RPGPundit Reviews: Passages

This is a review of Passages: Adventures Penned by Literary Giants; published by Blue Devil Games.  Game design by Justin D. Jacobson, setting material by Richard Farrese.

Passages on the surface looks like a mess of contradictions. Its a D20 game. Its pretentious storytelling. Its an "indie" Forge-influenced game. Its action-adventure. The game, on the whole, has a couple of serious flaws; not the least of which is the above trying to "be all things to all people".  In reality, the way the game turns out, it is a decent ultralite D20 game that is mostly a regular RPG. I would almost imagine any pretentious forgie or storygamer who got this game would feel cheated or disappointed.

I mean, its supposed to be for them right? Its published by Indie Press Revolution; its full of flowery prose, its snooty.  And yet other than one single tacked-on mechanic, in every other respect this is a serious solid regular D20 game with a couple of very clever innovations to the D20 system. The kind of thing that a typical Theory-gamer would despise.

Now first, the physical structure of the book.  The book is one of those slightly-annoying mid-sized book; not the size of a regular RPG book, not the size of a novel, something in between. I guess it does make the game quite portable, I did most of my reading of it carrying it around in my bag as I travelled around Montevideo, reading snippets of it in the cafes, restaurants, korean restaurants, pipe clubs, taxis and street markets. On the other hand, it won't really fit neatly anywhere on your shelf, unless you happen to be a big collector of these odd-sized gamebooks.

The cover is full colour with a neat drawing of a "safari photograph" of a Victorian couple in hunting clothes standing over the head of what I think might be a Jabberwocky, accompanied by Mowgli, the Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter, the White Rabbit, and Alice. Inside, the illustrations are all black and white, a combination of old victorian drawings and modern fantasy art, all tasteful and well done, sometimes funny and sometimes cool.

The basic concept of the game is far from new; it is the old chestnut of "what if all the weird things the Victorians thought up were true?".  Space:1889 already did it, as did Castle Falkenstein to a certain extent.  In this case, the idea is that there are infinite worlds out there, which can be travelled through Passages (hence the title of the book), and that basically all of Victorian Literature wasn't actually fiction, it was travel-logues of real places in other dimensions.

The idea is that the PCs are travellers through these passages and the fun is supposed to be in going to the universe of these stories: wonderland, the indian jungles of Kipling's tales, the London of Sherlock Holmes, etc etc.  Except that in many cases, in suggesting that these places are real places and not symbolic metaphors, you also end up kind of losing the purpose of the place. In no case is this more evident than in one of the very settings that the book chose as one of its samples: Lilliput. Swift's Lilliput makes perfect sense as a story with a moral; the game's attempt to explain it away in a "realistic" sense makes the setting lose its purpose.  Ah well.

The system of Passages is D20, but a very light very smooth D20.  There's no question that part of the mechanics of passages are very appealing; in principle it seems quick light and cool.  Unfortunately, any system where the game author has to ask pretty please not to abuse the system is pretty well screwed from the start; and this book does that very thing (see p.43 if you don't believe me).  The problem with Passages' D20 system is that it is ridiculously easy to min-max a character, and the author's solution of simply suggesting that players don't do exactly that doesn't quite come out as satisfying.  It seems to me that the base mechanics of Passages are just awesome, but a lot more work should have been put into character creation to put limits on the possibilities of min-maxing.

And what is the basic mechanic of Passages? Everything is resolved with attribute checks or skill checks.  No other dice are needed besides the D20. There are no classes, or levels. Combat is just another kind of opposed skill check. Combat is handled, in short, by having the attacker roll his attack roll, the defender roll his defence roll, and the difference between the two ends up being the damage dealt.

For the rest of the review, let's break things down chapter-by-chapter:
Chapter 1: This chapter is the introduction to the setting.  It has details about just what the concept behind passages is, written in a kind of dense style that goes on too long; and it has a really excellent timeline of the Victorian era, a year by year chronology that's very cool. Current score: Pretentious Crap 1 - Awesome 1.

