The Good, Okay, and Bad of Star Wars: The Force Awakens

This is essentially a rambly series of notes that might be used to make a more detailed essay for the future. 

The best parts of the movie at those that are put into motion by the characters motives. This is basic storytelling 101, that is: tie the character to the plot, not vice versa. When the movie focuses on the “finding Skywalker” main plot, it becomes an excellent film (a bit like how Episode II: Attack of the Clones is a solid Obi-wan mystery plot juxtaposed with a horrible Anakin romance/mass murder plot). The use of an A and B plot mangles the third act, but we’ll get to that below.

Here’s what I thought was good:

Rey: I think Rey was the best thing about this movie. Obviously, the actors have been freed up by a direct who like actors (and usually strives for melodrama, but my dislike of Abrams aside, the actors are working very hard in this movie). This character was handled with skill, her nature, plot, and background were delivered smoothly in short bursts of sometimes subtle, but present exposition and her movement through the film and her development was compelling. Daisy Ridley was stellar, especially as she keeps the plot moving in the most interesting directions and a lot rested on her performance. (please don’t let her be a skywalker, please don’t let her be a skywalker).

Kylo Ren: I will immediately cop to thinking Ren was a liability going into the theatre. Star Wars has a bad habit of raiding the same trophes or narrative structures, and the “black armored Vader-worshipper” was making me doubt the film. I was pleasantly won over. The character is three dimensional, and while I admit the emo-Ren jokes are probably, I think it’s a misread of the character. He’s not an adolescent moping, he’s a villain tempted by the light. After years of “dark heroes” in comics and SF/Fantasy movies (Aragorn has to be conflicted in Jackson’s films, Batman’s what Gotham deserves in Nolan’s movies, etc) , this was a nice and complex twist. His lack of control and his failures make him a villain like Richard the III or Macbeth, that is a villain that you either sympathize with or want to succeed. Adam Driver was very credible in every scene and I felt the combination of Ren and Rey (please no siblings, please no siblings) could easily fill out two more movies.

The Han/Leia relationship: If anyone needed reminding, Harrison Ford is able to do more with a smirk than anyone other than Michael Douglas. Ford’s charm aside, The Han/Leia relationship was mature, complex and subtle. Much like the way Rey or the Force was handled, there wasn’t heavy-handed exposition, just well-chosen words and well-acted scenes. One bought the mature, no-longer together relationship, and it set the right tone for the movie’s climax.

The Force: After the ridiculousness of midi-clorians and the hyperactivity of Force usrs in the prequels, Clone Wars, and even Rebels, it was nice to see the Force returned to a more limited and patient element of the movies. The scenes are so nicely paced when Rey is learning from Ren, and so well-done. I felt the Jedi mind-trick wasn’t fore-plotted well enough (Rey should have either asked Solo about it or observed Ren using it), but the interrogation and final battle sequence were willing to take their time and develop the exchange instead of rushing for wish-fulfillment instant success. Likewise, the use of Han Solo to confirm the Force was a good choice.

Character was the best thing about the movie. If the later movies can focus on these new characters and let them drive the plot, it will be a very strong trilogy.

  

What was Okay

Some the the characters failed to really engage the plot, or the setting was present, but either running on routine or in need of new ideas.

Finn: Finn was compelling, but the plot arc was too heavy handed at the start. I also felt that Finn was a little too quick-witted in his jokes and irony for someone just “deprogrammed” from a violent training regime. Still, John Boyega held his own against Ford, and the character added humor and energy to the plot. I’m interested in seeing how he’ll develop in later films, but right now he’s a bit distant from the main arc. The return to human/alien Stormtroopers, and the brief lines between the General and Ren were great.

Maz: or, the new “Yoda.” I was interested in a more social, less hermit “little wise alien” and I was sad to learn she’d been cut out of later scenes. Still, I originally listed her as a “good” but in hindsight she became an okay. As a character, there’s potential, but the film squanders her and makes her a plot device instead of a character.

