Review of Synthicide

Disclaimer

I belong to an organization called the Indie Game Developer Network, as does Dustin DePenning, the creator of Synthicide. I've been doing a review of one of the members' games monthly for the past couple of years. The last one I did was Sins of the Father. In some cases this may mean I get a comp copy; in the case of Synthicide, I did not (I backed the Kickstarter).

Synthicide

starts with the tagline: When Robots are Gods, Killing Humans is Fair Game. The title of the game refers to killing robots, and it's the most harshly punished crime in the game's setting (indeed, it's one of the only crimes that the authority, such as it is, bothers to punish). The word "noir" gets used in the promotion materials and elevator pitch, and I'm a big fan ofas a genre, so I was interested to see whatcould deliver. Let's find out!

The Look

is an 8.5x11 hardcover book, 216 pages.

The cover of Synthicide depicts a man and a woman in some obvious peril; they're facing down some kind of opponent, but because of the perspective of the picture we can't tell what. All we see is an arm, scarred and possibly tattooed, with leather bracers (which isn't very in keeping with the rest of the game, as I think about it). The focus characters, though, look frightened and harried. The woman carries a gun and then man a glowing sword, and other people, perhaps crewmates, are visible behind them. The cover, I think, does a good job of conveying the tone and feel of the game - high action, dark in tone, sci-fi but not necessarily hi-tech.

The back cover is much brighter and more detailed, and shows armed humans facing off against robots near what appears to be a refinery or generator. This shot, I think, is actually even more indicative of the game's intended feel. Both pieces are detailed and well-realized, though.

The interior text is mostly simple black-on-white, and is easy to follow. Sidebars in bright orange with white text call out various things (skill systems, sociopathy, "theater of the mind"). They're not very easy to read, but they also don't appear after the first few pages.

The book also has a number of...I think they're poems or in-character artifacts, but honestly I'm not sure. They're a grey jumble of squares and symbols, and cutting and pasting them into text program shows the letters more clearly, but also renders the interstitial symbols are slashes and other things, so it's still very difficult to parse. I thought maybe I was just having trouble reading them because my glasses need recalibrating, but none of my players could read them, either. They might be really interesting in-universe things, but I'll never know because I can't figure them out.

The interior artwork is minimal and consists of full-page pieces ending and beginning chapters. The art is good and appropriate to the mood and tones of the game; mostly it consists of characters holding guns and looking badass.

The Writing

The writing in Synthicide is easy to follow and well-edited. It's not especially gripping, unfortunately - it's functional and concise, but not interesting. The organization of the book's contents (which I'll discuss momentarily) doesn't help matters.

Since Synthicide uses its own custom system, it's important that the game mechanics be easy to follow and well-explained, and they are. None of my players had any real trouble understanding the mechanics, and I didn't find myself needing to reference the book much during the game (or, when I did need the reference, struggling to find what I needed).

Summary

starts with a one-page introduction to the game world. Using a series of small headers with singular topics, followed by one-paragraph summaries, it explains that civilization ended long ago in the wake of a mutant plague and a war, and that the galaxy is now ruled by a religious order called the "Tharnaxist Priests" who worship technology and, more specifically, a robotic god called "Ranix." The church is the closest thing to an authority in the setting, and they really only care about their own agendas - they're not here to protect and serve, so much as controlling trade and travel and punishing those that harm their priests or robots. The title of the game -- refers to killing a "Synthetic" (a robot commissioned by the church and then freed after a period of employment).

This introduction hits all the salient points of the game and gives the reader enough grounding in the setting to move on to systems. The next section begins with the game's attributes (Awareness, Combat, Toughness, Influence, Operation, Nerve, and Speed, which form the acronym ACTIONS). Game play is divided in Roleplay Actions (anything you want to do outside of combat) and Battle Actions (anything you want to do within combat, though unlike Roleplay Actions, these are specifically enumerated). The chapter explains these and then presents rules for Resolve and Cynicism (Resolve rises as characters follow their Motivations or reject Cynicism in favor of helping others, while Cynicism rises in response to wanton violence or greed), as well as food and sleep.

