so we've been playing Worlds Without Number by Kevin Crawford

 We've been playing for about six months now, maybe a little more. There's a lot I really admire about it and some stuff that doesn't quite seem to cohere. We've reached level 4 and are at a natural point to pause and reflect, so here are some thoughts so far.

OUR PLAYERS

We have:

•  Ratt, a Healer/Necromancer played by Nick
• Thrummond, a High Mage played by Thomson
• Serou, an Expert played by Chris
• Wren, an Expert/Blood Priest played by Cher
• and Benson, an Expert/Shapeshifter played by Michael Tom

THE SET UP AND WORLD

Their characters were kidnapped and brought deep into Sardoom, the Cursed Kingdom, where they were branded with the curse of the Dead God Emperor of Sardoom and set in the depths of the Demon Temple as a sacrifice to the Demon Wyrm there. They slew the Wyrm and emerged from the Demon Temple into the Keldwood, an ancient forest in the southern reaches of this vast, lost kingdom. They discovered that all citizens of this kingdom bear the curse of the God Emperor and are unable to leave on pain of death. They were urged to travel to swear fealty to the warlord of the Keldwood, a man called Kyrus the Fetch, who rules the forest from his ruined castle Pattern Transfiguration.

The characters are aware that theirs a world at the far end of time. Long stretches of space-faring civilizations have preceded theirs, and all have fallen to ruin. The world is peppered with artifacts and entities from other dimensions and other worlds, and all alive bear the marks of genetic, scientific, and magical meddling. Great cataclysms have rent the land, and in the last great war between the God Emperors, the sun itself was shattered, and for a long epoch known as the Age of the Black Dawn war was waged in the resulting darkness and the God Emperors were destroyed. At some point the broken remnants of the sun were lit, and tentative civilization proceeds in an Age of Kindling.

The characters spent a long month exploring the Keldwood. They came across old gods of the land and made covenant with one known as the King of All Sleep, who promised them respite from the curse of Sardoom if they could meet with him beneath Orax the Cursed Capitol, which lies at the joining of the Suffering Sea and the Siring Sea, far to the north.

Then they journeyed north to Pattern Transfiguration. They discovered a ruined castle beset by mutiny. The knights of Kyrus' Roundtable have seized different parts of the castle, and all seek the path to the Megathrone, which was lost long ago. It is said that he who sits the Megathrone has the power to project the castle into all possible futures. And as the characters have explored the ruined castle, they've discovered entities from other pasts...

OVERALL:

A fun game with a lot to admire that supports lateral problem-solving over brute force and tactical combat. Characters have an inherent fragility which makes head-on fights a poor idea, but monsters are cowardly and character powers are very strong and flexible, so the odds feel stacked in the players' favor.

Among the things nice about this game have been:

COMBAT IS NICE AND SNAPPY

So I really like how almost everything you can do in combat has an immediate effect, and combat is generally over very quickly. If you miss, you deal automatic shock damage anyway. If you cast a spell, the effects of the spell are powerful and always tip the combat in a big way. Hit points are low enough that you're never just chipping away at a guy's health for a long time. Monsters are constantly rolling against Morale, so there's always a good chance that your enemy simply decides to stop fighting.

This has meant that we can usually get through a bunch of combats each session. I noticed in Dungeons and Dragons, a lot of the time fights will be the main focus of each session. You might have one fight or two if you're lucky, and they'll be detailed and tactical. It's fun that in WWN you're likely to get a few even in short sessions like we're playing lately. 

Spells especially shine. There are only 5 levels of spells, but even at level 1 you're getting spells that let you enslave undead, gain complete control of another creature's senses, or instantly kill a low level enemy. At level 2 they're able to tunnel through stone and make walls of thorns. These are really fun and generally define the session. They've been able to sidestep powerful boss fights with clever use of spells -- when they faced off against the Cannibal Knight in a storm on the steps of Pattern Transfiguration, they cast a spell that destroyed the stairs under him, causing him to fall to his death. I love this kind of puzzle-solving approach to combat in a game like this; even though I'd given the Cannibal Knight a couple phases and mean powers, it makes sense and fits the world that their power was able to kill him without a fight. 

ARTS ARE PRETTY FUN

So in WWN you have spells that are a certain number of casts per day like normal and then you have "Arts" which essentially play the role of cantrips. You get arts as you level up, and you have a certain number of art points called 'Effort' which regenerate at a pace commensurate with the power they're used for. So if you use a mighty art on par with a spell it'll regenerate the next day, but if you use it to create a more basic power like light or magic-vision, you'll get it back as soon as you stop using the power. This means that each magic character has some neat little powers they can just sling around.