The First Order: I liked the way the story foregrounded that the Imperials are space-Nazis. I hope everyone who dresses up like Stormtroopers might start to think deeply about why they want to be space-Nazis (I’m not being censorious or funny here: there is a  serious discussion to be had about why the Imperials are so compelling to fans of Star Wars and it’s one people keep avoiding – the appeal of totalitarianism and Fascism might be purely aesthetic, or it might be far more complex). Either way, I liked the fact that the military leader assumed a more “Grand-Moff-Tarkin” like role in the movie, not simply filling in as background. That particular element was well cribbed from A New Hope.  

Names: Generally speaking, the names were well chosen, except for Finn and Poe. I kept waiting for an Ahab or Gatsby to wander in, or a Captain Melville or Whitman to show up. Jedi Master Whitman the great Force user, singing the Song of Myself or "I Hear Jakku Singing" as he lifts the Millennium Falcon out of a sandpit…"The force is like the leaves of grass, my young apprentice, like leaves of grass."

Design: Generally speaking the film had strong design, but that’s never been a problem for Star Wars. I felt the ships looked even more dense or chunky, but that may work aesthetically with the prior six movies.  

Dialog: “that’s one hell of a pilot” is the worst case of having the “niave” character tell the audience how to react to a scene they’ve just watched. Please, let’s have no more of that. The majority of the script was good, if it did crib too much from the Joss Whedon “clever witty lines that reverse the context” trick that he developed in Buffy and Firefly.

Climax: If the movie had remained focused on the “find-Skywalker” plot, then the climax would have been gold. The space battle dragged it down and didn’t add much to the narrative. I will avoid being too spoilerish, but this was a brilliant scene between Ford and Driver (although why no hand-rails, I mean who does health-and-safety on these places).

Dénouement: The final scene was nicely done, quiet and unresolved. I though the circling shot was pulled us out of the characters too much and so marred the moment. It was rushed into, but we’ll get that below.

Luke Runs-away: By now, there’s a repeated pattern: Jedi’s are bad teachers and when they fail they run away. It felt tired. I liked the idea of Luke retreating though…it makes a kind of Taoist find-the-hidden-master plot that worked well. The idea that Ren and Rey would be racing to find him was compelling. As an A-plot, it was new and interesting. The idea needed a little more complexity…why couldn’t Ren fall after Luke had left? Then you’ve got Luke’s regrets lived out in on-screen narrative time in the second movie, and the scenes would write themselves…

Generally speaking, the use of minor characters was fine, the monsters on the ship were okay, maybe too post-anime/manga, but let’s forgive that for now. The design and the use of specific settings – Jakku, Maz’s bar, etc was dealt with efficiently, with nice call outs to Miyazaki’s Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind in Rey’s introduction on Jakku.  

What was Bad

The movie hits the ditch bad whenever the Resistance starts to drive the plot.

World-building: Simply put, the world-building – Resistance, First Order, New Republic—made no sense. Any time I attempt to but together some kind of realistic framework for the polticis of this setting, it falls apart. This is not the case for the first six movies – at every point, the political frame of the setting’s background makes sense, even when it isn’t dealt with in much detail (the briefing scene on the Death Star in A New Hope that mentions the “senate” and the “emperor” was clear to a 7-year-old Canadian boy in Edmonton, so I think it works). There is no sense of the setting beyond the scene, and so the mass desctrution of billions of people on multiple planets is utterly meaningless and approached bathos. The universe beyond Rey and Ren is meaningless, and that’s not the way it should be.

Leader Giant-Hologram-Voldemort: This character was awful and probably unnecessary. He was boring and the visual design distracting and, oddly, poorly done. I thought he looked like an early Harry Potter version (that bad CGI) of that Orc general Peter Jackson inserted into Return of the King, toned down for kiddies and then plopped in. My wife’s immediate reaction was “oh, it’s Voldemort” which is equally fair. No more evil emperors training the dark-armor-villain guy please. Ren would be so much better with out him, and the First Order way more evil if it was just a group of people being monsters. We don’t need the deranged ugly hologram.

Starkiller: the weapon seemed dumb, and only seemed to exist because of a perceived need to blow up a big weapon. It was a lazy crib from the A New Hope, and never added to the plot. The Death Star is a real thing in A New Hope – the destruction of Alderan is driven by the characters, the characters then have to escape it, and then they blow it up. It created an entirely unrelated B-plot that produced unnecessary drag on the A-plot.