I want to call out the food and sleep rules, actually, because they're one of the things I really like about Synthicide. The setting is supposed to be gritty and focused on survival, which means that characters should be struggling to eat. The system highlights that by tracking hunger. If characters go too long without eating, they start to lose functionality. They can take "feast pills" to stave off hunger, but that only works for so long and makes the body reject real food for a while after the effects where off (starving Peter to feed Paul, as it were). Likewise, staying awake for too long causes penalties.

If these rules had been stuck in amidst similarly fiddly rules (encumbrance and the like), they'd have been forgettable, but set next to the Cynicism and Resolve rules, which themselves serve to highlight the games noir themes, the food/sleep rules help cement the setting nicely.

The next chapter covers character creation, and here, unfortunately, the organization is a little harder to follow. There's a nice checklist on the first page of the chapter, and that helps, but there are some key bits of information missing from the text, and (as usual) an example would have been nice. I made a character for Synthicide as part of my ongoing "make a character for every game I own" project; you can see that character here.

Character creation starts with an origin story, which covers things like where the character was born and how they became a sharper (basically a freelance mercenary; all of the characters are sharpers). Origin story can be freeform, or you can roll on a series of tables to determine it, which I find a lot of fun. You then choose a Motivation, which are pretty broad ("Spread Your Wisdom," "Make Friends and Allies").

After that, you choose a bioclass (are you outfitted with cyberware and to what degree), which determines things like starting hit points and attributes. The problem is that the description for, for example, the hardshell bioclass (meaning your body is rigged for cyberware but your brain isn't) gets "2 Body Cybernetic Slots," but what it fails to state explicitly is that you don't start with any cyberware. In general the book is pretty clear about what various choices mean, so we kind of went around for a while trying to figure out what kind of cyberware characters started with. It's actually "balanced" for them not to (inasmuch as they get other types of bonuses, so cyber'd characters don't have a bunch of options that others don't), but some of my players felt it was kind of unsatisfying to choose a "rigged" character but not get to rig anything.

After that, players choose an Aspect (a career focus, which determines what kinds of skill-based feats the character can perform) and what kinds of gear they have. I was overjoyed to find that gear is already parceled out into packages that the players can just choose, which removes the tedious "shopping trip" portion of character creation.

At the end of this chapter, there's a section on character advancement. Synthicide is a level-based game; every mission gives the characters trait points, and every four trait point levels up the characters. The advancement system looks fairly straightforward and well-considered, but as I only ran a one-shot game I didn't have a chance to try it out.

After the character creation chapter, the next four chapters - 77 pages - are lists of equipment, traits, and vehicles. Most of it is pure stats, tables upon tables of numbers and rules permutations. The vehicles chapter talks about rules for vehicle battles (really more like chases), but for the most part the system was all covered back in the first chapter. These chapters are just lists of things, and they go on forever.

The next chapter of any real interest is the Game Mastering chapter, always of particular interest to me. Synthicide is a heavily mission-based game; characters need to take jobs to gain money (called lurans, and as an aside, although the sci-fi basis of the game would suggest digital currency, in-world a catastrophic crash some time back pushed everything back to physical currency, which is a conceit I kind of like) so as to buy gear and, more importantly, food. The GM chapter, therefore, focusses on telling the GM how to structure these missions, advising to create two and let the players choose which one they want. The book advises, for the first mission, to have the players commit synthicide since that puts them on the run from the Tharnaxist church and gives them a mutual crime to cover up. That's good advice, and I wish it had been highlighted a little more because I didn't even noticed that piece of advice until after I'd already run a session.

The chapter lays out a structure and system for a mission based on the characters' levels; this translates to danger points which indicate the mission's risk level. The higher the risk level, the higher the reward should be. The chapter also asks, but does not answer, the overarching questions of the game world: What is the Church's goal? What was life like before the war? The GM is asked to consider these questions over the course of a longer campaign, and the book gives some suggestions, but in bullet-point form.

Following this well-done but all too brief chapter, we're back to lists. The next chapter is a long list of NPCs, monsters, and aliens. After that is a section on traps and how to build them, some random tables for making up a planet, and then a section on mission design. This section consists of a random table giving you a patron, a target, and a mission type, but if you don't feel like choosing randomly, the next 13 pages present sample missions. Each of these missions is a one-page summary with two or more different approaches to the goals, notes about how things could go wrong, and suggestions for antagonists.

