RE: Over the Edge RPG - New Edition Review

As a longtime aficionado of Over the Edge, there's definitely a set of points I need to take up in reply.

We're going to start with my major point of contention with you because, unusually for me, there's only one – and that's you cannot simultaneously long for the days when you could play a hyper intelligent shade of the color blue and have it make mechanical sense and object to being able to take on a room full of guys with full auto assault rifles with a tin cup. The thing that makes the former possible is the thing that makes the latter possible; the lack of hard conductivity between mechanical mechanism and in-story reification. You could always play someone who could kill everyone in the room, no matter what their side-arm, with a rusty tin cup. That is part and parcel of the way that OTE decoupled mechanical description from story execution, and is arguably the best and most important thing about the core game design.

So that out of the way, I have to side with everything else that you said about the book being disappointing because of its abandonment of many of the things which made the original design really good. Not least of which is going from "one core Trait, two side Traits, and a Weakness" to even fewer descriptors than that (though at least they kept the Weakness/Trouble, which I appreciate). I say that as someone who is perfectly happy, on occasion, to play games in which characters may have a single descriptive hook as their mechanical core, but the difference is that those particular games are all about doing one sort of thing and all of the PCs are engaging around that same singular thing. One of the joys of OTE was that your combat monster (and everyone had a combat monster in the group) very well might have to deal with ballroom dancing and casual conversation followed by a vigorous wall climbing followed by detective investigation followed by punching someone square in the face, and the default character Trait selection meant that they could be useful if not ideal in every single one of those situations. At least helpful. And when they weren't, that was a choice by the Player to make the character "interesting" in that context.

And yes, someone will point out that Fight and Sway being inherent to the character as a function of their Level means that all characters can function when doing those things at a level-appropriate ability and that helps ameliorate the problem above. But it's kind of boring and makes it hard for you to say "I want to be bad at this field of endeavor" without taking a specific Weakness regarding it.

When your mechanical overhead is already so lean, it is counterproductive to strip away that much more. You are absolutely correct when you describe that as removing meaningful choice for the players. It puts that much more character differentiation on fewer Traits which have much more lading.

If the mechanical descriptor was not referred to as Level, it might be easier to swallow. After all, as compared with the original OTE, where Fight and Sway were simply assumed to be part of what everyone could do with two dice/rank 2/however-you-want-to-describe-it, it seems a silly, needless complication. In fact, it feels a bit like a ripoff of the RPG/Character-level resolution mechanics in the Two Hour Wargames line of wargames, which I have maintained over the last several years are easily the equal of most of the indie RPG designs of the last several years. (Worth taking a look at if you're into lightweight RPG's, interestingly enough.)

At least they let us keep the Tells for Traits, even if they pretty much minimized the description of it to the tiniest possible paragraph they could squeeze out of it.

I can see what they intended to achieve with Levels. They wanted to build an underlying stratum which would normally be referred to as Scale in any other RPG designed by people who had paid attention to the last 30 years of design. They would have attached the Scale idea to the stories you want to run and talked about conflicts being at an appropriate scale when presented to characters, talked about Scale as impacting the narrative methods of talking about how Traits are used in the game itself, and if they had, I suspect that neither one of us would have a problem with the way it's presented. (Okay, I would have pointed out that you don't actually need to change the die rolls mechanically because Scale is a purely narrative-impact descriptor, but I would be much less grumpy about it.)

And I think we have to talk about the fact that the core resolution mechanic of OTE has changed from even the 20th Anniversary Edition (which is superior in every way and I encourage anyone interested to get their hands on it) and this one. In the original, Traits have Scores which determine how many dice get rolled, tests which involve determining outcomes randomly have Target Numbers, and bonuses and maluses just add or drop dice from the pile. It's lean, it's straightforward, and at any given point it's obvious how you should resolve things based on what you can see on your sheet, right there.

In the new system, the Level of the character is the determinant, there is a Level of the opposition if it's active and for passive opposition, the target number depends on whether the character is acting (for a seven) or reacting (for an eight), and the only question of bonus and malus is whether you get how many re-rolls. On top of that, threes and fours are special magic numbers that cause twists on top of the outcomes.

