Post originally by Tony Irwin at 2005-02-11 12:32:30
Converted from Phorums BB System

Hey Matthijs, I enjoyed your review and am looking forward to Part 2. I also found Universalis a rather dry and technical read. It missed the awesome short stories, full page coloured art spreads, and witty asides and knowing remarks from the author to the reader. It didn't draw me into a wonderful fantasy world where I could picture play in my minds eye. It was a cold computer manual.

On the other hand, when I actually played Universalis I was immensely grateful for the authors' approach. Universalis was different from other games I had played in that *every aspect of play* was governed by the ruleset. I was used to rule sets that covered only character creation, task resolution, character development and some world background stuff. There's actually very few rules that govern what happens in play in such games. To be honest you could summarise them in ten pages (despite the books being a couple of hundred pages long). There's very little in such games that the authors have to keep utterly unambiguous. The authors can present lots of low key discussion, imagery, and ideas for you to muse upon and mull over and enjoy as long as the very few key rules to play are kept crystal clear. (Take the Decipher Star Trek ruleset as an example of a game that included all the discussion, imagery and ideas but failed to keep the very few key rules crystal clear. There was enormous dissapointment over how they presented the character creation rules.)

In Universalis *every single part of play* is touched by a rule. Anything that happens in your game will be covered by and explained by a rule. The rules have something to say about *every single moment* in your game, not just the moment when you create a character, or the moment when you have your character get into a fight, or the moment when your GM awards you xp to develop your character. I suggest that there's not much room in the Universalis text for having fun with discussion, or imagery, or leave it or take it ideas, because the authors have to explain an enormously big rule set in an utterly unambiguous way. Such a game needs a very precise tone to the text.

So yeah, its dry, but I think it needs it.

Anyway, I look forward to your next review and to hearing how your play of it goes.

Tony