Fabula Ultima Vexes Me
Fabula Ultima vexes me. By all accounts, I should be thrilled about this game. It pulls from the kind of video games and comics I also pull from when making campaigns and adventures. It uses the same sort of enemy and threat design I do, focusing on thematic, consistent, learnable weaknesses for enemies and building set-piece boss-fights. Without overwhelming players with options, it has a flexible character creation system. All things I love.
But it vexes me.
It might be the way it talks about dungeons. "To make sure this is clear from the beginning: dungeons aren't necessarily a thing in Fabula Ultima, and you might run an entire campaign without the Player Characters ever entering one." The emphasis in that quote at the start of the second section on dungeon design is the developer's own. And as you might guess from it being the second section, a comparatively large amount of pages are given over to how the GM should build and run dungeons, despite them not really being a "thing." It reads to me like an acknowledgment that all the fiction the game is built on centers around treks through dungeons, but no desire to address the kind of detail-driven, deliberate play that comes with dungeon games. Which is fair, but it vexes me, the dungeon-liker.
It might be the way the game approaches worldbuilding. You gather as a group and work your way down a checklist, step-by-step, answering questions and establishing a world from your responses. It is pretty elegant, but also has a bit of the "How to draw an owl" problem to it. How do you draw an owl? Step one, draw a circle. Step two, draw the rest of the owl. After a handful of easy questions, step four suddenly asks you to create the nations of the world and establish all the following: how they relate to each other, what their customs are like, what their beliefs are, what their industries look like, who lives there, and what creatures roam its borders? Quite a lot of details!
And to be fair, the book frequently reminds you its fine to establish these as the need arises in play. It's actually how the game approaches everything - world building, character relations, even adventure design, can be developed during play. And it isn't a GM-only task, as players can spend Fabula Points to establish a fact of the world in play.
Except, isn't it still largely a GM's task? Take monster design. The book helpfully walks you through making foes and balancing fights. It's really quite excellent and in a lot of ways pretty elegant - strides ahead of D&D! But the example given for making a fight starts by having the GM stop play for 10-20 minutes to go off and make an encounter from the ground up. And the entire book's this way. Need a point of interest because the random encounter roll decrees there be one? Pause the game and make one. Players conjure an ally with a Fabula Point in the middle of the fight? Pause the fight and find or make that ally.
And I think that's really the part that gets to me. More than the dungeons, even. The book frequently encourages collaboration in creation, but I can't help but look at the tools and see they're all GM focused. The players may outline the setting of the game, but the GM fills in the details, builds the adventure, and all the while is encouraged to create it on the fly.
Which probably works fine for a lot of groups. I am an incredibly high-prep kind of referee. It helps put me at ease to have a lot of stuff puzzled out ahead of time, and minimizes how much dead time there might be at the table. And I suspect that Fabula Ultima's very casual approach to dead time is what's eating at me. Because honestly, a lot of the stuff that vexed me above is in a game I run and love - Beyond the Wall.
When you start a game of Beyond the Wall, the first thing you do is build the starting world together. But where Fabula Ultima has a single page process to follow, Beyond the Wall integrates world building into character building. As the players follow prompts in their character's kit, they create the people living in a village, establish what the village is like, and plant some hooks that you then can tie into one of the pre-written adventures included with the game. After that, it becomes a much more classic style dungeon game, which means a lot of work placed on the GM.
So yeah. I am vexed. I can see where Fabula Ultima is like a game I adore, Beyond the Wall, but I get irritated as I read the one and excited as I run the other.
Ultimately, I should just play the game. That will clarify a lot for me, either confirming or assuaging my fears. I just need to find (or make) the time to set-up or find a game. And that might vex me more than anything else!