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I had to interrupt the series in the last three weeks but I plan to keep the weekly review for the next four or five weeks. After that it will be time for another break.
BEFORE THE REVIEW
For many years I wanted to get a copy of Prince Valiant. There were many reasons for this: It was a Greg Stafford game published by Chaosium; it was based on one of best graphic novels series ever; it was fantasy; the reviews when the game came out gave it high marks and pointed to a – at the time – innovative system. There was just a catch. 13 years ago I had not the money to buy it and when I got the money it was OOP. Until last May when to my amazement I found a copy in good condition in the only RPG game store in Lisbon. With no second thoughts I spent the 250€00 needed to get the book. And of course I had to review it.
(Should I mention that the full name of the game is actually Prince Valiant, the Story Telling Game? Naaa, I’ll do it latter on.)
STYLE
E-x-c-e-l-l-e-n-t. Extraordinarily excellent. (Yes, even if I spotted a typo somewhere.) If you read my The Travels of Mendes Pinto column here at RPGnet, you know that I’ve given some thought to the how to design and present role-playing game books. I can only say that PV delivers on all accounts and that it would have saved me a lot of brainstorming if I had this book in my hands long ago. Let me point the key aspects:
Critical attention to the combination of setting-directed, non-gaming material, with the rules. PV is based on graphic fiction that was created to be read, not as data for an rpg setting. It uses that data to provide the setting materials for the game, not as a substitute for the original fictional form. PV knows that a fiction book is a fiction book and that a game book is a game book. It does not try to be both. The setting materials are there to allow the players to understand and develop the context of their game and to highlight the way one can play in that context with the rules the book provides. A lot of people writing game books the current days should learn this lesson.
A progressive, step-by-step approach to the presentation of the game materials that allows the players to learn by playing. Yes, this is very, very gamist. You find this in any of those outdated wargames and boardgames people keep playing instead of ROLE-playing. PV also followed that path. Because it is a GAME. And it knows the rules of good game design. It knows the book is there only to allow the players to learn how to play. And it knows that the best way to achieve this is through clear, modular rules.
A deliberate focus on clarity, conciseness, unpretentiousness and simplicity of language. Instead of 500 pages of boring pseudo-literary text you have 90 pages of setting and rules plus 32 pages of goodies, pages that don’t forget that a picture is worth a thousand words (this is unfair, I must say, since not everybody has one Hal Foster to work with). PV demonstrates why the other 378 pages one finds here and there should not exist in the first place. (Ah, but the market wants those 400 pages…)
Almost perfect editorial work. Yes, I remember a typo somewhere. But that’s all.
Simple, clear and intuitive design. True, this is a BC book (BC, “before colour” you silly). There are no bells and whistles but keep in mind PV was designed in 1989, not in the New Millenium. It was up to the best that could be done in that bygone age. And it makes you think whether bells and whistles really add something to your role-playing experience. (You may be a little suspicious about this. After all, I’m one of those guys that still thinks that Pong was the best computer game ever. I do.)
Conclusion? 5, of course.
SUBSTANCE I – SETTING
Prince Valiant (PV from now on) is based on the Prince Valiant series of Arthurian graphic novels authored by Hal Foster. For the ignorant lot that knows not what I’m talking about, let me put it this way: Prince Valiant is the best Arthurian-fantasy Spaghetti ever (like you have Cyberpunk and Steampunk, you have Western Spaghetti and Arthurian-fantasy Spaghetti). In other words, this is the Arthurian cycle with a twist. The main character is – you guessed it – Prince Valiant, Val to his friends. He makes himself into a knight of the Round Table. A very independent knight with a rich and beautifully illustrated life. Now go out and buy the books.
The basic rules allow for the creation of knights or candidates for knighthood. Advanced rules allow for other types of characters, including ladies and less savoury females.
