I finished running an online adventure for Break!! It went well, though coordinating time to play left me exhausted. Turns out when two of your players live on the other side of the world and have three kids, all under age eight, you have to be flexible with scheduling. And today that meant I had to run an online game at nine in the morning, heh.
My short take away? It's a dungeon game alright! My longer thoughts are below the break, including thoughts about dungeon games.
Weird scheduling aside, the game went fine! I let the group know up front that this was a test, I don't know the rules by heart, and that the goal for today's session was to tackle three of the procedures laid out in the book: Exploration, Combat, and Negotiation. The group consisted of four players and three NPCs, a mix of followers gained during character creation. I rolled out some preamble setting up the adventure and the group took to exploring a six room dungeon! Three hours later and four rooms explored, they solved the problem they were sent to investigate and returned back to town to report on a new problem that will be the focus of the next adventure. A tidy, fun time all around!
So one adventure in, my big takeaways are:
- Break!! has great vibes. I dig the science-fantasy, frozen-in-time world and my players loved their characters. We had some moments of adjusting to the setting, but once we did everyone stayed in character in a way that felt true to the vibes. A+! Great vibes!
- It plays like a dungeon game. If you've played AD&D or Basic D&D it feels familiar. Not a surprise, given the game comes out of a decade of OSR design work. I had a hard time puzzling out how much of that was because I made a dungeon for this adventure, but I literally designed it to test procedures written in the rules... so I feel confident saying this is a dungeon game.
- GM support is minimal... but that's also the norm in the indie space for this kind of game. It does a pretty admirable job of guiding you through building out small adventure sites and a small setting to situate them in, but only gives you a handful of threats to populate them with and no advice at all for how much treasure to hand out. I imagine a lot of that comes down to page limits - it's a 470 page rulebook - and needing to cut space somewhere. But it puts me in a position where I have to do more work to run it.
- It really needs a better pdf. This is less a critique of the game, more the nature of Break!! being designed by a two person team who made a pdf with what looks like print layout concerns in mind first, play testing ease second. The designers have promised a better one in the future that will be easier to use as a reference, so fingers-crossed there!
My plan is to run one more adventure with the group. I have a small overland adventure outlined and am in the process of writing-up. After that, though, I don't know if I will run Break!! again anytime soon. Not because of anything wrong with Break!! itself, but because it's, well... it's a dungeon game!
This is about to pivot from talking about Break!! and turn into a ramble about dungeon games in general, so if you made it this far, feel free to bail out here! Try the game out if you have a pdf of it and give the book a buy when it hits stores!
So, yeah. Dungeon games. I've been playing them for swiftly approaching three-quarters of my life now. And in all that time, it has been an uphill battle to convince friends to try anything they didn't already know the name of. D&D, Pathfinder, and Shadowrun? The ones that have video games, novels, comic books, and movies made about them are easy to sell friends on playing. Which is a problem, because often those same games are the ones I have the least interest in running - I'm over twenty years into the hobby, I am ready to try other stuff that is also easier and more interesting for me to prepare.
The problem is, every time I try and pitch a group on a different game, I am told "We just want to play D&D." Or worse, people drop out of the group all together!
Nothing I've seen in Break!! convinces me that I could pitch it and break this trend. At best, I think I could convince some of my friends to sit down and play once or twice. But it ain't gonna make them say "Damn! This is the shit, son! We need to play this instead of D&D!"
If this sounds defeatist... yeah! It kind of is! Pitching takes work and time. Anytime I decide to pitch a game, I have to make the choice - do I put in the effort and lay down as much runway for my friends as possible to convince them to try a game out, or do I take that same time investment and pour it into a D&D or Pathfinder game I know they'll show-up for? I've done this a lot, for multiple friend groups. I know how this goes!
So yeah. Break!! is neat, I am gonna run at least one more adventure and keep the game in my back-pocket, but it's a dungeon game and I don't think it's going to be the one that will magically allow me to convince friends to play it instead of whatever the latest edition of D&D or Pathfinder is. So it goes!