Intrigued by a new Wilderness of Mirrors

I just saw that the "double-oh-two" (002) edition of Wilderness of Mirrors is available as a PDF. There's a six-page preview up on DriveThruRPG, but it doesn't offer much in terms of what's different in the new edition. Since the actual book is itself about 14 pages long, a 6-page preview is rather generous. I can't really ask for more, even if it isn't answering my questions.

So what are the differences between the first and second edition of Wilderness of Mirrors? Here's what I can gleam from the preview:

• The stats are no longer named for Roman gods. Judging from the index, it looks as though the whole mythology theme has been moved to what is perhaps an optional setting that takes up about a page at the end of the book?
• There's a new stat that represents using muscles or physical force to get what you want. 
• The stat that was for killing looks to have been basically split up into shooting and the new muscles-related stat.
• As near as I can tell, the stat for being team leader is gone. 
• The final page has some sort of list of (possibly real-world) intelligence agencies.

What changes I see look good. The mythology stat names worked against the theme/setting of the game, so I'm happy to see them gone. Saturn was a dump stat for all the PCs except the actual team leader, so I'm happy to see that stat not just renamed but removed. Setting information, even if it is just a page or two, could be good for getting your mental gears turning. What John Wick did choose to change or add, looks to be 100% improvements.

One change I would have liked to see, but clearly isn't in the new edition, is fixes to the character creation math. As mentioned in my various other posts, there are certain builds that are just better than others in terms of in-game effectiveness, but if everyone made the "smart" decision during character creation, you end up with lots of overlap and little differentiation between PCs. Replacing Saturn with "The Heavy" may fix that a little, but probably not completely. Which makes me curious as to whether or not there's any changes to the way mission points and threat are generated,  as  you could perhaps fix the problems there.

Links to some of my previous posts about Wilderness of Mirrors:

• Character Creation House Rule
• Mission Point House Rule
• PC Mortality House Rule
• Star Wars Wilderness of Mirrors
• Those posts and a few more on WoM (9 posts total), all laid out on one really long page

So now I have to decide if it's worth picking up the new edition. On one hand, it's only 5$, so I can clearly afford it. On the other hand, it's $5 for just 8 pages that I haven't read, most of which might be content I already have (so the big improvement might just be a spiffier layout). To further complicate the decision, the new version of Wilderness of Mirrors will eventually end up reprinted in the upcoming The Big Book of Little Games, price unknown, release date unknown. Hmm.

John Wick could use an editor

Last night I played Yesterday's Tomorrow (a retro-pulp RPG, sometimes abbreviated "Yes. Tom." below, because it amuses me to do so) by John Wick. Between it, and my experiences running Wilderness of Mirrors half a dozen times in the past year, I've come to an inescapable conclusion. John Wick needs to get himself a number of assistants:  a friend who is really good with numbers, a blind playtest group, and a cold-blooded editor who is not afraid to hurt his feelings.

Don't get me wrong, I love John Wick's games. I subscribe to his YouTube channel. 7th Sea remains my favorite setting in all of gaming. I really admire the core idea of Wilderness of Mirrors, putting the "planning stage" of caper and spy movies front-and-center in RPGs. Yesterday's Tomorrow had some awesome concepts (Peril) and a great sense of genre. On an abstract theory level, all of these are incredible games. However, all of these games share one or two common flaws that really get under my skin and detract from the experience at the table. I love them, but I'm never completely happy with them.

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Off Balance: 

In Yesterday's Tomorrow, character creation makes no mathematical sense. There's four Attributes ("Styles"), and each rating point in them unlocks corresponding advantages: so far, so good. But the advantages make no attempt at either balance nor coherence. Most advantages boil down to just +1 die. The exceptions are the "Special" advantages, for which there are basically one per Style, and you can only get them for your best Styles. All this works well in theory, but the actual power-level of the Specials vary wildly. Fighting Styles and Titles give +2 dice per level of advantage, making them twice as good as normal advantages. They're "Special" and somewhat limited, so that's fine. But for each point put in Mysticism, you get +3 dice and a special power. There's no trade-off, nothing to balance it. The Specials for Mystery are just plain better than for the other three Styles, with no rationale or explanation of why. Plus, given that the rules specifically allow you to use Advantages from one Style on rolls of completely different Style, those bonus dice in Mysticism are really flexible. If you want to be the best fighter, don't waste your points on Kung Fu or Marksmanship, take Mysticism: Invisibility and attack people from surprise. If you want to social your way through situations, don't worry about Titles and Romance, just take Mysticism: Command and Mysticism: Hypnosis. Sure, it's a "high trust" game that's not really about success or failure, but when one of four attributes is so obviously more powerful than the others, the rules really shouldn't pretend that it isn't.

