The Inside Scoop on Gaming

(Note: this CAPSULE review is somewhat biased based on my taste in RPGs in general, superheroes in particular and the mood I was in when I wrote it. I'm sorry if as a result of this the good people at Pinnacle lose sales. But if they're the kind of mush-heads who believe every review they read, did you really want their money anyway?)

There's a chocolate bar we have in Australia called an Aero - I don't know it the rest of you have heard of it, but go with me here. Its gimmick is that it is filled with lots of air bubbles, giving the chocolate an interesting texture. It looks cool and is pretty tasty, so you buy one and start eating it and then suddenly - it's all gone! That's when you smack yourself in the head and realise that you just paid a buck eighty for a product which is 50% air.

Brave New World is perhaps the roleplaying equivalent of the Aero chocolate bar. It looks good, it tastes good, but it ain't going to fill you up. And you really are paying a lot of money for a lot of empty space.

I don't just mean visually, although the book is written in a big font, with generous spaces and larger than necessary borders cutting into the word count, but in the words themselves. Due to the somewhat "dumbed down" language and the simple lack of depth, detail and hard data, much of the information in the book feels cursory and unsatisfying. I managed to read most of the book (without going into all the descriptions of every skill, quirk and weapon) in about two hours. And I'm not a fast reader.

Now, the one thing the Aero bar doesn't do is advertise itself as a solid chocolate bar. Nor does it say, upon opening the wrapper that this chocolate bar only provides some of the chocolatey goodness, and then go on to say that to get the really choc-tastic stuff that fills in the holes in the bar you just bought, you should go out and buy more Aero bars right this minute.

To quote from BNW's definition of the skill "Faith": "Faith actually helps certain kinds of deltas use their powers. You'll learn more about that as the Brave New World saga develops." They list the skill, they tell you it is a factor in how some powers work, but they don't tell you how it works, or why. So you have no idea whether to take it or not.

I listed this at the start of the review because I reckon that most people are going to read that and go "You WHAT?" and not want to buy the game. And fair enough, I say, but this means you really don't need to read the rest of this review. So you can go now and do something worthwhile with your life instead. Trust me, the rest of the review won't be interesting at all - except for the lesbian sex scene I slipped in towards the end, of course.

Now, to be fair, BNW does point out in its introduction (which is, logically, buried in the middle of the book behind the setting information) that this is what it intends to do. In a paragraph entitled "The Road Goes Ever On", Forbeck explains that this book is just the beginning of a long and winding saga, and an equally long and winding statement from your bank, marked "OVERDUE" a lot. This then is BNW's operating principles - selling not a complete game in one book, but a collectible game that only provides a full product once you've caught them all.

In the heady days of this post-Pokemon new-millenium-bar-one-year-if-you-can-count era, I'll leave it up to you if this process is a good or bad thing and just tell you what this book gives you. Remember, once upon a time it was also considered an insult not to be able to get a complete card game in one box. My how things change, eh?

The game starts off with a flashy little story called "Patriot's Last Stand!" which proves once again the unfailing law of RPGs: the comics which feature in comic book RPGs always suck. (The exceptions, of course, being those based on pre-existing comics and which use those properties in their material, such as the most excellent Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles). The story is very short, but still decent, and the pictures are nice - the suckage factor comes from not really being good at the whole comic art-form of presenting movement (both of the narrative and the physical movement of the characters) through static frames. When you're staring at a picture wondering just who that guy is and how he got into that position from the previous frame, there's a problem with the art.

So, once we've seen Patriot stand up (and, of course, get knocked down, kinda like in that Chumbawumba song), it's on to the setting information. This is presented like the text of a website called www.deltatimes.com - the website for people into Greek-Alphabet Fetish Porn. (oh yeah baby, lick that omicron, oooooh!)

No, sorry, it's not that at all. Silly me. Deltas, you see, are what we call superheroes in Brave New World, cos they're different, they're changed. (Remember that semester of physics you did at college?) Since the Latin for change is already taken (mutantis, you philistine!) and delta sounds pretty cool, this works for me, although I refuse to go on panty raids or attend keg parties.

DeltaTimes is an underground webzine for those deltas who don't want to register with the government, as all deltas are now legally required to do. Since these people have obviously been living under a rock for their entire lives (or perhaps had this misfortune of attending an American public school), it is clearly necessary for this website to explain to the reader the entire history of deltas in America.

