get to roll any excess dice – which is unacceptable to the proud munchkin tradition of class/level gaming, because you have roughly a 1 in 1,024 chance of rolling a 20 that way. Or the gamemaster can let you make a "heroic" or "legendary" character and roll each attribute 2 or 3 times, respectively.

Attribute Characteristics?

If we group together the physical, mental, social, and mystical attributes and average each group, we also get the attribute "characteristics": Endurance, Perception, Affinity, and Fortune. Endurance serves as the hit points for each of a character's body parts. The rest are percentage scores. All four traits get modifiers for race, but no race gets more than +10.

Which makes the Perception and Affinity traits particularly silly.

Perception is your chance to notice something hidden or out of the ordinary. It's the mental average – the average of Intelligence, Wisdom, and Knowledge. Silly? I'm not talking about how all three traits are supposed to play an equal role in your Perception (living encyclopedias, geniuses, and paragons of wisdom are equally perceptive?). That's silly, but I'm talking about how your Perception is 30% at best – and that's only if you're a mental giant with a human maximum of 20 in all those traits and come from a "perceptually gifted" race.

A 30% to notice something amiss. Anyone else think that's a bit low? Hell, Call of Cthulhu investigators are supposed to be ordinary people, and even they find stuff more often than that. Even better, through character advancement, you can hope to gradually raise that by another 10%!

Affinity, the average of Social Class, Charm, and Appearance, is even sillier – it's your chance of getting strangers to have a good impression or "good feeling" of you. Come on...isn't that something that should be left to a Charm save? Or maybe even a skill? Hell, even the reaction roll tables that most high fantasy games include would have been more useful. But hey, we at least get a break with this trait – we can gradually raise it by as much as 20%!

Fortune, the average of Aura, Will Force, and Piety, is the "last chance" roll that the GM can allow if you're clearly faced with imminent doom. Making the roll, of course, means that you survive through some deus ex machina: divine intervention, sheer will, sheerer dumb luck, magic, whatever. It's the only trait where such low percentages make sense. In fact, depending on how easily you think players should get such breaks, a max 30% may even be a bit high!

"Race?" "Elf." "What flavor, sir?"

As far as character races go, every cliché of AD&D gaming is still here.

Elves? High, gray, wood, and dark. Halflings? No, excuse me, "midfolk", and there's town, forest, and river varieties. Dwarves? Mountain, dark, and civilized. Oh, wait, here's something new – civilized dwarf births only produce a daughter one in thirty times (dark dwarves are worse at one in forty, and mountain are much better at one in eight). One would wonder how these guys sustain themselves as a race, especially since, as with every other dwarf race in the history of high fantasy gaming, they have little talent with magic.

Oh, what have we here? Apparently, there might be a surprise after all – players can also be mountain or forest avians (bird men), goblins, ogres, centaurs, and saurians (hulking lizard men). Those choices aren't in every fantasy game. Okay, it's not great enough to arouse more than my ambivalence - I still failed my sanity check when I yet again saw a game of stock elves, dwarves, and halflings - but it's something, I guess.

Alignments!

Imagine also has alignments. Ready? See, you can choose between different types of Good, Neutral, and Evil alignments, and – now, wait, I'm getting to the part where it's actually different!

The alignment system at work here can be described as an "expanded" version of the one in AD&D. At either end of the scale, we now have a "Fanatical" Good and Evil. Each alignment now also has both a "Passive" and "Active" distinction, which are pretty much what they sound like. The exception is True Neutral, which has neither and is different from Neutral (Active) and Neutral (Passive). (Oddly, Neutral Good and Neutral Evil are listed as "neutral" alignments, instead of as good/evil alignments.) Changing the Active/Passive part of an alignment isn't penalized as badly as a complete shift to a different alignment.

Although Neutral/True Neutral, Neutral Evil, and Neutral Good remain, AD&D's traditional "Lawful" and "Chaotic" distinctions have been relegated here to optional "tendencies": Moral, Immoral, Order, and Chaos. Characters can take them to help flesh out their alignments (as long as they don't take two tendencies that contradict), and violations are penalized less than Active/Passive violations.