Then there's all sorts of other weird little blips to character creation, like the Athletics Talent that gets +2 dice for no specified reason (all other Talents are +1 die), several instances where "Imagination" is accidentally substituted for "Science!" without explanation, and the weird phrasing of the Romantic Interest special. Then there's the bit where it tells you further information on Gadgets can be found in the Risks section, but when you go to look it up, there's nothing there on the topic. There's a really simple and elegant character creation system hiding beneath these layers of unexplained and arbitrary wonkiness. The game comes very close to greatness, but ultimately fails to live up to it's potential. It falls victim due to balance issues, poor editing and lack of examples for some of the less obvious things you can put on a character sheet.

The weirdest bit has to do with NPC Companions - each PC can have one, but the rules don't really explain how they work. If they add to your pools, they're way over-powered, giving +6 dice (split across three Styles) for 1 advantage rank. If instead you have to spend your PC's Peril to activate them, you'll almost never do it, because your heroes pool will almost always be larger. If they're a second character you get to play even when your main PC is not in the scene... well that's just not ever stated and is only vaguely implied at best.

Wilderness of Mirrors had similar lack of balance at character creation. 5 attributes, one of which ("Saturn", the team-leader power) was a completely useless dump stat for every PC except the actual Team Leader, because it literally can't be rolled for any useful purpose during the game. So while there's no single ultimate stat like in Yes. Tom., there's one stat that's just obviously worse than all the others.

In 7th Sea, the best stat was clearly Panache, as each level of it gave you another action per round to use the rest of your stats. Every campaign I've played or GM'd of it had all the players openly envious of the PC(s) that had more Panache then them. A low Panache could make combat deathly boring for you, waiting your turn while everyone else took two to three times as many actions each round.  Likewise, Attributes were far better than Skills and Knacks, and the costs at character creation were completely different ratios than the costs later with XP. The player who put the bulk of his or her points in Attributes (especially Panache) would be at a great advantage over the player who wasted points on skills. Let's say you wanted to be a great swordsman - the way to do so was not to invest character points in Attack: Fencing or Parry. Putting those points in other areas (Panache and Finesse) would get far greater results for your investment. That's really counter-intuitive, and thus far from ideal.

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Second-best is too darned good:

This is also related to character creation, and is a recurring theme in John Wick's recent games. Essentially it boils down to lack of character niche or specialization. By default, every character ends up being really good at everything. There's no "I'm our breaking & entering specialist" or "she's the tank", or "he's the smooth talker", because everyone is almost equally good at everything.

In Yes. Tom. there's four attributes ("Styles") and each PC is really good at two of them. But even when rolling the one's you're supposedly not good at, you're still likely to get enough advantages affecting the roll that success is guaranteed. At four dice, you're looking at a 93% chance of getting the single success needed to narrate "I kill them" or "I jump out the window to safety" or "I convince them that I'm trustworthy". But four dice is about the lowest you should ever be rolling. Sure, I'll prefer to roll my best stat with the 10 dice it could generate for me, but effectively the characters have no weaknesses (especially if they took Mysticism). If the big lumbering thug with murder on her mind has to finesse her way through covert diplomatic negotiations at an upper-class soiree, she probably pulls it off. The only thing that could stop her is if she chooses not to roll, or intentionally narrates her own failure. So there's no risk of failure in your worst stats, it's just that you'll get to narrate more bells and whistles and flavor text in your best stats.

On one hand, I applaud the power-realization that the game enables. Certainly it's a fresh new way to approach the core concepts of fantasy gaming, and it definitely captures the dashing larger-than-life heroes of the pulp genre. It should appeal to narrativists, method actors, and monty haulers alike - I have to acknowledge that that is pretty cool in the abstract.

At the same time, it makes all the PCs very cookie-cutter. Your top two (out of four) styles are mechanically augmented, they get the specials, and just more advantages in general. There's no distinction between those top two, however. Action primary and Romance secondary will play and feel almost exactly the same as Romance primary and Action secondary.  Which means that there are exactly 6 character builds (Action & Mystery highest, Action & Romance highest, Action & Science highest, Mystery & Romance highest, Mystery & Science highest, Romance & Science highest). The mysticism powers should in theory expand that somewhat, but in practice there's strong mathematical incentives to spend most of your Mystery advantages on getting most of the mysticism powers, so two characters with Mystery as a high stat will mostly duplicate powers. With really good roleplayers and a small enough group, this will be a non-issue, but a game that only works within certain constraints should probably at least mention that fact in passing. Some advice for GMs in group size, or advice for PCs in character creation goals would be well worth adding a page to the short pdf.


Wilderness of Mirrors has the same problem. There's five attributes, and each PC has enough points to get themselves the maximum score in 3 out of 5 if they take the minimum score in the remaining two. Given that one stat ("Saturn") is an under-used dump stat for all but one of the PCs, it's not a hard sacrifice to make, at least for everyone but the Team Leader.   Your three high-rated attributes are flexible enough to cover most situations, and the typical character employing this "hat trick" build will almost never be forced to roll their one genuinely bad stat. If it does come up, they'll probably have a few spare Mission Points to cover it. End result: every PC is equally good at everything that matters (with the possible ironic exception of the team leader, who gets shafted).