The next chapter introduces optional rules, including a system for Twists (in the plot) and then a bunch of different dice permutations. I didn't use any of these, but I thought the Twist system was interesting and probably should have been part of the main game; I'd definitely use it if I were going to run Synthicide long term.

Finally, buried in the very last chapter, we have the chapter about the game universe.

I mentioned way at the beginning of this review that there were some organizational problems, and this is the main one: The book starts off very well, giving us enough grounding in the setting to have some context for the terminology and the rules, but then it buries us in minutiae for nearly 100 pages before getting us back to something we can really sink our teeth into. This chapter starts off with some light history (just one page, and I appreciate that, because I find in-game histories pretty boring most of the time), and then the map of the galaxy. The rest of the section goes planet-by-planet, telling us who lives on the world, what the tech level is like, and so on.

The last thing we get before the index and the cheat sheets is several pages on factions. These groups are mentioned in the book, but when I started reading them I couldn't remember a thing about them; it had just been too long since I had any context for them. Some of them are pretty interesting and they would absolutely be useful during a campaign; the problem is purely one of organization.

Systems

's dice engine is nicely simple: roll a d10, add an attribute, compare to a difficulty. The GMing chapter talks about how to set a difficulty. Difficulty 6 is considered standard, meaning that a character playing to their strengths will succeed most of the time.

In combat, as I mentioned, the actions are specified. Every turn, characters get a number of Action Points, which they can spend on various actions (a first attack costs 1 Action Point, a second costs 2, moving costs 1, and so on). The actions are intuitive and easy to understand, and integrate well with character powers and skills.

Characters can spend Resolve to treat a roll as if the die came up 10, which I appreciate. Single-die systems can be kind of unforgiving, especially for starting characters, and it's nice to have a way to hedge one's bets.

The game includes a system for psychic powers. We didn't get to use it during our game (no one played a bulbhead), but the psychic powers, again, key off of the main system in a simple and intuitive way. Mind Burst, for example, is an attack action and inflict damages, while Push allows the character to move a target a set number of squares on a grid map.

Synthicide doesn't have a lot of sub-systems. Vehicle combat, as I mentioned, is more like a chase than a fight (it's about positioning more than anything) and involves collection pursuit points, while travel times are important only inasmuch as the characters need to track how much food they use. Gear, likewise, is pretty simple; it just adds modifiers to damage, cover, and other traits.

Actual Play

I ran a session of Synthicide with four players, all of whom were experienced roleplayers. We started off making characters, and then jumped into a mission to rescue a pirate who'd been captured during a resource-collection run. The characters approached the mission as a stealth exercise (sneak in, free her, sneak out), but they wound up tripping alarms and having to fight their way back to their ship.

We found the system to be simple and intuitive. The character sheet looked kind of busy to the players who were used to more system-light games, but once everything was put into context it fell in place. As I mentioned, one of the players was a little bummed that her character didn't start with any cyberware, but beyond that, the players enjoyed the game and said that they could see playing a long-term campaign.

Criticisms

My main criticism of Synthicide stems from the organization of the book. All of the things that make the game what it is are buried at the back of the book or hinted at here and there. The book seems to take the approach that we need to learn the game parts and then drape the setting over it, but the setting is what we're going to find compelling, and so it needs to be highlighted. The result of the book's organization is that while we're told what kind of world it is and what the tone of the game should be, it doesn't wind up feeling much like anything but a generic sci-fi game until the very, very end (there's a fiction piece at the end of the book - why put it there?).

Conclusions

Synthicide is fun. It's a simple, clean system, it's well-supported and easy to run, and it dodges the problem that games with involved settings sometimes have (requiring players to read the whole book to be able to make decisions about characters) by presenting random tables that propel new characters right into the world. It's a shame, then, that the world feels so thin. I would love to see Synthicide with some more examples, some more fiction, some more attention to tone and feel, because at the moment it's a bit too lean. With that said, the game works, and I absolutely recommend it to fans of darker sci-fi, especially to newer GMs.