It’s obvious from first glance that game designer Joshua A.C. Newman has something bold in mind for Shock: Social Science Fiction. The book is an unusual size, nearly square, with a bright orange cover with black lettering. But the game isn’t just supposed to be bold; it’s intended to accomplish a very specific purpose. Like many indie or Forge games, this one has a narrow focus: creating science fiction stories that explore social themes. And the game is well designed to do that. But my overall impression after reading it is that this is a great game that will takesome work to dig out.
It’s not that the game is buried. Quite the contrary, the rules are “light” to the point of barely being described. It seems to me that this is a great game that’s been rushed to press with too little revision and not enough explanation.
Contents
What you get, for $25, is 82 pages with a lot of white space. Generally the page layout is good: it’s easy to read and fits the sci-fi feel the game is aiming for. Artwork is minimal, and not memorable, but it sets the proper tone. Captions help establish the thematic material behind the illustrations, which is important. Along with the rules, you get a pretty good sci-fi story written by Ben Lehman and derived from an actual play experience. The story is accompanied by sidebar notes about the game mechanics. This is a clever way to combine “game fiction” with game examples, and more games should do it. So the story does more than just give flavor; it adds substance.
Even so, you don’t get a lot of rules in your 82 pages. Now Shock: is intended to be rules-light by almost anyone’s standards, but it takes a certain amount of explanation and example-giving to help people “get” a game like this, and I’m not sure there’s enough here. Take a look at the page breakdown:
Short story with sidebar game info: 22 pages
Game overview: 4 pages
Rules chapters: 18 pages
Advice/rules on being an antagonist and ending stories: 4 pages
Mediography: 14 pages
Glossary: 4 pages
The rest is pictures, table of contents, and ads. What’s here is good, possibly great, but like the guy in the old joke, I’m left saying, “It’s good, what there is of it.” For my $25, I would’ve liked a lot more examples at every stage.
The Game
But let’s talk about what you do get and how it works. The game is built around a grid. Along one axis is a list of “shocks.” Shocks are things that are different about the game world than our everyday world, things like “androids who look like humans” or “your memories can be recorded on a computer.” Along the other axis are issues, themes that the players want to explore. Each shock or issue is “owned” by a single participant, who apparently has final say about that shock or issue. How exactly that affects play isn’t spelled out that I can see, but obviously it helps settle disputes in a game that operates without a GM.
Oh, yes, it’s one of those games. The GM authority is distributed among the group. Everybody plays a protagonist, and everybody plays somebody else’s antagonist. (There’s apparently turn-taking between protagonists, but that too isn’t really spelled out.) Each protagonist is placed on the grid at an intersection between one of the shocks and one of the issues, so that protagonist’s story will highlight those two as they come together. That’s cool, though then theoretically a group of five people could have twenty-five protagonists in their grid. I guess they just pick which spots they want? No rules for this are provided, although there is a way to move on to a new protagonist after a story ends.
Protagonists are defined pretty simply. They’ve got an issue and shock from the grid, and they get a limited number of “features” (traits or aspects or edges or clichés, depending on what other rules-light terminology you’re familiar with) and links (contacts or connections). The only real stats involved are the total number of features the character has and two “praxis scales.” This takes some explanation, and again I thought the rules didn’t provide enough, so bear with me as I try to explain while having to guess about a couple of points.
A praxis scale is a pair of opposed “ways in which characters confront challenges in their stories.” Somehow the group comes up with these in the course of making the world. The book gives very few examples (it promises more in the bibliography, but they aren’t there), but one pair it offers is “buying vs. stealing” and another is “violence vs. compassion.” It’s not clear to me how you’d come to consensus on a pair of these scales if you had four or five participants and lots of shocks and issues to try to encapsulate, but there you go. (The two scales aren’t really connected, although the layout of the character sheet had me convinced they were—probably the only real layout problem in the whole book.) So a character might have a praxis scale of “violence over compassion” with a “fulcrum” score of 6. So if the character wants to use violence, she has to roll over 6 on d10; to use compassion she must roll under 6.
(To give you a hint about the flavor, in the book that preceding sentence wouldn’t have used “she” but instead the invented gender-neutral pronoun “hie.” I didn’t find these new pronouns too distracting, although they did stand out when they were used once in a sentence that grammatically required the plural (and automatically neutral) “they.”)
Mechanics
The basic game mechanics will seem fairly familiar to Forge fans and somewhere between innovative and incomprehensible for people who’ve never ventured beyond D&D. They’re definitely “conflict-resolution,” not task resolution. You don’t roll to see if you can get the door to open. You roll to bring about an Intent. Both the protagonist and the antagonist (or as the game would say, each *tagonist) has a stated Intent. This is basically “setting stakes” for those who are familiar with that terminology: you say what will happen if you succeed versus what will happen if you fail, and either way has to be interesting. Plus the two Intents can’t be mutually exclusive, because you might both succeed or both fail. This is another spot where the game is far too short on examples. It depends almost exclusively on the sidebar annotations on the story to illustrate setting Intents, and in doing so offers too little commentary to help people new to this kind of gaming to figure it out. Experienced Forge gamers will probably be fine, but anyone new to conflict resolution will probably have trouble.