This is, frankly, a mess. Like, a real, poorly described mess. Do I see what they're trying to go for with that? Absolutely. They are trying to build that scaling system that we were talking about before and reducing the amount of dice manipulation that players actually do during the play. As a result, they have absolutely made things a terrible mess. Actual process of play ends up taking longer because you roll two dice, look at the outcome, decide if you want to reroll one of them, 1/3 of the time there is a special event/twist that comes up, and that requires figuring out what happens especially if it's at odds with what the test was actually to resolve – it's just a terrible mess of cognitive overhead.

Compare to picking up your Score on a Trait in dice, picking up one if you have a bonus or a malus, rolling them all, taking the top two or bottom two, adding them, and comparing to a target number. Boom, out, ready for the next resolution.

I am a great, unquestioningly huge fan of story game-style extremely lightweight mechanics, but this is a mess. On top of that, it takes five pages, from 29 to 34, to actually communicate how the process of resolution at a basic level goes off. It needed half a column to describe the process and a full column to do a simple walk through, but they gave it five pages.

In short, that right there is 50% of what is wrong with this book.

The other 50% can be picked up on within 20 pages.

"Trump won the 2016 election in the US, leading to actual, no-shit Nazis marching through the streets of America. His victory has also embold-ened retrograde politics around the world"

-- p6

"In days gone by, a player’s authority over their character was assumed to be absolute. These days we’ve seen the limits of rugged individualism, and we acknowledge the collaborative nature of all shared narratives."

-- p12

The original OTE was politically weird and carried a lot of freight from the writers' personal politics, but it focused on the weird, which made the writer-on-board messages a lot more interesting because they came out of left field. Unfortunately, the last 20 years have not been kind to that kind of political thinking. While fighting The Man it became The Man, and it's hard to try and pretend to be the underdog while being highly oppressed when you've had the reins. It's also probably a side effect of the fact that non-mainstream RPGs suffered a bit of a purge, the likes of which the Khmer Rouge might view appropriately. What I'm saying is that diversity in political thought is necessary if you want to build something absolutely wacky that offends everyone equally and, as a result, is a lot of fun.

The writers of this edition of OTE want us to know that they are absolutely, 100%, across the board in agreement about the things that are wrong with the world today, and everything bad in it are definitely things that they don't agree with and that no one associated with them has anything to do with. Absolutely not. Nope. And nor should you. Not even for fun. Not even in play. If you're the GM, make sure to feel bad about portraying the opposition forces of the players because you are definitely channeling everything that's evil.

That makes the setting as presented painful on a bunch of levels. Despite the fact that it takes up a whole lot more column inches in the new layout than Al Amarja did in the previous books, it doesn't end up is interesting. There's a lot of weird things described and most of the organizations have a section which talks about other groups as they see them, but there's a weird sameness – even when we are talking about time traveling psychic lobsters – which just doesn't sit well. There are definite moments of interesting but they are almost lost in an ocean of trying too hard.

And before I leave, let me bitch about one thing which you would think would have been learned in the early 90s, and that is overly busy, shitty layout. White text on a saturated purple background. White text on a black background which is scratch-patterned. White text on a saturated red background. Tables without clear divisions. All of these things are absolutely terrible, and they are everywhere throughout this edition of OTE. Everywhere.

Graphic design can be a hugely important part of the presentation of a non-mainstream RPG. Mothership is an excellent example of graphic design with a certain level of complexity that both creates emotional resonance and is functional at conveying mechanics of the system. It may be the high point of this generation of RPG presentation. OTE reminds me of White Wolf circa 1993 to 1997. Except they can afford more color.

It's bad is what I'm saying. And it didn't have to be.

If anyone is interested in playing Over the Edge, and they should – it's a great game, I heavily suggest picking up the OTE 20th Anniversary Edition because the layout is spare and clean, the mechanics are nicely described, and you won't feel like you've received a lecture when you get to the end of the book. Skip out on this edition because nobody needs to do that to themselves.

If you're looking for other mechanics-light games which really capture the spirit of original OTE in terms of play, go check out Wushu (it's free!) because it literally does everything that original OTE did and let you do it yourself even more easily.

New-OTE. What a disappointment.