MB Review: Overview and Chapter One

I should start out by saying that this will be more of an analysis than a review; it's hard for me to be unbiased towards Masterbook due to my long experience with Torg, which is what Masterbook's mechanics are based on, and I was rather disappointed with Shatterzone (sort of an intermediate step between Torg and Masterbook) so I may not be looking at Masterbook with a completely unjaundiced eye. So if you find the tone of this post rather negative, it probably is (but there are things I like in Masterbook, I just tend to focus more on the things I don't like....)

One quick comment, I don't particularly care for the glossy black cover. It actually looks good but it picks up grimy fingerprints real easily and my copy already looks grungy (and until last week I hadn't even read the book, I'd just browsed through it once or twice.)

Before diving into the nitty-gritty details of the book, a general overview of several different areas:

Artwork - Passable to good for the most part though nothing really captured my attention. A decent mixture of genres represented though a little too heavy on the fantasy stuff for my tastes. The sci-fi artwork is in general the weakest of the book except for the very nice piece on page 66 (though I'm certain I've seen it somewhere else....) I was pleased to see a few cowboy illustrations though I expect the chances of seeing a Western sourcebook anytime soon aren't that good.

Text/Layout - There's a lot of information being conveyed here and there are a few places where I momentarily got lost reading the text, but for the most part I was able to follow things well enough. There is a rather large amount of white space at the end of several chapters which is space that might have been better used in loosening up some of the denser sections of the book.

For example, Chapter Two (Background Generation) has nearly a half page of blank space at the end, some of which might have been better used as artwork space a couple of pages earlier to break up the monotony of several pages of straight text. But from what I know of the publishing process it isn't always possible to work things out that well in advance (text comes in too long or too short, artwork is late in showing up, etc) so this is only a minor complaint.

The main thing I don't like about the layout is the rules overview at the beginning of the book; it tries too hard to not just provide an overview but a quick synopsis of everything and it just ends up looking really cluttered and cramped. In particular, almost every table and chart is crammed in when most of them are not all that necessary for an overview; I suppose it could be explained as an attempt to put all the tables and charts together over a couple of pages so players won't have to go flipping around trying to find them all the time, but if you're going to do that either produce a generic Masterbook GM Screen or put just the tables and charts on a couple of pages in the back of the book instead of embedding them in a bunch of text.

Cards and Dice (included in the boxed set; the Cards are also available seperately from WEG) - When the Masterbook boxed sets first came out a lot of people complained about the cards being poorly cut. Mine do not appear to be that bad though there is a noticable difference in the way the two stacks were cut (the deck comes broken up into two stacks), one of the stacks does not have as smooth of corners as the other stack but you have to look pretty close to be able to tell. When the stacks are shuffled together the deck does look a little ragged due to the different corners but if people hadn't mentioned it before I got my copy of the game I probably would not have noticed the difference.

Overall impression - I'm having great difficulty in summing up my opinions on Masterbook. I am trying to avoid looking at it through Torg-tinted glasses but it's not easy; most people who are going to read this review are quite familiar with Torg so comparing Masterbook with Torg is a easy way to describe the game, but from a Torg standpoint Masterbook is like a cousin instead of a direct descendant. Compared to the larger-than-life mechanics of Torg, Masterbook seems mundane and ordinary instead of the more-realistic-but-still-exciting mechanics I would expect from a generic version of Torg.

But I know that I'm not being fair to Masterbook when I say that; at its heart it is still based on the Torg mechanics and that makes it better than a lot of other RPGs on the market today. I guess my biggest problem is the same one I had with Shatterzone; I was expecting it to be "just like Torg , only better" and when it wasn't (from my viewpoint), I lost most of my enthusiasm for it.

To me, the crowning point of Torg wasn't the wonderful mechanics or the Drama Deck, it was the heroic scope and feel of the mechanics and what they allowed. Shatterzone and Masterbook don't have that scope and feel, they're much more "believable" and "realistic" than Torg, so my gut reaction is that they can't be as good as Torg. Overcoming that gut reaction is proving to be more difficult than I anticipated, probably because my preconceptions for a setting like World of Indiana Jones is much more Torg-like than Masterbook's mechanics will support.

So I'll qualify my overall opinion this way: Torg players and people familiar with Torg are likely to find Masterbook a bit too confining and restrictive. People coming to Masterbook without much or any previous Torg experience are likely to have a much more favorable opinion of the system.

