A few months ago, I promised fellow RPG blogger Jeff Mejia (infamously known as ‘The Evil Dm‘) that I’d review Broadsword, the indy RPG game he co-wrote with James Stubbs, as well as his recently published companion book World of Broadsword.
As mentioned yesterday, instead of asking Jeff for free review copies (he offered to do so more than once), I purchased both product for a grand total of 8$ US to support his work.
I set out to read both product with the only reference that it was a RPG based on the cheesy Barbarian/Sword and Sorcery movies of the 70’s and 80’s.
This post will be about the Broadsword game. I’ll post a second one soon about the game’s expansion: The World of Broadsword.
As I was reading through Broadsword, my initial gut reaction wasn’t all that positive… Once I was done and slept on it, I started digging around and I realized that to be fair to the product I needed to review it from a different perspective than a D&D veteran used to current design philosophies.
Broadsword is a simple, Beer & Pretzel RPG that has no other assumption than letting a bunch of players create Brawny/Buxom, ham-fisted warriors in minutes and spend 2-4 hours killing stuff and getting hacked to bits numerous times.
So I’m going to tackle this review from another, less anal-retentive, crunch obsessed angle…
Once upon a time…
Back in 1983, I was a 10-year old nerd that loved to play with the Atari, Intellivision, Legos and boardgames. One lazy weekend afternoon, my childhood friend Mathieu G. (not the same Math of my current group) called me and asked me to come and try this new game he had discovered.
Picking up my motocross-shaped bike (I’m too old for the BMX craze), I dropped by my buddie’s house. We sat on the basement table and he brought up 3 sheets of white paper, a pencil and a d6.
“My cousin has this game called Dungeons & Dragons” my buddy started. ” It comes in a Red Box and it has full of weird dice. Let play a game I created based on that. You are an adventurer and you have a sword and a shield. I’m going to draw a map as you explore a dungeon and you get to kill monsters and find treasure”
‘Sure’ I said. “How do I kill the monsters?”.
“Hummm… roll a d6, if you roll 6 it’s dead, if you roll 1 you’re dead”
“Cool! And what if I roll 2-5…”
“We’ll say that you go from near death(2) to wounding the monster real bad (5).
“Awesome!…”
We played that version of the game for hours and hours. I showed it to my father and all my other friends.
Then a 13 year old neighbor I kept pestering borrowed the AD&D Players Handbook from a friend and showed it to me (probably just to shut me up).
I never looked back…
Broadsword is that game I played before I discovered AD&D (And learned English trying to decipher Gygaxian Prose).
Mechanics:
Broadsword is a 17 page RPG that’s part of the 1PG line of games.
1PG stands for 1 page. That means that the actual rules of the game (including char gen, but excluding magic) fit on just one page.
They’re even reprinted on the character sheet so players have all they need to know about the game.
The mechanics are simple: Each character has 2 sets of randomly determined stats:
The Primary stats are Brawn, Personality, Perception and Knowledge. Each has a numeric value between 1 and 3. Each primary stat has between 4 and 10 skills that you can buy with randomly determined skill points. You can spend up to 3 points per skill.
Task/Combat resolution is then: Add skill to related primary stat and roll less than that on a d6, 1 is always a success, 6 always a failure. Opposed checks (like combat or contests of whatever) are won by succeeding by the widest margin against the target number.
The secondary stats are:
Presence: The character’s charisma. Determines the number of ‘traits’ you can buy with the character at char gen.
Guts: Your resilience to fear. Failing a guts roll makes you lose a presence point. Dropping presence makes you too unnerved to be of any use in the party (and actually makes you prone to hurt the other members)
Blood: Hit points !
Reputation: General perceived badassness.
Combat then is done by foe and PC rolling opposed Fighting/Shooting skill (from the Brawn list ). The winner deals Blood damage equal to weapon rating (from 1 to 8 ) + Brawn rating (an extra 1 to 3). A PC starts with 3d6+10 blood points.
Armour has a rating of 1 to 3 and absorbs that many damage upon a hit.
There are 20 advantages that a player can choose from to customize a character. That’s where the whole Barbarian feeling comes to life in that game. With choices like Animal Buddies, Flesh Wound, Good Looking and Lightning Reflexes you can deck your Thundar McConan with the traits to make it a perfectly acceptable unidimensional warrior!
Finally there is a one pager about Magic that gives some indication to adjucate magic (although it actually refers to another product for the core magic rules).