Which is fine, but does it have to take that long? Do we really need such length on the history of the world, especially since it has so little bearing on the game you're playing? We hear all about the first delta, who popped up in World War 1, how his successors became costumed superheroes during the depression, and how they all went to war against Germany. During this war, a delta suddenly evolved into a much more powerful "alpha", and soon others did also. But in 1976, every alpha in the world disappeared in a big explosion that also wiped out Chicago (Dude - no more Chicago Hope? No way!). So excuse me for wondering why, if they're gone now, we wasted five pages explaining where they came from. Granted it was five pages of big font and bigger pictures, but still, they could have used that to elaborate on the global nuclear war which only happened a few years ago, an event they gloss over in two short paragraphs later on.

Of course, the answer to why they tell us all this stuff is probably that all these things will eventually become a lot more important, as soon as you get your hands on the rest of the Power Rangers so you can form them together to make the mighty Voltron!

Christ, now I'm having sugar-rush flashbacks to the eighties. Am I wrong in thinking that "Decepticon" is the coolest word in the English language? I think not.

So once we get passed this fascinating history, we get down to what is a pretty cool setting. With superheroes - and thus supervillains - roaming the countryside, smashing things up, people start to get a little freaked, and certain laws eke their way into the American constitution which restrict the freedoms of these guys. When supervillains kill Jacqui Kennedy instead of her husband in 1963, the Prez immediately calls in an act requiring all super-types to be registered with the government. Backed by Superior, the first and toughest alpha, most alphas and deltas comply.

A few years later, a few thousand people get whacked in Manhattan, and Kennedy goes nuts and declares martial law to crack down on the supers. His prime goon squad, Delta Prime, is formed to track down any delta who isn't registered and put them in prison. If you're left wing, think of it like conscription. If you're right wing, think of it like gun laws. However you swing, it's a fascist police state with truncheon and jackboot aimed squarely at the deltas.

So if you don't register, you're on the lamb, and automatically a part of The Defiance, a loosely collected rabble of rowdy rebels. This is a hard and lonely life, full of secrecy, deceit and paranoia. Join up and you can use your powers at will - but the government owns your ass and can wear it as a hat when and where they like. In a nice move, the game tries to present both options as equally viable to players, but doesn't quite succeed. This is a four colour game, and that also extends to the politics - freedom good, Saddam Hussein bad.

Whether registered or not, if you're going to play vigilante without every criminal in the world getting your address, you'll probably want a secret identity. So masks and gloves are a good idea in the setting, and not simply because they are the rules of being a superhero. This is, however, superheroes in the "Silver Age" mould - boots and capes, winning smiles, simple names like Superior, Patriot or Susan, out to fight for Truth, Justice and the Freedom to Drink Budweiser and Look at Girly Magazines while Watching the Superbowl, God Dammit.

(Christ, Microsoft Word has Budweiser in its dictionary - its Australian dictionary. That's just really scary.)

The setting is a tad cheesy, and is presented in strokes too broad, morality too obvious and detail far too light. However, at its core, the bright American heroes in a dark American world does actually work. If you ran it seriously, it's a powerful, if old, theme to explore, and if you run it lightly, its four colour morality will encourage the cliches just as you would wish. Plus, it has plenty of juicy character hooks that stem from being the underdog, and the Statue-of-Liberty-ness does give the feeling that your hero actually has something worth fighting for beyond just doing good deeds; there's a constant feeling of democratic passion running through the whole game which is damn hard not to get caught up in. Put on the Star Spangled Banner and try not to feel the goosebumps as you ask to be given liberty or given death, one more time.

And that - the historic highlights and the politics of being registered or not - is the whole of the setting you get. No demographics, no timeline, no maps, no major NPCs, no plot hooks, no back-door shenanigans - none of the stuff most RPGs are packed full of these days. Nor do they give you all the answers to the mysteries. However, I think (being the not-interested-in-detailed-settings-guy I am) what you get is completely usable, in that it sets the scene well enough. Any GM worth his salt could take this setting and run something with it - as long as you don't mind working up the kind of details missing, and you don't expect to buy any more books if you start solving the mysteries your own way.

Now, the rules. The core system is a stripped down version of the Deadlands system, in such a way that it is almost identical to the Icon system (although the way they explain it is a lot less dull, of course). Attributes are measured in number of six sided dice rolled, with the highest number rolled being the result. The difference between this system is that in Icon, sixes explode only if rolled on the Drama Dice, whereas in BNW all sixes explode - ie you roll them again and add the new result. Keep rolling if you keep getting sixes. This allows it to have something of the cinematic highs of D6 without having to do all the maths (Emperor: Take up your weapon and strike me down! Luke: Ah, Christ, do I have to? That means rolling 10d6 again…). So hurrah for that.