Chapter 2: By the way, I should mention that each chapter has a stupid quasi-victorian title that doesn't really tell you what the chapter consists of.  For example, Chapter 2's title is "Lady Anne Thomason's Compleat Manual on Etiquette and the Development of Passengers of High Standing". And what is it? Basically, character creation.
This chapter has some useful setting fluff, like concise lists of Victorian standards of behaviour for Gentlemen and Ladies.
Character creation consists of first choosing a culture (from a list of Arab, Asian, Easterner, Frontiersman, Native, and Westerner).  Each has a writeup which gives you some details on the Victorian literary stereotypes of each culture, generally trying to emphasize the positive, rather than the negative. So the section on Asians emphasizes their discipline, honour and wisdom, and archetypes like "the buddhist monk who seeks enlightenment, the philosopher who studies lost medical arts, or the practioner of forbidden techniques" and not, say, Fu Manchu.
Next you have to choose a social caste, from the list of Slave, Serf/Servant, Freeman, Bourgeois, Noble, and Royal.

I'll note that both of these choices are mostly just background choices; any mechanical bonus is purely optional and up to the GM to determine.  So its not like these are race or class or anything of that sort, just purely setting-based background material.
We only really get to the mechanic part when determining attributes. Its the standard 6 D20 attributes, which all start at a base of 3, and a PC has 60 points to divide among them. Each attribute also provides the standard modifier.
Hit points are used in the game, and start at 10+(2xCon modifier, if positive). Con penalties do not reduce HP.  As there are no classes or levels in Passages, characters can only gain more hit points by purchasing "advantages" that give them more HP.
Characters start with a certain number of skill points, which they can invest in either broad general "skills" (at a rate of +1 per point) or into highly-specialized "sub-skills" (at a rate of +2 per point).
Then there are advantages and disadvantages, which you purchase with something called "creative energy" points. You start with 20 points to buy advantages with, and disadvantages give you extra points.  You also gain these Creative Energy points as the "experience points" of the game.
Finally, you get "plot points". These are basically the one bit of lip service paid by the authors to GNS/Storygames/Forge theory.  I despise this idea that some RPG writers have that in order to get their Groovy-cards punched, to get the seal of approval from fucking Ron Edwards, they feel the need to add a single storygamey mechanic to an otherwise entirely regular RPG. Why? Why do they fucking do this? Later on, the author even suggests that you can change plot points from their default usage (where the player can temporarily take control of the story and utterly ruin the regularity of this RPG for no good reason) to more regular/standard "adventure point" kind of mechanics, where he just gets a bonus on a certain roll.

I mean, do Storygamers really get off on this? Do they really think that a totally conventional totally regular RPG which chooses to tack on a stupid Forge mechanic will suddenly be hipper for doing so? Does it satisfy them? It certainly wouldn't satisfy me if you took a totally Forgey game (say, My Life With Master) and added a single regular rule to it; its not like that would suddenly magically make the game acceptable to me; so I can't imagine that taking a totally regular RPG, a D20 game at that, of the sort the Forgies despise, and adding a single Forgie-storygame type of rule to it as an utterly shallow utterly sycophantic move, could possibly satisfy any of the hardcore Storygamers.  So all I can imagine it does is annoy people like me.  I'll grant that at least in this book they've included an explicitly-written alternative, so its not difficult at all to revert the game back to regularity by turning plot points into just another "adventure point" mechanic. So overall I'm going to score one goal to each side, which leaves us at 2-2 pretentious-awesome by the end of this chapter.

Chapter 3: This chapter is all about the skill system, which is pretty standard for D20. Modifiers and synergy bonuses and such are largely left to the discretion of the GM, which is fine by me.
What is innovative about the skill system in passages is that you have a short list of general skills, and each one of these has a set of "subskills" that you can be far more talented at. So for example, the general skill Carouse has as its subskills "connoisseurship", gamble, and gather information.  The Combat general skill has Attack, Defend, and Initiative as its subskills. Characters can put points into both the general skill, and any of the subskills, and skill checks are done by adding both the general bonus and the specific subskill bonus appropriate to the task.
This system is pretty cool, but it is also here that the worst minmaxing occurs, and it is very easy to create a character with only one or two skills with huge amount of subskill bonuses that becomes very unbalanced.  This could easily have been remedied by setting up some kind of limits to the ranks or subranks that could be purchased, but the authors made no attempt to do so. I find this sloppy rather than liberating. So again, one goal each leaving the score at 3-3 pretentious-awesome.

