2012/04/16

One of the most complex fantasy rpg ever?

This is the last comment, left 4 months ago, on Grognardia's retrospective on Powers & Perils:

I've played a lot of role-playing games in my life. Like many others, I teethed on AD&D. I took a gamble on Powers and Perils and was glad I did. It is'nt a game that you can merely flick through. You have to read it and then play it. The game is complex tis true, but for good reason... It has a versitile system where generating a character makes it nigh impossible to come up with identical characters, an extremely diverse and solid magic system and a game where the players can feel their character developing as they play.

James wrote that Powers & Perils feels far more sterile, as if it were an exercise in "Ivory Tower" game design divorced from actual play.

I picked my copy of Heroic worlds, and looking for P&P entry we read:

POWERS & PERILS
Exceedingly complex fantasy system,with skill-based character abilities and a spell point magic system. There are five rulebooks: [...]

So everyone here seems to consider Powers & Perils terrifying complex, but that is not true in my opinion. I think many persons out there lack a virtue called patience, first of all. Secondly, a lot of players crave for immediate entertaining, of the kind a game like D&D can bestow.
I would like to make posts in the future where i create characters (also magicians), and i 'd like to talk about combat and other things as well.

Also, i found this today.

But how wrong is James' review of Powers & Perils whenever i read it: surely no one would feel the urge to try this game if he based his opinions solely on what James wrote in that (quite brief) post. It's virtually impossible to list all the subtle details of this game in a few pages, how could he do it in a couple of sentences?

I am articularly struck by phrases such as these:
...it's a poorly organized and unnecessarily complex design given that it contains so little that's genuinely new or imaginative.

(so little that is genuinely new or imaginative?) The combat alone is aeons far ahead that found in AD&D, just to make an example...

another phrase:

..There's very little to recommend it over almost any other significant fantasy RPG of its era (or before), because it brings almost nothing unique to the table.

again, what? almost nothing unique to the table? Are you cognizant of the immense list of unique attributes not to be found in other fantasy games, or the magic system, or the skill system (i love it so much), or the experience system which is a work of genius?

Powers & Perils is not so complex as they say, there are tons of tables that Richard Snider put in those books to help the reader find the appropriate values immediately.
I think i will explain P&P a little bit to the masses in the future.

4 comments:

perdustin said...

Are you using the Perilous Lands setting?

Antonello Molella said...

It sounds like a lot of comments I have heard about Dangerous Journeys: "Too complicated!" or "Impossible to play!".

I'm looking to forward to hear more about P&P from you anyway.

Philosophical slumber said...

yes i'm playng in the Perilous lands setting.

Bombasticus said...

Everyone who loves the Perilous Lands knows about the official expansions to the south and west that Snider put together over the years for the mailing list, right?

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