The downside though is that some classes are pretty much just their arts. Sometimes it seems like the Blood Priest doesn't have much to do but make magic light and blessed blood. Benson hasn't played many sessions, but when he does he mostly logs on and goes "I have the sharp claws art so my dog form can deal 1d8 damage with a claw attack." Arts have seemed most interesting for the Healer/Necromancer and High Mage -- Ratt has some fun little powers like she can't ever over-exert herself, and she can self-heal on a hit, and analyze an enemy's hitpoints and physiology with a glance. Thrummond can Dispel Magic and see enchantments, which gets a single-sentence description of any magical effect, or he can retain a spell he just cast. Lots of flexibility and potential here.

SKILLS ARE NICELY SCALED

Skills in WWN are scaled to a 2d6 roll and only go up to Rank 4. As soon as you're Rank 0 in a skill you're considered to be able to do most things that a skill calls for. So you roll 2d6 and add your skill points and attribute modifier (which never goes above +2), and you try to get the target difficulty, which ranges from 6 - 14. This is a really easy scale to wrap my head around, and it's easy to assign monsters a skill bonus as well. It's easy to look at an ogre and say "Yeah, he's got a +4 to strength based skills but a -2 to thinking" and just go from there. It means that players with pretty bad bonuses also have a good chance to winning, but it's easy to look at a difficulty to 10 - 14 and reconsider your choices.

It's easy to overlook, but the Expert really is good at skills in a way that makes that class stand apart. Serou doesn't have spells or arts, but he's always getting into ill-advised scrapes and jams, only to weasel out of them by a free reroll on one of his many skills. He feels like Bilbo in a way I haven't encountered in a thief class before: a loose cannon way in over his head, who's managed to survive with mysterious good luck.

The downside here though is that the skill list is a little loose. It's kind of cool that everything thief-related gets moved under "Sneak," but then there are some more mysterious choices. There's nothing that governs ropework, for instance, so we've kind of just moved ropework under "Sail," and decided that since Serou is a sailor, he's good at ropework. And then Sneak gets used a lot -- we're rolling Sneak for pick locks, disarm traps, hiding, and so on. And when we get to the little-used skills, it's a little tough to figure out what to use for instance "Lead" and "Trade" and "Connect" for. I guess maybe if they ended up in a city, and we wanted to run a city sandbox?

FOCUSES HAVE A BIG EFFECT

So aside from spells the big thing that really stands out are the focus choices. A focus is basically a feat, and you only get a few of them per character, maybe 5 at most. Each focus has two levels too, and if you specialize in a focus, it has an even bigger effect. These are focuses like "Poisoner" and "Artisan" -- Poisoner lets you craft basically infinite poison and antidotes which can deal tons of damage or insta-kill an enemy, while Artisan gives you huge leeway and advantages over the kinds of items and upgrades you can craft.

And crafting is a pretty chunky system in WWN -- you can make +1 weapons or weapons that emulate magical effects, or if you have the time and resources, you can craft just about anything you set your mind to. They've used crafting to create ladders when they don't have sufficient rope, or wheels for a wagon, or to repair a ruined gatehouse, or repair armor ruined by a rust monster. It's a nice way for the players to take some time to try to out-think a problem rather than just shoot it with spells or hit it with their sword.

Some of the other focuses are a little less interesting. There's a variation of the classic "Tough" feat which just gives you some extra hitpoints and lets you automatically stabilize at 0hp. Tempting when you're a fragile 1st level character but possibly not a lot of fun to play with.

HOWEVER:

There are some issues.

THE EXPERIENCE SYSTEM FEELS LIKE A COP OUT

Basically, you're supposed to just give your players a few XP per session as a good job reward. This rankles me as a matter of principle, so I've bolted on some other basic OD&D leveling system and give them XP for gold. It kind of contributes to my main problem with WWN which is that...

IT DOESN'T QUITE FEEL LIKE A COMPLETE GAME

It's really almost there. It has almost all of the components, and a lot of the stuff that any experienced DM needs to run a game. But there's this persistent sense of hmm this isn't quite a complete game. The monster section is very sketchy. The spell list is quite short, compared to D&D. The advanced classes are set aside in chapter 6, and implemented only as partial classes. I wish there was like, double the stuff. And of course, a lot of the stuff that's here is a conversion of D&D. So you've got Magic Missile and Fireball, they're just called "Coruscating Coffin" and "Howl of Light" or whatever, so they're just a little harder to remember what they do.

The XP thing particularly bugs me. It feels like a misunderstanding of what XP is doing in a game, and sidestepping it as a concept entirely feels like a misstep. XP isn't only a way for the game to change over time, it's pacing and reward. Gaining power should feel earned through struggle, not just by passively enduring a game.

