Review of Myriad

I am reviewing Myriad at the behest of the publisher. Myriad is available for free from the Sane Studios website.

I am reviewing the electronic PDF.

There are no picture illustrations apart from the cover logo, although there are some attractive tables and figures that illuminate concepts from the text. The text is legibly organized, and the prose is concise, precise, and clear. Ordinarily, I do not like a lot of jazz or “attitude” in a game rulebook, but a little more might have helped Myriad. 74 pages of clear, concise writing can begin to get a little dry. Nonetheless, I never found myself nodding off to the extent I could not follow the text.

On the cover page, Myriad bills itself as a “Universal RPG System,” but in the Forward, states, “Myriad is not a complete RPG in its own right.” Essentially, Myriad is a collection of related, coherent mechanics that can be used to assemble a traditional RPG. Myriad includes a full introduction; some of the terminology is probably quite familiar to the veteran gamer, but might be helpful to a new player whose first game is Myriad. Very little vocabulary is specific to Myriad, which is always refreshing.

Myriad is not a “rules-lite,” freeform, avant-garde, or troupe style game, but rather, despite its constructional approach, oriented to traditional games where a Game Master presents challenges to the players. In fact, it offers options for many classic mechanics ranging from XP for defeated foes to random character generation, if you want them. However, the central premise is that Myriad should be configured to fit whatever context you want. For instance, if you want to run a game that emphasizes racing, you can set up abilities, skills, SFX, and resiliences related to racing, and the experience rules you use should reflect your play preferences.

The central mechanic is the Ability Test. Essentially, you roll a number of dice based on your statistic (such as Power) and take the highest die. You then add your skill rating (such as Athletics) and compare it to the TN. If it’s equal or higher, you get a success. Each roll of a 6 can be used to gain a +1 bonus on the test, or it can be “burned” to activate SFX. Variations produce the Opposed Test, the Extended Test, and finally, Conflict (an opposed, extended test). As you may notice, skills trump abilities in deciding what you can practically accomplish, while abilities determine how likely you are to succeed.

The most familiar form of conflict to most role-playing gamers is mortal combat. In that case, the conflict is a series of opposed tests, attack versus defense, with each successful attack scoring damage. Damage is inflicted on a Resilience. Wounds, for instance, is a resilience, which means if your Wounds are depleted you’ve lost. If your Critical Wounds are depleted, you are dead. However, conflict can take other forms. For instance, two characters might be trying to woo a third, and decide to have a battle of wits; in that case, when the resilience is exhausted, the defeated party retires in embarrassment. This is a very flexible system that can be applied to various forms of real or mock combat, social interactions, races, contests, and chases.

SFX refer to a special kind of ability, that may belong to a person or be imparted by equipment. They defy ordinary categorization, being a combination of critical successes and special abilities. Essentially, each SFW allows you to burn a rolled 6 to gain some special result, whether that is squeezing a few more yards out of your motorcycle jump, a killing stroke, or an armor-piercing attack. Many, many SFX are given for a variety of tests, ranging from archery to vehicular operation to casting spells. However, none of them are priced; that lies within the province of an individual game.

Character creation can take several forms, including point-based, categorical buying (with points allotted to statistics, skills, and so forth), random generation, and template based. Templates impart things like species traits or “classes.” Similarly, experience can be based on levels, freeform, or random improvement. Costs for skills and statistics are based on the number of abilities; hence, if you want combat and social interactions to be equally important, there should be a similar number of skills of each type. Character creation is defined in three tiers, ordinary, heroic, and Godlike level, corresponding roughly to everyday people, heroic adventurers, and superheroes and other supernatural characters. Boons and Flaws cover special traits of characters, such as being near-sighted or belonging to a social elite. In theory, you could use Myriad for just about any genre, from horror to modern detective games to the Authority.

In actuality, using it for any particular game takes a certain amount of work. You have to decide whether you will use the four default statistics, or more. You must formulate a skill list. Acceptable SFX, Boons, and Flaws must be devised. Statistics for everything must be generated, although it must be allowed that most things have very simple statistics. Sample Modules are presented that show some adaptations of the system to various ends.