And now, onto specific details and comments concerning the Masterbook rules. I'm afraid that to make things easier (and shorter) I will be assuming a basic familiarity with Torg, Shatterzone or Masterbook mechanics on the part of the reader of this review, so anyone who doesn't have that familiarity is likely to get lost and may want to bail out now...

Skipping over the Table of Contents (which appears fairly complete, though I noticed that it doesn't have the correct title for Chapter Two) and the Overview, the first chapter deals with Character Creation. To be specific, it deals with generating the attributes and distributing skill adds. Character Advantages and Compensations are covered in Chapter Two.

The first step of designing a character is of course the character concept, which is briefly covered with an example (the same example character is used to demonstrate all the procedures in this and the next chapter.) My only comment is that there aren't too many guidelines offered here, their advice essentially boils down to "talk it over with your GM". That's good advice of course but it stikes me as being rather skimpy. However, more advice does appear in Chapter Two so it's at least covered somewhere. I do wonder though if it might work better for the player to generate the character's background first and then develop the attributes and skills second, but I suppose either method is a valid one.

The attributes in Masterbook are the same as in Shatterzone but slightly different than in Torg; Dexterity and Toughness have been broken up into two attributes each (Dexterity and Agility, Endurance and Toughness) and a few of the other attributes have been renamed and redefined a bit.

Agility now represents gross motor coordination and balance while Dexterity is fine motor coordination and hand-eye coordination. I like the distinction and it does make Masterbook much more applicable to generic situations and characters than Torg.

Strength is still Strength, the only real change here from Torg is that climbing is now an Agility skill, leaving lifting as the only Strength skill. Strength is now figured into movement values and is also used to determine Toughness, which is no longer a primary attribute but a derived attribute.

Endurance has replaced Torg's Toughness attribute in all ways but one; Toughness is still used to resist damage. A character's Toughness is now determined by his Strength and Endurance attributes. I will concede that this does make some sense, someone with muscles bulging out all over his body should be a bit tougher than someone with an average muscle build.

However, I don't feel comfortable with the derived nature of Toughness; it's an unnecessary complication. Plus I notice that while Toughness is supposed to represent "physical hardness and natural armor", animals in WoIJ with natural armor are not given a naturally higher Toughness but a Toughness with an additional armor value - this could be an error that slipped by due to WoIJ being written at the same time as the Masterbook rulebook but I think it illustrates that Toughness as a seperate attribute isn't all that necessary, the armor could in most cases just be added to Endurance for about the same resistance to damage.

I also do not like how Toughness is determined in Masterbook. Shatterzone used a formula, (STR+END+END)/3, while Masterbook uses a table. The problem with the table is that the results it produces are IMO bogus. The table has a secondary problem of only covering a range of 5-13 and the suggested rule for attributes outside that range seemunreasonable; every point outside the range is a direct 1:1 modification of Toughness, which makes me wonder what kind of Toughness a creature with very high STR and END is going to have - for example, a dragon might have a STR and END of around 22 which would give it a TOU around 30, much higher than the attributes themselves.

But back to the realm of player characters and their numbers - lets look at an average person with an 8 Strength and Endurance, since 8 is defined as being "low average" for all the attributes. To me, that means this person should have a low average Toughness, also 8. But that's not the case, he has a 9 Toughness, a "high average" attribute.

What about someone who has slightly lower average attributes, a 7 in both Strength and Endurance, will he have a slightly lower average Toughness? No, he also has a 9. How about at the bottom of the scale, someone with a 5 in both Strength and in Toughness, described as "almost no physical ability"? They have a low average Toughness, a 7. What about the top end of the scale? The highest it can get is 12 even when the attributes are 13.

I see an additional problem in addition to the variable definitions of "average" in use here. It means that a character cannot hurt someone with identical attributes without generating at least a +1 bonus to damage - unless he has a Strength of 13, then he can hurt his duplicate because his Toughness is only 12! It also means that a small child or animal (STR & END 5, TOU 7) can withstand damage almost as well as the average adult. I hope I'm not alone in finding this a bit unrealistic.

Moving along, Intellect and Mind are the mental attributes (duh!) and while they're essentially the same as Perception and Mind in Torg their definitions have been changed a bit and some skills have been shuffled around. I don't particularly agree with some of the skill changes but I'll save that for when I discuss the skills.