Poe Dameron: He was compelling for the first ten minutes and then was the figurehead of the B-plot dragging the plot into the ditch. I thought he’d be there more, but he wasn’t, and as a result, he’s totally disconnected from the other characters, no matter how many times he pats Finn on the shoulder.  

Actor service: The “minor” pilots and Resistance command staff were dominated by familiar actors. It broke verisimilitude and generally produced a sense of Hollywood-back-patting that didn’t help the already bad B-plot.  

R2-D2: This was the biggest gaff. The fact that R2-D2 was going to wake up and have the missing piece of the map was completely obvious and the heavy handed C-3PO lines were tiresome. When he just conveniently powered-up and got things going so the plot could dénouement was lazy. If the latter half of the film had been a race to R2-D2 (maybe Ren captured him with Rey and they had to go back…), then the plot could have avoided the Starkiller and made the R2 scene meaningful, but it felt like the writing was on auto-pilot. The fact that J J Abrams has later tried to clarify this moment means it wasn’t handled well in the film.

The Resistance: As I mentioned above, the Resistance makes no sense politically as it is explained in the film. When the Resistance shows up, we do get the great scenes with Han and Leia, but we also get the B-plot and a lot of narrative drag.

Plot was a problem for the movie. The first half of the movie works on all engines, then it develops a conflcit between that it thinks the plot has to include and what the characters need to be doing to move the plot forward. This is largely the result of too much was cribbed from the first movie. Some of it could be easily forgive (Maz’s bar, Jakku) because it was similar, but different and it linked to the characters in clear, meaningful ways (e.g. Jakku links to Ren, her scavenging, and her memories of being abandoned). The B-plot can’t be considered a success because it isn’t developed in tie with a character, not is it developed into a narrative need.

The movie was not as good as any of the classic trilogy films, except perhaps for moment in Return or Lucas’s less confident direction of actors in A New Hope. It is better than the prequel movies though and if the writers can develop new ideas and focus on character, there’s a good chance for stronger movies in the future. The move away from Abrams will likely be a good thing (I don’t care much for him as a director or writer…I pitched an idea to my wife tonight that he’s essentially a geek Michael Bay).

Played Review: Minecraft Card Game?

A Christmas present to the Apprentice, the Minecraft Card Game? is a good family game.

Minecraft is a potent force in late-elementary these days, akin to marbles and Pokemon of the past. There is, of course, a lot of “stuff” associated with it, some “official,” some “unofficial.” This means there is a real range of quality in Minecraft ephemera, which is a long-winded justification to a bias against this game. The fact that my son insists that one of the formulas to make an axe is incorrect made me leering about playing this game with a kid who’s too “in universe.”* The use of a question mark at the end of the title is inexplicable and deeply troubling to the part of me that reviews grammar with first-year university students every year.

A 2-4 player game, it claims to be good for 8+ and makes no claim on the package about how long it takes to play a game. The game involves “mining” resources and then exchanging those resources for tools, like axes and shovels. The tools give you victory points and a special ability. In play, all the players are racing to break a victory point threshold that ends the game.

We played this as a family game, so Mom, Dad, Apprentice, and Junior Apprentice (who’s four) all played. The game was simple to get, corner rules (tool abilities, special cards) were intuitive and easily sourced from the rulebook in play. The cards are easy to read and well-designed, all keeping with the publisher, Mojang via Mattel’s, aesthetic of low-grade pixel art. No actual knowledge of Minecraft was needed to play.

After a turn everyone was on board and the game ran smoothly. Junior Apprentice lost interested after a few turns and needed more coaching, so the age description of 8+ is probably fair, though I could see younger kids staying the course and enjoying it in the 4+ range. Our game took 35 minutes or so, and was pleasurable. The only really slow part was the need to reshuffle the mining cards into five new piles when the discard pile was full. 

The special abilities were interesting, although they could become potentially abusive if someone in a group is prone to power-gaming or jerk-like play. That said, none totally block a player (you can only lose half a turn) and the ones that have milling effects on the card stacks don’t really benefit the player too much, so I think the game looks balanced. It was quick and fun. It could have replay value, but unlike other games we’ve tried this year (Forbidden Island, Castle Panic, Dominion) this didn’t produce a burning need to replay.