Most of the time, these alignments worked decently enough – they're certainly colorful, and offer a bit more choice than stock AD&D. To finally give Imagine some credit, it succeeds in defining each possible alignment in ways that make it distinct from the others – a tricky feat, given the challenge of describing "Active" and "Passive" views for neutral alignments without sounding vague. But like most alignment systems, Imagine had to do some serious stretching before fitting in characters with really complex personalities and motives (at least in AD&D, you had Chaotic Neutral as a catch-all category for them). It needs more refinement before it can fully transcend the restrictive nature of its roots.

Skills, Character Classes, "Levels", And Skills, Skills, Skills!

Along with attributes and alignments, characters also have skills. As mentioned before, this happens to be entirely where the other half of Imagine's cool ideas lay. Many of the skills are actually magic-like effects – theoretically, you could learn things like "Plane Shift" or "Summon Supernatural" or "Reincarnation" as skills and use them more or less at will, instead of having to use energy-consuming spells. This just strikes me as worthy. But the non-magic skills have some good ones, too – Sever, Slay, Assassinate, and Sweep (hitting multiple opponents with one blow) are fun.

Unfortunately, the way Imagine handles skills is also where it becomes a seriously irritating piece of work.

There are really two types of skills in this system: class/racial skills and social skills.

Class and racial skills are, more than anything, just typical race and character class abilities, the "adventuring" stuff that constitutes about 95% of the skills you'll be using for dungeon crawling, combat, thieving, wearing armor, detecting magic, and other typical high fantasy activities. All but the most pedestrian of these skills are "restricted", which means that only the chosen classes and races can ever learn or attempt to use them.

Social skills are mostly the boring "normal person" skills that aren't technically part of any character class – beginning classes get a list of social skills to choose from, sure, but after that, anyone can learn any of them, by finding a teacher or something and taking the listed training time. The social skills are colorful, but other than the odd bonus to a real class skill or ability, they are only occasionally useful, something the text itself admits.

So far, so good, right?

The problem here is in how these skills are gained and improved – Imagine uses entirely different systems for both class and social skills (you can't gain new racial skills unless they're non-restricted, and you improve them the same way as social skills).

No, actually, before that, the problem is how Imagine handles rating your skills.

It's a percentile system.

Fair enough. So how do we get a percentage? Get ready to take notes. Okay, all skills have "ratings" which tell us how hard they are to learn – really powerful or complicated skills can have ratings as high as 20, but simple ones (particularly social skills) may be only 7 or 8. Each skill also has two attributes controlling it – by averaging the two together and comparing the average to the rating, we get a base chance of 5% for every point above the rating. (Sometimes, a skill has only one controlling attribute, sparing us the tedious averaging.)

And yes, if your attributes suck enough to put you under the rating, you end up with a negative base chance.

After that, each skill also has a "start bonus" – a random roll you add to the skill when you first learn it, like 2d6% or 1d10%. Again, social skills are more lenient, with much higher bonus rolls (nary a one gives you less than 4 dice, and some grant even 8 or 10. And many of the rolls are d10's, as well). If a skill is being taken as a racial skill, the start bonus roll is doubled.

Hopefully, by now, you've managed to end up with a positive number.

Finally, you add any other bonuses you might be getting for something – most of the classes have a +30% to their five "core" class skills and a +5% or +10% to other relevant class skill groups (combat, magical, stealth/intrusive, etc). Then you might have a bonus for your race, as all of them get bonuses to different skills (again, particularly social skills).

This is all a lot more tedious than it sounds.

It could just be me, though. I've grown accustomed to simple and straightforward systems like Silhouette and FUDGE ("Make up my name...put my 5 levels in these attributes...look over the broad skill list and use my 15 levels to buy 4 Good, 1 Fair, and 1 Mediocre skill...take my three Gifts...take a couple Faults and use them to get 2 more attribute levels and 2 more Good skills...what the hell? Am I done already?"). Imagine may gravely stress that "each character's development is unique", but personally I could give a left testicle if Dark Priest A's attributes and luck uniquely make him 3% more likely to successfully commit blasphemy than Dark Priest X. If it takes me an hour to finish creating a character, it had better be because there's so many interesting character backgrounds to read and choose from, not because it takes that long to roll and look up the 20 or 30 totals I need to calculate under the pretense of "unique character building". Fine detail is worse than useless if it doesn't add to the fun.

To their credit, though, at least there are charts to clearly outline the whole process, and five pages of master charts with all the skills, ratings, and start bonuses.

Okay, so we've got our skills. How do we improve them?

