Review: Wyrd Is Bond

Posted by Bryant on April 24, 2004 at 07:45 PM

Tom and I had a pretty good time during our brief Wyrd is Bond test-run today, and then I went out to bask in the beautiful spring day and wrote up a review. It goes a little like this.

Either the concept of street-level rap singers and graffiti artists using magic as readily as they use turntables and spray paint turns you on or it doesn't. Wyrd is Bond is exceedingly high concept, and it gets the concept right. The setting is evocative and convincing, but the mechanics could have used some polish.

Wyrd is Bond is a pretty traditional RPG, once you get past the setting. It's rules-light, but narrative power is in the hands of the GM and the dice are used about like you'd expect them to be used if you grew up on 80s RPGs. Well, with some clever twists, but you're rolling to determine the success of your declared action in the end.

The world's note-perfect to my privileged white boy ears. I really liked the relaxed attitude about magic and history: magic is out in the open, but it hasn't made a whole lot of difference because magic doesn't give you big flashy city-wide effects and because it belongs to the streets. It can be somewhat awkward playing characters from a real world culture that you don't really understand, since one's likely to be wary of parody, but that's probably an issue which one has to grapple with on one's own. Once we got into the flow of things it didn't feel uncomfortable to us.

Player characters get a half-dozen magical gangs to choose from. The presentation is pretty close to a White Wolf splat. Some gangs are clearly bad guys, some are clearly good guys, and most are somewhere in between. Even the good guys have grey edges, for that matter. The setting is defined in large part by the gangs and their interaction; for example, the literal demons behind the D-Men are a powerful hint about the role of evil in the universe.

While the gangs presented cover the possibilities fairly well, I'd have liked to see more emphasis on group gang creation. It seems likely, given the culture, that players will want to play characters from the same gang. The drawback to splats is that it makes it easy to players to funnel character conceptions into pre-generated roles. It would make sense to provide some detail on sketching out your own gang rather than asking players to assume a pre-determined identity, since gang identity is so core to the setting. This might also help with character differentiation, about which more later when I talk about mechanics.

Character generation is simple and sweet. You choose some positive and negative traits, one skill which you're unusually good at, and a number of relationships -- including a Lover (which could be a place or a thing) and a Rival (which you hate more than anything in the world). Interacting with your relationships gives you mechanical bonuses, which really brings home the importance of personal interactions.

The relationships are, in fact, the idea I'm going to steal and try and patch into other games I run. The concept is very flexible (D20: +1 on rolls which directly benefit your Lover, and -1 on rolls which directly hurt your Lover...) and places a spotlight on NPCs. How do you make players care about NPCs? Well, you make the NPCs human and well-rounded, but why not provide some in-game benefit for caring about NPCs as well?

Speaking of whom, the simple character creation makes life easier on the GM as well. I like systems in which the GM can write up a new NPC in a couple of seconds. It supports ad-libbing and creative deviations from the expected path. Grunts don't have any stats at all; named characters just need a couple of traits and maybe a skill. Again, it's very sweet.

The core mechanic is a great idea for quick task resolution. You roll 3d6, and allocate each die to a different aspect of success -- Order, which is essentially initiative; Power, which determines success; and Payback, which determines how much magical oomph you get back if you were attempting a magical effect. Payback is kind of the odd man out here, in that it doesn't have much meaning for non-magical actions.

Various effects provide bonuses. In some cases, you get to roll an extra die or two and choose the best three. In some cases, you get to roll an extra die and add it to one of the three core dice. Some effects just give you flat out bonuses to each aspect.

Combat is simple and quick. This is not a world in which magic beats technology; a guy with a shotgun is going to take down a guy trying to use magic most of the time, unless the magic-user has put some investment into magical items which help him in a fight. Guns do more damage than magic, plain and simple. I like that, however.

The system falls down when you get into non-combat actions, unfortunately, because Order and Payback lose a great deal of importance. When you're not in combat, the Order die loses all meaning. Payback is also pretty unimportant, both since it only applies to magical actions and since the bonuses you get from high Payback dice are mostly only relevant to combat.

So when you get right down to it, outside combat you're usually just rolling 3d6 and taking the high die. This makes for a pretty granular system; players will get a 5 or higher most of the time. It also minimizes the advantage of a positive trait, which simply allows you to roll an extra die and choose the best three rolls. Characters are therefore mechanically near-identical when it comes to social interactions. Traits do help a little, but I'm not sure they help enough.

Then you've got the question of how a GM can reasonably create high difficulties when the players are always rolling high. Tasks can be easy or hard without a whole lot in-between. In our test run, Tom played a very social character who didn't like combat, so these issues came up a lot.

Now that I've spent a while sounding like a rules-oriented grognard, I'll note that it's certainly possible to patch the system -- for example, Order could represent the speed with which a character accomplishes a task outside of combat. I'll also note that we enjoyed the game enough so that we spent an hour or so hashing over these details and thinking about probabilities and such.

Finally, some of the intent behind the rules might have been clearer if there were more examples. I strongly believe that one of the most essential parts of any roleplaying game is the example of play. There are none in Wyrd is Bond, and it suffers for it.

At twenty bucks for 96 pages, it's a worthwhile purchase if you like the concept. I wouldn't buy it for the mechanics, but the game world is good enough so that it makes sense to either tweak the mechanics, use another set of mechanics, or accept them wholeheartedly if you're not as picky as I can be.