That said, this game is better than I expected it to be and won me over. If you have kids who like Minecraft, this is a nice way to get them at a table and a good, quick game. It's also playable without an adult and so is useful to kids beyond the "family" context of this review.

Two Stars

*like seeing a Star Wars, Star Trek, or Lord of the Rings film with me. I’m too “in universe” and so get grumpy about things some of the audience won’t care about. I’m still pissed about those elves showing up at Helm’s Deep. 

Painted THMiniatures Terrain

I painted up the THMiniature terrain that arrived last month. The process took four paint sessions after priming. I decided to go with "tabletop" quality at the moment...it would take one to two more sessions to really highlight and texture the pieces totally.

I used Krylon Camouflage Brown spray for primer, a Citadel white spray for under-painting, and a mixture of craft paints and Reaper/PP3 colours to paint. I try to avoid using "minature" paint on projects like this, mostly because of the size of area to be painted, but a Reaper "Wood Brown" traid worked well for the, well, wood.

Here are some pics:

Obviously, the apprentice and I used the pieces for a game of Warmachine. It was a 25-point Legion vs. Protectorate game using the "Close Quarters" scenario. The apprentice won the game through Control points in the third turn. I'm finding the speed and ranged attacks of the Legion difficult to counter with the Protectorate, who are a faction I've been trying out. I feel a need to drift back to Khador. Giant Steam-powered Russian Robots!

The pieces painted up easily and with good detail. My original review stands: these are a solid four-star product. Here's a link to the company's website: http://thminiatures.com/. You should check these guys out.

Review: Fantasy AGE by Green Ronin

Fantasy AGE is Green Ronin’s new “generic” version of their Dragon Age licenced game. It is 144 page and relatively slim. As such, it isn’t comparable in size to generic games like GURPS or the Cypher System and is perhaps better compared to Savage Worlds or FATE in terms of quantity of content. Another fair comparison might be Dungeon World.

Overall, Fantasy AGE is a satisfactory game.

We played a session of the game, making characters and playing a short adventure which involved a two combat encounters and a bit of intermittent role-playing with dice supports. One session is not the ideal for a real test of a game (three is better), so take this with a pinch of salt: The play went quickly, suffer little mechanical “bog-down” for a new system, I didn’t spend much if any time laboring over the system, and the players had a couple of cool moments. But I also didn’t think the monsters were challenging the PCs, and I felt one or two characters were too universally good at everything. With a few good roles and min/maxing your race, you’d end up with a decent mage who was the equal of most warriors in combat – the Dwarf Mage was a mean melee combatant.  

The game features readily accessible rules and uses a fun dice mechanic – you roll 3d6, with an off-colour die as your “stunt” dice. When you roll doubles, you get a critical effect. This doesn’t just pertain to combat, as spells, exploration, and interaction all have potential stunts. Players and GMs get to choose their stunts, so the system has some depth. In theory, the bell curve of a 3d6 should make players less vulnerable to a cold night of rolling (a problem with linear dice rolls).

But, beyond the dice and stunt system, Fantasy AGE is perhaps too generic. The races are all the usual suspects (elf, dwarf, orc, halfling, etc) and the classes – Mage, Rogue, and Warrior—are different, but don’t carry much detail. There is a background system, but it doesn’t offer much beyond a descriptive quality. The system doesn’t attempt to reward any characterization, and there isn’t much of a setting offered.

The book looks good, is well presented and offers good advice. However, it offers little in the way of monsters and adversaries, and what there is is pretty bland. The monsters aren’t imaginative nor do they feature interesting abilities. Now, in a game this generic, you’d expect goblins, dragons, giants, etc, but a few interesting takes or curve ball monsters make a game distinct in a simple way.

The magic system has range, and I think it could be used to build interesting organizations, but as it is, the spells are there. They’re generic enough that the passing resonance of games like Ars Magica or Mage in the use of language like arcana and rolling for effect and stunt, just makes you think those games have fun magic systems and this system is without texture and nuance.

The players enjoyed the critical stunt process, but wondered if there were better ways to handle things than a chart. It seemed to at least two of the players that you’d start defaulting to certain stunts and ignoring the majority of the chart. I don’t think the charts slowed play, and once players were familiar with it, the game would be pretty quick.

