|
Can't Anyone Save the World is not... a game. It barely qualifies as a rule system.
It's a stripped down collection of rules taken from modern D&D, placed next to new concepts which are not fully realized, and a small sampling of the author's custom fantasy world. It's a fantasy heartbreaker that strips out all of the interesting bits of modern fantasy RPGs and leaves behind a thin shell of bland modifiers.
The only time I felt measure of engagement reading this product is for the Elemental Wheel. It's a cool concept. I was then extremely disappointed to find out that it's only minimally realized. In short you choose two elemental affinities and these either have a complementary or adversarial relationship to one another, it's very Magic the Gathering. Then the "game" promises that this choice will matter to your character. It does not deliver on this promise. The only aspect that matters is if you picked a complementary relationship or an adversarial one, it's completely binary, and then it only matters in making your character slightly better in one capacity or the other. There are so many places my mind went when I looked at the elemental wheel and I was rewarded with the most bland possible version of that choice.
But by far the biggest dissapointment is the utter lack of a fleshed out advancement system. The GM is suppose to hand out experience at the end of the session. For what? The game doesn't say. It just has tables for spending this Xp. How are the character's motivated to act? What is the reward cycle of the game? What is the game about? The mechanics of the game do not inform these questions. Instead the GM rewards Xp for... something and the characters spend it on bland abilities.
in Conclusion Can't Anyone Save the World is an underdeveloped system of rules that fails to excite or engage its readers or incentivize a system of play. Its own best concepts are at best lazily applied to a loose framework and a minimal setting. In a word it is bland.
|
Log In 