Oh, dear.

First, let me explain about character classes and "levels".

In theory, Imagine character classes may seem a little more flexible than AD&D, but that's only because it gives the classes more class-related things to do. There might be more flexibility than that, but in a minute, the skill system will quickly make maintaining that belief problematic at best.

Anyway, Imagine has your typical character classes – warriors, rogues, priests, mages, both the straight classes and variations on each. Warrior variations include duelists, knights/dark knights, rangers, and bards. Rogues include acrobats, assassins, bandits, buccaneers, and minstrels. Priests include dark priests, seers, shamen, monks, and druids. Mages include mentalists, alchemists, sages, and white/gray/black witches.

The point is, each class has a different set of class skills. Warriors obviously won't have skills like "Divine Knowledge" or "Resurrection", while a shaman won't learn "Armor Knowledge". Five class skills for each class will be "core" skills, which you get at a +30% bonus.

(Oh, yeah, and each also has different sets of allowable weapons and armor, but we'll pretend we don't recognize that from anywhere. But hey, at least here, it's not literally impossible for you to use "off-class" equipment – you just can't ever gain proficiency in the weapons, and with the armor, you can't use your class skills while it's on.)

With me so far?

So we have classes. Now we need levels. In Imagine, levels are divided into "goals" and "titles". You start at 1st title, goal 0. The goals are technically the "levels" here – they're what you go up when you get enough experience points. But every three goals, you also go up a title.

Every title, you get another roll to add to your Endurance (the roll is determined by your race). You also get that +1% to Fortune, Perception, and +2% to Affinity! More importantly, you also get access to more of your class skills. Yep – you only have about 4 or 5 of them at 1st title. The rest are spread out, three or four to a title. When you get new class skills, you go back through the above process to get your percentage, of course.

(Incidentally, the system also has "practitioner titles" for skills – that is, how many titles you've had a skill. So you could be a 10th title assassin and have 4th title Fencing, or something. For various reasons, this is actually important for some skills.)

Every goal, you get two different things.

The first is two 5% chances to increase an attribute relevant to your class. (Yeah, I'm excited, too.)

The second brings us full circle. It's a number of skill points to put into your class skills, with most classes getting 17-18 points each goal. These points can only be spent on class skills (not social or racial skills), and each point raises one by 1%. There is really one central problem here.

This is the only way to raise your class skills.

Oh, wait, my bad, there's a way where you spend some time "training" a class skill and get a fraction of your experience points towards the next goal – at the cost of spending that fraction of the next goal's skill points on the skill you trained.

So no, there is no real way to get any truly "extra" skill points, barring gamemaster fiat or wishes or something.

Which leads us to another problem: there just aren't enough damned points. I thought this while I was running the game, but you don't even have to go that far to see it.

Think about it. By going up three goals, you've received around 50-55 skill points, right? Enough to increase one of your four or five beginning class skills by 50-55%.

Then, though, you're at the next title – and you receive three to five new class skills to worry about. By the time you've made a total increase of another 55%, you're up another title and get yet more skills. Each title, you can either get good at one skill, a little better at a couple, or you can make almost pointlessly modest improvements to all of them.

In the beginning, this isn't so much a problem – most 1st title skills tend to be core skills anyway, so you get them at +30%, easing the need to seriously improve them. It also helps to have relevant maxed-out attributes, so that you can get over the skill ratings and get a high base chance, again easing the need for much improvement.

When you start titling-up, though, stellar attributes aren't a bonus so much as a necessity. There aren't many core skills past the beginning, so you really need high attributes if you want to be anything approaching useful in your new skills without having to sacrifice all your skill points.

Then there are a lot of those cool high-level skills, such as the aforementioned Slay or Plane Shift. These are the ones with ratings of 18+ and a starting bonus of maybe 1d10%. Even with munchkin attributes, there's no way you're going to avoid completely sucking at these without throwing the next title's worth of points at them (probably more than that, if you're Mr. Merely-Above-Average and got a total starting chance of –20%). That is, if you're lucky enough to not have a bunch of other cool skills you want to increase.

I intensely dislike this setup enough as it is, but when you add it to the whole "class skills divided by title" scheme, it makes a lot of the interesting character classes and class skills largely pointless.

