[RPG]: Midway City, reviewed by Darrick Dishaw (3/3)

http://www.rpg.net/reviews/archive/11/11774.phtml

Darrick Dishaw's Summary:

change the name, add a bit more Noir, and you've got a good, off-beat game.

Go to the full review for more information.

[EddyFate]

Thank you for the review! I just want to make a few comments to clear up some points:

Character Creation seems a little convoluted for my taste.

I'm sorry it comes across that way, but in playtest it seemed to be pretty simple for players to grasp. A standard human character spends 30 points on traits (attribute/skill) and perks (advantages), picks up to three hooks, and spends money. In my playtest, players who have traditionally been confused by character generation in other games were able to make characters like Flips and humans with steelware (which are slightly more complex) in about twenty to thirty minutes.

Sometimes I thought the detail was too much or didn’t do anything for the game. Examples of this are sections on the sport of baseball and a company that makes cigarettes. I’m glad to have a detailed setting, but I can’t see myself including those items in a campaign.

In my playtest campaign, I was asked questions like the names of baseball teams (for an NPC who was a sports fanatic) and what brand of cigarettes were smoked. I actually axed a lot more information in the equipment section after lengthy consideration, because at that point the detail was getting a little excessive for my own tastes. Each person draws the line of "too much detail" in a different place, but I tried to err on the side of including detail but making sure it didn't take up too much real estate in the book.

[The Jade] feels like an idea that wasn’t taken far enough.

Agreed, and that was again largely due to space considerations (another hard decision to make). My partner, Cynthia Miller, already has an outline for the Jade book, and it's going to be one of the first books we put out to support Midway City.

There are two Narrator (GM) styles and a short description of each. The first is Story-Driven which explains how stories are strong, tightly woven plots by the Narrator. The second is Rules-Driven where the “dice fall where they may” and everyone adheres to the polyhedron outcome. I simply wonder about stories driven by the players themselves. Isn’t it the character’s stories after all?

That section was specifically intended to cover the two main styles of rules interpretation. On the next page (page 109), there's a section called "Ownership" that briefly discusses ways to increase player narrative control, and the Narrator section also has another bit on spending Sugar to grant player narrative control. There's also a good chance that the upcoming LARP conversion will have even more information on "letting the players drive."

Again, thank you for the review!