Sunday, 30 June 2024

RPG: First Impressions of the Shiver Core Rulebook

So, I won this in a raffle at my local, the Leadbelt Gaming Arena. It was one of those raffles with a choice of prizes, your ticket determining when you'd get to chose from what remained. I mention this as an acknowledgement of bias, as I effectively got something I liked the look of for free, but the choice wasn't entirely mine. I started writing this as a means to figure the game out, but it turned into a review of a sort, so please enjoy this content.

 


Shiver is a tabletop role-playing game made by Parable Games, a Nottinghamshire-based enterprise. Its a system to run games based on horror movies and adjacent media. As systems go, its more narrative than tactical, which is appropriate given the theme. If you can just fight your way out of a situation its not really horror any more, is it? The most direct comparison I can make is to the Call of Cthulhu system, as Shiver is quite capable of Cosmic Horror, but its more of a sub theme. Shiver is not a d100 system either, so the generation of replacement characters when, not if, someone dies is probably gonna go a bit faster. Instead, its a custom d6 and d8 system, with one of those clock mechanics that seem to be popular in narrative RPGs just now. The clock mechanic, called the Doom Clock for self-evident reasons, is the means of increasing tension for players, with bad things happening at every quarter hour. This is a metaphorical clock rather than a real time one, its not about the passage of time, and player actions can accelerate or turn back the clock. I say actions, I mean bodged dice rolls, and the supernatural-adjacent Weird character class tends to do things that advance the clock. Actions themselves are resolved via some very pretty but proprietary dice, and this prompts my first complaint.

Game designers, if you are adding custom dice to your game, please ask yourself a serious question. Is this actually justified by the experience you are trying to create, or is it something that's gonna read like a means to extract more money from players by creating a barrier to entry? With Shiver I'm not convinced that the game is in the former category, and I ended up falling down a rabbit-hole of probabilities that I will spare you from. Resolving actions in Shiver is a matter of having a dice pool, rolling, and picking out the desired symbol from the custom dice, character abilities and circumstances adding or removing dice as you’d expect. Of these two special dice, the d6 is the hardest to justify. The Skill die, once you get right down to it, is a reskinned d6, with no change in the ratio of faces. This feels a touch needless, as in real terms you are looking for a symbol with a 1 in 6 chance of being rolled. You are, as they cool kids say, fishing for sixes with extra steps. God forgive me for a Rick & Morty reference, but its a layer of obscuration for no benefit. With the Talent dice its more justified. The faces are different from a regular d8, offering more and multiple Talent symbols that make passing tests easier, but also generating more Strange results. The use of the Strange skill and dice result is the first wrinkle here. These are usually negative outcomes, and the hardest result to get overall with a Talent die, but this enables the abilities of the party's token Weird character. Its a horror game, Strange things happen, I'm sure you can imagine the kind. Adding further nuance is the Luck mechanic, where Luck results can be banked for use in future tests, as Successes. Finally, if you failed a test, you advance the Doom Clock by the number of Strange results. The overall feeling I get is that you don't want to roll dice if you don't have to, for fear of the consequences, but you will want to go fishing for Luck so you can actually pass tests that you aren't good at. I think that works well for a horror game as a concept, its risk versus reward. This also helps with the theme, as surprisingly the rules mechanic for fear is actually a bit minimal if we just go by page count. So, in general, there’s depth, but I'm not convinced the specialist dice add much beyond surface flavour, while obscuring the odds from the players. But hey, they offer a link to a free dice roller.



Ultimately, how dice work and when tests are made the domain of the Gamesmaster, or Director as the game insists on calling it, and so only matter as much as you let them. The game tells you that, although not in those words. I'm mechanically inclined as a player, so it matters to me what they do. But lets put that aside for a more important question, what is this book like as a Gamesmaster's resource? And how might things look for players? The answer to both questions involves how the book is presented and organised. Its a very pretty book, featuring nice art with maybe a bit of Mike Mignola influence, and the writers seem to want to provide all the resources you'd conceivably need. The presentation tends towards at least one piece of art per page, with spaced out text. This makes it attractive and accessible, especially in the character creation section. That said, this is a 223 page book as a result, and its split into only 4 chapters. I do like how each chapter has its own index on its first page, but I would probably have broken up the GM-centric chapter 3 into at least two chapters. Its 95 pages by itself. Creating a character is a similar story. The approach there is simple but wide; you have a load of options and can probably create any character you might want in a scary movie fairly quickly. There's no dice rolling for stats, for example, and there's a bit of a D&D players handbook feel to things. I like the Fool class, that looks fun to play as. The character creation section is however 60ish pages long and has its own layout problems. On the plus side, I do like the introductory chapter 1, that does its job well, and there's a starter scenario in chapter 4. Going back to the Dungeons & Dragons comparison again, this is a bit like someone trying to do the Player's Handbook, the Dungeon Masters Manual, and a starter set as one omnibus edition. Its all there, but its an unwieldy chonker because things are so spread out.


I do want to run this game when the opportunity presents itself. My group does enjoy a bit of horror, and this looks to be a good system for that. I like its style, and it looks to be very adaptable. On the other hand, I feel there's a simple but sound ruleset being obscured by fancy dice and a bloated rulebook. The dice are a gimmick, and I’m pretty sure you could trim the page count by 30% with a change of presentation. Presentation matters in the first impression, but it stops mattering once you’re using the book every week, and dealing with actual people. You kinda want something more concise at that point. Then again, my favourite RPG is The Mecha Hack, which is shorter than two chapters in this book by some margin. I like to build up from something as a GM, and not getting slowed down to flick through a rulebook, but your mileage may vary. If you're looking for a comprehensive horror game, I think this would be a good choice, despite the negatives I highlight.


Look into it.

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