Charisma is Charisma, not much to say there. Confidence is the Spirit attribute from Torg expanded a bit, it now includes some of the skills that were under Mind and Charisma. I don't really mind the expansion of the attribute, it was pretty underutilized in Torg. My one dislike is that while Confidence may be more descriptive than Spirit for what it now does, it just doesn't sound like an attribute.

Before I get to the derived attributes such as movement rates I'll address the number of attribute points you get. Specifically, you get 68 points for your eight attributes (remember, Toughness is based off of Strength and Endurance .) Immediately you should notice that the average Masterbook character is not going to be anywhere as well off as the average Torg character which gets 66 attribute points for 7 attributes, an average of 9.4 vs 8.5 for Masterbook.

I find this to be one of the main contributing factors to Masterbook's "mundane" feel, the ordinary attribute levels that characters will have. Also, unlike Torg where the Ords were built on 10 less attribute points, there's no difference between the PCs and normal NPCs, they're built on the same amount of points. So essentially it's like playing an ord in Torg.

The odds of a character increasing an attribute under Masterbook looks pretty slim, so for the most part (barring background Advantages) characters are stuck at being more or less like everyone else. True, players can bump up one, maybe two attributes to above average during character creation but the game's going to balance that out by forcing them to take equally low attributes somewhere else or taking high-level Compensations to make up for any extra attribute points taken as an Advantage. So characters either end up hopelessly average or deficient in some area just to be above average somewhere else.

A problem I see with this is that it will end up enforcing stereotypes much more than Torg's templates do - every athelete of reasonable ability (ie, high physical attributes) is going to be on the dumb side or uncharismatic due to low levels in his non-physical attributes. For example, a football player with Strength and Endurance of 11 is going to average a 7 in some of his other attributes and an exceptional football player with a 12 or 13 in those attributes is going to be even worse off.

And at the other end of the spectrum, every natural genius could end up being a 98-pound weakling. There just doesn't seem to be much opportunity for a wide variety of attribute combinations without falling into the "big and dumb", "brainy but wimpy" or "charming but empty-headed/frail" stereotypes.

I suppose that Masterbook may focus primarily on skills over attributes so it expects most characters to take median attributes without too many high/low ones. If so, I guess many of these complaints can be handled by saying that a one point difference in an attribute is a substantial difference but I don't see that in the game mechanics, it looks more like a two point difference is required before there's going to be much of a change in a character's potential.

Next up are the movement rates, which like Toughness are derived from some of the attributes. The four movement rates are naturally enough running, swimming, climbing and jumping (long jump). Each form of movement has a limit value that is the maximum speed a human can have regardless of his attributes.

The Masterbook limits are the same as the ones in Shatterzone but are slightly less than the ones in Torg; I have no problem with this, the ones in Torg are definitely not for normal people (and even with Torg's larger-than-life atmosphere I still I find Torg's Running limit of 10 a bit hard to swallow.) For the record, the limit values are Running 8, Swimming 5, Climbing and Long Jumping 3. (Oh yeah, Torg's Climbing rate is 2 so SZ and MB are actually allowing more than Torg here!)

My concern here is that for average characters the numbers may not be that believable; someone with an 8 Agility and Strength will have a running value of 6, which translates to a running speed of 15 meters a round (10 seconds). What's wrong with that? The same person can walk 12 meters a round (two times the running value number); is three meters in 10 seconds really all that much of a change? Yet for this character, moving 12 meters is a simple action but moving 12-15 meters is a complex action and will affect other actions.

Even worse, take someone with 5's his Strength and Agility - his running value is 4, which means he can walk 8 meters in one round but can only run 6 meters in the same amount of time! Granted, most characters are not going to have attributes this low, but I don't like seeing rules break down this way. Note also that someone with a movement rate of 5 runs exactly as fast as he walks (10m and 10m)!

The difference between walking and running speeds also grow rather quickly; our average person with the 6 has rates of 12/15 but 7 goes up to 14/25 and 8 is 16/40; one person's 3 meters is another person's 24 meters, all from just a two point difference.

The other movement rates don't really have this problem but they're so much lower and more restricted that there really isn't an opportunity for this kind of a problem to show up. (I also don't have enough personal experience with swimming, climbing or long jumping to draw real-life comparisons like I can with running and walking.)

Now don't get me wrong, I actually like that there's finally a rule to determine what speed a person walks at as compared to his running value, I just don't agree with how these rules work.

