Magic Realm (Light 30)

Howdy everyone!

Magic Realm (Light 30)

The game I chose for this assignment is a shortened, single-player PnP version of a game called Magic Realm, which is, essentially, a mini version of DnD. The game consists of making your own map, character, adventures, and more. The goal of this version of Magic Realm is that it's a "Light" introductory version into the main Magic Realm game, that can be done in (supposedly) 30 minutes, or units of time. Thus, 'Light 30'.

The big, overall goal of a game is to survive for 14 'days' (21 if you want it to go longer!), and to receive treasure, gold, and followers. Again, this game is more or less a simplified version of a bigger version of this game, on top of it being playable by one person in, supposedly, 30 minutes.

The core mechanics for this game involve rolling one, sometimes two, d6 die. There is also an extensive checklist that you must use in order to keep track of abilities, npcs, monsters, combat, equipment, and more.

The 'map', with an eyeball denoting my character.

The space of the game is determined mostly by the person who wishes to play, as the map you draw is of your own creation, only bound by one rule, which is that each zone must be adjacent to two other zones. The other requirements is that there must be one village zone, where you start, two mountain zones, two cave zones, and one forest zone. There is also one large road that you must add, which must pass through every single zone.

There is a MASSIVE amount of objects and attributes that a player can have on their character, and honestly, it's very overwhelming. The rules themselves are very convoluted and hard to understand as is, as there is never really an outright stated 'start' to the game. Even with examples, trying to follow along with just starting your character sheet is ridiculously difficult. There are four 'states' that you are in as you play the game as well. The 'Birdsong Phase', which means you plan your moves for that 'day'. The 'Daylight Phase', where performing actions occur such as being blocked by denizens, monster rolls, and spawning monsters. The 'Evening Phase' which is combat with aforementioned monsters or even denizens, and lastly the 'Midnight Phase', which is when it all resets, or if it's the 14th day, the game ends.

The massive amount of items, spells, etc.

These phases are massively complicated, and on top of that, the combat makes absolutely no sense to me, personally. Merely attempting twice to understand how the combat worked was enough to make me give up trying to understand it. The instructions for these phases aren't very well organized, as well as the actual combat system being very cloudy with explanations, and poorly displayed 'guides' to assist you. To add onto the game's weird complexity, there is a 'chit' system, where you can apparently only move a certain way if you have certain chits, and they can become fatigued or wounded, which if all of your chits are wounded or fatigued, you lose. There's also a mechanic called "effort asterisk", which make a single chit cost more.

THE COMBAT..

Your only operative actions are rolling the dice, deciding where to move, and choosing certain aspects of the game should you roll the appropriate numbers. You can chose to locate, peer, or do other actions in your planning stage such as hiding (which you need to roll below 6 in order to successfully hide), moving, searching, trading, resting, hiring, and enchanting.

The Resultant actions you would want to take is the appropriate planning in order to ensure you don't lose your chits, too much gold, fame, or friendly denizens.

The biggest issue I, personally, have with the rules of this game is that they are so needlessly complicated, that it would take you days to even begin to understand how this game even remotely functions. They are slightly out of order of importance, telling you important information after you've already done something else, causing you to have to re-roll or re-write whatever it was you had to do. The diagrams offered to explain the rules of the combat system also do not make any sense, as many things in this game are denoted by shortened little versions of the names of certain things, and there is a lot of overlap between shortened versions of names.

I assume after someone managed to work out how to start the game, you would learn micromanagement skills with keeping track of all of your statuses, chits, allies, locations, gold, so on and so forth. I say assume as I still, personally, have not figured out how this game works, though that may be because I have a lot of trouble understanding very complicated pages of rules. (I'm very visually oriented.)

Chance is a huge aspect of this game, as you want to aim for having the lowest rolls possible (snake eyes is one of the best rolls you can get in the game, as well as just single ones), so there's a lot of chances that you'll simply keep failing your rolls by rolling 6's or above, end up dying, and lose the game. The chance system is about the only thing, other than picking a class for your character, that I could really understand with this game.