Review- Synapse: Part III, Controlling the Player

Continuing the review of Synapse (Part I and II), the next section of rules I want to talk about is what I consider the most interesting.

There are found in Chapters 3 (Culture), 4 (Life Experience), and 5 (Personality) that in total create the values for the character's Motivations. There are 22 Motivations, each in the end to be rated from 1 to 10. These include things like Revenge- a person who wants paid back for wrongs done him, to Nurturance (I don't think that's a real word)- the drive to take care of others.

How are these used? Let's quote an example from the rules on page 111.

For example, lets assume the Hero whose motivations are listed below has come across one of her long-time rivals, who is hanging off the edge of a cliff on a rope. A quick glance at the major motivations of this character reveals two motivations that are strong and would apply to this situation; Nurturance and Revenge. Abasement and Achievement are strong motivations for this character, but it does not relate to the actual situation so they are ignored here. The motivational setup for this Hero indicates that she would want to help them (Nurturance) more than she would want to punish them for past misdeeds (Revenge). Therefore, all things being equal, the character should want to help her rival get back up to safety.

What we have here is a another in a long list of mechanics called Personality Mechanics, i.e. mechanics that determine the decision making of characters instead of players. D&D alignment is a version of this, although the form was greatly expanded in games like Pendragon.

The most common reasons for systems like this are:

1. The designer and/or GM thinks that the players are playing their characters wrong- and they turn to mechanics to 'improve' role-play or to enforce conventions of the genre. Judging from a number of posts on the designer's game blog, this is a major goal for him.
2. The players who are so boring that they can't role-play an interesting character on their own- so they need a crutch. Something to remind them that- hey, there's suppose to be a person here...

Both are rather sad reasons. And in the end both are doomed to failure except at the most shallow level. But those reaching for systems like this tend to only think in shallow terms, so it fits and in its own way even works. For the designer/GM they enforce 'correct' play, and for the player it removes the burden of role-play which was something they likely didn't want to do in the first place.


With that in mind, the method in Synapse isn't bad at all, given what such rules are attempting to do. Here the complex creation system that so dragged down the skill system (take culture, life experience, plus extra points and get your totals for each Motivation) is almost welcomed. After all, if you can't role-play your character you may at least have some detail to determining what he's going to be.

It does suffer from the same 'this impacts you in the way the game says it does'. For example you could take a life experience of Sexual Abuse which drops your Sensuality by 6 points and adds +2 to Rejection. I don't think one would need to think very hard about how such an experience may in fact reverse those types of modifiers. But much the same can be said about any mechanic of this type.

Synapse offers two methods for overriding the mechanic.

One is for the player to present an argument for the decision that the GM agrees with (this is still meeting item #1 above for having these rules in the first place, and so is all to the good in allowing the GM to control the role-playing of his players).

The other is something called a Motivation Boost, which is a die roll against Eccentricity that costs the character mental stress upfront and risks perhaps undesired changes in your Motivations. Oh wait, they would only be undesired if you were actually role-playing instead of just using the mechanics.

All in all, this section of the rules aren't bad for what they are. Better than most in fact.


Lastly for this part of the review let's look briefly at the section on Morality. The pitch for the game says it goes far beyond good and evil, and then it says on page 108 that it's too complex of a subject and that only very general guide lines are going to be offered.

Those guidelines come out some PC book about moral systems that makes the most general comments possible. For example: people react to things as either person, animal or object. There's even a chart for it. Yes, it's a boring as it sounds. Like a freakin' text book by a bad author.


More importantly, why is this section even here? Shouldn't the Motivations handle all this in normal play?

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?

Review- Synapse: Part I, First Impressions

Greg Christopher has released a free public beta of his game Synapse, something he's been working on for quite some time.

Greg has in the past left me an impression that he is at his core... a game design new ager for the lack of a better term. Someone out to change the hobby with lofty dreams and 'new' ideas. Perhaps the natural result of a culture that wants to define everyone as special and talented- even if they aren't. However that is all first impressions and first impressions can be unfair. Besides, I recall baiting Greg before (I believe the subject was 'designing for women') and he responded calmly- that is worth points and respect. Few on the net are capable of an adult reaction to criticism.