MAN THERE'S A LOT OF TRACKING

One ration costs one encumbrance, but 7 rations cost 4 encumbrance. My players have evolved spreadsheets to track inventory and encumbrance and at times during hex exploration we've lost a lot of time just to ration tracking. We've managed to make it work by putting the onus on me to say "You have to eat," which I do every time they camp... but it's hard to remember. And then they try to forage, and forage a certain number of units of rations, which then gets converted into encumbrance and oftentimes immediately eaten. Ooh it's cumbersome.

And on top of that is system strain. System strain basically accrues every time you're healed, and when you're at max system strain, you can't heal anymore. You heal one system strain every time you rest. Can you see where I'm going with this? Basically it's just a lot of tracking. And for the most part, it doesn't matter. No one's ever run out of system strain.

I do like the encumbrance system though. Equipped and readied items have a different inventory than stowed items, and it's quite costly to retrieve a stowed item in combat, so players have to be smart about their inventory.

IT'S NOT D&D

Dungeons and Dragons simply has the juice. It has history and volumes and volumes of books and ideas to draw from. There's an endless fountain of inspiration to draw from in D&D. D&D can encompass almost anything -- it's such a wide net that it can cover a huge range of genres and move between them effortlessly. It can go from horror to comedy to high fantasy to gothic fantasy to sci fi and still feel like fantasy roleplaying. The iconic monsters and villains of D&D are touchstones that can inspire entire campaigns.

Combat in WWN is missing some of the rules I came to love in D&D. No critical hits? No death from massive damage? Fighting can sometimes miss some of the old excitement.

Worlds Without Number is a fantastic take on sci-fi sword and sorcery. A world where you can go from fighting ancient robots to activating an ancient star transfixer to entreating a barbarian atop a wyvern for assistance, and then fight a tentacled alien in a mist-filled forest. It's easy to imagine the rusted tombs and timeworn cities that fill this broken world.

On the other hand though... all of this stuff can exist in D&D.  But in a sci-fi game like this, it gets harder to expand out of sci fi into the kinds of myriad fantasy ideas that D&D supports, while in D&D, I find it easier to branch temporarily into sci fi and then flip back into whatever fantasy the session needs. At one point in D&D they spend a few sessions fighting Noise Marines in an electrified techno-pyramid, and everyone was just like "Okay, we're doing noise marines now," and when the next monster was a giant crawling mummy, that was no big deal either. In WWN, when they fought a dragon, we all had to think together like, "Wait... what does it mean for a dragon to exist in this world?" And it's a little bit of a struggle.

and maybe finally?

TEN LEVELS FEELS TOO SHORT

I know that a ten-level system is standard for a lot of OD&D and OSR hack games, so I wanted to see how it felt. And frankly it feels like way too much of a compression. I love the sprawling feeling that a 20-level system provides. In fact, I loved it so much I let my players level up to 26 before I put my foot down and sent us back to level 1. With a ten level system, it's hard to avoid, for me, a feeling of claustrophobia and a sense that, damn, we're almost done. They're getting close to level 5 and though I know there's a lot of raw XP to chew through before getting to level 10, it just looks to me like halfway there and I don't like it.

There's also just not much in between progression. You get your one art in a level or your one focus IF you're lucky, and most of the time it's a few skill points and an attack bonus. So in fact, there's maybe not a lot that changes level to level. It's meant to be more a sandbox maybe, and the characters are progressing laterally somehow? I'm actually not sure. That kind of goes back to my complaint about it not feeling like a complete game. 

I really want the experience of setting out on a grand adventure, and to have that sense that if you persevere through myriad trials, you'll see a number of adventures over your lifetime. In my D&D game--which lasted ten years mind you--they completed like ten dungeons and a 400+ room megadungeon and explored like 2-3 cities and traversed multiple wastelands and explored the sky in their Flying Fortress and went to Hell and so on and so forth. The Orostranthian Elf Mecha, a boss which took them 2-3 tries when they first fought it at level 10, MANY YEARS into the campaign, was eventually the kind of enemy they could surely handle multiples of at level 20 and then level 25, again, many years later. I love that sense of progression and history. Hitting level 3-4 feels appropriate for the players in my WWN game... IF it was a standard 20-level system. Almost halfway there feels like a letdown.

SO IN CONCLUSION

This is a fun, snappy, smart game with a lot to admire, but I'm not convinced it really meets my needs for a game. A nice experiment but ultimately will need something bolted onto it or vice versa to really work long-term. Really good game but not quite there, I think, for me!