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Message: <blockquote data-quote="CardinalXimenes" data-source="post: 4695345" data-attributes="member: 58259">Some thoughts on The AwakeningNext up, it's David S. Percival's The Awakening. I'll allow that I've got a soft spot for post-apocalyptic settings, so this one was an interesting one to look over for me.Presentation:I really like this layout. The TOC was handy, the two-column format was easy to read, and the heading font changes made topic shifts easy to spot. The quote inserts could perhaps have used a bit more flavor, but the fact that they were there helped give more visual interest to the pages and fend off walloftextitis. The decision to put the conflict resolution process definitions in front of the character trait definitions produce some muddiness in using terms before they're defined in the text, but it's fairly minimal. Perhaps the largest problem here was in the combat section, where it explained the effects of damage and permanent wounding, but didn't explain how much damage a hit did until the skill section and the later equipment section. The effects of Dodge and Parry are also only revealed later, and not mentioned in the attack resolution section of the rules.Setting:The game is set in the modern-day Pacific Northwest on the Canadian side of the border, about three years after the entire human race fell asleep at the same moment. The PCs are among those relative few who have since awakened, finding themselves dirty, confused, and worn from months or years of sleepwalking. In addition, all the Awakened have woken up with at least one inexplicable psychic power. The vast majority of humanity continues to sleepwalk, impervious to hostilities from other human beings. A portion have awoken as pack-living, murderous "Nightmare Runners" that lack both psychic powers and any vestige of human reason. To top off the new world's menagerie a number of monstrous or unnatural creatures now haunt the wilderness, the seas, and the desolate cities.On one level, The Awakening provides a standard soft-apocalypse setting. There are no nukes or alien heat rays or comet strikes to wipe out industrial resources or physical structures, and three years isn't enough time for natural decay to efface human creations. Other Awakened have scavenged the low-hanging fruit, but any halfway inventive group of PCs would have plenty of reasonable places to look for useful salvage. The physical plant of civilization is still there to be used. A lot of the more popular post-apocalyptic tropes from the genre can be inserted into this setting without difficulty. Cannibal biker gangs, New Age cults, crazy survivalists- they can fit in here with minimal tweaking.On another level, The Awakening tries to add psychic powers into the mix. This is a tricky thing to patch into a setting like this, and I'm not sure the integration was quite as smooth as it could have been. On one level, this is perfectly reasonable- these men and women have just woken up a few months or a year ago and the functioning of their powers isn't a certainty under the best of conditions. They may not have gotten enough of a grip on their abilities for it to have meaningfully affected how humans interact. Figuring out how their psychic shticks can be used among other humans could well be a good part of the newly-awakened PCs' adventure.On the other hand, the psychic powers tend to be rather tightly defined and somewhat mechanistic in their effects. They're tools, much like a rifle or a water filter, and their uses are generally fairly obvious. For some settings this kind of magic would make perfect sense, but it makes a rather sharp contrast to the dreamlike, surreal quality of most of the other "magical" creatures and phenomenon noted in the game. Adventure hooks for the setting are straightforward. Just about any soft-apoc trope can be used with minimal trimming, and the setting offers Nightmare Runners and psychically-empowered warlord types as setting-specific threats.Mechanics:Rolls are almost entirely percentile-based, though a deck of playing cards is used for determining initiative and psychic power skill roll bonii. The basic action resolution mechanism involves rolling under Stat+Skill+Difficulty Modifier on percentile dice. Stats range from 0 to 30 for beginning characters. Skills are availble with two at 10, two at 20, and one at 30. Difficulty modifiers range from -40 for an extremely difficult task to +40 for a very easy one.As you can see, a character attempting an average-difficulty action that he's been optimized for is still looking at only about a 60% success chance. The advancement system ensures that this total is going to rise fairly rapidly within a session for often-used skills, but it's still not quite heroic-level performance. This could well be reasonable for a game in which the PCs are simply regular men and women who've happened to be Awakened, but it could be frustrating to play characters gifted with unearthly psychic powers but unable to actually use them with any kind of reliability.I haven't got a good feel on combat from my reading. It feels like it could be extremely wiffy, with attackers looking at 60% hit chances at the top end. Then again, everyone can take two actions per round without penalty, so that's two 60% chances to hit. A given weapon can't strike more than twice, so if you want to take more than two actions to attack, you need a second weapon or a willingness to punch or kick. Actions are declared at the start of the round, and every action after the second adds a -10% cumulative penalty on all actions taken, and offhand attacks suffer an additional -10%. Napkin math suggests that the penalties balance out attack-spamming tactics versus aiming fairly well.For a post-apoc game, I found it interesting that I didn't find any guidelines on hunger or disease. These elements aren't terribly popular in most RPGs, given that dying of untreated bronchitis or infected bug bites isn't exactly the most heroic way to go. Even so, post-apoc setting players often enjoy emphasizing the brute necessities of existence, where finding a month's supply of Hormel Potted Meat Product is something that merits celebration rather than burial.On the whole, the mechanics of the game seem solid and serviceable, though I have a few reservations about how fiddly modifiers can get at times, with skills granting special perks, Dodge and Parry affecting attacks, damage being determined by die face determination, initiative by card decks, and advancement based on specific skill rolls. It seems to me that there were a lot of good ideas here, but maybe too many of them got used in one system.Summary:This is another good and workable game. The psychic aspect and backstory could be removed entirely and you'd still have a perfectly playable post-apocalyptic game. That may be the game's greatest weakness as well as its best virtue; the backstory and psychic elements don't seem to be as tightly integrated with the game world and mechanics as they might be. The combat system and action economy look interesting, and I was impressed by how well the math on them held up under my first look.</blockquote>

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