So maybe Synapse is something special. Greg has earned the right in my mind to taken seriously, so let's do exactly that over the next few posts. I'll take Synapse apart and see if it does break any ground, and if it does- was that ground worth breaking?

First up- first impressions. The type of stuff that runs through your mind when you first open a gaming book on the shelf at the store and browse the book. Would I buy it or not?

Synapse is a 281 page PDF, with art that isn't outstanding art but good enough.

It opens with a all too typical section about "What is a RPG?". Nearly everyone that buys an RPG never reads that section. Frankly they're boring for the simple reason that the typical gamer already knows what an RPG is to them, and come hell or high water that's exactly what any game they pick up well be.

But it can be an interesting insight into the mind of the designer and here the 'intro' section takes up pages 4-15. Here's the first sentence:

"A roleplaying game (RPG) is played by a group of typically four to six people, usually around a table. The goal of the game is to tell an interesting, collaborative story and to have fun doing it. To tell the story, you use your imagination. There are no winners or losers because the game is about cooperation."

As is typical for RPG books, it's horrid. For one thing it tells me to use my imagination to reach the goal ( defined as 'collaborative story'), so right off the bat it's telling me I don't need this game- I could succeed without it using my own ability to create. Yes, nitpicking that, but it's there along with defining for ME what MY goal in a RPG MUST be and that part of it put me in a cranky enough mood to do nitpicking.

To be honest, most games screw up this section, so it's nothing new. But still disappointing. Often these sections have nothing to do with the actual rules and are pure boilerplate to increase the page count. So we'll see.

The most interesting section in the intro is on page 12. I always like understanding why the game was made in the first place. There are hundreds of games out there, with nothing really to set them apart other than perhaps setting which is always the least effective influence IME. So having something to tell me what is special about a game is very useful indeed.

What does Synapse have to say here?

"Synapse is a roleplaying game system where your character is conceptualized as a brain, not an entire person.... By contrast, in Synapse, all your attributes are mental. Your physical self is more like equipment than a part of your character."


So... that.. means... well... nothing. You could say the same about any game really. It's all in how you want to look at it. So my first reaction is that this is a way of pointing out a difference that really makes no difference. I sure it makes sense to the author, but I could have used something a bit more descriptive. Nothing that immediately follows makes it more clear- instead it mostly insults gamers and other games.

"The process exists this way because traditional RPG games are, when you examine them carefully, not as much about telling a story as much as they are about killing things and taking their stuff."

Massive turn off. My campaigns have not been *about* killing things and taking their stuff for decades. Nor is Synapse above this sort of thing as back on page 9 we read:

"Maybe your character is breaking up the thieves den because she wants to get her hands on some of the loot."

Hypocrisy, thou name is Synapse. Here the designer makes a mistake I seldom see outside of the likes of the Forge. Belief in the concept that a rpg campaign is defined solely by the rule set. This has never been true, and never will be true. RPG campaigns are defined by the players and how they choose to use the ruleset.

OK, enough with poor definitions and foolish claims. What appears to be the real goal of the design is stated on page 13:


"The character creation process is matched to the actual growth and development of real human beings in the real world."

A bit more reading and it seems clear that beyond the hyperbole, the actual goals of the system are roughly as follows:

1. Define the mental side of characters in more detail using something like the Theory of Multiple Intelligences (it maps poorly to this model and I reference it only in that the concept seems similar).
2. Refine this with a total 'lifepath' concept that generates your character in a method similar to the real world human development.
3. Resolved character changes caused by play in a method similar to real world development.

And that's basically it. As stated Synapse isn't a RPG as much as it's a character development engine. It's gaming for psych majors. Note, there's nothing here on those intro pages that indicate any means towards creating great stories- which is well and good since the author said I'd have to do that myself with my imagination.