I have nothing against the idea that first-level characters shouldn't instantly have skills like Slay or Resurrection. Game balance, people! But the Imagine system makes them useless even when you do get them by giving you little chance to improve them without becoming one-sided. This is especially true towards the last titles (the Player's Guide stops at 10th), when there are few goals and skill points left for you to attain – and many high-rating skills you'll need them for. You just aren't going to be able to master many of the neat skills you saw when you first read over your character class. You are forced to specialize pretty narrowly, and that's a shame.

I'm not a power-gamer, and I'm not insisting that I should be able to easily increase every skill I get to 100+%...but surely they could have been more reasonable than this. As it is, nothing captures the feeling of playing without a full deck quite like the Imagine system does.

Of course, we're not done here. There are still racial and social skills, which use an entirely different system of improvement.

Training.

Yeah, training. As in, you spend time either self-teaching or having someone teach the skill to you, and then you get to roll and add to your percentage.

You should have heard the way my head hit the table when I read this, after reading all that nonsense about class skills and points.

Training!!

Words fail me when I try to imagine why they couldn't have done the class skills this way, too.

Is it because they're that afraid of characters getting too powerful too fast? Whatever. Most of the skills take days to learn/train, and no fantasy gamemasters I've played under would let a party sit around unmolested long enough for a munchkin to raise something 150%. Even beyond that, training a skill gets harder each time you succeed.

This becomes even more absurdly humorous when you discover that you can get and improve "unrestricted" class skills through training, such as Move Unseen and Weapon Parry. Yeah, absolutely – the mage class might not have Weapon Parry, but one of them could go and learn the damn skill and train it whenever he wants, where a warrior would have to wait for the next goal's skill points.

What's wrong with this picture?

You know, many consider SenZar abominable enough to count as a biotoxin. I know there are gamers on usenet who could badmouth it for hours on end (and they would be absolutely right). I myself have serious problems with it on a number of levels. But you know what? At least the damn game made a half-assed attempt to be flexible and playable.

I realize that many circles would consider what I'm about to say a grave, your-decedents-will-kill-mine-in-retaliation insult, but Imagine's failings actually remind me of what SenZar did right. There are, actually, to be fair, things you can do in SenZar that traditionally aren't really possible in D&D clone games.

Sure, SenZar had classes, levels, hit points, and all the rest of it, but I liked how it was not only possible, but easy to get more powerful without actually going up a level. You could raise any of your attributes, and a damn sight more often than roughly once every twenty levels. And the classes were actually flexible – the spell and combat progressions were fixed (the only thing you can do is raise your attributes to get more bonuses), but any class could learn any skill. If you were a warrior and wanted to be a thief, too, it was actually possible to pretend you were – and have the skills to back it up. Even if you wanted to be a warrior and cast spells out your ass...oh, for god's sake, just pick one of the endless dumb "magic warrior"-like classes the authors put as 75% of the character classes! Or better yet, just take one of the mage classes and graft it onto your warrior class. The rules don't care!

And speaking of skills, SenZar takes the best, simplest part of Imagine's "social skill" approach and runs with it. That is, it shares only the fact that you take the time to learn the skill and then you get it. Even better, every SenZar skill is tied to one of your attributes – as in, using the skill entails making a simple attribute roll. In the final humiliating bit of complication, you can take the skill's training time more than once, each time getting a permanent +1 on rolls for the skill. It's as simple as the mind of a model, and not at all distracting from the glorious process of ass-kicking and hoard – er, I mean careful role-playing.

Realistic? Pat Robertson's chance in a progressive society. But try to tell me with a straight face that Imagine's approach is any more realistic, for all its ill-considered complication.

It's heartrending, really – I don't want to say it, but SenZar is actually much closer to the revolutionary high fantasy game that Imagine so wants us to believe it is.

Even worse is when I imagine the simple things that might have improved Imagine's class/skill rules. Make a class's skills improvable by training, so that the skill points will seem more like the bonus they're supposed to be. Or, barring that, more skill points would be good – probably 1.5x to 2x the present amounts. Some broadening of the skills would also be an improvement (for instance, I don't think it was really necessary to make Move Unseen and Move Unheard different skills). Higher attribute gain chances (maybe 15-20% - still really unlikely, but now not so distantly pointless). Eliminate the weapon/armor restrictions - it's silly to believe that mages could never (even eventually) become competent with a given weapon, and without easy access to the Armor Knowledge skill, how far are mages and shamen going to get against the default penalties for plate mail anyway?