Now here's where John Wick's recent creations have problems that his earlier works didn't always exhibit.  7th Sea did not have this problem at all. It featured half a dozen different types of Sorcery, each of which oozed flavor (literally, in the case of Porté), and had completely different mechanical engines and effect types. There were half a dozen (and five or six times that with all the sourcebooks in play) Swordsman Schools, each of which had it's own special moves and most employed functionally different weapons. There were enough attributes and skills that know one character could master them all. A large palette of Advantages, Arcana, and Backgrounds rounded out the options at character creation and gave each PC their own theme. It was a little fiddly as a result, but you could have a large party of 8 PCs with very distinct specialties and no overlap.

So why was 7th Sea better in that regard? Was it just a function of being more crunchy? Are his recent designs too rules-light to have room for play balance or character niche? Is it impossible to make a story game that is fair and mathematically sound, and also gives each PC something special? Is character niche only achievable in a crunchy, option-loaded system?

I don't think that's the answer or the cause. I suspect that explanation is that 7th Sea was a team effort. I've never met the man, but my take on this is that John Wick is an "ideas guy". The sort of person who brainstorms and dreams really well, comes up with cool ideas and isn't afraid to put even the wildest of them to paper. I am moved by his artistry, even as I criticize and decry the rough edges. I'm hoping that someday soon John Wick gets himself a really top-notch support team to help put the final polish on his games and fix mathematical awkwardness. I invariably love his core concepts, yet often end up frustrated over the presentation and finer details.

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 A few simple fixes:

I hate to be the guy that just bitches and gripes, and never does anything to solve the problem. So here's some links to possible solutions to the complaints I've raised.

House-rules and fixes for Wilderness of Mirrors.

House-rules used to reduce the excessive combat math in 7th Sea.
For those new to 7th Sea, or just making characters for the first time, following these short rules. (Delivered from memory, it's been a few years since I last made a character)

• Buy Sorcery and/or a Swordsman School, they make your character more interesting. Don't waste points upgrading their knacks just yet, you'll be fine with the basics for a while, and they're easy to raise with XP later.
• If you have not read your Sorcery thoroughly, only take it Full-Blooded. Some of the Half-Blooded sorceries are crippled in non-obvious and unsolvable ways.
• Panache is the king of Attributes. A Panache of at least 3 is a must have, or you'll regret it.
• Attributes are better than Skills, and a broad base of Skills is far more important than raising individual Knacks. Though it doesn't read like this should be true, Basic Knacks are far better than Advanced Knacks. Advanced Knacks only cost more at character creation, and are cheap with XP later. At character creation, there's no need to raise any Knack above 1.

In just a moment I'll adress the rules to "Yes. Tom." In my very next post, I'll provide a set of House-Rules that I think would bring out the best Yesterday's Tomorrow has to offer.

StarWarsderness of Mirrors

Last night I ran a one-shot of Wilderness of Mirrors, using the setting from Star Wars.

I replaced the 5 stats of Wilderness of Mirrors with five similar, but subtly different stats. The five attributes were:

• Droid - used for tech, repair, and computing
• Flyboy - used for piloting and acrobatics
• Jedi - used for The Force, Luke
• Princess - used to charm, inspire, and command
• Wookie - used to intimidate and battle

Effectively, I folded the "Saturn" and "Mercury" roles from the main game into each other, since my previous experience had told me that "Saturn" was too weak. I used Saturn's power, with general social-roll utility of Mercury. This left me with Mercury's special power sitting unused, and I realized that being able to tell a perfectly convincing lie was very much like "These aren't the droids you're looking for", so I added in the Jedi stat. The end result was that the five attributes felt much better balanced, instead of Saturn having the awkward "dump stat" status it has in the main rules. I was very pleased with that.

If you look at the attached character sheet I made, you'll notice I also tweaked the power of "Pluto". Stealth isn't really center-stage in the Star Wars films, it's got it's place, but it didn't seem it should be a central character focus. So, I made "Flyboy" cover acrobatics and piloting, with the modified special power to escape from any one tight situation. This is a slightly more frenetic and active version of Pluto's power, and it can be used in a ship. Again, I was pleased with the way it played out.

Overall, things went well. My only complaint involved my own memory issues re: the rules. The main rules are so simple, I didn't re-read them before play. I got about half way through the session, and then commented "I don't remember this being such a cake-walk for the players. I feel like the difficulties should be higher." That's when one my players (thanks, Erik!) stepped up and reminded me about the tokens/points the GM is supposed to get. Off the top of my head, I couldn't remember the rate the GM earns these Setback points, so we went with one every 30 minutes. Turns out that it's supposed to be one every 20 minutes, which would have been much more challenging, and probably far better to have the extra 3 or 4 Setbacks, but we had fun anyway.

