Sword World: What If D&D Didn't Matter?

This post is me suddenly realizing that I could Simply Write About something I've repeatedly alluded to in replies on social media: 

"If you've ever been curious what a fantasy adventure TTRPG might look like if it hadn't developed under the massive shadow of D&D, then you should check out Sword World."

I probably don't need to explain the shadow of D&D and how it warps the TTRPG landscape. It's the game everyone has played, it's many people's only game, and it's the game everything else is compared to. But the interesting thing is, that's not true across the whole world. In Japan, for example, D&D never got that initial foothold (something about dice availability, if memory serves) so the TTRPG scene developed in its own ways. Even now, D&D is simply Another Game That Exists. It's not the most popular one (that's Call of Cthulhu, interestingly enough), and it's not even the most popular one in the fantasy adventure genre: that honor goes to the subject of this post, Sword World 2.5.

I want to be clear, because the internet has (rightly) learned to be wary when an American wants to talk about something Japanese. This is not a post about how perfectly awesome Sword World is, or how it's better than "western" RPGs, or anything like that. This is about the fact that we have a genuine example of a fantasy adventure TTRPG that was under no pressure to compare itself to D&D, which feels a little like peeking into an alternate timeline. I, for one, find it fascinating to compare and contrast. Maybe you will too.

So let's talk about One Real Example Of What Fantasy Adventure Looks Like When D&D Ain't Shit.

Sword World 2.5

Just as a quick introduction, Sword World is the top fantasy adventure TTRPG in Japan. It's currently in edition 2.5, which is what I'll be talking about here. There's no official English version, so I'll be using a fan translation, which you can get for free HERE. There are three core books; I've looked at Core Rulebook I, which covers the general gameplay rules and the basic races and classes, along with a few monsters. My understanding is that Core Rulebook II and Core Rulebook III include some special additional rules and advanced classes, but I haven't looked at them yet. Trust me, there's plenty of interesting comparisons to observe just in the first book.

Classes & "Skills"

I'm starting here because it's one of the first and biggest differences someone like me would notice about SW2.5. It has classes and skills, but they don't work the way we're used to. Your classes are your skills. You don't put points into skills, or have your class grant you skill proficiencies that scale up automatically. No, when you make a skill check (or spellcasting check, or attack roll), you roll 2d6 and add your level in the relevant class. Most (but not all) checks have more than one class you could use, so you use whichever one you have the higher level in. If you don't have a relevant class at all, then you just roll a blank 2d6 (you don't even get your ability modifier).

As you may have inferred from the preceding paragraph, multiclassing is normal. I don't mean it's "allowed" or it's "not a variant rule" or it's "common." I mean it's the expected default. Every character is a mix of a handful of different classes, likely each at a different level. If that sounds overwhelming, that's because you're imagining "classes" that are much bulkier than the ones in SW. You don't have a five-page spread of abilities for each class. Your class is like... a paragraph or two. For example, the Fencer class explains that as long as you're using light weapons/armor you get an improved crit chance, and... that's it. Add your Fencer level to your combat rolls, just like anything else, and you're ready to rock and roll.

XP, Advancement, and Adventurer Level

While SW2.5 does have "experience points" and "levels," it doesn't work like how you're used to. Instead of reaching the next XP threshold and gaining a level, you spend XP to purchase levels of individual classes. The XP cost of purchasing a level depends on whether it's from a "major" or "minor" class, and how high your level already is in that class specifically. Have a look at this chart:

Brand new characters start with 3,000 XP worth of levels, so you might start the game as, for example, Sorcerer 2, Fencer 1, Scout 1, giving you magic as your primary focus but with a bit of melee ability for flexibility and a wide array of utility skills. Someone used to D&D would call this a 4th-level character, but in SW it's actually a 2nd-level character. This is because your "adventurer level" is equal to your highest class level, not your total number of class levels. Which makes sense, because we're on tight 2d6 math for everything, so we want to be measuring power by what's getting added to the roll, not by how many different things you can do.

How you gain XP in the first place is also a bit different than the D&D model. You automatically gain XP at the end of each session: 1,000 XP if you achieved your objective, or 500 XP otherwise. That's basically it. There's some bonus XP if you defeated monsters, but it's pretty small: 10 XP per level of the monsters defeated. The example in the book is if you win a fight against a 3rd-level monster and their four 1st-level minions, that's 7 levels total, or 70 XP. You also get 50 XP if you manage to roll snake eyes on 2d6 (a 1-in-36 chance). Both of these are a drop in the bucket compared to the base session XP.

But in addition to XP and classes, your advancement also includes "Growth" of ability scores. At the end of each session, you— wait a second, I haven't told you about ability scores yet, I'd better do that!