There are some character advancement rules but this game was not designed with campaigns in mind.
Actually, the game assumes that players may go through numerous characters in one evening!
Fluff
Once you account for mechanics, character sheets and cover pages, the book contains a one-page series of tips for referees which can be resumed as
…this is not a scholarly work or an in-depth roleplaying experience; it’s “make-believe goes to the movies.”
The rest are one page adventure plans: 3 stand alone scenarios and a 6 part ‘campaign’ arc.
So basically, there’s no fluff in the book, apart from a 1 paragraph introduction before the rules stuff starts.
At that point I was a bit perplexed, the game has no setting and explains none of the tropes of the genre…
That’s when I realized that the setting and fluff of Broadsword reside in the player’s minds. The game was created to appeal to players who watched hours upon hours of pulp barbarian movies and want to recreate that feeling for in an evening without having to buy 3 Core books, 2 sourcebooks and designing a 15 page adventure.
(That being said, World of Broadsword, the second product provides an actual setting, stay tuned).
Chatty’s take on the game
So now that I’ve taken the game in perspective, what do I think of it?
First, I’m not the target audience for that game. I don’t usually play a pick-up RPG game. On casual evenings, I’ll usually reach for a board game or play console games with my buddies.
However, for a simple game that can be learned in 5 minutes (15 if you create characters) and whose GM can whip an adventure almost instantly, it truly delivers on its promise.
Still, I think the game makes a few assumptions that might not be evident for literal minded GMs like me. First, it’s clear that such simple mechanics mean that the GM must wing a lot of how things happen when it can’t be resolved by a simple skill roll.
For example, how do you handle a 2 (or more) on 1 fight?
Additionally, there’s no indication about how much Armour and Weapon cost. Characters get silver but there are no equipment/service costs anywhere.
I think it was intentional because the game was not designed to be focused on gear or loot except as a vague motivator
(I mean why does Cohen the Barbarian raid the temple of the Scantily clad Snake priestesses if not to get his grubby hands on the Gem of Eternal Stiffness, sell it and spend it on ales and whores right? ).
However, because weapons cover a large range of damage (from Shuriken=1 to Greatsword=8) and armour also covers a range (hides = 1 and metal = 3), any player with a smidgen of the power gamer gene will automatically go for a Greatsword/metal armour combo all the time.
While it’s a Sword and Sorcery game, the magic rules leave me a bit confused, probably because it’s actually an extension of magic rules found in the 1PG companion. That’s the game weakest point by far because it fails to deliver on the ‘sorcery’ part.
Still, in such movies, the magic yielders are always the bad guys (i.e. NPCs) and the engine is flexible enough for a creative DM to fake magic attacks and enchantments without arousing suspicion.
Regardless, I can totally see how I could recapture the feeling of playing like I did 15 years ago. Take the description of a creative GM, a barebones rule set and a bunch of eager tongue-in-cheek, slightly drunk players and you got yourself an evening filled with laughs and crude Chainmail bikini jokes!
Final Verdict
Broadsword is a minimalist but effective RPG engine that offers to recreate the best (and worst) of low-budget/low-fantasy movies taken directly out of the collective recollection of the sword & Sorcery genre of the 70’s and 80’s.
Oh and it’s 4$.
Post publication random trivia
As I was checking the weapons list, I noticed that while the game is called broadsword, there is no broadsword in the list! I guess that ‘sword’ is a broadsword… 🙂
nice. It sounds like the kind of game that would be great when switching between DMs or systems – something to loosen people up and get them out of their current mindset. Or a bit of something light after a really heavy RP session. Or a good go-to if parts of the group can’t make a session. Or even a decent-length campaign actually – there’s always another undiscovered baddie around the corner in the Barbarian world 🙂 (When last we left our intrepid heroes they were waddling off into the sunset weighed down by bags of gold and nubile priestesses….however, now they’re tied and blindfolded in the back of a cart…. 😀 )
hmmmm….I seem to keep coming up with ways I could use this….I may have to buy it 😀
For 4$ you can’t really go wrong.
Next week or so I’ll put up a review of the expansion book. It’s really quite good…
If I play a game of it… I’m going to lay it real think with the Cheese… Nubile females and Serpent temples and all…
that’s 1$/usage idea so far….seems a fair ratio 🙂 *puts it on the list*
oh totally! as much cheese as you can stuff in with a little extra cheese on top 😀
One of my life rules is
🙂
My favorite pick-up one-page roleplaying game is M20. The advantage is that it is essentially a d20 system.