Even better (and something that actually would have been vaguely revolutionary) would be a meta-system where players have the option of creating their own classes, with "creation points" or something to buy core skills, class skills, class bonuses, skill points per goal, and other special traits. There could be a scale for how many points to allocate, depending on how "legendary" the gamemasters wants the characters to be.

With this setup, it could, in theory, be possible to emulate a lot of your favorite fantasy heroes from movies and books (a favorite Imagine boast at GenCon last year was how it was "built for this") without the quixotic headache of having to fit them into predefined character classes. And that, sir, would be much closer to building "a world limited only by the bounds of your mind".

Even without a full meta-system, classes could still be made genuinely customizable by allowing players to actually pick their class skills each title (either through slots or another point system), instead of pretending characters of the same class are unique simply because they have different skill percentages. There could even be "suggestions" for those who just want the "default" mage or warrior or whatever.

(Obviously, with both ideas, there would have to be some restrictions or higher costs to discourage munchkins from taking Slay, Destruction, and Assassinate as their beginning skills, but hey, this was just something I thought of in five minutes. You can't expect it to already be perfectly ironed out.)

But enough of it all. We still have combat to go over.

Combat: The Dark Heart Of The Game

As we all know, combat is crucially important in any game of this type. High fantasy began (and largely remains) a hack-and-slash genre, without exception where class/level games are concerned. The skill system problems could probably be forgiven if Imagine could reward our patience with an exciting system of combat.

We'll never know. If Imagine's skills are an exercise in irritating bookkeeping and narrow development, its combat is a maddening nightmare of micromanagement. I'm not even sure if I should get started here. It almost makes Rolemaster look like a FUDGE game that's being run by the father, son, and holy spirit of all stoned LARP fanatics ("Whoa, dude...that rock-paper-scissors stuff is...like...gonna screw up all our scenes...role-playing only, maaaan"). As far as its ability to assault reason goes, it's worthy of inclusion in Lovecraft's Necronomicon.

Have to start somewhere.

In Imagine, your ability to hit stuff isn't a percentage skill like everything else. It's an entirely different system using a d20.

(And no, we don't recognize that from anywhere, either. Nor will we later recognize how mental combat has five attack modes and five defense modes, which are chosen in secret before each attack...)

Attack skill is rated on a 6-step spectrum: Beginner, Novice, Intermediate, Advanced, Expert, Master. 1st title characters will be either Beginner or Novice, depending on class – how often they progress to the next step also depends entirely on class. A warrior, naturally, achieves Master at 9th title, while a mage would only be at Intermediate.

Hit/miss resolution is determined by a sort of "bullseye" system – an imaginary bullseye is superimposed over whatever body part of the target you're trying to hit.

Basically, it works like this: if you roll your d20 (+ strength bonus) high enough, you hit the bullseye (and the targeted area). Roll lower, and you're off target in one of the four main directions (up, down, left, right). The first "off-target" ring is still a hit, so if there are other body areas next to your target area, you could hit them instead with your off-target shot. The second (and last) ring is all automatic misses.

Naturally, the bullseye "range" depends on your attack skill. A pathetic Beginner would have to roll 19 or 20, while a Master hits it on 9+. (Thankfully, the character sheet includes a bullseye on which to draw the ranges for your attack skill, and also makes a handy reference during combat.)

If your victim has enough seconds left this round to react, they can try to parry with their weapon, shield, or part of their body. This means rolling Weapon Parry, Shield Parry, or Body Parry - on a success, the attack is blocked and the damage is instead applied to whatever is blocking. There are, of course, other defensive skills, but you get the general idea.

By itself, this isn't so bad. It pulls off the difficult task of providing a halfway realistic hit location system that isn't too tedious to be worth using. It also forces players to describe and role-play their attacks, which is always a bonus. Pretty slick. If we could somehow have just left things here, Imagine combat would have kicked ass.

Sadly, we still have the rest of it to experience. Other than the general horde of modifiers to everything, my main problems with the combat here are movement and damage.

