Role-Playing Games |
Shadow Bindings, inflicted on the world by Joseph Teller &
Kiralee McCauley
A review by Mark Damon Hughes <kamikaze@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu>
Overview: A few good ideas in the sourcebooks, but the system
is incompetent and annoying, and is not worth the time to even read. Rating:
Terrible.
The first thing anyone will notice about Shadow Bindings is
that it's poorly edited, written, and organized. Almost every page contains
juvenile spelling and grammatical errors. Unless a game is truly compelling in
some other way, this alone is enough to make me ignore it, but I waded on, much
to my regret...
The organization has special problems. First, it's a set of
web pages. There's nothing wrong with this when done right, but the embedded
hyperlinks are not otherwise marked, so it can only be accurately used in
digital form. If you print it out, you'll just have underlined phrases every
so often. Even if you read it online, some of the links are missing. Also,
the background color is a nauseating bright cyan, which makes it nearly
impossible to read online unless you know how to make your browser not use
their colors.
Second, large sections of the game are actually in the world
books, which will inevitably lead to contradictions and duplicated work, and
makes life difficult for anyone attempting to use it for their own games.
Ironically, the first worldbook "designed specifically for them", is one of
those broken links. I had to go wading through the rest of the site to find
one of the worldbooks.
Third, the sections are not rationally broken up into different
pages, instead they appear to have just written it stream-of-consciousness and
then broken it up into different pages, but it doesn't even have links to most
of the files, so you have to hunt around for the link embedded somewhere in the
text, which gets you to bind2.htm and bind3.htm, but not to the other three
files. The only way to find the rest of the files is if you download the
entire thing, or hunt through the partial index for things that you haven't
seen yet, or just guess at filenames. This is probably the *WORST* web design
I have ever seen. Naturally, they didn't even write their own HTML, they used
Wordperfect (and we all know how great HTML produced by word processors is!)
The first file contains the *TWENTY-FIVE* primary attributes
and 6 calculated stats necessary to characters. I used to believe that in most
cases the quality of a game system was directly proportional to the number of
stats in the game... but this is just obscene. 12 of these are very intrusive
personality traits; they're more intrusive than even Pendragon's, which at
least managed to tie its traits to its setting, but these are for a purportedly
universal system. You can assign any score of 1-20 in these, except in the
ones which have proscribed values in the text; high scores are almost always
good and creative personality traits, while low ones are insipid and banal.
The total of these 12 is then used to determine sort of inversely how many
points you get to spend on physical attributes, forbidding characters who are
creative and vibrant from having powerful bodies, while the mentally twisted
get to be fast and tough.
The second file starts with the advantages & disads that
"apply in most worlds", including several variants of "Beast Friend", etc., and
vampiric "Blood Thirst", "Haunted By Uneasy Spirits", and so on. Apparently
the authors have a different conception of what "most worlds" means, or they
live in such an addled state that they think those things are real. Many of
these refer to "skill pool A" through "skill pool F", which leaves you
completely confused as to the value of these things until you reach the third
file...
The third file, the last one actually linked into the rest, has
the blandly-named (in spite of their slogan "Who Ever Said A Multi-Genre RPG
Mechanic had to Be Generic and Bland??" - apparently the *authors* did...)
skill pools A-F, which are actually:
A= Scientific, Academic & Bureaucratic
B= Physical Training
C= Social Skills & Knowledge
D= Esoterics, Religion & Occult Knowledge
E= Artistic Oriented Skills
F= Mechanical & Technological Skills
Why didn't they just use those terms throughout? Because they
wanted to torment the victims, er, readers, one supposes. The pools are based
on the totals of five to six stats, but the skills themselves don't seem to
have any relation to the 25 stats you arranged around.
Of course, there are no example skills in the skills section -
and those in the sourcebooks aren't explained, they're just listed (and there's
hundreds of them, down to the level of "Baseball", which defaults to Thrown
Weapons - apparently only pitchers need the Baseball skill),
<sarcasm>because of course all skills are self-explanatory from just
their names</sarcasm>
The rest of the third file is some vague comments on equipment
(why is this in the skills section? Because they have no organization!), but
no actual equipment listings - "In general players should customize their
equipment by culture, and purchase what they can with price lists for their
culture. This should be done quickly as it is not a major part of the character
creation process, unless the equipment is vital to the character concept." -
<sarcasm>Boy, that was useful! Sure glad they told me
that!</sarcasm>.
Then there's skill use, which is percentile rolls of 5% times
the skill rating of 1-20 - except that the example disagrees and says it's 4%.
Why didn't they just use a d20 for skill resolution, if everything's in 5%
multiples (as later sections show that it is)? Incompetent game design that
will just annoy players, is all I can figure.
Then in the same file is combat, a bunch of hazards, and morale
rules. I won't go deeply into these, but they're obsessively complicated, and
yet at the same time do not provide much real detail or realism. You can make
an aimed attack at a body part, but the critical table covers all body parts,
so you'd just have to reroll over and over until you got something in the right
area. The effects of these criticals is also not explained, you're just
expected to guess at their meaning, apparently. There's plenty of combat
modifiers, but they're all multiples of 5%, eliminating the sole value of using
percentiles.
The fourth file is more hazards, healing rules, tables of
technology levels (which are again high in complexity but low in practical
detail), and object damage. What do ANY of these sections have to do with each
other? Why are they in the same file? Why are these hazards not with those
previous?
The fifth file is magic levels, but no actual magic system,
three entirely different experience systems, a footnote on supernatural
abilities, and a glossary that tells you nothing useful.
Finally (I think), the sixth file is a bunch of errata and
missing rules that they couldn't be bothered to integrate into the rest of the
game, even though they have the files right there.
The game as a whole is a festering mass of ill-concieved
notions implemented haphazardly. The organization is completely randomized,
and will waste all of your time if you ever attempt to use it in actual play.
It's horrid in print, and it's only marginally better online, if you can
convince all your players to put it on their laptop computers.
Recommendations: don't taint your computer with its presence,
and the only valid reason to print it out would be to burn it in protest. Just
walk away and play a better game.
Last modified: 98Aug23
Written
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