Synnibarr vs WotC

[Mecheon]

There was also the System Mastery two-parter review (Technically three parter as they did a review of the newer edition as well). Its a rite of passage for RPG reviewers. Always has to be the Synnibarr review

 

[Fifth Element]

There was also the System Mastery two-parter review (Technically three parter as they did a review of the newer edition as well). Its a rite of passage for RPG reviewers. Always has to be the Synnibarr review

It's amusing that the very first bit of that review talks about how the author appears to have written the game straight through, without ever pausing to consider what they have written. Given McCracken's own claim that each of the 1400 powers were written perfectly on the first go, it seems the reviewers were more right than they might have thought.

 

[bedir than]

Given McCracken's own claim that each of the 1400 powers were written perfectly on the first go

He doesn't make that claim at all. He in fact says that doing so is impossible.

 

[Deset Gled]

It's amusing that the very first bit of that review talks about how the author appears to have written the game straight through, without ever pausing to consider what they have written. Given McCracken's own claim that each of the 1400 powers were written perfectly on the first go, it seems the reviewers were more right than they might have thought.

In my earlier post he claims the first version of Synnibarr (pre-printed version, I guess) dates back to ~1980. So there were about 10 years of edits to get to the form that is well known.

Oh my…I just read his comment about how he spent 6 years (later claiming 10) living on only 450 calories of Ensure a day. And how it takes a writer an hour to write one spell. So I guess he’s one of those guys who has to exaggerate and lie without needing to as well. SMH. I had a roommate like that once. Even for things no one cares about, they still felt the need to lie and embellish it to ridiculous levels.

For reference, this is from his personal FB:

 

[Sacrosanct]

In my earlier post he claims the first version of Synnibarr (pre-printed version, I guess) dates back to ~1980. So there were about 10 years of edits to get to the form that is well known.



For reference, this is from his personal FB:

View attachment 261222

Which is blatantly untrue. He'd have lasting damage after a month, and dead shortly after, let alone 6-10 years. For reference, the average person will lose 20 pounds at 500 calories a day after a month. And that's on a supervised diet to get minerals. Heck, two years ago I had to go on a liquid diet for medical reasons for a month, and that was 1400 calories a day. And I had to take supplements. And I still lost 20 lbs that month and felt like crap. Irritable and couldn't concentrate.

500 calories a day for 6-10 years is simply impossible, and it's not close.

 

[darjr]

A “Native American” class. Ugh.

Ok it’s from the 80s, which isn’t an excuse, but that’s not great.

Does the new version fix that?

Actually never mind.

The review podcast is very entertaining anyway.

 

[eyeheartawk]

God, I love Raven so much.

Everything about him and Synnibarr gives me such endless joy.

A true renaissance man. I remember in the time before the third edition Kickstarter one of the things he claimed to be doing was like, a local lingerie designer.

A LOCAL LINGERIE DESIGNER

And, it appears, an unsuccessful foray into pornography. As one does. (SFW)

 

[Mannahnin]

Oh, boy do I have Raven stories... as in I used to play both D&D and Synnibar with him and even more.

Finding out that he's gone all conspiracy isn't a surprise

His claim to the invention of the game is that he and Gary were talking at a convention. Raven suggested getting rid of the boring levels of D&D, like the first ten or so. Characters would only be superpowered and iconic. And then other oddities just kept popping in and basically every comicbook he'd ever encountered was incorporated.

also, he may still have an incomplete roleplaying game I was co-authoring and he was the producer for back 92-94.

Yeah, I played Synnibarr with Raven as well, as a teenager. Met him at DragonFlight convention at UW EDIT: Seattle University in probably '91 by randomly signing up for a session he was running, enjoyed it, played another, bought the edition that was then for sale (big blue three ring binder, all black and white printing), and signed up for sessions at another convention or two over that year/the next, and then joined his home group in '92, I think, playing regularly with him until my family moved back to NH from WA in May of '93.

Raven worked part-time at Wonderworld Books & Games in Burien, WA, which was the Seattle suburb where we lived, so my younger brother and myself often met up with him at the store so he could drive us over to his apartment for the session. Or my mother might drop us off, or sometimes another player would pick us up and bring us home on his way to/from his own place. If you look a the 1993 edition (or just the wikipedia page on it) you'll see it's printed by Wonderworld Press, which was the same company/owner as the game store. That was a pretty great game and comic shop, BTW. Still have my Tundra Press edition graphic novels of The Crow I bought there. I think I got my copy of Pauli Kidd's Lace & Steel there too.

Before we moved back, the 1993 2nd edition had been released, and both my brother and myself are in there named as playtesters, with our PCs named. Still have my autographed copy at home. Also before we moved away, Raven made a point of accelerating his campaign schedule a bit to get us to 50th level and onto our God Quests, for our PCs to get the chance to win godhood. Which they did. I have a vivid memory of one of, or THE last session on the actual God Quest (we played a few times after, with our characters as deities, as well) in which Raven's RPing of a vicious, intimidating antagonist brought me (a stressed-out teenager whose parents were in the middle of a divorce and was imminently about to move away from most of my friends and back to the East coast) to actual tears. It was an intense and amazing session. I still retain some lessons I learned about GMing from him.