Once Intents are set, you can roll a number of dice equal to your total number of Features (for Protagonists, they start at 3 and get more when they fail) or the amount of “Credits” you spend (for Antagonists, 5 maximum). You can decide whether to roll d10s to help yourself succeed (you take your best result) or d4s to thwart your adversary (you add or subtract your highest die from theirs to try to make them fail). This is a clever and simple mechanic that lets you decide which side of the conflict you want to emphasize. I’m looking forward to trying this and thinking more about how the dice work in this game.
Unfortunately, yet again, the game is far too short on examples. As far as I can tell, there is only one example in the entire book that actually says who rolled what on the dice and what that means, and that one seems to have a crucial typo. It says that Alice rolls 2,3,5 on her d10s, but then refers later to her 7 (from d10). Now I can see that it must be a typo. And the rules are simple enough that I can get them. But it seems like when the game spends 22 pages on game fiction that’s intended to be an extended game example, the author could at least a couple more times show us what the dice say instead of just saying “Joshua wins and Vincent loses.”
For mechanics, though, that’s almost all there is to it. If your protagonist fails, you get to add a new feature, which will give you more dice in the future. If you can’t stand the failure, you can risk one of your links to buy a reroll.
Fluff
There isn’t any. No default setting, which I must admit is totally appropriate for a game that’s intended to let people create any sci-fi setting they want. The bibliography provides some inspirational references and lists the shocks and issues they each tackle. The sample story and a couple of picture captions give some limited ideas of what other people have done with it. But this is clearly a stripped-down system that will work great for people who come to it bursting with sci-fi ideas they want to explore. People looking for the game to provide lots of inspiration may be disappointed.
Ratings and Assessment
I don’t want to give anyone the impression that I hate this game. I want to love it. I’m a fan of the kind of sci-fi this game is trying to produce, and all the names that are dropped as being key playtesters and consultants are people who’ve made games I love: Emily “Breaking the Ice” Care Boss, Vincent “Dogs in the Vineyard” Baker, and Ben “Polaris” Lehman. And this game has some of the best features of that style of game, with some interesting and useful innovations. I love the idea of having (essentially) offense and defense dice in an opposed-intent conflict resolution mechanic, especially when it’s easy to tell the dice apart. Building the game out of shocks and issues is brilliant. I’m genuinely eager to try this game out and see how it works in actual play, and I’m confident that with a group who wants to play in the spirit of the game, it will work great.
But you knew if you read this far there was going to be a “but.” Here it is: I feel like those first couple of playtests will be more work than play because things aren’t explained well enough. The group I play with will have to decide what to do about all the bits that aren’t explained: how to alternate “turns,” how to decide who gets what protagonist from the grid, how to generate good praxis scales. And then we’ll probably have some confusion over dice because even though the rules are simple, examples are lacking. So I’m a little frustrated, and a little disappointed. The other games that I naturally want to compare this game with—Polaris, Dogs in the Vineyard, Primetime Adventures—just give you more substance for your money, especially in terms of examples.
So for the product that’s actually sitting here next to me, I have to give it lower scores than I really would want to. For style, while I like the layout and the boldness, it’s not really anything that special. And where it tries to be special is in being bold, always including the colon with the title Shock: and using those gender-neutral pronouns. OK, but then I think the game itself needs to be bolder. List some shocks that will shock even sci-fi fans. Have some surprises on the bibliography. If shock is the theme, then go all the way with it. As it is, the artwork is adequate, and the page layout with its abundant white space leaves me feeling ripped off more than anything. I have to go with 3 for style.
For substance, for all the reasons I’ve said already, I can’t go higher than 2. I hate doing it, because I think with this game a lot of people can make some of the most substantive games they’ve ever done. But what you get here is less than you’ll expect.
Now if you’re a die-hard Forge fan and you love the other games I’ve mentioned here, you can probably add one to each of my ratings. And if what I’ve described here sounds at all interesting to you, then I’d still recommend getting Shock: because I think you’ll find plenty to like.
But for myself, I’m really hoping for a second edition that corrects the shortcomings of this edition. We need an extensive example of building a game from nothing that shows us all the debate involved, and then we need five or ten shorter examples of possible games. The bibliography or something needs to provide dozens of sample praxis scales. And with the small number of total rules here, each one needs at least one specific example. Most should have three or more. Until that new edition comes out, I’m fascinated but disappointed. I don’t know of any game out there that will let players explore the full range of meaningful science fiction like Shock: does, but this great game deserves a better presentation.
