Review- Synapse: Part II, Skills

It's been a bit since the last update. Life is busy and all.

Let's pick up with the part of the review of Synapse. The Part I was about my first impressions and what goals the game appeared to be aiming it. IMO, it failed on both accounts (I wasn't impressed, and the goals seemed both unobtainable and frankly not desirable). But first impressions can be wrong, and sometimes worthwhile things are found even in attempts at the most foolish goals. So let's play around with the mechanics some. Here' we're focus on skills, often the core of any system.

Character generation takes up pages 16 through 172 and is broken into eight sections: Brain Chemistry (I swear, this one section header by itself will cause most people to trashcan the book right there), Biology, Culture, Life Experience, Personality, Connections, Skills and Possessions.

The concept is to... 'naturally' grow your character in a fashion that he is the sum of... all they things modern lay psychology says he's the sum of.

I'm afraid the rules weren't well written with important information all over the place. For example you don't know what effect your Attributes (from the Brain Chemistry section) has until you reach 'Making a Skill Roll' on page 174. Just for reference, here we find that the game becomes Shadowrun 4th Edition and you roll a number of dice equal to the ruling Attribute (1 to 8, 3 is average) plus an extra dice if you have the linked talent then plus 0 to 4 dice for your training. Rolling a 5 or 6 grants a level of success. So a 'average' guy would have an attribute (natural talent as I'd call it) of 3 and if trained to the level of 'trained' +2 dice for a total of 5 dice for the typical skill test.

It's at this point that the wheels of the primary game goal come off depending upon the viewpoint of user. Do you personally think that success in an activity is more governed by natural talent or by training? Does this reflect a better view of how characters exist and interact with the world?

If you think training is more important than natural talent, the core design of the system disagrees. I'm afraid I fall into this camp, believing that natural talent only determines the upper limit of what training can provide. To put this into perspective- my version of this system would say that the attribute governs a skill cap. Thus training would provide all 5 dice if the attribute allowed it.

Another problem, do you believe that there is only a single way of thinking that can get you results in any specific area? For example the game says that Lock-picking is solely based upon Spatial and is modified by the Dexterity talent. Do you agree? I don't. Because I don't think someone excellent at lock picking is automatically as good at unarmed combat. Synapse however says this is the case. Further I think a person could pick locks by using Cognition, i.e. determining by analysis how the lock works and thus how it could be defeated.

The final result of all this is that Synapse suffers from the same simulation problem that all games do. Real life is very complex and game systems must be very simple. By attempting to define things like Brain Chemistry and the resulting building blocks thereof that in the end create skill- Synapse is highlighting that disconnect between reality and games instead of concealing it. The result can be disrupting to anyone who thinks differently on any number of matters than the game designer himself.

Thus by it's very design, Synapse is aiming for a very small target- people who think the mind works like the designer says it does.


One last comment on this part of the rules.


Synapse is designed to give you an end result that is common in RPGS: A Skill Roll. It does this by showing all (according to the game) the building blocks of what makes up a skill.

The typical RPG just gives you a Skill Roll (using any number of methods). And lets the player define what aspects of his character was the building blocks for that result.

Which do you think offers the most diversity in character design? Which method would you like to create characters in?