Attributes also smell like Icon - just the big four: Strength (physical power), Speed (physical control), Smarts (I think you can figure that one out) and Spirit (mental strength and charisma combined). You split twelve points between them, to get a number between 1 and 5 in each. Times that number by 3 to get your skill points for that attribute. Skills (again like Icon) give a flat bonus to the roll. So a person with 3 Smarts and 4 Astrophysics would roll 3d6, getting 2, 5 and 6. Rolling the 6 again they get 2, giving 8. 8 + 4 (for the skill) gives 12. Beat a target number (5, 10, 15 and up) and you win. Beat it by five or more and you get extra successes for each multiple of five.

Simple, fast, and it works. Plus, there's a lot of skills to keep up the variety. Hurrah again.

Players are also rounded out by picking from a long (and no more flawed than in any other RPG) list of Quirks (read ads/disads) and of course, the meat of any superhero RPG - powers.

Oh dear.

BNW powers are not, as in most superhero games, pick and choose off the rack. Rather, they come as ensembles around a theme. You're not someone who can fly and also melt butter simply with your mind, you're an All-Things-Flying-Guy, or The Mental Master of Most Every Type of Dairy Produce. Now, Matt Forbeck has already defended this move quite eruditely on RPGNet. After all, pick and choose powers have been done very well by almost every other game out there. This way, you get something which holds together in a logical way, and best of all, you can design a character in just a few minutes, rather than hours. Sure, these are limiting but no more so than say being a Cleric in D&D once you've had every spell in the book.

All of this makes sense in theory. In practice....well, frankly, in practice, the power packages suck harder than a limpet on steroids.

First off, we have the Bargainer, who, like the Huckster in Deadlands, makes deals with the spirits for powers. What powers can they be granted? Those that mimic another power package. Uhuh. That is a rather wasted category if you ask me. It is also never clearly explained why these people dress like stage magicians and use magic wands. Mandrake they are not.

Also on the uber-dull list is the Healer. What can she do? Well, she gets lots of bonuses to her healing rolls. No, that's all. No, I'm not kidding. Don't look at me like that. It's in the book, I swear!

This sort of definitional stuff continues: The Speedster can only move fast. The Blaster can only blast out energy from his hands. The Flyer can fly (and for some reason has natural armour while doing so - it's a bit of variety, but it doesn't make much sense). The Goliath also has two powers - he's big AND strong. And so on. The're not so much ensembles as one-size-fits-all full-body jumpsuits; they're uniform simply because they're just one thing. The only two vaguely interesting combo types are the Bouncer (an agile and fast fighter type) and the Scrapper (a tough and fast-healing fighter type). Um, OK, so they're not actually that interesting after all.

Now, maybe you get off on this sort of thing. All I know is that I got to the end of the distressingly short list provided (there's only 10) and I didn't want to be any of them, nor did any of them gel with the concepts I'd imagined in my head. I consider that a bad mark against a game. Sure, with a fair bit of elbow grease you could twist a Goliath into being interesting, but I can't see anyone ever wanting to have two Goliaths in a party, or playing another Goliath later. These are dull, one trick ponies with no internal variety.

No, that's not strictly true. Each package has two (2) Tricks, of which a character can have 0, 1 or 2 of at creation. These aren't exactly a riot of new options, however. The Healer, for example, can have Heal Disease or Heal Poison. Be still my heart.

It doesn't help that the information on each power package is skimpy at best, and confusing at worst. As with other Pinnacle books, they state at one point that much more, and better, is coming in the sourcebooks. If you thought Deadlands was irritating in this matter, welcome to a whole new world of pain. But if you like broad brushstrokes, you'll be OK, at least for a little while. The other big section in any supers RPG is of course combat, or "The Big Throwdown" in this book. Combat is as equally complex as it is in Deadlands (check out my review of it for the full details) and requires just too many modifiers, details and die rolls. Even in this very "gamist" and very teen-targeted product where dice-laden combat is always of the essence, there is just too much detail to account for. They have simplified a few things from Deadlands, but nothing which will dramatically effect the speed of play. For most, it will need to be stripped down or greatly ignored to be really usable, but once you're there, it's OK and kinda fun.