But the major stumbling block is the game gives you Elves and Dwarves and Mages and Rogues, and well, D&D already does that…Unlike Burning Wheel, which gives you Elves and Dwarves, but ramps up the mythopoetics and mechanics to be unlike D&D, Fantasy AGE is generic in the way earlier D&D was. That means you’ve got a lot of work making a setting and presenting something interesting. I suppose if you’re ideologically opposed to D&D, Fantasy AGE might fit your bill, but I think most games who reject the premise of D&D won’t find much in Fantasy AGE.

That said, the game isn’t flawed. If you’re burnt out on D&D or Pathfinder mechanics but want to keep things going in the same generic vein, then this game might work for you. The starting adventure is a good one (a riff on a common horror movie motif).

If I consider the comparisons mentioned in the opening things shake out like this:

Compared to FATE, Fantasy AGE is not a story-driven game. Mechanically, FATE and F/AGE are heading in different directions, but like FATE, there isn’t much in terms of setting to enjoy. You’ll need to work to make the game start off and while FATE gives you a lot of examples, FATE CORE is harder to run “off-the-book” than F/AGE. But, if you AND your players are into giving FATE the full go, I think it has more mileage. On the other hand, F/AGE doesn’t require the kind of investment on the player’s part that games like FATE (and Burning Wheel) require.

Compared to Savage Worlds, F/AGE is a pretty limited package. Savage Worlds will give you a better “off-the-book” experience and offer you more latitude. There’s a better starting adventure in F/AGE, and there’s more work to be done running SW as fantasy (personally, the “language” of Savage Worlds works against using it for Fantasy and Sci-Fi games).

As an aside, the Cypher System rulebook arrived in the mail just as I was prepping to try F/AGE out. The monster’s provided there are so much more fun and variety that it was really glaring. Now, the Cypher book is more than twice as long as F/AGE, so the comparison isn’t entirely fair, but it was quick striking.

I think Fantasy AGE is a satisfactory game. Green Ronin do reliably good work, and this product holds up in terms of quality and presentation. It’s easy to learn, quick to play, but it only offers a generic experience.

Three stars. 

Dungeons and Dragons, Fifth Edition (a run review)

Dungeons and Dragons is a game with baggage. As the earliest major/popular example of a role-playing game is casts a long the over genre. It is the money-maker (however small the pie actually is), and its influence is fairly ubiquitous thanks to video games. The concepts of cooperative play and continuous character improvement are two of the most important innovations in game history. Arguably the success of collectible card games, non-historical war games, and the current tabletop board game phenomenon all owe a debt to D&D.

All this is meant to say one shouldn’t review D&D lightly. Each edition has been met with the gnashing of teeth and the grinding of axes. My thinking is that you should reserve judgement until you’ve given the new system a descent workout, perhaps a year or so. This is what I did with 4e, and while I eventually soured on it in 2010, it did provide the backbone for a very enjoyable 2 year, 5 month campaign which is among the more memorable I’ve run. This review is essentially a DM’s review. I have not played 5e, but I have run it.

By way of background: I started playing D&D in 1988, after some proto-rpg experiences, and then moved on the AD&D, mostly a mix of whatever 1e and 2e material we had, along with some BEMCI material. I played a lot of Rules Cyclopedia D&D and then played 2e through the late 90s until 3e came along in 2000. I ran a lot (and played a little) 3^rd edition. From 2000 to 2006, it was essentially the only game played weekly. Gaming was a bit sporadic in 2006, but again, 3.5 was the game. Like I mentioned above, I felt it necessary to give 4e an honest try, and ran it from 2008 to 2010. From 2010 to 2014, I ran a mix of different games, including 3.5 and Pathfinder, until 5e came out in 2014.

My group and I have had two 5e campaigns: the first was a play through of the starter set and its adventure “The Lost Mine of Phandelver” (silly name though). Then we switch to a homebrew setting and we’ve been happily playing along a developing series of stories. So far the players are at 6-7 level, and so I won’t be commenting on high level situations until I get there.

My Review of 5e: Fifth edition is a very good game, four stars.  

That’s really the summation of a year of play.