So, here are the first impressions:

• The game takes itself too seriously
• It insults gamers, basically saying they are sociopaths who aren't role-playing or creating actual stories.
• It proclaims itself the one true way of.. not creating stories... but of creating brains.
• It's founded on a concept that I consider impossible for a playable game (modeling human development as opposed to a gaming character's development), or even if it were possible it would be undesirable (as nearly all humans are boring in what they develop into).
• It claims an end result for such modeling (great role-playing, great stories, etc) that are both unlikely and even contrary to the other.

Here I would put the game back on the shelf and walk out of the store (unless said store had different, more interesting new products to look at).

Next we'll see if Synapse achieves any of these goals, if it's the game the designer described, and if there's anything useful in it at all.

Is really that hard to replace an almost 50 year old rifle?

One of things I keep up with is firearms, both out of interest and the use they see in my games. A lot of research goes into weapons for my games so that people selecting them have reasons behind their choice related to real world.

Sometimes the news is (while not unexpected) silly. In that line, it seems that yet another attempt to replace the M16 is on the edge of failure. I've nearly lost count of how many time they've attempted to find a replacement, just off the top of my head there was the ACR, the OCIW, and XM8 and now this one and it was only targeting a small percentage of the total weapons. Currently just about every firearm maker offers a improved M16 in one form or another.

So what's going on here? Has firearm tech really stalled to the point that there's nothing better? Is it actually politics and penny-pinching being hidden by spin? Are people stupid?

Well, that last always applies of course. After all, people still stick with D&D and that's a worse performing platform than the M16 ever was. This is true even if the goal is playing rpgs instead of killing people.

But here I think it's mostly a case that the technology just hasn't moved very far in the last hundred years. I'll still take a M1911 over any 'modern' pistol and for many cases I'd take weapons from WWII over those deployed today. About the only real improvement has been in weight, and that seems to have hit its limit.

In any case, I think any replacement project is doomed as long as they insist on the replacement being chambered in .223. You can add bells and whistles all you want, but no amount of improvement around the edges is going to impress anyone if you're still using a poor ammo choice. After all, rifles are built around the bullet. And it's far pass time for them to revisit that first choice if they want an improvement for the future.

Note: Currently (and somewhat in line with my thoughts), SOCOM is still going to buy the 7.62mm version of the rifle.

Central PCs in Campaigns

Came across a blog post that I mostly liked today. It presents the idea that a RPG campaign doesn't have to be peer focused thing- but can mirror classic source material. Things like Doc Savage perhaps, with one main character and the supporting casts.

I liked the blog article because it's really something of a match to how I always run my campaigns. Sort of a match, because I don't agree with everything there.

For example, I think most who have dug into Middle Earth consider Sam and not Frodo the main character of Lord of the Rings. Or one could say that no single character is, instead claiming that it is a collection of individual stories that make up the history of the War of the Ring and that Frodo and Sam only got the most screen time because they were closest to the Ring. In much the same way, one could claim that Luke wasn't the main character in Story Wars- that taken as a whole it's Vader. But all that is nitpicking as certainly there are story arcs that feature a main character with a supporting cast.

The major point that I disagree with is that in order to recreate this the GM and players must actually work at it- i.e. put story concerns first. And that just isn't true.

IME it's very common for one player to for whatever reason stand out at a gaming table. And they become the focus for the story as much as say Sam (or Frodo depending upon your POV I guess) in Lord of the Rings did.

Sometimes it's because that player is the best at the table. More often IME it's because the other players are very interested in that one character themselves for some reason. I've seen players twice decide to have their characters die to save specific characters that they themselves decided were the most important in the campaign, not with respect to story- but purely as a element of their character.

GMs react to this, and storylines start to revolve around these characters. This doesn't mean that the spotlight is always on them, any more than it's always on a single character in Lord of Rings or Star Wars. In a large and long running campaign there is room for everyone to shine somewhere.

So I think these types of campaigns can grow naturally without effort in a gaming group that avoids trust issues. Indeed, I think a campaign of equals is actually difficult to enforce as a playing style, and if attempted likely the cause of any number of harms along the way.