As always with Wilderness of Mirrors, the GM just sets up a very brief mission proposal, and then lets the players roll with it. (The bulk of my game prep was making that character sheet.)

Players have a lot of narrative control, and you never really know where things are going to go. We started with the PCs having to steal the Death Star plans and convey them to Princess Leia. By the time all was said and done, the plot involved Wookie and Gamorrean porn stars, evil architects with brain-sucking Dark Side powers, lots of EVA (zero-G combat in space-suits), and an escape in a garbage scow. Very amusing... but trust me, the less you know about "the Wookie Wax", the better.

Wilderness of Mirrors House Rules

Yesterday I GM'd the rules-lite espionage RPG Wilderness of Mirrors. It was a lot of fun, but we ran into a few snags and hurdles. Nothing we couldn't overcome, but the next time I run it, I'll definitely be using some house rules to dodge those problems. Here's links to three posts I wrote this morning about bits I found to be problematic, and how I intend to fix them:

• Character Creation House Rule
• Mission Point House Rule
• PC Mortality House Rule

Despite those fairly large snags, the game delivered on fun. It's just that it was the sort of fun where everyone comments repeatedly "this is silly and needs to be fixed". Those three house rules should fit the bill.

My players came up with some great mission details. By actively giving them some subplots at cross-purposes I was able to promote a little bit of treachery despite the superfluous piles of Mission Points. One PC sacrificed herself to kill the big bad, another PC eliminated a personal enemy that the group was ordered to abduct and convert, and a third PC tried hard to get the second one killed but kept failing. I consider myself lucky to have such a fun group to game with.

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I'd previously blogged about Wilderness of Mirrors a few weeks ago, identifying my favorite part and a few early red flags, should anyone be interested in reading more of my thoughts on the game.

Character Creation House Rules for Wilderness of Mirrors

The next time I GM the Wilderness of Mirrors espionage RPG, I'll be completely doing away with the point-buy system for character creation. Instead, we'll just assign each PC one stat at level 5, one at 4, one at 3, one at 2, and the final (weakest) stat at 1. The players get to choose which stat gets which rating.

Why the need for the change:
The point-buy system in the Wilderness of Mirrors rulebook looks neat on the surface, but (as I'd mentioned in my initial pre-game post) it boils down to only 6 different arrays of stats.

• 5, 5, 5, 1, 1
• 5, 4, 3, 2, 1
• 4, 4, 2, 2, 2
• 4, 3, 3, 3, 1
• 5, 5, 2, 2, 1
• 3, 3, 3, 2, 2

To save the group a lot of time learning crunching numbers, I wrote down those 6 permutations and brought it to the game I GM'd yesterday.

All four players in my group looked at that an decided 5, 5, 5, 1, 1, was superior to the other five possible arrangements. And honestly, they're right. It gives you a total of 17 dice, whereas the other versions give between 13 and 15 dice total. Analyzing those trade-offs, The more you think about it, the worse the other set-ups look, because you'll be rolling one extra die in your weak area at the cost of losing a total of three (or more) dice from two of your best areas. And it's not like that second die in your weakspot is going to really help much - you'd need to roll an 11 or 12 on 2d6 to get any measure of narrative control.

My group is not typically a munchkiny bunch - we run weird one-shots and run lots of goofy narrative systems. Realizing how heavily the system rewards that choice, the decision was easy. When one option is so much better than the alternatives, no one wanted to be the only person left in the dust.

This quickly developed into several different (but related) problems.

All or nothing: With the stats being just 5's and 1's, that means that for any given stat you either always have narrative control, or never have narrative control (since you're looking to roll a 11+ on either 5d6 or 1d6). If it's just a binary function, why spend time rolling dice and adding numbers? Okay, I'm over simplifying it - there's actually plenty of times you want to roll 16+, which means the options aren't "yes" and "no", they're more like "50/50" and "no". That's really not an improvement.

Character redundancy: With all characters having the 5, 5, 5, 1, 1 stat arrangement, you can be certain that any two characters will have one stat that's rated the same - they'll overlap one of the 5s. This is detrimental to accepted notions such as individuality, character concept, and character niche. Instead of "I'm the assassin, and he's the techie" you end up with "We're both assassins and techies, but I'm also the team leader and he's also very stealthy".

Saturn is a dump stat: The character overlap problem gets even worse because you almost never roll Saturn. The team leader needs it at level 5, everyone else is going to want to rate it at 1. Which means the above problem of character redundancy just got worse, since every character except the team leader has a Five-Star rating in 3 out of 4 remaining stats. This also has the unfortunate effect of making the team leader the weakest character in the group.

Special powers: The highest-ranked PC in a Stat gets a corresponding one-time-use power. If there's a tie, they both get that power, but whoever uses it first uses it up for the whole group. For our group of 4 players, this meant that the special power for Saturn went to the team leader. The special power for Mercury was shared between two players. The special power for Mars was shared between 3 players, as were the special powers for Vulcan and Pluto.

It was ugly.