I think he told me that our PC gods were included in the one expansion/supplement book it got, but I never picked up a copy. Which I should probably remedy.

Raven was a wonderfully creative and charismatic GM (or "Fate" in Synnibarr parlance). He had fronted rock bands and made a living for some period busking on the street. I saw him wolf whistle at a woman across a street and throw her a grin, and she grinned back and waved. This was with him standing next to his crapbox rusty car and two gangly awkward teenagers, just as we were leaving Wonderworld for game night. But he was a pretty handsome fellow, with a muscular, gymnast's frame, a thick late-80s/early 90s black mullet and mustache, and a brilliant white smile flashing underneath the latter. He was a good and generous dude, and a pretty good mentor figure to me, a homeschooled teen, at the time. An example of someone trying to live a swashbuckling, creative, romantic life and be both friendly and manly, as well as generally kind.

I never heard of a conflict with Peter Adkison from him, as far as I remember, but maybe that happened after I moved away.

Raven and I reconnected on FB a few years ago, and he sent me playtest files for the new 3rd ed of Synnibarr by email, which I feel guilty over not reading yet.

Some of his players from back when have shown up in the thread and I’m beginning to think they may have a point about it being the first cross genre game. I dint count the claim that he was distributing it locally for several years and chaosium beats them for a generic system regardless.

However it does appear it may be the first of its kind, sort of. Not that it makes his behavior any better or lend me to believe much of anything he says.

I mean, it's hard to say what counts as the "first cross-genre game". IIRC Jon Peterson's work documents that 1977's Superhero: 2044 was the first superhero RPG, and that digging into the history, it actually started as the author's D&D campaign which transitioned to a modern/superheroes setting by the PCs passing through a gate, before becoming an actual "full" superhero RPG.

But definitely by the time I met Raven and bought that Big Blue Binder edition in '91 he had been working on Synnibarr and running it for YEARS, and a decade isn't at all implausible. I met a bunch of his other and former players. Mostly stoners and metalheads, and generally nice folks. They talked about the various iterations of the rules, including one where you could make up spells on the fly if you could compose(or at least deliver) a rhyming incantation at the table, and Raven would work with you on the spot for what it did.

And when I first encountered Synnibarr I had never seen anything like it. I was a fanatical Dragon reader, and always perused all the ads as well as read the reviews, and an obsessive game store shelf browser. I read or at least examined and skimmed every game I could possibly lay eyes on. I had GURPS and liked it. I started in on Palladium with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles & Other Strangeness. But while BRP and GURPS were universal systems intended to handle nearly any genre, usually that was one genre at a time, or maybe mixing two. Synnibarr's maximum overdrive mix of fantasy, sci-fi, superheroes and martial arts all rolled into one heady ball of craziness seemed unprecedented.

Raven was, again, this was 30 years ago now, a marijuana hippie. The look on his face when I told him I'd joined the Army was one of shock and disappointment.

Their only common trait is arrogance, but McCracken has a book that once sold well and for a period of time in the early 90s was an invited guest to conventions rather than banned

Yup. Exactly. Seeing his reactions to BLM and CHAZ on FB since we reconnected there a few years ago have been disappointing. I've "debated" with him a little about some of his stuff, but I don't want to get into politics here. His crazy post about the Ensure seems related. Some mental health struggles, it appears, along with extended economic ones, combining with his longstanding penchant for dramatization and storytelling, to exaggerate what he's been through. I don't doubt that it's based on his reality, though. I know he's gone through some really rough years, a house fire where he lost most everything, etc. I suspect something similar is going on with the Adkison grievance. Dramatizing and exaggerating a real event to the extent of distorting the facts.

It's amusing that the very first bit of that review talks about how the author appears to have written the game straight through, without ever pausing to consider what they have written. Given McCracken's own claim that each of the 1400 powers were written perfectly on the first go, it seems the reviewers were more right than they might have thought.

No, you've misread him. He's making a ballpark estimate of how long it would take to write all that IF one were to do it in one pass, to support his claim that he'd been working on it for many years prior to the publication of the 1991 edition, since the rules do indeed seem to have gone through several iterations prior to that.

In my earlier post he claims the first version of Synnibarr (pre-printed version, I guess) dates back to ~1980. So there were about 10 years of edits to get to the form that is well known.



For reference, this is from his personal FB:

Yup.

 

[Fenris-77]

I can't read the title of the game without thinking of Cinnabon and then I get sad because nothing about the game is even remotely as awesome as even walking past a Cinnabon at the mall (that smell!), never mind actually consuming a delicious pastry.

 

[Mannahnin]

I can't read the title of the game without thinking of Cinnabon and then I get sad because nothing about the game is even remotely as awesome as even walking past a Cinnabon at the mall (that smell!), never mind actually consuming a delicious pastry.

I had a lot of fun with it, back in the day. Though GODS is it cumbersome.

If you are a teenager/young adult fanatic gamer who has the time and inclination to work at those mechanics, you can indeed do awesome and crazy things with it.

I remember one of our signature quotes from a session (in which we had to calculate falling damage from basically Low Earth Orbit) being "Only wusses burn up on re-entry!"