Chapter 4: This is the section on Advantages. The advantages are the replacement for things like feats or powers, and they are bought with "creative energy" points, the equivalent of experience points in this game. Many of these advantages have prerequisites and their costs are variable.  There's a wide variety of Advantages listed; the standard ones allowing you to buy increases to attributes, skills, hit points and (ugh) plot points. Other advantages are divided between regular advantages (things like martial arts, weapon proficiencies, etc) and supernatural advantages (powers like "aura of fearlessness, detect passages, invisibility, etc).  The latter advantages are limited by GM approval.
There's nothing particularly bad about this chapter, so I'll give it one goal for the "awesome" side, leaving the score at 3-4.

Chapter 5: This is the section for disadvantages. Disadvantages are supposed weaknesses that give you extra creative energy points.  The book recommends that characters start with no more than two of these, but it doesn't seem to make a hard rule of it. As usual, giving bonus points for character disadvantages is an open invitation for min-maxing, as players who want to could easily reap tons of points from weaknesses they don't think will directly bother them much, and put those points into turning their character into an unbalanced overpowered monstrosity. That adds one goal to the "suck" side, leaving the score at 4-4.

Chapter 6: this chapter talks about wealth and equipment.  The game does not include any particular rules about wealth, expecting that you neither keep track of monetary wealth nor using any kind of "wealth level" system that games like D20 Modern or True20 use. Instead, its just supposed that the GM will have to regulate what kind of equipment characters can have access to, based on social class, the GM's discretion, and presumably how much of a pushover he is with whiny players. Score one for pretentious suckitude. Weapons are divided into melee and ranged, and each of these have proficiency levels of simple, martial and exotic (which must all be bought with Weapon Proficiency advantages). Melee Weapons have a damage modifier, which in most cases is a negative modifier (with unarmed strikes doing -7 damage and nonlethal damage at that). As it turns out, I'd imagine this means minmaxing characters would all be going around with the very Un-Victorian War Clubs or Great Swords, which actually do +2 damage. Firearms  range in damage values from -2 (for a derringer) to  +8 (for various rifles). Armor reduces damage by various values. There's a fairly good list of general items, and a couple of sample "unique items" included (like Excalibur), the sort of things you might find in some of the other worlds you travel to. In all, this chapter doesn't add much to the coolness factor, but the lack of clear rules on wealth and the possibility of abusing weapons and armor for minmaxing force me to give another goal to the "suck" side of the equation, for a score of 5-4.

Chapter 7: This chapter is all about general mechanics including combat rules. This is a pretty standard D20 chapter, giving rules for various conditions, checks, hazards (poison, acid, etc); plus the combat rules. Combat is based on opposed rolls of attack vs. defence, with defence rolls being automatic (if you're unaware of an attacker, you roll without bonuses). I would imagine that combat in actual play would be pretty brutal, with combat either being very quick for characters who have a very wide difference of bonuses, or plodding and up to chance for characters who are relatively close to one another in scores. An optional rule allows defence rolls to always count as being a minimum of 10 on the die roll, and I would imagine this rule would be pretty necessary in fact, if you don't want combat to seem too arbitrary.  Finally, this chapter details the plot point mechanics, where a character can spend a plot point to temporarily take control of the game and change details to suit him; or the proposed non-Forgey alternative where spending a plot point gives a character a single +20 bonus on any one roll.  Since I've already scored the suck value of plot points, I'm going to say that the score was nil this round.

Chapter 8: from this chapter onwards, we get into the setting elements of the game. This chapter provides an overview of what the Victorian world was like, including the city of London, the British Empire, views on women, Darwin's revolutionary theories, etc.  Then it goes on to explain what the worlds of the Passages are like; how some of them can be very familiar and similar but with slight differences, where the same people exist but act differently, or where characters of fiction are people of fact; and others are fantastical places that bear little resemblance to the regular world.
On the whole, this overview is mediocre; it doesn't provide any really cool material, but it does provide a good review.   It doesn't include any mechanical elements, so its pretty well just background.  In this chapter we also get a sample world of Lilliput (from Swift's story), where the Lilliputlian story is actually turned into a complex political-social conflict that misses the point entirely of Swift's work.  This leads us to the conclusion that many of the literary worlds one might visit will end up working in much the same way: the familiar places and characters of literature will be there, but they will be bereft of their original purpose.
After that, the chapter gets into the various power groups that know of and operate with the Passages. You get the Opus Mundi (a kind of knock-off of the Opus Dei, even though the latter organization didn't exist back in the victorian era, being a product of Francist Spain), the Traum Des Gott (a german philosophical group who's ideology leads them to want to stop interaction between the different universes), the Nihilists (the radical anarchists of the Victorian age), the Magi (which are basically the various occult magical groups of the victorian age, made to seem pretty smarmy and inept in the book), the Sisterhood of Lysistrata (a female-supremacist organization that originated from another universe where women are dominant; which doesn't really strike me as fitting very well with the Victorian world except possibly as the Victorian's worst nightmares), and MI6 (the Queen's official secret organization dedicated to exploring the parallel worlds, which both actively recruits freelancers and poaches members of other organizations; its set up in such a way that this could be a very good starting org for the PC party while still allowing them to have previous ties with any of the other groups listed above).
On the whole, these groups are pretty creative and relatively interesting.  I'd say this chapter gives another goal to the cool side of the review, once again tying up the score at 5-5.