Ability Scores

Characters in Sword World have six stats. Which is funny, because if an American designer said that, many people would assume they had never seen a game other than D&D. But that's objectively not the case for SW2.5, and in fact there's a very specific reason to have exactly six ability scores: Growth. Your six stats are numbered 1-6 on your sheet, and at the end of each session, you roll a d6 twice, pick one result, and increase the corresponding ability score by 1. But wait, it gets even more interesting.

You don't add your ability score to rolls, you add your Ability Modifier, which is exactly what you think it is. This is even funnier than having six stats—people would call you a liar right to your face if you claimed that you had a score/mod duality for any other reason than D&D-brain. And yet, here we are. Anyway, you get +1 mod per 6 points of score. Most starting mods will be +2, some will be +1, and very very few will be +3. But this connects back to growth: if you have a score that's close to the next multiple of six, you can try to steer your growth toward it and get that next +1 (eventually, dice willing).

But growth isn't the only way that SW2.5 makes ability scores more relevant than in D&D. Weapons and armor, for example, have minimum Strength requirements. (Proficiency by class isn't really a thing, for the most part.) You use your Vitality score for calculating HP, and your Spirit score for calculating MP. I haven't found anything similar for Dexterity, Agility, or Intelligence, but still, the scores are getting more use than in D&D at least.

Side note because I know you're wondering: yes, you roll your ability scores. In order. That said, there's some amount of control: your choice of background gives you a set of flat numbers that your rolls are added to, and you also roll three full sets of scores and choose from among them. This model, alongside the growth mechanic, point to an interesting middle ground of guided chance in between the extremes of raw luck from old-school D&D and full control of modern point-buy.

I Am In Love With "Fellows"

In video games, sometimes an NPC will temporarily join your party, following you around and helping in combat but staying in the background the rest of the time. In some tabletop D&D-alikes, you can get hirelings that work similarly. In Sword World, you can do this with other people's player characters.

Want to share your character with the world? Make a Fellow Sheet, which summarizes their stats and includes a random roll chart for a few combat actions, and—get this—you even have to write down lines of dialogue your character would say when doing these combat actions. You can then post your Fellow Sheet online, such as in a fan forum, where people you've never met might pick them up to take along on their adventures.

Fellows stay in the background, contribute according to your custom random table during combat, and cannot take damage or die (in the event of a TPK, they're assumed to miraculously escape). Here's the adorable part: after using a Fellow, the book explicitly encourages the player(s) to contact the Fellow's creator (probably just a post online) both to thank them for their help and to give a recap of their character's little side adventure.

Power Tables

Remember I mentioned the issue of dice availability as part of the reason D&D didn't catch on right away in Japan? Well, SW2.5 is fully d6-based, and that includes rolling for damage (or healing). But apparently they didn't want everything to deal Xd6 damage, so instead they created Power Tables. Your weapon or spell will specify a "Power" rating. Find the row for that Power on the table, and roll 2d6. There will be a box corresponding to your result which tells you how much damage you deal. (You also add bonuses from things like your STR mod, but that's after you're done with the Power Table roll.)

At first I was surprised. Requiring a reference to a table on every single instance of damage is a bold move, though maybe you get used to it if you're referencing the same Power rating every time. Also, it does present an interesting solution to the need for variable damage output using only d6s and without too much range from the bottom to the top. I don't know if I would have the guts to do this in a design of my own, but I see what it's offering.

Relatedly, this method of damage calculation means everybody's always rolling 2d6 for damage, and SW2.5 takes advantage of this. Your chance of a critical hit is based on the dice result of your damage roll rather than your attack roll, scoring a crit when you roll your weapon's crit threshold or higher. Lots of weapons put this threshold around 10-11, but the Fencer can reduce this by 1 (at the cost of halving your STR score for the purpose of weapon and armor requirements, which means less power in the first place and also less defense). Also: crits can explode. When you crit, you record your rolled damage, and roll again. If that's a crit too, just keep going.

Three Combat Systems

So, you know how in D&D (and similar games), there's differing opinions on tactical combat versus abstracted combat? There's grid-based model, battlefield zone models, here-there-elsewhere models, all kinds of stuff. They all have advantages and disadvantages, and often it's a major decision point for which game(s) someone is willing to play.

Well, Sword World just sidesteps the issue by having three different combat systems with different levels of complexity and depth. The idea is that you bounce around between them, depending on which one serves the needs of a given fight. You can use the "advanced" mode (full tactical grid) when you have a big, complicated fight with interesting terrain and want to have a really robust experience. But if you want a quicker fight, you can use the "simplified" mode, where you just abstract the battlefield into three zones (the melee "frontline" and two ranged "rearguards") and leave it at that. The stats on weapons and spells (range, area, etc) are designed to accommodate both modes.