We all looked at it and said "this isn't gonna work". After a few seconds of pondering aloud, I instructed everyone to switch to the 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 spread instead. That change resulted in characters that overlapped less, but it still resulted in 4 out of 5 characters having a "1" in Saturn. It was better, though. With this spread, everyone felt like they had a focus, and the characters weren't just carbon copies. We played it out, and were happy with the results (though Saturn still seems like a dump stat).

Earning Mission Points in Wilderness of Mirrors

On paper, mission points are the main tool and resource of the players in a game of Wilderness of Mirrors. The first time I GM'd the game, however, they failed to provide the expected dramatic tension, and weren't even a meaningful form of resource allocation. The PCs had far too many Mission Points for them to carry any weight or meaning.

This is bad, as one of the ways the game achieves the "you don't know who to trust" element of the spy genre is by giving out "Trust Points" when PCs betray each other or narrate in events that hose the group. But if you're sitting on a pile of 12 Mission Points and have only been using about 2 per hour of play, you're really not motivated to do anything underhanded to add Trust Points (which, other than how they're gained, work just like Mission Points) to your collection.

It's worth noting that I did not play using "Solution #1" from the rule book. It strikes me as much harder on the players. It may turn out you're just fine handing out tons of Mission points if using that mechanic. Eyeballing it, it seems like too harsh a correction to me. After 2 hours of play, the difficulty needed to earn basic narration rights for a PC would be a 41 (instead of 11), and that's pretty brutal. In the final scenes of 4-hour session, the PCs would need to roll a 65 to even get a veto/ammendment option.

So, the rest of this post assumes you, like me, are not using "Solution #1", and are instead using solutions 2 or 3, or some similar variant of your own devising.

It feels to me that the number of Mission Points needs to be curtailed a bit. Of particular concern are Mission Points gained by flavorful embellishing details, and Mission Points gained by details that help the Party succeed at it's mission. The goal is to reduce the former and all-but prevent the later.

House Rule regarding how Mission Points are earned:
At the start of the planning stage, the GM sets aside X # of Mission Points, under the name "Style Points". X is usually 3, but if there's fewer than 4 players, X is one less than the number of players (minimum of 1). These X Style Points are for flavor, in-genre tropishness, awesome ideas, etc. Whoever comes up with the coolest idea during Planning gets all 3 points, but if the GM's having a hard time deciding, he can split them between 2 or 3 players. Style Points go directly to the pool of the player who won them, they don't get split up by the Saturn. In all other ways, they work just like Mission Points.

Actual Mission Points then are handed out only for details that provide challenges to the team. On the map or plan that the team is drawing up, anyone may designate a detail to be a challenge. They describe the challenge, and list 2 of the 5 attributes - those are the only two attributes that can be used on that challenge. This gets written on the plan, and is then worth one Mission Point. This might not seem like much of a bonus, but there's nothing stopping players from putting in additional challenges beyond what they expect to deal with. For example, if there's two entrances to the building, one might have a guard post (takes Mercury or Mars to get past) and the other has a security lock (takes Vulcan or Pluto to circumvent). Unless things go very badly, no individual player will have to deal with both of them. In fact, the existence of these two challenges makes it easier for the party that splits up, because they can match appropriate skills and get in by different routes. But at least they've added some measure of a challenge in exchange for the two Mission Points they've earned.

I suspect you'll end up with 8-15 mission points per player, but if still at the high end they'll be offset by more (and better defined) challenges.

The rules for Trust Points remain unchanged, and will hopefully become more attractive since there's a bit more challenge in the mission.

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Thoughts behind that House Rule:
For those interested in why I concluded such a house rule was needed, here's the problems I found with the existing system. These became apparent in just one session of play, and were a real shame to deal with...

Earning Mission Points for trivial details: Here's the prime source of the problem. The game says any given "detail" the players bring up in the planning stage is worth from 1 to 3 mission points. But it gives no parameters of what constitutes a "detail". It being a cinematic game, you naturally want to reward stylish and flavorful details, details that play to tropes of the genre, and of course details that provide challenges for the players to overcome.

So at first I'm giving out mission points freely. As I'm handing out the 12th or 13th point, however, I realized that really the only detail they've given that potentially adds any challenge was "The perimeter is patrolled by guards in scuba gear with harpoon guns." The scenario at that point was shaping up to be flavorful and cool, but a total walk in the park.

Crap. Half the details given out so far were actively making it easier on the players, and I was foolishly rewarding them with bonus dice for making it easier on themselves. So I slammed on the brakes, and started only giving out points for details that actively made the scenario tougher on them. I feel I was draconian from then on. At least 50% of the details after that didn't get rewarded, and only one detail in the whole list was awarded more than one point. Despite my being a hard-nose, the party still earned 31 mission points during the planning stage.

Motivating Saturn to not just evenly split the mission points: This is a minor problem, but worth mentioning. So you've got 31 mission points, and your team leader has Saturn rating of 5 so the other 3 players each start with 5 free mission points (for a total of 46 points for the whole team). What's that team leader going to do?