Chapter 9: This chapter is the GM Advice chapter, which includes details on how to interpret rolls and mechanics. This chapter is mainly interesting for one thing: contrary to the presence of plot points, this chapter is one that actively recommends that the GM ignore or alter the rules as he sees fit, or fudge the results of rolls if he feels its needed.  This is decidedly UN-Forgey advice, where if the Forgies have their way the GM isn't allowed to do anything of the sort, and certainly not without consulting the players.
And yet, it shows off just how gaming-ideology schitzophrenic this game really is; right after that section it provides yet more advice on plot points, suggesting GMs "shouldn't feel threatened" by players basically altering the whole of reality at their whim through the use of plot points.  Once more, it seems that the writers of the game have tried to please everyone and will just end up annoying both sides; even so, the definite inclination of the game as a whole, if it wasn't for the presence of plot points, is certainly toward regular roleplaying. Rarely have I seen a case where it is so blatantly obvious that the Forgey element of the plot points is something tacked on as an afterthought and that operates in direct contradiction to the mechanics and power-balance of the rest of the game.
The chapter also tries to give advice on how to handle minmaxers, suggesting that the GM try to find ways to use the character's weaknesses against them,etc. Again, I think this is trying to pass the buck to the GM to do what is essentially a game designer's job.  Obviously, no game is minmax-proof, but leaving huge gaps in the character creation and point allocation rules that make the game ripe for rampant abuse and then suggesting that it should be up to the GM to "deal with it" seems like an utter cop-out.
The rest of the chapter contains some pretty bog-standard encounter and adventure ideas, including a dozen suitably victorian adventure seeds; and rules about how to craft campaigns and include different elements like victorian sci-fi, mystery, and comedy.
The chapter as a whole is pretty good, but the dual-identity-disorder of the ideology behind the game, and the cop out on how to handle minmaxers make me give the chapter a tied score, bringing us up to 6-6.

Chapter 10: This is a chapter on NPCs and monsters.  It contains sample NPCs with some plot hooks, as well as some notable personalities the PCs might meet on their travels, like Aladdin, Captain Ahab, and Professor Moriarty (but not Sherlock Holmes!?).  It also has some standard stat blocks for various archetypal stock NPCs, and a small selection of animals and monstrous creatures (the latter is a VERY small selection).
There's nothing wrong with this chapter, but its not very complete either. Nil score.

The book closes with the appendices, including a bibliography and a lexicon of victorian terms.

Conclusions:

The Good: On the whole, this is not a bad game. Its "Sliders" in the Victorian age. If you really dig the 19th century, you'll dig the game. Its got lots of good little details and trivia about life in the Victorian era (society, etc), and the D20 system is a relatively good iteration: its very streamlined and yet still definitely D20, probably likely to appeal to both the D20 nuts and those who aren't so hot on the system.

The Bad: The Character creation process lacks the kind of limitations, that would have been very easy to implement, that could prevent the possibility of rampant min-maxing.  This means that GMs are stuck having to struggle with any player wanting to break the system for their own benefit.

The Ugly: The game doesn't know where it stands on the divide between regular RPGs and Forge Games. Its 95% regular RPG, but the authors felt they had to add that 5% Forge-influence just to try to be "hip" with that crowd of pretentious losers.  I'll grant that they did it in a way that is very easily reparable, and it amounts to little more than lip service, but the troubling question is WHY did they feel they had to include this in the first place? It certainly doesn't add anything to the game, it certainly doesn't make the game into a "storygame" as such, and it just takes away from its value as a Regular RPG. Its pointless pretentiousness at its worst, for no good reason.