There's also a third mode that splits the difference between simple/advanced, but I honestly don't see the point of it. Maybe I'm missing something and I would get it if I actually played it? Who knows. But hey, it exists!

Okay Okay I'll Wrap It Up

There's plenty more interesting points of comparison to talk about (like how dwarves are fireproof and elves are perfect swimmers, or how there seems to be an assumption that adventures are short and serialized instead of campaign-length megaplots), but this is getting pretty long already. Anyway, the point is, Sword World is solidly in the adventure fantasy genre without being a "D&D clone," and this makes examination of its design choices absolutely fascinating for fantasy fans who live and breathe the inescapable dominance of D&D. If design comparisons are at all interesting to you (and if you got this far into my blog post, I assume they are) then I highly recommend that you go have a look at SW2.5 for yourself. And by all means, hit me up with your observations! I'd love to hear about them!

The GoldenEye Effect

I've been telling myself I would write this for ages, and now that I have enough other things I want to procrastinate on, it's finally time. It's about a type of media literacy failure that might have a formal name somewhere but I've been calling it "The GoldenEye Effect."

So if you were alive 20-30 years ago (and even maybe if you weren't), you're probably aware of the GoldenEye 007 video game for the Nintendo 64. It was a first-person shooter made as a tie-in game for a then-recent James Bond movie. And unlike most movie tie-in games (yes, that was common in the Old Times), GoldenEye was incredibly popular. Tons of people have fond memories of weekends with pizza and friends, playing 4-player split-screen free-for-alls, and yelling at the one kid who kept picking Oddjob and saying it's only because they like the character and not because his hitbox is half the size of everyone else's.

Yes, I too played this in my youth (my older brother was Oddjob Guy). Another thing that was part of my youth was a subscription to Nintendo Power magazine. Part of that magazine was a set of awards for games in various categories based solely on reader votes. You would send a physical letter to the magazine's office listing your picks for each category—things like best graphics, best music, best controls, and so on—as well as the best game overall. The magazine would then publish the results in a future issue.

Like I said, GoldenEye was incredibly popular. Nobody was surprised when Nintendo Power readers voted it the best game for that round. However, it also dominated most of the individual categories, often defeating games that were unequivocally superior in those specific categories. It was so egregious that the magazine even went as far as to directly chastise its own readers for so blatantly just picking their favorite game over and over instead of being honest about individual categories.

The best graphics in video games at the time, according to Nintendo Power readers.

I was a kid at the time, not exactly a paragon of media literacy. Maybe that's why having this distinction spelled out to me stuck in my memory so much. This was my first conscious exposure to this fact of human behavior: many people will not differentiate between their evaluation of a thing as a whole and their evaluation of its individual facets.

Now, I'm calling this "The GoldenEye Effect" because it was both an egregious example and also my personal first awareness, but it goes far beyond just video games. It's an issue with media literacy more broadly. (Probably also in other things, but that's beyond what I feel like getting into right now.) You read a book or see a movie, you fall in love with it, and then you start listing individual traits and over-selling them as each being as good as your overall appraisal.

A more recent example is the series Arcane. When it came out, I couldn't go 2 minutes without hearing people raving about how incredible it was. I watched it, and came away simultaneously impressed and disappointed. On the one hand, that show was fucking gorgeous. The visuals were stunning, not just in art style but in cinematography. The music was great, and was also put to fantastic use in how it was integrated into the action. Furthermore, several individual scenes were wonderful—the fight between Ekko and Jinx, for example, could have been a stand-alone short film on the strength of its visual storytelling.

But.

The plot was disjointed and jerky. The show would signal a focus or direction, then do something else instead (and not in a "dramatic reveal plot twist" kind of way). Several key characters had unclear personalities, shifting around to serve the plot like Captain Janeway cranked up to 11. The show had some real warts mixed in with its accomplishments.

Which is fine! Most things have strengths and weaknesses, and if something's strengths outweigh its weaknesses for you, then you'll probably like it, and that's okay! Nothing needs to be perfect to be loved. But that's not the same as being great in every category. I've seen people say everything from "it's basically perfect" (normal hyperbole, I can overlook that) to "it has no flaws" (that's a bit more specific and debatable) to "in addition to its beauty, it's a masterclass in storytelling and characterization" (hold the fuck up).

In Conclusion

Nothing is perfect. If you love a piece of media so much that you've read/watched/played it multiple times, but you still can't point out any real flaws, you're probably deluding yourself.