Oh, one other thing concerning movement rates; I noticed that while there were Advantages and Compensations that can affect movement skills, there aren't any that will affect the movement rates. It seems to me that someone with a "bad knee" (a level one Compensation) should have a lower walking and running rate than the average person but this is not mentioned or accounted for anywhere.

I would suggest that players who take such a Compensation should apply the appropriate skill modifier to the appropriate attribute when figuring the movement rate, thereby producing a different number. For example, the "bad knee" adds a +2 DN to Running, Swimming and Long Jumping skill checks so when figuring the character's movement rates the player would subtract 2 from their Agility. For an average person that would drop his running rate from 6 to 5, his swimming rate from 4 to 3 and his long jump would stay at 2 (it's low enough that you need a massive change to affect it.) I can see a "bad knee" also affecting climbing but it's not listed in the example.

The last part of character creation (at least the part in Chapter One) is allocating skill adds. Masterbook has the same skill setup as Shatterzone, which is slightly different from Torg. There are still skills that cannot be used unskilled (though now they're called Trained and Untrained Skills, which I think works better than "Skilled Skills" and "Unskilled Skills") but there are also now Macroskills, called Focus Skills in Shatterzone. (Not be be confused with Macro Skills in Torg which are skills used over long periods of time.)

These are basically like scholar and science in Torg, you have to pick one specific area under that skill instead of being able to use the skill for everything that might come under that category. The big difference from Torg is that a lot more skills are now classified as Macroskills (for example, all the vehicle skills are now Macroskills.)

The specialization rules are pretty much the same as Shatterzone, there are a few changes but none really in character creation. For Torg people, specialization is a lot different under Masterbook; instead of getting a flat +1 to your specialization, you buy skill adds for the specialization that are then added to the base skill when you use the specialization. So if you have fire combat +3 and the pistols specialization at +2, you have +5 skill adds when you're using a pistol (but only +3 for any other kind of firearm.) Trademark Specialization is still around but it is now an Advantage you have to get as part of your background. I'll talk more about it when I cover Chapter Two.

I don't have any real complaints about the rules for buying skills during character creation, they're pretty straightforward and the few restrictions are either familiar (no more than three adds in a skill, skill adds cost one skill point) or not that difficult to work with (no more than two adds in a specialization skill, specialization adds cost 1/2 a skill point.)

But there is a potential for problems in how the number of skill points a character gets is determined: unlike Torg and Shatterzone the number of skill points characters get are based off of their Intellect and Mind attributes. The rationale is that characters with higher attributes are more intelligent and "well-learned" so will have more skill adds.

But a little thought will turn up any number of cases where this isn't necessarily so, it's possible to be intelligent without being well-learned and vice versa. Maybe that would be represented by having a high Intellect and an average Mind or vice versa but I figure if we're going to go this far, why not also account for age and/or experience - shouldn't a 50-year old character have more skill adds than a teenager? (You could try to account for that with the extra skill adds Advantage coupled with the Age Compensation but you'll only get one or two more skill points out of it.)

When Masterbook originally came out, several of us on the mailing list were worried that this was going to give mental-oriented characters a huge advantage over physical or personality-oriented characters; not only would they have a high starting level for their primary field of choice they would also get more skill adds on top of that. This could still be a problem but I think for the most part it is not going to happen too often; to get more than two extra skill points the character will need an 11 in both Intellect and Mind, forcing him to sacrifice in other areas, so it's probably not going to happen that often.

Finally for Chapter One there's a scale provided to correspond a character's number of skill adds with his proficiency. For example, +1 add is "novice", +2 is "beginner", on up to 16+ being "probably the most learned in the world". This scale is obviously based around the use of specialization adds instead of general adds as I don't see very many characters getting their general skills up that high. The scale is a bit vague for my tastes; I would like to know what a bachelors, masters and doctors degree would equate to but there's no real definitions provided so a doctorate could be anywhere from 7-15 adds ("advanced professional" to "master".)

Actually I wonder if the scale is meant for specializions or general skills; the example they give is for martial arts, which is not a specialization. it kind of worries me that they might be expecting characters to get that high in their general skills (advancement is much slower than it is in Torg, I think +7 adds in a general skill would be pushing it for Masterbook characters.)

Torg, Masterbook, Shatterzone, West End Games, and WEG are trademarks of Purgatory Publishing. You can find out more about Torg at www.westendgames.com.