SUBSTANCE II – SYSTEM
Let’s start with character creation: Pick a name. Now pick an occupation (if you are playing the basic rules you are saved this excruciating choice: your character is a knight). Describe your character. Feel free to do as you please. Design the coat of arms if the character is a knight. Write down the possessions of the character.
Ok, I jumped three steps since these are at the core of the character: Quantify your fame. Fame is the XPs of PV. It also signals the position of the character in society. You start with 800 fame points. Determine your stats. You have all two of them, Brawn for all physical activity and Presence for social interaction. You have 7 points to divide among them (at this stage a calculator may come handy). Determine your skills. You have to pick 6 from a list of 14 basic skills (ranging from Agility to Riding) plus 15 advanced ones (going from Alchemy to Stealth). You have 9 points to distribute and none of your 6 starting skills may have a ratting below 1.
As you can see, PV’s character creation is for the hardened role-player. No, I’m not being facetious. I really mean it. You need to have a good concept of a character to do something useful with such a system. If you do, you really can do something useful with it (there are excellent examples in the game book that demonstrate this).
Handling situations is no less complicated. Pick an attribute and a skill – yes, you can use any skill with anyone of the two attributes, it depends on what you’re trying to do. Now, breath deeply since you are getting to the really hard part: Sum the attribute and skill ratings. Done? Add any modifiers that may apply according to the situation. Pick an equal number of coins and throw it down (or up but expect they will fall down on their own). Count heads: that’s the number of successes you get in the action. (I said coins, there’s no mistake. I guess this is where Garrett Michael-Skarka should go to his lawyer and put Greg Stafford in the bench for obvious plagiarism.)
Good, but you use successes for what? To beat the opposition, of course. Actually, there are two ways to achieve this. The first is called simple opposed resolution. In this case the one with more successes wins. The second is extended opposed resolution. Here the objective is to reduce the opposition’s coin-pool (did I say “pool”? I did but “purse” would be a more appropriate expression. And did I say “coin”? Yes, but I could as well have said “d02” if it wasn’t for a certain person whose hate of d02 knows no limit): Each round the loosing party deducts from his coin-pool a number of coins equal to the number of successes the other side got. Whenever a character reaches 0 coins he is out of action. Combat, for instance, is handled through this complex extended opposed resolution thing.
Speaking about combat. There are several skills for different types of combat. This means that different knights will have different strengths in their main sport. There is also a good list of modifiers that affect combat. While fighting several opponents, their respective dice-poo… I mean, coin-pools can be staked together. Battles get as much attention as skirmishes and follow the same conventions.
I know, you know, everybody knows, no pain, no gain. I said above, being reduced to 0 coins means the character is out of action. This is to be taken literally. Characters in PV don’t die as an outcome of defeat (unless it’s glaringly obvious that death is the only possible outcome of the situation, but in this case one doesn’t even need to go through all the cumbersome coin-rolling). They are just taken down. No, this is not a concession to sentimental players with tender hearths. This is so because this is how things work in the graphic novels.
Fame, as I mentioned before, is the stat used to record the advancement of the character. It works both to allow the players to acquire more skill points and as a general indication of the social relevance of the character. Otherwise it would not be called fame. It is attributed by the GM at the end of the game session based on some very subjective criteria that suit the style of play of the game designer. And mine, I must say.
The advanced section introduces some more rules that put the game at the brink of unmanageable complexity. For instance, they introduce a new type of stat – “character traits” – that go from being AFRAID of something to being VIOLENT. There are many to choose from, and many of these branch into several more specific alternatives. Double traits become obsessions. Traits are to be, gulp, role-played. There’s no roll associated with them. If used properly, they justify extra fame.
Still not satisfied? Check the optional rules. They present, among other interesting variants, a rule where you can branch your two basic stats through specialization. For instance, your character may have a high Brawn of 6 but, since he gets easily seasick, this is reduced to 2 when on board over even the most peaceful waters.