As a nitpick, every single measure of distance in the combat chapter and elsewhere is given in inches. As in "we assume you are constantly thinking in terms of using miniatures". They do at one point explain that one inch is two yards, but come on! Even the most gamist of RPGs previously on the market were never so blatantly a game of soldiers! RPGs are supposed to happen in the mind, not on the table, or at least I think so. But even if you get off on rulers and grid paper, how many ten year olds can afford miniatures, or have the patience to paint them, for that matter?

Yes, I said ten year olds. I'll come back to that.

There is one new idea in BNW, though, and it's a damn clever one. This is the Tricks idea mentioned above, but they don't just exist for the superpower packages; there are also ones anyone can have. Tricks work by being activated when you get the multiple successes I mentioned above. For example, say you have the Trick Bull's Eye and you get one extra success. You can then use that success to make your shot hit a better hit location. This was part of the general combat system in Deadlands, here it is a little personal tweak which is very cool. Other such combat Tricks include Knockback, which throws your opponent backwards with extra successes or First Move, which gets all your attacks in early, when you roll extra successes.

Skills and Attributes also have Tricks. Are you the kind of guy who really Knows the Streets? Then every time you get an extra success on a Streetwise roll, you immediately gain the skill Area Knowledge of where you are. Likely to make New Friends? Then an extra success on a friendly persuasion roll turns your victim into a trusted pal. This idea of an Advantage which only kicks in with those special rolls is (to me) a very new and very clever one and you can bet I'm going to pinch it. Kudos to the Mr Forbeck for that one.

The book rounds out with a short list of guns, ammo and other toys, a few notes on experience points and then a very small GM's section. The secret setting info herein is, like the earlier stuff, interesting but short and yes, not strictly complete. They assure us we'll be told more soon enough, thanks for that. And then, since the publishers decided not to include a starting adventure (it's in a supplement, of course), we come to the end of the book. Which does include a very good index, kudos again.

So time for the final analysis. Is BNW a complete game? No, not as it stands. Nor is it a very "full" game. But is it playable with what you have? Weeelll, yes it is, as long as you don't mind games low on detail, and you can get past the power packages problems. Whether you can stomach these is really the whole key to whether you'll like the game. For my money, even if they are simple, they just don't cut the mustard. Hell, they don't even cut the mayonnaise.

But if these packages work for you, BNW is a decent game. But it is not a particularly great game. The system works OK, the setting is interesting, you can play it, and have a bit of fun. It even has a few inspiring ideas in both system and setting. But bar these, the system is nothing incredible and is hampered by too much complexity in combat, while the setting never really develops its basic ideas well enough to be truly interesting.

BNW could definitely be a bit of fun. Like Deadlands before it, it nicely captures the freewheeling youthful spirit of adventure that infuses Palladium games and their ilk. However, unlike Deadlands, I fear it lacks sufficient depth and development to really hold the interest of an adult group. It would be fun for a one-off, or if you're mad keen for a simple, four colour supers and have a soft spot for the Pinnacle system, but if you're a veteran hobby gamer looking for a reliable superhero game with enough scope to last a while, I would not put this on the top of your list.

On the other hand, if you're ten years old and this is your first RPG....well, then that's a different story. You'll probably enjoy the big print and the lightness on the text. Forbeck's constant too-cool-for-school voice and hack-and-slash 'tude will no doubt be just the kind of thing you want to read. You might even prefer the simplicity of power ensembles and love the complexity of the combat (although one might suggest that those two things tend to contradict each other). After all, the Basic D&D red books also seemed damn simplistic when compared to modern standards - races and classes blurred and stripped down to the basics, rules were over-simplified and there was a lot of space spent explaining things very gently and very broadly.

And if you remember, those red books also only listed experience levels up to Level 3. For levels 4 to 10 - and for the game to really work - you needed the Expert set. I'd bet the same is just as true with BNW - once you get a few more books - a dozen more power packages (which are indeed in the first supplement) and a better grasp on the full potential of the setting - I bet the remaining flaws could be ironed out and the game would become much more interesting, even to older players. And hey, kids love collectible things, so this approach will work wonders for them and the market, right?

I don't know about anyone else, but one of the big reasons I dropped out of roleplaying at the age of eleven was because I was frustrated that my options were so limited, and could neither afford nor find the later supplements for Basic D&D. Luckily a few years later I discovered TMNT, but if I hadn't, I wouldn't be here now.

Is Brave New World just what a young gamer would want? You decide.

Style: 3 (Average)
Substance: 2 (Sparse)