The best parts

Like 4e, 5e is easy to run. There’s less rulebook review than the first 3 editions, DCs are broadly easier to set. The whole “bounded accuracy” idea, which just creates a game with lower numbers of math is great. The game is robust and fun to play while reducing the prevalence of magic items and returning to an ethic of homebrewed ideas and DM interpretation.

The art is more inclusive, and generally well done. The cover on the Monster Manual is great. I’m glad to see artists other than Wayne Reynolds gracing the covers of a major fantasy game. I’ve enjoyed many of his covers, and I think his work on the Eberron books was genius, but he’s gotten a bit omnipresent and the choice of different artists is to be commended. The humorous doodles in the indexes and appendices are wonderful and a welcome change from the seriousness of 4e.

The classes are interesting, but as I’m not playing them, I can’t comment on them too much. I will say that I’ve liked the way characters have leveled. The PHB follows the same pattern as all the PHBs have. The backgrounds are really well done and fun. Character creation is simple and fast. Levels 1 to 3 are fragile and dynamic. Characters between 4 and 7^th level feel hardened and defined. The spell system is good and flexible enough. The majority of classes are interesting from a story perspective. We’ve had multiple fighters, a rogue, barbarians, wizards, a monk, a paladin, a druid in the party and each one has had good hooks to present a game.

The Dungeon Master’s Guide is very good. For a new DM, it offers strong advice and practical tools. The magical items are gold and loads of fun. The treasure tables are awesome. If anything, this stands out as the best contemporary DMG. The 1e DMG is eccentric and inspirational, and the 3e (not the 3.5) DMG was brilliant. All the other DMGs have been lacklustre and unappealing to me. This book provides ideas for an experienced DM and makes prep light.

The Starter Set is great. It’s cheaper than other “starters” and while it lacks the same production quality and goodies of other games starter kits, the content is solid. The adventure, “Lost Mine of Phandelver” is a great adventure, especially for new DMs. We had fun playing it and I thought it developed very well.

The legendary monsters are fun and a good mechanical solution to the problem of outnumbered big villains. I do miss the “elite” monsters of 4e though. 

What’s bad

The cover of the PHB is another bad cover. We haven’t had a good cover on the PHB since 1e, although the unified codex appearance of 3e/3.5e gives that edition a pass. I don’t know why it’s so hard to commission a painting that is clearly dynamic and shows the player characters doing what they do in the game. Also, I'm rather bored with the "plotting/threatening monster/wizard" on the DMG cover. 

Here's a much better image for a DMG: 

It's dynamic and properly reflects the DM's responsibilities to create fun and challenge. 

In all fairness, Paizo’s Pathfinder books demonstrate a much better approach to art, but in all honesty, the graphic designers of 3e were probably on to something with the unified codex appearance of the books. 

The encounter design system is interesting, but needlessly math-heavy and not really effective. 4e did this better and maybe Pathfinder does, too.  The encounter design is so unwieldy, it seems odd, mostly because my biggest “mechanical” gripe with 5e is that it seems adverse to procedural rules, except in adventure design. Many smaller press games, I’m thinking of Burning Wheel games, or Dungeon World, use procedure very well, and I think the downtime rules are a major missed opportunity for adding a bit of procedural clarity to the player’s side of the game, while the DM is burdened with poor encounter design advice. I'm now building encounters like I did in 2e and 3e. 

The inspiration rules are interesting, and provide a way for player’s to manipulate the game a bit, but they aren’t well integrated to the play style of D&D. Games like Fate and Numenera add these features by making them integral, but with D&D, it seems like I’m having to remember the rules even exist. This is possibly a behavioral flaw on my part – two plus decades of habit is difficult to overcome. But, on the other hand, D&D has an established moment in which PCs are rewarded: the procedural moment at the end of the session when XP is handled. I think I'll be houseruling an inspiration procedure similar to Burning Wheel's end of session Artha recounting.  

The Monster Manual is a real mixed bag. Yes, the quality of production is fine and the monsters well-chosen and diverse, but there’s two big problems:

One, the art lacks a sense of presence. Monsters are presented is good written detail, but the visual images place the creatures against a smoky parchment background and there is little sense of motion or intent to the art. Even more maddening is the lack of scale in most pictures. There are images that look small and others that look huge, but the images convey incorrect impressions of the monsters. It’s too bad the art doesn’t show the monster doing something, or including some element for scale.