To the authors I say: Guys, have the balls to make a regular game. That's obviously what you wanted to do; otherwise you would never have bothered making the other 90% of the game what it is, or giving the kind of GM advice that you do. If you think you're "storygamers", you need to strongly re-assess that idea about yourselves. Why are you adding a thorn into your own game just to satisfy some idiots' theories about what makes for good gaming? The rest of your RPG PROVES you know what good gaming is, there's no reason to cater to that crowd.

RPGPundit

WW-style dice fudging and rules altering, Forgy player empowerment and a d20 chassis... They tried to cater to everyone and his mother, didn't they?

But what has driven me to post...

QuoteTraum Des Gott (a german philosophical group who's ideology leads them to want to stop interaction between the different universes)

This one hurts to a native speaker. This should be "Traum des Gottes", or if the title refers to the Christian God, "Gottes Traum". (The Christian God isn't an entitlement, it's a proper noun, so it's very unusual to put it behind the thing that the Christian God owns, though not technically wrong.)

Not that I demand that a game designer has to learn every language he makes use of in his game (I know that I don't do), but at least with major languages as German and Spanish whos native speakers can be found on the important forums, he should put the effort into it to let his stuff briefly check for mistakes. (Except if he writes for Warhammer, 7th Sea or a Pulp game, there's where I wholeheartedly expect totally wrong German words and names and embrace them :haw:)

Thanks for the review. One minor factual correction, IPR does our fulfillment and on-line sales, but they do not publish the game. Blue Devil Games (my company) is the publisher.

On a couple of other points you talk about, I think they are interesting issues.

Plot Points. This is more a failing of the presentation of the rule. In retrospect, I should have offered more guidance of how the rule is intended to work in play. It's not intended to enable lengthy stories and doesn't make it a real narrative-oriented game (not "narratavisim" -- I won't go there). It's primary function is to serve as the safety net for the potential lethality of the combat system. Although combat is not likely to be as prevalent as, say, D&D, it can be very lethal when it does happen. The example I always use is if Blackbeard fires his revolver and the shot would normally kill the PC, the player spends a plot point and says "No, it hit my whiskey flask instead" or some such. Like I said, I didn't do a good job of explaining it in the book, so I see how it can come off as a reall hippie-style mechanic.

Min-Maxing. This was a very tough choice for me, but it was certainly intentional and not simply laziness. In fact, in our initial iteration, we had pretty specific character creation guidelines to prevent it. One of the first questions I asked myself when I started work was whether social contraints could do the job in place of mechanical ones. I decided to give it a shot, and I think it does work in practice. On the one hand, you've got simple communication: One of the players is building a Combat +20 PC, you suggest he spread it around some more. On the other hand, there are mechanical ways of dealing with it too: One of the PCs has a Combat +20 PC, give the Jabberwock a Combat +20 rating too; that's in the advance about scaling encounters based on actual PC abilities. Maybe I'm just sheltered, but it seems to me like min-maxing is the great bogeyman of role-playing--more feared than actually experienced.

I've started working on a free supplement for Passages called "Annotations", in which I will deal with both of these issues (and a few more) more concretely. Thanks for taking the time to review Passages; your feedback will help me hone and improve the game further.

Thanks for the review, Pundit.  The premise of the game really interested me when I first heard about it, but I wasn't 100% sold on it.  I'm still not 100% sold on it, but I've got a better idea now of where it may rank on my "want/check out" list.

Quote from: Justin D. JacobsonMaybe I'm just sheltered, but it seems to me like min-maxing is the great bogeyman of role-playing--more feared than actually experienced.

Sorry to say it mate, but I think you've led a sheltered gaming existence.

Min-maxing isn't a bogeyman, it's as real as death.

Though it's clear from context, I'm referring to min-maxing that rises to a detrimental level. Sure, everyone tries to make their character good. But I've never seen any of my games break down from someone taking this to the extreme. I'm not sure I've ever heard about it actually happening in someone else's game either. I'm sure it does actually happen; I'm not doubting that. I just don't think it's necessary to design a game around negative outliers.