Alex Schröders last blog post..Comments on 2008-04-22 Twitter
It sounds like something you could easily play with your kid. Obviously the gore and scantily clad damsel description should be done appropriately to the age of your kid. 😉
The system is simple enough for a first contact with RPG.
Both Micro20 and Broadsword would be perfect introductory RPGs for children. The theme in itself is irrelevant as I’d tailor it as a classic Monsters in the Cellar adventures.
Yeah I don’t think a six year old boy would get the narrative subtleties of half-naked priestesses and loinclothed heroes.
As I expect little comments on this, here’s a question for the readers who follow the comment RSS feed:
Is there a need/market for “pocket” focused RPGs like the 1PG system and M20?
Especially one whose mechanics only focus on task resolution and combat.
Would you play a pick up RPG on a slow Friday where the DM calls in sick or something?
The closest I did is to make a one evening adventure using the current system…
At Gen Con I actually registered for a game of RPG Pundit’s Forward…to Adventure so I could have a try of such a game (plus it advertises itself as being tabletop Nethack, how can I resist?).
-chatty-
I’ve bought more than a few rpg and rpg like products that fill the “don’t feel like doing the work for a regular game but don’t really want to play board games either” niche. There are actually a couple of great board games along those lines too. The best of the best that I’ve played are TSR’s old Dungeon Board Game, the newer Dungeon Twister (only for small groups, You have to get an expansion to play with 3 or 4 players), Bane Master (and intriguing Collectable Card Game that has been out of print for a very long time.) and arguably BESM. (The core rules of BESM could be printed on a 4X6 index card. Add in skills and powers and it gets a lot longer, but the game itself is great for a “I have 15 minutes to prep before my players get here” night.
Spirit of the Century is not a pocket RPG, but it is designed specifically to be run as one offs. Adventure design is quick and painless, and it is another game that can be an easy way to switch gears for a bit.
Oh! I forgot, another board/card game that fits the boll? Munchkin. I see Munchkin as the core of the hack and slash experience. I’ve heard that combining the sets can be suboptimal in the fun category. All rules, no plot, no GM even, good fun if you have the right group.
Oh, Atlas Games’s Once Upon a Time isn’t really an RPG. Instead it is a storytelling game, so instead of distilling the thump and smash aspect of role playing, it distills out the narrative aspect. As with all competitive story telling games, the rules allow for some pretty assholeish behavior by people who are there to win instead of being there to have fun with friends.
Some of the RPGish board games out there are considerably more complex than the simpler RPGs.
Michael Phillipss last blog post..Avoidance memes
I own more than one set of dungeon cards/tiles that included a single sheet or small pamphlet of rules for using them as an rpg. Including the old D&D Cardmaster set.
Michael Phillipss last blog post..Avoidance memes
I’m a Munchkin/Talisman player myself. While it gets old real fast, we play Munchkin (and Chez geek) about twice a year.
I agree that BESM (2nd Edition) is a great simple game… it’s actually one of the best simple ‘generic’ yet complete systems I’ve read. We played only once and moved on to D&D 3.5 mostly because we had had enough of 8 years of point-based character development with Gurps.
I found (and lost) a link to d20 SotC that I should hunt down again. I like the genre it portrays, but I don’t feel like learning a new RPG engine other than 4e currently.
Does a minimalist narrative game work? I’m curious how that would go…
Yeah, I find that 2-3 games a year of munchkin is about right. Apparently it is great to play with your kids, though I lack kids to verify that with.
I suspect that a lot of the ease of play and setup would be lost in SotC by making it d20. It is a strongly narritivist game, and adding a mechanics heavy system to it would be likely to make it bog down. I’ve not given it a real good reading yet, but it seems that Spirit of the Century is one of those games where the rules should be easy to learn and apply to the point that after reading it and after character creation, you don’t need the book.
Once upon a time works very well. It isn’t so much a role playing game as a group story telling session with cards and a win condition. It is easy to metagame to a win condition, but so long as any hyper competitive sorts in your group can tone it down for the play session, that isn’t too big of a problem.
http://www.atlas-games.com/onceuponatime/
@Chatty+cheese: excellent *hand motions* 😀
Would you play a pick up RPG on a slow Friday where the DM calls in sick or something?
we actually had a regularly scheduled pick-up night for a couple of months (which sounds odd, but…. 🙂 ) It worked quite well. But we might be strange.
