I'm a big fan of Monte Cook and Bruce Cordell. With a few reservations, I loved Numenera and have had a lot of fun GMing it. So I looked forward with a lot of excitement to reading and prepping a campaign in The Strange, their cypher-system-based campaign setting that involves a lot of plane-jumping and genre building.
Unfortunately, my response to The Strange has actually been pretty mixed. I think it's one of the more risk-taking RPG settings to appear over the last decade. But I'm skeptical about one of the central design choices - and one of the most important game mechanics - embedded within the game.
PCs who change over and over again
Cordell and Cook have designed a system where in nearly every adventure, the Player Characters will change in fundamental ways, possibly two or more times in a game session.
When PCs shift from one dimension (or "recursion") to another (and making these jumps is one of the coolest things about the setting), there is a strong likelihood that they will effectively become different people, with a new race, new gender, new equipment, and new game mechanic rules governing their abilities.
I think this idea is revolutionary and exciting in theory. It forces GMs and players to actually think about role-playing and about their characters as "characters" in a story. What does it mean that one moment your PC is a tough-talking gumshoe, a guy who carries a pistol, but the next moment she's a tough-talking knight if Ardeyn who summons magical fire?
But does it work at the game table?
I say that this is cool in theory, but I don't think it actually works very well in an RPG, for several reasons. The first is that it's just a pain in the butt. Imagine if every time your Pathfinder adventure shifted from one setting to another you had to swap out all the feat chains and equipment that make up your party's PCs.
Especially at high level, that's a nightmare. (The cypher system is more streamlined than Pathfinder's d20 mechanic, but reworking PCs is still a significant chore.)
More problematic is the fact that it's never explained in story terms how any of this makes any sense. Why should a private eye from earth translating into the magical realm of Ardeyn suddenly get to choose to be a dragon slayer or a Qephilim who can throw lances of light around? Why should a cyborg from Ruk get to choose to be a mountain man on earth who knows how to live in the wilderness?
What about the mystery?
The bigger problem, in my view, is that Cordell and Cook have eliminated a lot of the mystery that should come with arriving in each new plane. By this mechanic, PCs get to choose their new abilities in the new dimension ("We're translating into a fantasy world? Cool, I'll be a cleric now!") but they also arrive with a lot of basic background knowledge about each place they visit.
Say your plot takes the PCs from a world that looks like the Matrix into a world that looks like Earthsea. A PC built like Neo would get to refashion himself to look a lot like Ged and he'd also start off knowing the basics of life in the new world. The rules are careful to smooth this transition in a way that erases much of the excitement and risk of jumping dimensions and genres.
What about the genre bending?
Which leads me to my final point. This mechanic (and it really is fundamental to the game) also downplays one of the coolest possibilities that should have been a big part of The Strange, which is genre bending.
The truth is I don't want my Special Forces commando to become a knight when he enters a fantasy world. If I wanted to play a game where a knight fights a dragon, I'd play a different game. I want to play a Special Forces commando fighting a dragon. I don't want my Rukian cyborg to become a college professor when he arrives on earth. I want the story to be about a cyborg wandering around on earth. I think a lot of players will feel the same.
No quick fixes
Sadly, fixing this and allowing players to just stick with their PCs as they adventure across the dimensions won't be easy. Cordell and Cook do offer other ways to plane-travel that don't change the characters and their equipment. Tweaking those rules is easy enough. The bigger problem is that they didn't balance the various powers and abilities that appear on different worlds.
A PC who starts the adventure as a knight from Ardeyn who can channel sin-fire or a half-man-half-machine from Ruk with weapons built into his flesh will almost certainly be far more powerful than a private eye from Seattle who knows how to operate undercover or solve mysteries.
What's more, because of this reliance on morphing PCs, The Strange doesn't include any rules for multi-classing across genres. There's no way for that special ops soldier to pick up an intriguing new focus or equipment while on Ardeyn. According to these rules, he might shift into something cool and different temporarily. But when he comes back home, he's (mostly) just a mundane soldier again. That's a bummer.
How much cooler would it have been if by mid-campaign your special ops soldier who is "licensed to carry" is also able to "regenerate tissue"? Or your college professor who "conducts weird science" is also able to "shepherd the dead."
The bottom line? It's a beautiful mess.
After all that, it's going to sound like a back-handed compliment when I say that I love the risk-taking here. But my praise is sincere. This game plays with one of the fundamental conceits of the RPG, forcing players to deal with PCs who work and feel very, very different over time.
My suggestions, meanwhile, are much more conventional, much more old-school and predictable.
My sense of The Strange is that it's sort of like one of Quentin Tarantino movies that don't quite work. Even a messy Tarantino flick is fascinating and important and worth thinking about. I think this game really is pretty broken at its core, but it's not broken because Cordell and Cook were being lazy.
If I'm right, it's broken because they were trying to do something new and big. I hope other RPG designers are paying attention.