See where I said "enough seconds left this round to react" about parrying, above? Imagine divides combat into 10-second rounds. Every action – attacking with a weapon, moving, turning, speeding up from a walk to a jog, so on - takes some of these seconds. Every weapon's stats include the seconds it needs to execute an attack (high Strength and Agility can reduce this a limited amount). Your Initiative roll (basically a d10 roll minus any Intelligence or Agility bonuses) determines which of the 10 seconds you can begin acting on. Your off-hand can also act for 5 seconds (the full 10 if you're ambidextrous) - handy if you have a shield, as they only take 1 second to parry an attack.

Again, this isn't really that bad, although I know many rules-light gamers who would have preferred the "okay, Assassin A has this Agility rating and these total modifiers, giving him X actions per turn" approach of many simpler games, as opposed to actually dividing every combatants' seconds among different actions (this gets really, really tedious when there are a lot of fighters).

Within reason, this system can provide some interesting interplay in fights. For example, if you're trying to waste someone with a 95% Weapon Parry, you would think you would never hit them, because 95% is really easy to roll under. But if you have a quick enough weapon (like a knife or some other 1-2 second weapon), you could attack more often than they could parry...you wouldn't cause much damage, but you would be at least getting through, and forcing them to spend most of their time parrying instead of attacking. Especially if you've got one in both hands. Or – given Imagine's damage system - you could use a slow (but really heavy) weapon that would sooner or later just break theirs if they keep parrying you. Or you could take some buddies and use the tried and true "gang beating" tactic – Jackie Chan aside, it's hard to defend against attacks from three or four sources at once.

Unfortunately, my problem with the "count your 10 seconds" system comes with its implementation of other actions.

Particularly movement. Unsurprisingly, your walking, jogging, and running movement rates for each hour, 10 seconds, and 1 second are among the many things you calculate during your character's creation, so now we know exactly how fast our character can move during one of these combat seconds. The problem is, you can't just say "okay, I'm running now" whenever you have a second to move – first, you have to spend time getting up up to it. No, I'm not kidding. If you're standing still in this system and you want to run, first you have to spend 1 second walking, another 1 jogging, and then, finally, you're running on your third second. Slowing down follows the same progression, but you can slow down faster by making a 1/2 or 1/4 Agility save (depending on how many "steps" you're skipping), at the risk of falling down if you fail. It's worth trying, though – if you don't, you could easily run or jog past your opponent, end up 10 or 20 feet behind him, and have to spend another second turning around (still, at least you would get to execute a "Move By" or "Move Into" attack). On the upside, I don't think the system goes as far as to require the seconds you're parrying on to coincide with the same seconds your attacker is using. I could be wrong, though – Imagine makes every possible attempt to avoid being rules- or detail-light.

Needless to say, I really loathe how movement is micromanaged here. When I run games, I usually take a vaguely Feng Shui-kinda attitude to it. In other words, screw movement, screw positioning, everyone can attack everyone else unless there's some compelling reason they can't (seriously out of range, already surrounded by five or six people beating on it, someone actually wants to use the Hide skill for once...). I tend to do this even in games with a lot of movement rules. There is a simple reason for this.

The authors of Feng Shui seem to believe - and I agree - that in movie fights, we don't really care about boring details like exactly how far away everyone is from everyone else. We care far more about who's getting their asses kicked and how badly. Movement and distance are only exciting or important when they're...well, actually exciting and important. Like when two people are racing for a weapon, or one of the heroes rushes over to help someone who's about to be decapitated, or the mega-ultra-5-mile-crater-making bomb has 12 seconds left and the idiot bad guy is wearing it as he's running away. Thus, the game has maybe two sentences of hard rules governing movement, when the gamemasters I've played under bother with it at all.

Admittedly, Feng Shui is a game emulating the grossly absurd reality of Hong Kong cinema, but its logic here easily appears in more sober genres of fiction, not the least of which are the fantasy movies and novels Imagine tries to capture.

It's not that movement/range rules have no place in RPGs. I'm not even saying that I myself can't enjoy using them, when they're done well. I know gamers who genuinely find the abstract approach to combat kinda boring and appreciate the extra strategy of movement. Even so, Imagine's movement system is way off the mark. I know its creators were trying to embrace realism, but when it gets to the point where we're measuring the seconds it takes a human to accelerate, things have just gone too far. Again, there has to be a better, simpler way.

Unfortunately, as much as I could (and did) simply ignore Imagine's movement rules, any complaint I might have with them absolutely pales in comparison to its damage system – a sub-system that is just a bit harder to disregard.