Two, the monster design is boring. Compared to the 4e Monster Manual, 5e feels like a step backwards, and not in a good way. Most monsters are simply a melee attack and a multi-attack. There’s not much interesting about the creatures and a DM will have to work to make the majority of encounters interesting. Encounters can become static 2e slugfests if things go badly or the DM and players are having off nights. There’s also a lack of depth in the NPCs presented in the back. Many of them are great, but there needed to be clear analogues to the PC classes – there’s no ninja/monk, no wizard, no barbarian analogue for me to just drop into a session. 

While the Monster Manual is a necessary book and the writing is good, the mechanics are a big let-down. The DMG and PHB are full of creative and sometimes imaginative mechanics, but the MM seems oddly devoid of those elements. Given that it is a book of monsters, that’s kind of unforgivable.

The Tiresome parts

Skills are still floating about, and I’m not sure why…Non-weapon Proficiencies would add a bonus in the same way as skills, and so I’m not sure why we’ve kept skills about, especially as everything is supposedly an ability check. So long as you’re including “skills” players will think of them as “skills” and not “proficiencies” and there’ll be a level of dissonance at the table. Either use skills or ditch ‘em, I say.

I’m not really enamored with the large format used by RPG publishers. In fact, I find the standard 8.5x11 book a lazy and unappealing default. Every game book I own that isn’t that size reminds me of how much I don’t like reading these unwieldy tomes. Also, why aren’t the booklets in the Starter Set perfect bound? The reuse value of the booklets is pretty limited as they get bent and torn easily.

The sorcerer is largely undefined and limited in interest.

The warlock is not bad, but always feels boring. I see how its different magic provides a different play experience, but the whole “deal with otherworldly power” doesn’t really do much other than force the character and DM into a Faust story. Any class should be able to do this (and yes, I know you can multi-class), and spell casters should be able to do so as a matter of story, not a mechanical class requirement. Overall, the warlock is a disappointing class to me, both in narrative and mechanical terms. The mechanic could have been folded into the sorcerer class and the room used to provide another nature-based class, like the 4e Warden, which was a great idea all around, or a psychic/divine class, akin to a mentalist or mystic.

Overall, in play I’d give 4 stars overall to fifth edition. It is a very good, fun, but somewhat expensive RPG.

If pressed, I’d give the following stars to the main products:

Starter Set: 4.5 stars

Player’s Handbook: 4 stars

Dungeon Master’s Guide: 4.5 stars

Monster Manual: 3 stars

Review Policy

I’m writing up some game reviews for the site. They’ll fall into two categories: family game reviews and hobby game reviews. I’ll try to get a few done a month until I’ve caught up with this year’s gaming finds and then I’ll review as a we get to try new things.

I’m usually cautious about reviews of games. Many of the reviews you’ll read on-line are reviews of having read the game (this is especially true of RPGs and war games). I personally think reviewers should indicate if the review is either the product of having read, played, or run the game. Reading a game can be combined with experience to offer some ideas, but there’s very little to compare with playing or running a game. Things come out in the wash that don’t appear on paper and ideas that seem odd come to life at the table.

I also think we need to play games multiple times to get a feel for them. A few years ago, I was inspired by the online idea of a “run club.” Each member of the club (our regular gaming group) agree to run a game. We played the game for four or five evening sessions. The duration of the club was based on the observation that you need to play a game, especially a complex board game or a role-playing game, three times, after making characters.

Three times lets you figure out the rules better, overcomes an off night for the group, and allows people to re-jig their characters or strategies to better fit the game. After that, you probably have enough experience to offer an opinion or write a review.

Some other games, maybe major games with lots of history and “baggage,” shouldn’t be reviewed for a while. You should play them many times, seriously, before offering a review. This doesn’t appeal to marketers and it doesn’t appeal to our contemporary media landscape.

We’re still debating our format for the reviews. I’ll flag them as read (maybe previewed?), played, or run (for games I’ve not “played” in, but I have “run” as the game master) and I think we’ll use a five-point scale:

5: a great game, awesome and inclusive of the players

4: a very good game, engaging and fun

3: a good game, fun with replay value

2: a competent and fun game

1: a marginally fun game

0: a deeply unfun experience