Some thoughts about Break!!
I skipped working on Erasure last night because I ran a session of Break!! for some folks. The session went well, and I think I both finally have a decent grasp of the site-level stage of the game and have exorcised the drive to play Break!! that's possessed me this past year. Despite what that might suggest, this is a good thing!
The pitch for Break!! is it's a procedure driven cartoon-and-video game themed game that exists somewhere in the middle of the spectrum between OSR stalwarts like Knave or Old-School Essentials and the popular Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition. Its a game where you can play a retail worker who has stumbled into a fantastic world with a broken sun and find a new career as a Murder Princess. The vibes, as they say, are immaculate.
Gameplay wise, I find it a bit trickier to pin down. My first instinct when I read the rules was to treat it as a dungeon crawler. And the game isn't quite that. I drafted an adventure, played it a few times with different groups, and realized that fundamentally it pushes against the pace that a typical dungeon game embraces. Procedures like checking for Wandering Encounters each time the party takes an action within a space or moves between spaces creates a situation where you're having many random intrusions on the space or scene. Characters regain all lost Hearts (the game's Hit Points) after each encounter. These and more create a pace that both moves quickly and feels overloaded.
After running the adventure a few times and upon reading another OSR-derived game, Mausritter, I realized that despite the art of exploring haunted houses included in the adventuring sections of the book, the game really wants you to think of this as a five-or-six scene point crawl. Hell, if I paid more attention, I would have figured that out earlier from the various site maps included in the book, all of which are point-crawls. With that in-mind, I took my original adventure, condensed it down1, and tried to treat it as a point crawl. Last night was the first run of that condensed adventure, and... it mostly works?
Wandering encounters still happen too frequently and health recharging from encounter-to-encounter takes getting used to, but it flowed better once I stopped thinking of the location the game took place in as a building and instead thought of it as a bunch of connected stages. There was still too much "this is a coherent place" in the adventure2, but it made more sense to me once I thought of it as a point crawl instead of a dungeon.
With that, er, break-through in mind, will I run more Break!! down the road? Probably not. I think it does a good job as a game I can pitch folks who might otherwise only want to play D&D 5e, but the pointcrawl approach isn't appealing to me.3 I can tell I'd start to treat this like I treat D&D 5e and Pathfinder, where I'm writing scene-based adventures built around set-piece fights. I've spent 25 or more years doing that, and at least for now I'm more interested in running a dungeon-game that I don't think Break!! would be a good fit for.
So yeah, that's Break!! for me. A really cool game that ends up being a bit too close to a kind of game I don't want to play at this point in time. I'm glad I have an adventure in my back-pocket I can run for others, but I can stop turning the game over in my mind and move onto thinking about other stuff.
None of the groups I played it with stuck together long enough to finish the overland exploration portion of the adventure. I originally scoped the adventure to be a small dungeon followed by a session of downtime and an adventure where you travel overland to find where the big threat is hidden, then dive into a final micro-dungeon. I anticipated this being about two-to-three sessions, each about three hours long. In practice, character creation took its own two-to-three hour session, the first dungeon took its own session, and downtime and starting overland exploration took a third. I think two groups stalled midway into overland travel and a third never got to that part of the game. I don't think it was the fault of Break!! as much as scheduling games is, as always, tricky.↩
I ended-up defaulting to treating the site as a "dungeon" a couple times. First was when a wandering encounter came into a room the party left, and I allowed them to listen at a door to see what followed. The second came when the party decided to split-up, with one member crawling across cables connecting two separate rooms. That character triggered an encounter, and despite being in two separate rooms, the group could interact with each other in limited ways. This led to most of the group racing down through three "points" to try and join the fight in a way that just didn't feel right to me.↩
I also have concerns about how well the game supports campaign play. It gestures at this, incorporating pretty robust downtime and crafting rules, but there's no advice on how to pace out things like treasure and rewards other than XP. That's not unique to Break!! - nearly every game I read or run has minimal or no campaign support - but because it makes some pretty fundamental changes to things like XP, I can't turn to analogous games like B/X D&D to fill-in those gaps. Additionally, it's a small enough game whose forward-facing community is the developer's blog. It's not a bad resource, but it isn't a replacement for having campaign guidance collected into a PDF on the game's website or even in the book.↩