You know how some gamers who rag on AD&D get irritated because it rolls everything short of the d20 for weapon damage? Well, these guys could take one look at Imagine, and they would never complain again. Although, to be fair, Imagine damage restrains itself to d4's and d6's, it follows a "more is better – much better!" philosophy. Except for staves and daggers, just about every typical player weapon needs at least five or six dice to roll (okay, there's the long sword – it's just 4d6). I would also complain about all the 7d6 and 8d6 polearms, but those take so many seconds to attack it's not like you would have to roll damage more than once a round.

Anyway, once you've hit some area on the target, you can roll damage and apply it to that body part. A normal human has 19 body parts that can be targeted like this – the shoulder, arm, forearm, thigh, shin, hand, and foot on both sides, as well as the head, neck, and upper, mid, and lower torso.

Each of these parts has its own Endurance, based on multiples of yours...and a place on your character sheet to write it down.

Imagine's overview boasts that its combat allows characters to become "much more than a 'blob' of points". This is very funny to remember when you're staring at a figure covered with numbers.

That aside, you kill defenders by damaging a vital area. Once a vital area hits 0, they have to start making Vitality saves to stay conscious, with the excess damage points mounting on the penalties pretty fast. If a vital area is damaged to negative Vitality, death occurs. Limbs also have this 0/-Vitality system, only the steps are "make a Vitality save to keep functioning" and "automatic severing/smashing beyond recognition", respectively.

Then there's shock. Any time the total amount of damage on your body is more than triple your Endurance, you go into shock. Exactly what happens depends on your Vitality, but basically, you lose any semblance of usefulness and start losing points from all your wounded areas each minute.

All the vital areas also have special injury effects that can happen each time they're hit (typically 1% chance for each point of damage), and then there's also rules for fatigue, knock back, knock down, blood loss, non-weapon damage, damaging weapons ("Okay, if you go over the object threshold but not its strength, you lower its strength by 1 point...but if you go over both, you break it and apply the excess damage to the person!"), and the ever-popular process of getting your weapon stuck in an opponent.

And I would talk about those some, but it just occurred to me that I'm probably getting close to the "Augh! Enough already! Move on, dammit!" point. So, even if Imagine has seemingly endless factors involved with damage and inflicting it, there's only one last thing I want to discuss here. The one thing that, more than anything about the damage system, drove me up a wall.

Armor.

In most popular games, armor reduces the damage you take, makes you harder to hit, or both. We've all seen a RPG before. We know how it works. While playing these games, many of us have blissfully overlooked a recurring theme: armor – and its effect in combat – is a simple, straightforward process. It's added or subtracted from something, or modifies some die roll somewhere. Even in games like Witchcraft and the World of Darkness, where the armor value has to be rolled, it's workable.

So how does armor work in

Imagine?

Well, you have point values for armor. Studded leather is 8, while plate mail might be 20. You can also get various articles of armor and layer them over each other, if the inner layers are flexible enough. These just add their values together. (Remember, it's important for us to know the total armor value of each body part.)

So far, so good. Except for the 19 armor ratings for each character (since full suits are so expensive, most starting characters will have several different ratings), nothing too shocking. So when you get hit, the armor value just subtracts from the damage, right?

Nope! That would be too easy, and we wouldn't be able to make yet another chart out of it. Instead, how much your armor subtracts depends on how much damage was inflicted.

Yep. If you have 20-point armor, it subtracts a different amount from a 15-point hit than it would from a 40-point hit.

Now, wait...if the armor's 20 points, wouldn't the 15-point hit just be blocked entirely, maybe with a optional point or two left for blunt trauma?

No, I already explained it to you: that would be too easy. Maybe I should just explain this from the beginning.

There are five types of normal damage in Imagine: thrusting/cutting, piercing, smashing, crushing, and constriction. The last two are barely relevant – crushing is things like giants or buildings falling on you, and constriction is not a damage factor for typical human weapons.

For any one of these types, the armor subtraction depends on whether the damage was a) more than 1/4 the armor value but less than 1/2, b) more than 1/2 but less than full value, or c) over the full value. Most types do no damage if they're between 1/4-1/2 the armor value, for example, but crushing does its damage minus 1/4 your armor value. When between 1/2-full armor value, cutting/thrusting and piercing damage do 1/4 their total damage to you (no armor subtraction), but smashing does 1/2. Over full armor value, cutting/thrusting and smashing do their damage minus 1/2 your armor value, but piercing does damage minus 1/4.