Once Upon a Time is a great game (good call Michael Phillips!). You have _got_ to be quick on your feet though, even when playing to have fun, to keep the flow going. It’s a practice thing though I expect 🙂 Incredible fun to watch/listen to. (Great before a night of improv or a session that’s going to be mostly RP too. 🙂 )
This style of game can be great for groups that get into heavy RP too, especially if they enjoy the roleplaying, and don’t want to constantly roll to see how well their dramatic speech is coming across. That way, the mechanics are used sparingly, and people can enjoy whatever kind of game they want.
I’ve DM’ed for similar style games, and it can be a LOT of fun going on a one-shot dungeon crawl without having to worry about much of anything except where the next monster is. 🙂
And Sandrinnad, you’re not weird; we had a scheduled pick-up night too, where we’d either do something like this, play board games, or if we actually got everyone together (rare), we’d continue on with our normal game. It was great, because if you couldn’t make it, you didn’t have to feel guilty.
JFargos last blog post..Green Grey
@Sandrinnad: Ask my how I feel about bacon one day… it’s a wonder I can keep my weight in the ‘slightly overweight’ bracket. 🙂
@JFargo: Hey there welcome to the blog, I’ve looked at your own about photography and personal health and I should drop by and siphon you for tips on macro photography for my D&D minis as I did for Greywulf and John Arcadian. (I still need that desk light)
We really really suck as story tellers and we really really like to play with powers on a battlegrid. I have my storyteller moments and so does the group (although Franky is our best yarn-spinner)… I’m really not sure that such a game (Once upon..) would be a hit in our group.
Yeah, Once Upon a Time is definitely not an RPG. It is a bunch of friends getting together to competitively tell a story. (With fewer rules than The adventures of Baron Von Muchausen or however you spell it)
My Life With Master is a very player centric freeform narritive game. Not exactly minimalist, but the antagonist/master is created during character creation.
Michael Phillipss last blog post..Avoidance memes
In order to play anything, I’ve really got to be excited about it, I would be really hesitant to play anything like this, what when you can work on existing characters.
I would like to find something that would bridge the game, we only play every 3 weeks, but it always seems to take an hour before we really get to the point where everybody is into the game and preforming at the right level. Personally, I think that the reason for this is a specific person, whom I am not inviting to tonights game, and I’ll see how my players preform.
There are a few board games that I’m interested in getting, but with prices as they are (I am, after all, poor-white trash) I really cringe at spending money on something that players don’t want. Learning new rules really sucks too. Bare bone systems just don’t work for us!
Not that I don’t respect the Evil DM, I’d love to play in one of his games, he’s got a brilliant mind! A few months ago I caught wind of a campaign world that he wanted to build and it sounded killer!
That is the other side of the Internet sword, while it is easier to discuss gaming with other DM’s in your own home, but now you can’t beg yourself a spot at their gaming table.
Ripper Xs last blog post..Building a Fantasy Calander
Phil: I don’t buy light pick-up rpgs, because designing a simple one with task resolution and such takes a few minutes. (I don’t generally buy much stuff, though, so…)
Well-designed pick-up rpgs are interesting to read, though, as are unusual ones. Levi Kornelsen’s Microcosm (http://members.shaw.ca/LeviK/Microcosm.pdf) is one of the unusual ones.
@Rip: God I hear you…. I’d kill to be able to play in a game run by Mike Mearls or Jeff Rients.
@Tommi: True enough, I’ll get to the companion book later this week where Jeff has a very effective and simple approach to setting that I just may steal for building up my own setting later on.
Oddly enough I was just asked earlier this evening if I would run an Amber Diceless RPG game. I don’t feel -quite- up to explaining that (I probably wouldn’t do it justice) but once you have a rough feel for a setting you can run just about anything that doesn’t require specific mechanics on the fly. It has it’s own setting and once you know it, it’s very easy to kickstart a game with an encounter or two using an NPC established in published stories. In this way it kind of qualifies as a fun, quick setup game you can run at the drop of a hat.
Even character creation can be a blast. It’s a points based system (but a very simple one, no resemblance to GURPS whatsoever) and chargen starts by your players blindly bidding on one attribute at a time. The GM then tries to sell them on said attribute and how useful it is to make them spend more and outbid each other openly. It’s one of the things I miss about every other system I’ve run. In the end everyone knows who’s the best at a given attribute but nobody knows quite where they stand which helps the Makiavellian atmosphere.
Wikipedia link explaining in a bit more detail:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amber_Diceless_Roleplaying_Game