Unless there's some abnormally clever reason to do otherwise, they're gonna take 5 of the 31 free points for themselves, then split the remaining 26 points roughly evenly between all the players. It just felt like there wasn't much of a motivation for splitting it in any other way. With a total pot of 46 points, it's not like anyone can argue that their character really needs more than say 14 or 15 mission points. Which means that one of the big "advantages" to the Saturn stat (to compensate that you probably never roll it) is negated by the decision being almost meaningless. Maybe, late in campaign, after you've established some rivalries and betrayal, there might be a situation where a Saturn is motivated to snub someone at Mission Point allotment time, but for a one-shot it was pointless. (And yes, I gave my team leader secret directives to get the "traitor" killed, so she slighted him by about 4 mission points. This tipped him off, and yet still wasn't enough of a deficit to matter, since it left him with about 9 points.)

Defining what you roll: In most RPGs, you take an action, then roll for success or failure. In Wilderness of Mirrors, you basically just state the category of action (from five categories) and roll. If your total is 11 or higher, you narrate what happens. If you roll lower than that, the GM narrates.

Since the categories are very broadly (and vaguely) defined, it's pretty easy to justify using your specialty for just about everything. Seriously. You put a PC in a knife-fight, expecting them to use Mars (the hit man stat). Instead, they roll Vulcan (the fixer / techie stat) to produce a hidden sonic device that immobilizes the foe. You present them with a locked and alarmed door, expecting them to use Vulcan to disable it, and they instead suggest Pluto (the stealth stat) for thievery, or Mars for demolitions, or Mercury (the charisma stat) to charm an code-key off someone. Surprise, it turns out every stat is actually a 5! Or, rather, that every roll is made using your best stat.

This flexibility with the stats and rolls means Mission Points and Trust Points are further devalued - as you'll almost always be rolling 5 dice even without them.

When can you spend mission points? The rules seem to be implying you spend the mission points before you roll, but don't state it very firmly. For reasons stemming back to Luck Points in Cyberpunk 2020 (but also applicable to 7th Sea's Drama Dice, and Savage World's Bennies), I generally prefer to have players spend such resources after they've seen their other dice. It just sucks too much to squander a rare resource on a roll that would have succeeded without it, or on a roll that doesn't have a chance to succeed even with the resource.

In Wilderness of Mirrors, however, the resources aren't rare at all. Instead of 3 per player, you get at least 10 per player, maybe as many as 15 or 20 counting Mission and Trust. Unless you trim back the number of Mission Points earned (or use Solution #1), I heartily endorse making the players choose how many Mission Points and Trust Points they'll spend before they roll any dice.

PC Mortality House Rule for Wilderness of Mirrors

Wilderness of Mirrors is largely a game about narration rights. However, it provides precious little in terms of guidance as to what is or isn't allowed when you're narrating. Technically, if you wanted to narrate "a nuclear bomb kills everyone but me", the only thing stopping you is the fact that no one would ever game with you again. Obviously, that extreme an action is out of bounds, but there's no good guidelines in the rulebook to what is or isn't acceptable.

On page 12 of the rulebook, under the label "Solution #2" (the second of three possible ways to handle the mechanic of putting the mission on a time deadline), there's some helpful advice regarding "permanent damage" and how the GM needs full narrative control to inflict any lasting injuries on your character. (Attaining full narrative control isn't easy for the GM.)

Sadly, this "permanent damage" rule is only mentioned in one of the three options of how to handle that mechanic. If using "Solutions" 1 or 3, the issue of how to deliver such injuries is a little unclear.

More importantly, the game is rife with inter-party conflict. The rulebook actively encourages the GM to create situations where one PC is ordered to plant a bomb to kill another. That begs the question, can a PC kill another PC? Can they narrate permanent injury to a PC? If the answer to either of those is "yes", then how do you defend yourself? The game has no contested rolls, partly because until someone's narrating the results, you wouldn't know if they're attacking you.

The Two-Chip Rule:
Here's my proposal, which replaces the "permanent injury" rule, and is intended to work with any of the three "solutions".

Each PC starts the game with two poker chips (or colored stones, etc ), one each of two different colors, let's say red and blue.

While you have the blue chip, the narrator cannot give you any permanent damage. He can still wound you, even describe that you're captured, etc, but escape remains likely and your future actions are in no way penalized. Any time his narration (or veto) wounds you, he may choose to take away your blue chip. If you don't have a blue chip any more, when the GM's narrating (not just using his veto) he can give you permanent damage. So, the GM has to "set up" his big moves against players by first stripping their blue chip in some harmful development. It takes a one-two punch to really hurt a PC.

While you have the red chip, no other players can incapacitate you, nor give you permanent injury. If a player narrates some sort of harm to you, however, they may choose to remove your red chip. Thereafter, for the rest of the session, any time a player narrates harm to you, they may choose to give you a permanent injury or incapacitate you. Note that even if Player A makes you discard your red chip, you become vulnerable to actions from not just Player A, but also B, C, D, etc.

