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Review of Fusion
THE BASICS
Fusion
is a modern Danish roleplaying game. Modern in that it takes place in our time
and in that it owes more to nineties games like Vampire, than to D&D. And
Danish in that it takes place in Denmark and is written in Danish.
The game
is written by Palle Schmidt and Malik Hyltoft. It’s published by Høst & Søn,
an established Danish mainstream book publisher. Several scenarios have been
published, and the game has an official homepage at www.fusion-net.dk.
Denmark according to Fusion
“May
you live in interesting times”
Chinese
curse.
Fusion
is set in Copenhagen, not my Copenhagen, but a Copenhagen where law and politics
has been Americanised. Private citizen may own guns; private detectives must
have licenses to operate, but can take actions not normally allowed; the running
of the police has been turned over to the boroughs; the welfare system has
collapsed. Denmark is no longer a quiet, well-ordered society, but a place fit
for a noir TV series.
There is
no explanation for this change, and none is really needed. The setting is simply
a fusion between a city that is intimately known to Danish players, and a genre
that is intimately known to everybody, the gritty American crime drama.
Think of
your home area. Think of the insane asylums you spooked each other with when you
were children. Think of the bus stations which ugliness has always fascinated
you. Think of the bad parts of town. Now think of using all this, all these
details, as a game setting.
THE SYSTEM
Detectives
The
basic premise of the game is that all players are private detectives, and that
they all belong to the same firm. The game encourages the players to define
their own detective bureau, and run it in the game. Truth to be told, the game
does not contain enough detail to run a bureau in any kind of detail, and I
suspect that the authors have just winged this part of the game in the play
tests, and focused on the scenarios in stead.
Task resolution
Fusion
has a fairly standard die pool system. All abilities and all skills have a
rating from 1 to 6. You add an ability to a skill, and get the number of
six-sided dice that you roll for a given task. A roll of 6 gives you a success.
If you roll more 1s than you have in either skill or ability, you get a fiasco.
Yes, you can have both a success and a fiasco on the same roll(say you hit with
your pistol, but run out of ammo).
You can
also take specialties, whatever you can think of really, that ads die to you die
pool within the field of the specialty. Because the rule is ability skill
specialty = dice pool, Fusion can keep the number of skills low, and players can
come up with whatever specialties they like, making character generation both
fast and flexible.
Characters
Fusion
is focused on private detectives, so the list of skills is short and easy to
grasp. The same cannot be said of the list of abilities.
There
are 10 (!) abilities. Including both Intelligence and Cleverness, both Agility
and Coordination.
Player
1(whining): “Why do I have to roll my Agility, my Coordination is higher!
Surely it takes Coordination to…”
Player 2
(confused): “You use Intelligence for THAT? I thought you we used Cleverness.
Can I change my character? Because the basic concept behind him is…”
Player 3
(lazy): “Hey, mister gamemaster! Could you just explain the difference between
the 10 abilities? I can’t make up my mind as to which of them I should
progress in…”
You do
not need that kind of confusion in a rules light game.
Other
than that, the tight focus of the game makes creating characters a simple task.
Destiny
In crime
literature, the main characters’ weak sides are constantly and mercilessly
poked. To ensure that this will happen in Fusion too, the game uses positive and
negative destiny points. When something good happens your detective may get
positive destiny, and if something bad happens negative destiny may accumulate.
For each 3 destiny points a destiny trait must be chosen, a trait that defines
the character.
Say you
have a detective with 3 negative and 3 positive destiny points. You chose to
make him a chain smoker (negative) and have good night vision (positive, the
effects of such positive traits are left to the GMs discretion). During a nasty
case about a series of premature burials, your detective gains another 3
negative destiny points. You must now choose another destiny trait, and what
could be more logical than a phobia against premature burial?
Violence
When you
have a well functioning task resolution mechanic, combat rules become child’s
play. In its core the Fusion combat rules is a neat one roll system. However,
the authors seem to think that a roleplaying game worthy of the name should have
a lot of combat rules… Most of these rules are not very well explained or
thought out, and anyway, even if you want a game full of tactical decisions, you
don’t need a lot of rules in a setting where everybody are familiar with every
shopping mall escalator, and every public lavatory. Keeping it rules light, like
the rest of the system, and using the many pages of combat rules for something
else would have better served Fusion.
HOW DO YOU PLAY THE GAME?
Fusion
has a solid focus in that all player characters are private detectives and
members of the same firm.
Furthermore
the book has a couple of pages that gives gamemaster and player alike an
overview of fundamental forensics and surveillance considerations. In that way
it is insured that everybody knows about rigor mortis and the problems of taping
a conversation in the open - it is insured that everybody is ready to play the
investigation game.
As a
gamemaster, you are also given a host of details and special effect ideas
throughout the book, Details and effects that can make your game alive and give
it an appearance of realism. This is where Fusion really shines: the heat waves,
the Yugoslavian mafia, the waste disposal strikes, the radical left-wing teenage
groups, and the new age religions.
So the
Fusion book does everything in its power to support the gamemaster and player
alike. But make no mistake, this is a game of investigation, and as such is not
suited to players who cannot concentrate, or who cannot remember detail from one
session to the next (as is many a players wont, god bless them).
Scenarios
Nearly
half of the Fusion book is given over to scenarios (this is a very Danish thing,
we seem to have a very strong tradition for writing ready-to-run con type
scenarios).
The
scenarios are very good (when read, anyway), filled with action, intrigue and
scary stuff. But of course, as always with a pre-written scenario, the GM and
the player characters are “invisible” in the story, as the author doesn’t
know them or their preferences. But if player and gamemaster alike is ready for
a backseat ride, the scenarios are fine.
STYLE
The
fusion book is very, very well illustrated, both regarding photos and drawings.
I can only recommend that you see for yourself, at the website www.fusion-net.dk. The entire look supports the “Dark Copenhagen” concept, and helps
to bring this concept across to the reader.
A LOST OPPOTUNITY
The idea
that a RPG could be made that would bring a lot of new players to the hobby is
sometimes put forth. This game conceivably could be aimed at all those people
who watch crime stories on TV, and read crime novels. Such people can rarely
take Fantasy and Science Fiction seriously and so they stay away form
roleplaying games. But if someone where to put out a game based more on John
Grisham than Tolkien…
But
Fusion is not that game. Fusion certainly is based on detective TV shows and the
works of popular crime writers (not Grisham, tough) but it is in no way a
beginner’s game. In fact it is obviously written on the assumption that the
reader already knows a good deal about roleplaying games. This saves the authors
a lot of explaining of course, and anyway I suspect that their target audience
is players whom the authors would like to game with themselves, and not clueless
newbies. A fair enough choice of course.
CONCLUSION
If you
are a Danish speaker, and you wish to run a series of cool prewritten crime
scenarios, I can highly recommend Fusion. If you are a Danish speaker and this
is not your cup of tea, you might still use Fusion as a “Copenhagen by night”
or “GURPS Crime” type of sourcebook.
If you
do not speak Danish, you could still consider using the Fusion method: turn your
hometown into a TV Crimestory land, and get down to some gritty noir campaigning.
Oh, and
if you are a game designer, you might also copy what Palle Schmidt and Malik
Hyltoft have done: write a roleplaying game in a mainstream genre, and get a
mainstream book publisher to print and distribute it. Who knows? You might write
history ;-).
Mads
Jakobsen