Many of the mechanics and modules of the game; they “do the job,” but often lack the nuances of a dedicated game engine, or even a workbench approach such as GURPS or Hero. For instance, the Magic system allows you to use Intellect to weave spells. Complicated spells require several turns of weaving. Optional rules allow magicians to quickly cast “zap” spells. The system is workable, but suffers from a flaw I often see in freeform magical systems; what is interesting about magic is not what it can do, but what it can not. The system presented would be excellent for a freeform caster, or a versatile psychic, or even the Green Lantern, but in each case would not create interesting limitations. For instance, while there is no reason why the Green Lantern necessarily can not perform Charles Xavier style telepathy, he generally can not. The magic system presented is good for some conceptions, and is good if the players are willing to work within the genre, but goes off it its rails if the players want to do something that can not ordinarily be done with the kind of magic you have in mind. In a Forgotten Realms game, for instance, healing would be closed to most wizards, and magic missile to most clerics. The Ars Magica game makes some explicit declarations of what is impossible to magicians of the era, as does Talislanta. Magic in Harry Potter tends to accomplish whatever is demanded by the story; hence, as a resource in should be controlled in some way, or PCs will be able to enchant most of their problems away.

Other Modules cover combat with medieval weapons, autofire weapons, vehicles, and so forth. Anyone wanted to use Myriad for their games could not complain about the lack of breadth.

If I wanted to create a superhero game, I would set up a game at the Godlike level, probably point based with lots of general points; define several Statistics relevant to the style I wish to portray; define skills, either by personal preference or by ripping them off from published games; invent some SFX related to superheroic feats; and finally, devise a whole category of special Boons and Flaws related to super powers.

In that respect, Myriad is an excellent resource for conversions. If I wanted to convert White Wolf’s Vampire game, I could directly port over the Morality rules, replacing the success system with Myriad’s tests. In the case of a conversion of this nature, you do not have to worry about holes in the system, because you can create analogs of virtually any dice pool, success based, target based, or roll under system. Myriad would be the core, and wherever you needed a mechanic related to the original game, you could adapt one from the game if you had not come up with something better.

On the downside, Myriad suffers from some problems that often crop up in extremely abstract systems. Unintuitive results can crop up in even in very detailed systems, such as the discovery that a character in a certain game system could survive having his arms cut off if he had a low body score but not a high one, due to rounding issues. However, in very abstract games, such as Myriad, Marvel Universe, and White Wolf’s World of Darkness, they can crop up unexpectedly indeed. Characters with armor piercing bullets taking down Iron Man is one such situation that springs to mind; without careful consideration, weapons intended for one context can have unusual effects in another context. Perhaps bullets should simply never be armor-piercing in superhero games, although that would seem to leave the Punisher out in the cold. Rather, it seems that a better solution would be to make sure that Iron Man’s armor protects him as well as it seems to in the comics. Adapting Myriad to these purposes should be viewed explicitly as game design, as laid out in the rules’ introduction.

One reason that these problems can be hard to anticipate is the Test mechanic itself, which operates on a curve. On the plus side, you know that anyone with Chemistry 3 is capable of certain kinds of chemistry feats, and you know that someone with a high Intellect is going to excel at those feats compared to someone with a lower Intellect. You can guess that a character with a high Intellect is more likely to succeed at something slightly out of his league, but you can not be sure without examining the challenge very carefully. As an example of what can happen, you might send the PCs up against a dangerous knight, not realizing that the spread in skills makes him nigh-untouchable (or, conversely, that his good stats will not help him if his Resiliences are too low in the face of multiple SFX or powerful weaponry).

I would have great difficult statting up Batman and Superman in Myriad terms such that they could have the kind of epic confrontations that occur when they face off in their books. Getting the game system right for that particular genre would probably first involve fine-tuning my game by successively testing out increasingly stranger battles and contests. Judging a battle between a skilled fencer and a hulking axe fighter would be as difficult, or moreso, in Myriad as it would in a generic game such as Hero System.

Myriad is most likely to appeal to the home brewer who does not relish re-inventing the wheel. It is especially handy for when you need to create a lot of game in a genre that is not normally gamed, such as Anime-inspired soccer, soap opera, or a modern detective thriller. However, producing a lot of material might be more work in Myriad than in systems such as Hero, GURPS, or D6, where many of the design decisions have already been made for you. In terms of completeness, Myriad occupies a similar niche to the old generic D6 book put out by WEG. That means it is more realized in a final form than, say, a freeform Fudge-based game, but less “out-of-the-box” ready than D6 Adventure or Big Eyes, Small Mouth, and certainly less so than even a skeletal generic such as Hero or GURPS without sourcebooks.

Myriad is published under the Creative Commons License 2.0, which means that within certain constraints, you are free to publish, distribute, modify, and even sell it. Thus, with the right kind of fan and publisher support, Myriad could easily become a more “out-of-the-box” experience.

Myriad is intriguing enough to interest the hobbyist, yet not extraordinarily complex or unconventional. The rules strike a good balance, I think, between freedom and direction. It is hard to evaluate Myriad, as a game; rather, I think any particular rendition would have to be judged on its own merits. The Myriad rules themselves are definitely worth a look.