Let’s get serious. The rules are simple and user-friendly. They have been developed with a key idea in mind: allow the player to impersonate a character like the ones present in the graphic novels. They achieve this in perfection. The fact that the rules are simple does not mean that they are simplistic or lacking. On the contrary, there’s a lot of depth in this game. Just look at how carefully the game entities have been chosen, how well they are substantiated with examples taken from the novels, how rich and varied are the alternatives covered. This is a model of a game system.
SUBSTANCE III – GAME MASTERING, I MEAN, STORYTELLING
There’s a complete section on, gasp, storytelling. Don’t make me repeat that expression any further, I’ll stick to game mastering. The section comprises a lot of good stuff. The highlight is a fantastic framework to manage episodes (scenarios to me and you) and campaigns. It does not just theorize about these concepts. The book provides a toolbox of pre-defined and flexible episodes that allow for endless gaming. All of this is very cleverly crafted. The novice game master (hoops, storyteller) will find it invaluable to learn the skills of his new hobby while the veteran will continue to get back to it to fill the blanks on his own ideas. Further to this the book has a lot of good advice on how to set up other adventures – in fact, guidelines to create episodes. This is complemented with a short but effective sub-section on campaigns.
The GM stuff is complemented with a sub-section on how to set up “special effects”, automatic events that affect dramatically the game. All of this is based on Val’s adventures as drawn by Hal Foster. In fact, the book provides a good list of literary and other sources and stats for all the main characters from Prince Valiant fiction, as well as a synopsis of his life story.
Finally, you get the very special handling of magic that can be found in the graphic novels. In PV magic is for the GM, there are no magician PCs. There’s a reason for it and it is ingrained in the way magic is treated in the source material. (Even if I think that there can be the rare occasion where a GM may allow a clever and subtle player to create a magician. In this case player and GM must work very closely together. It may be really fun to do this. I suppose you have to read the sub-section on magic – or to know the original fiction – to understand what I mean.)
Next, there’s that other sub-section of the advanced rules. The one about allowing the players to get into the GM pants. Basically, it consists in directions on how to allow a player to game master an episode inside the GM’s scenario. I’m not a big fan of this type of gymnics – I’m a conservative that likes to keep the fun of playing and the fun of game mastering separate since I personally don’t feel at ease in alternating these two roles within the same game – but I can see two circumstances where this short section can prove valuable: as a way to introduce players to game mastering; as a way to allow the GM time in the course of the game to do some “back-office” work without leaving the players idle. What PV has to offer in this field is very good. Basically, it provides directions to the novice GM candidate on how to manage a short episode that he can exercise with one of the episodes provided in the book that I mention above.
I’ve been mentioning those episodes so let me develop a little on it. PV provides 20 predefined episodes. Most are one page long. Several have the same basic theme. It includes things like “A challenge from a knight” (the classic ‘fight me or pay’ at the bridge), “Huns!” or “A damsel in distress”. All classic stuff that was used and reused by Hal Foster. All the episodes follow a similar format and offer several alternatives in terms of the way they can develop and the maturity of the PCs they were designed for. You may have 3 knightly challenges, 3 Hun attacks or 3 damsels in distress but they are all different and present different challenges to the players. You may use and reuse all of them and you will likely pick the NPCs and use them for other episodes of your own making (specially since characters seldom die in PV).
I’ve told you, this is a master’s work. It did in 89 things that we see today in games like Donjon or Rune. I leave to you a decision on who did it better.
SUBSTANCE IV – ROUNDING UP
Yes, the setting is fantastic but this is not the work of Greg Stafford (even if the choice of Prince Valiant for a setting is his work). Substance here refers to the system, the goodies included in the book and the way the setting is handled.
Do I need to spell it out? 5 for substance.
THE FUN FACTOR
The review is done, the ratings are defined the book is back on the shelve. What will I do with it in the future? I want to…
* Re-read the book: You may be sure I want to. I’ll read it again just for the fun. I’ll read it again for inspiration. Whatever the reason, I’ll read it again.