The reason I put in the "gang-up" aspect of this rule is because Wilderness of Mirrors lacks a detailed initiative system. I didn't want an inter-party conflict to be determined solely by who acted first. This way, the timely intervention of another PC can tip the scales.

The GM can't kill you, no matter what. There's only two ways a PC can die:

1. That PC's player may narrate their own character's death, via heroic sacrifice, suicide, or enemy action.
2. Another PC may kill them, but only if the target PC currently has no red chip, and has already been incapacitated by a PC's action. So a PC can be killed by another PC, but it takes 3 successful narrations to do so. The three narrations could be performed by 1, 2 or 3 different players, however.

Once per session, a narration (not a veto) that details healing, medical treatment, the passage of large spans of time, etc, may include the restoration of your blue and/or red chip(s).

The Planning Stage in Wilderness of Mirrors

I bought Wilderness of Mirrors for one reason - because it does a really good job of modeling (in gaming) the planning stage of spy movies, caper films, etc.

In other game systems: This common element of espionage films is often a bit of a trouble in RPGs.

If there's one obvious solution (just one good way into the enemy base, for example) then there's a good chance the players will feel railroaded.

A GM who's conscious of that will come up with more than one way in - which means the GM does a lot of redundant prep work when they pick only a single approach. There's a chance that the players won't see one of the paths to success, or will value one as being much better than the other, and they'll still feel railroaded.

This results in the typical dungeon-structure showing up in spy headquarters, military camps, space stations, etc, because trying to hit the right balance is really hard - you want to keep the player's decisions meaningful, but not have to come up with a ton of work for yourself or bore everyone with a lengthy exposition dump. *

Ultimately, once you've given them the intelligence report on the site of the mission, it becomes a contest between the craftiness of the GM and the craftiness of the players. Often that contest involves the GM intentionally handcuffing themselves by leaving back doors that it's hard to believe the enemy overlooked, so that the players have a chance. If you don't, you run a greater risk the PCs will hit a wall they can't surmount.

This is going about things the wrong way - it's not supposed to be the players trying to outsmart the GM, it's supposed to be the Player Characters (who have different skillsets than their players do) trying to outsmart the NPCs. Really, James Bond shouldn't be at a disadvantage because the guy playing him doesn't know as much as the GM does about how alarm systems work. But I've ranted about that before. **

Wilderness of Mirrors avoids all of those traps. How, you ask? By not having the GM do a darned thing, and always assuming the PCs kick butt.

Between sessions, the GM only has to brainstorm a one-sentence description of the new mission. He can seriously just show up to the game with that sketchy little description, and absolutely zero additional prep work. ***

Each session starts with the planning stage, with the players collectively sketching out a loose map, and filling in details of how the defenses that have to be overcome. Each such defense or detail gets you a mission point award, which you'll use later to overcome those same defenses.

While the rules don't say this as clearly as they could, I believe you're supposed to run the planning session in-character. At least as much as possible. So it's not "Wouldn't it be cool if there were like those infrared beams, you know, set up like a web somewhere and we had to like crawl through them without touching them? Should we put that in, like near the vault room?" Instead you should be saying "Before he was captured, our Mole reported that an InfraWeb 9000 alarm system had been installed in the chamber outside the vault. We'll need to requisition the proper gear to see the infrared lines, and assign our most acrobatic agent to getting past that."

The point is, you're not motivated to come up with something really easy, or really hard - but rather to come up with something really cool that'll look and sound awesome when you circumvent it. The players should absolutely be proposing things that sound terribly difficult, but which they already have an idea on how to solve or slip past.

The difficulty to infiltrate the evil lair (or whatever the framework of the mission is) is beside the point. Your dice rolls don't determine success or failure, they determine narration rights. Success is assumed in most circumstances. If I roll poorly, I may still take out that guard - but the GM will decide his body is found by a random patrol 10 minutes later, and we have to act fast.

As with any good caper or spy plotline, the infiltration is only half the mission - getting out again is the tricky part. The setback points that the GM accumulates every 20 minutes are designed to make all hell break loose once you're inside. Expect something to go wrong, and a good chase or fight scene to break out in the second half of the night. By the same token, you might win the roll, and still choose to narrate a result similar to my guard example in the previous paragraph. Little unexpected twists get you "Trust Dice", as does betraying the group. (Gotta love the name of those Trust Dice.) Narrating a minor setback now can help arm you for controlled success at a critical juncture where it really matters.

This game is sweet.I'm very excited to try it.

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*: For an idea of my own on how to avoid the exposition dump, see: Discussion Cards. That idea works well with science anomalies / mysteries and for conveying situations where the Players lack info the PCs have.