Once again, what's wrong with this picture?

My players just stared at me in disbelief during their first combat, when I tried to explain this system to them. And these are people who have willingly played in Rolemaster campaigns.

I don't have to actually explain my opinion here, do I? To call this armor system a pain in the ass would be an unforgivable insult to everything that's ever been called a pain the ass. Even if you memorize the chart, that doesn't make it any more worthwhile to use. The armor system is a monument to rules for the sake of rules, design without any thought for how fun it would actually be.

But then, the web site does inform us that Imagine strives to avoid bogging the player down in endless calculations.

Magic, Circa 1980

Imagine magic, true to form, is also reminiscent of its predecessors.

I'm not even going to bother with flogging Imagine's creators for presenting us with yet another magic system of priests and mages, instead of attempting something original. At least Aria's creators, in their infinite verbosity, realized "Oh, my God...what if one magic system really can't fit every fantasy world?" and gave us a meta-system to work with.

D'oh! I just said I wouldn't start doing that. Anyway, the spells and invocations (priest spells) are divided into levels, but it also makes some attempt to be a point-based system. Mages and priests have respective aura control and piety control levels, which are largely a function of their title and determine the highest level of spells/invocations they can use.

They also have memorization points (determined by their Knowledge and title), which determines the total levels of spells/invocations they can have memorized or "prayed for" at once. Memorized spells, while reusable, gradually fade away until they're memorized again, while invocations only have a limited number of uses before they vanish from memory – this is probably because mages must use their limited aura pool to cast spells, while priests use nothing. But it still makes things very familiar...especially when the actual spells and invocations could stand in for anything out of an AD&D book.

On the other hand, at least mages can try to cast spells of levels over their aura control, at the risk of disastrous failure...the details of which, for some reason, have been relegated to the Imagine Master's Guide. Still, it's a nice touch.

This magic system (unlike certain other subsystems) is perfectly functional, if not also prone to the Imagine calling card of over-detail. But I cannot say that it offers much we haven't seen over and over in the past 20 years.

Final Other Details

The colorful cover artwork aside, Imagine's artwork is about on par with present-day GURPS – not awful, but nothing that inspiring, either. As far as the editing goes, it isn't without the rash of typos that seem to plague our industry's products.

Physically, the book is a good-looking hardback that displays the much-desired property of laying flat on any page. Inside, the text layout is clean and (in my opinion) surprisingly organized, given the mass of information in the book (it helps that each page has its section printed across the top). The book is quite sturdy and stands up well to heavy use. As far as production values go, there is little to be faulted here.

Is there something I'm forgetting? Ah, yes – it turns out that the claim of "a world limited only by the bounds of your mind" is arguably true after all. The Imagine Player's Guide comes without a setting, so you will have to invent your own. Imagine, obviously, is a generic framework to be picked up and molded by its gamemasters. Of course, that's what AD&D, Rolemaster, Aria, and countless other games were for. Exactly what advantages Imagine holds over these other systems would not be an enviable debate.

End Game

There isn't much I can say now that I haven't already. For what it trumpets itself to be, Imagine is almost calculatedly ludicrous, coming across as a clueless vanity project in the fine tradition of SenZar and The World of Synnibarr. Its creators have grossly mistaken flexibility for complication and rules for fun. It seems that they have paid little attention to RPG design beyond the early 80's, and as a result, they have made the high fantasy genre no richer now than before. Far from being a new degree of excellence, Imagine is a tedious re-write of things that came and went years ago. I have seen much worse games, to be fair, but few that have so conspicuously failed to impress me or live up to their hype.

I realize that Imagine was a great amount of time and effort from creators who clearly believed in it, and it leaves a bad taste in my mouth to have to disparage their work. But this is a game that needed a flogging, and long before I had ever set eyes on it.

As it is now, I can't recommend Imagine, especially given what else is out there. If you're looking for something novel in the fantasy genre, Aria would be much better...it, too, has problems, but at least its authors actually had new and epic ideas. If you really do (for some reason) want something heavy on detail and attempted realism, Rolemaster does it more sanely than Imagine. And if you're a high fantasy fan who's holding out for D&D3, my advice is this: keep holding.

Style: 2 (Needs Work)
Substance: 2 (Sparse)

Imagine Player's Handbook