I have new boots!

I tend to have really good luck with footwear. I wore sneakers in high school, but I switched to boots when I realized exactly how difficult it was to find sneakers that were entirely black--though I did have one pair that I wore until they fell apart. Then I got a pair of boots that lasted me almost eight years, through most of university, all of Ireland, after I got back and through the period that I was dating softlykarou and our marriage, into Japan, and then I only got rid of them because the sole wore down so thin that walking on wet pavement would get my socks wet (and I'm pretty sure I never saw a cobbler in Japan. Or maybe it's just that I don't know the Japanese word for "cobbler"). Then I asked my parents to send me a pair of boots from America, because there was no way I was going to find shoes that fit me in Japan without looking all over the country, and those lasted around three years until a few days ago, where I switched to the boots I'm wearing in that picture.

I had a lot of emotional attachment to my first pair of boots, because they'd been with me for years on three continents, but I didn't care much about the second set and I was happy to get rid of them, though that may have at least partially been inspired by how I stepped in a huge puddle the night before before I went shopping and they were still wet.

I'm not sure if my choice of boots says anything about my evolving taste, but my first pair were mostly fabric and I'm actually not even sure if they had any leather at all. My second pair looked a lot like motorcycle boots (they may have been, I don't know), and my current pair could probably double as dress shoes, since they're textured and have the same kind of toe modeling as the dress shoes I currently own. Or at least, they'll be able to once they stop ripping my feet apart. Having only had to break in new boots twice ever I'm not really used to it, though it has happened with other shoes too, like the time I wandered all around Tokyo in new sandals in the summer, which was not my wisest decision ever. I've looked around online, and gotten advice from the reasonable to the ridiculous, but I suspect the only thing to do is pay my debt of blood and hope it doesn't take too long for them to adjust.

It's everything I ever wanted in an RPG Kickstarter!

And I haven't backed it because if it looks too good to be true, it very well might be.

I wrote before about a lot of the stuff I do include in the moddable CRPGs I play, like food and water or encumbrance systems or disease rules or lighting and visibility levels affecting attacks, has too much of an opportunity cost to use in a tabletop RPG. The fiddliness inherent in calculating and updating all that by hand makes it way too annoying for too little gain to use in a pen-and-paper medium, but a computer one? A computer one designed to be run like a tabletop one? That could work!

But there isn't much information about it. That pitch video is basically "This is going to be Your New Favorite Game because it's totally awesome. And Robin Laws. Woo!"

Now, Robin Laws is awesome and having him write the rules implies that it's not going to have tens of thousands of lines of code for combat but social mechanics that boil down to "I don't know, make something up," but there's just not that much info except that it's skill-based and multi-genre, other than what can be drawn from the screenshots. The first update has more info, but even there it's pretty vague.

Alright, what can I learn from those screenshots and the update?

• Stats have a 3x3 grid like in White Wolf games, though the third category is called "Spirit" instead of "Social," but apparently covers the same ground with stats like "Presence" and "Influence."


• Skills are percentile, or at least expressed to the player in terms of percentage of success.


• Character creation ranges from "slap on a few templates and go" to "design everything by hand."


• There are multiple possible models for the same character, with different armor, clothing, weapons, hairstyles, and so on, so the Invincible Sword Princess can wear a ballgown at a court event and then heavy armor when out in the countryside.


• There's a system of Qualities, like Fearless or Undead.


• Injury effects exist, as do wounds, and a bunch of situational modifiers like lighting, armor penalties, encumbrance, and so on.


• Asymmetric player information is possible. If one character notices something but the others don't, everyone isn't automatically informed.

There's a lot that's not there, though. The first "genre pack" is fantasy, and apparently it's orc-dwarf-elf fantasy from that first update, but how does the magic system work? How customizable are skills or qualities--or the races, since "minotaurs" is a stretch goal? Are there combat maneuvers like disarming people or is it just attack->attack->attack? Is the environment manipulable?

What's more, there's a response about how they're not releasing a rules PDF because the rules would be way too complicated to use at the table. That may be true, but in playing MMOs and reading about RPGs I've learned that the collective knowledge of the player base is often larger than the knowledge of the developers, and if there's anything there that's potentially exploitable, someone will find it if the info is available. That's especially true in complicated systems, since the amount of rules interaction--and thus, the potential for an edge case to make everything explode--grows geometrically as the rules grow arithmetically.

I don't know enough to commit yet, but I'll be watching this one like a hawk.