**: Pet Peeves Regarding Attributes. Since writing those words 20 months ago, I've seen a few "hippy games" that let you use mental and social traits this way. Sadly they all seem to be games set up for one-shots only, either being very gimmicky or having no XP system. (Or both.)

***: Myself, when I get around to running this in a couple of weeks, I might actually spend 20 minutes before / between sessions. I like the idea of presenting a loose structure to the map, for the players to build off. Like just drawing a coast line, or the outlines of 5 buildings that are left unlabeled for the players to define. I'll then absolutely have the PCs do the planning stage in-character.

Crunching the Wilderness of Mirrors

I recently picked up Wilderness of Mirrors, a mini-RPG from John Wick.

Overall, I was very impressed. The game is short and sweet and elegant, and absolutely nails it's theme. I'm considering putting my copy of Spycraft into the sell/donate box, because I'd definitely run WoM (Wilderness of Mirrors) over any sort of d20 Espionage game. A few simple reasons:

• Characters in WoM start off as professional master spies, with no need to "level up" or run training missions.
• The mechanics are fast and simple. Outside of character creation, there's exactly one chart. PCs have two resources to keep track of, and 5 stats. It's a definite c4 on my crunchometer.
• The burden on the GM is really diminished. Your work between sessions is about 5 minutes of brainstorming. During the game, the GM never rolls the dice, and only has one resource to track. The toughest part of GMing WoM is keeping an eye on the time (your one resource arrives every 20 minutes of real time, so the tension of the story ratchets up the longer you play).
• Best of all it captures the feel of the "planning" stage of any good spy or caper film, which is really hard to do right. More about that in my next post.

The game is very narrow - focusing on Bond / Bourne / Bristow type scenarios - but it's really good at what it does. With a little elbow grease, you could also expand it to cover things like Ocean's 11, Reservoir Dogs, or even The Great Escape. So, in general, I love the game, and will be hauling it out first chance I get.

I do have a few little nitpicks, though:

1. Given the game's basis and theme, the name of the 5 skills puzzles me. You have five skills, which are basically leadership/planning, fighting/wetworks, techie/fixer, faceman/deep cover, and stealth. Instead of choosing appropriate espionage-genre names for those skills, instead they're named after Roman Gods. It's supposed to sound like codewords for the training types, but seeing as how the game has no defined setting (beyond "your favorite spy setting"), the Roman codes seem silly. If you were running an MI-6 / James Bond game, you'd talk about Q and M, not Vulcan and Jupiter. In an Alias game, you'd say this is SD-6's top Wetworks agent, not "He's a Mars". A minor quibble, since renaming is easy in such a light system, but it feels like a strange hold-over from Wick's previous game Enemy Gods (where the names of the Gods were also the names of your stats, but with a more flavorful connection).
   


2. Character creation is light, but still presented as being more complicated than it really is. You have 30 points to buy the five skills, and a non-intuitive cost chart that looks simple but will have to be explained three times to some players. Yet despite that, there are only possible spend patterns that don't waste points, and two more that do waste a point or two but don't hamstring your character.
   
   To save others the trouble of doing the math themselves, the four efficient builds are:
   
   • 5, 5, 5, 1, 1
   • 5, 4, 3, 2, 1
   • 4, 4, 2, 2, 2
   • 4, 3, 3, 3, 1
   
   In addition, the following two builds each leave one or two points unspent, but don't leave any dice hanging, and are not strictly inferior to the other four builds.
   
   • 5, 5, 2, 2, 1
   • 3, 3, 3, 2, 2
   
   For the record, I don't think that last one is a particularly good idea, as you'd be guaranteeing that you don't get one of the five "I'm the best in this skill" powers, but for a group with 6+ PCs, or for a really long campaign with a lot of mission types and some attendance spotiness, it might be worth it to have such a generalist in the group. Maybe.
   
   That there's only 6 ways to split the points isn't a complaint - the complaint is that they could make this much easier for new players with a chart of your 6 (or even just the 4 best) options. The details of the point system behind those 4 or 6 arrangements really only needs to be explained if you want to make more or less powerful agents for some reason - a notion the game doesn't explore as it already starts you off with James Bond / Jason Bourne level characters.
   


3. No XP system. This is actually my biggest gripe. I can rename a stat, no problem. I can crunch the math on character creation and make a list that simplifies things for new players. Both of those are easily fixed. The game lacks any form of XP or Character Advancement.
   
   For a lot of players, that means they will never look at it as anything more than a one-shot. I've run long campaigns of Everway and Amber, and I know first hand that some players just seriously dislike any RPG without tangible advancement.
   
   James Bond never levels up - he's every bit as tough in the first movie as he is in the most recent one. Such an argument just might work in WoM, at least for a little while.
   
   Jury-rigging such a system seems doomed to fail, too. The game's just not granular enough. Assuming the stats cap at 5, all PCs would end up carbon copies very quickly. If there was no stat cap, you'd end up rolling unwieldy handfuls of dice and in the late game the GM would have no narration rights. It'd get ugly.