* Be an occasional player: If there’s a game that makes it easy for the occasional player, it is PV. The simplicity of the rules means that it does not look like a waste to spend time creating a character for just one night.
* Play in a campaign: Yes, PV is a game that makes you wish to be a knight in an endless quest for adventure, romance, drama and joy.
* Be an occasional game master: It’s all there. I know about no other game where it is so easy to just pick it up and prepare a one-shot.
* Game master a campaign: PV gives me a whole world to create adventures, and the tools to do it. The answer can only be yes.
WHAT’S IN A NAME
This book raises an interesting question. PV was published in 1989 so it must have been designed at least in 1988. Now, PV presents itself as a “storytelling game” where there’s a “storyteller” that takes direction of the game. Furthermore it has a coin-pool mechanic where players “roll” a number of coins based on their attribute and skill stats, compare that to a set success threshold – a very simple binary one, as it fits coins –, discard failures and count successes.
Where did we see all of this? What company makes “storytelling” games moderated by a “storyteller”? What company uses a pool, not of coins but of dice, that conforms to all the points I just described? What company introduced all these “revolutionary” concepts in… 1991? Two years after PV…
FINAL THOUGHTS
PV is an excellent game. Part of it is due to the superlative qualities of Hal Foster’s graphic novels. True, these provide a fantastic setting but that’s not enough to make a game. The rest is Greg Stafford’s creation, a job of love that does full justice to Val: A simple but effective rule system that fits the conventions of the narrative like a glove and outstanding guidance for both players and GMs. This works because Greg Stafford, in his rules design effort, never lost its focus on the setting. This is not a game where we have a setting and a system tossed together. The designer started by getting immersed in the setting (as presented in Hal Foster’s fiction) and attempted to abstract the critical concepts that underline that setting and to conceive a system based on those concepts. All of this wrapped in a faultless package that was designed to provide what any game book should aim for: A tool for role-playing.
The plain truth is that PV provided in 1989 many of the things that latter would be considered a paradigm shift: a fundamental attention given to setting and the narrative aspects of playing; shifting roles within the gaming group; a focus on well developed roles; simple – if not minimal – rules (pardon, pardon, this was NOT to be considered a paradigm shift – who needs stinkin’ rules today?). The difference is that PV did all of this without hip or pretentious claims to being a quantum leap to the abode of role-playing. Neither did it deny its “gamist” roots. And it did it WELL.
It’s funny to notice that role-playing game books followed the opposite evolution of the real world species. PV belongs to an extinct era where game books were small and flexible, designed to be used for ages. Nowadays one only finds books the size of a gigantic dinosaur, that don’t allow you to play more than half a session before you have to buy the next splat book. I may be outmoded but I’ll stick to the past. PV is the best role-playing game book I’ve ever seen.
On a personal note, I’m not a big fan of light games like PV. Neither is the system something that makes my heart beat. But this is my subjectivity speaking. It cannot cloud the fact that this game is perfect. Mind you, I’m measuring my words.
Now, write, email, visit, send a missile to Chaosium and have them re-publishing PV. They have to do it. You deserve to have PV. (Ok, allow them to update a little their standards and use colour art instead of the B&W they had to stick to in 1989.)
PREVIOUS REVIEWS IN THE SERIES
Hero Wars: http://www.rpg.net/news+reviews/reviews/rev_3385.html (technically not part of the series, I’ve included it because the game falls into the scope of games I’m reviewing)
RuneQuest 2: http://www.rpg.net/news+reviews/reviews/rev_7969.html
RuneQuest 3: http://www.rpg.net/news+reviews/reviews/rev_8012.html
Basic D&D: http://www.rpg.net/news+reviews/reviews/rev_8045.html
D&D 3E: http://www.rpg.net/news+reviews/reviews/rev_8088.html
Next month it’s time to Exalted. Need I explain why?
