Magical West Postmortem

Obligatory “Howdy, partner” partner!

I figured I’d start off this blog in earnest by playing in a creative space I’m really comfortable with.

For the uninitiated, I released a tabletop RPG system, Tales of the Magical West, in July of 2019. It’s a fantasy/western alternative history system focused on creating characters with unique abilities to solve outlandish problems. It was a personal project since 2016, starting from some homebrewing for my own campaign I ran with my college friends. Through years of tweaking, I put together two hundred pages of rules and world building. It was a real passion of mine and it was a nice experience to develop an independent project.

As I’ve worked on other projects, video work, writing, and graphic design, I’ve always felt my mind wander back to the magical west. When I initially released it, I crossed the finish line with a firm “this is good enough.” Of course, I was proud to have put it all down on paper, and that only got better when people started playing it, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned in the past few year since releasing Tales of the Magical West, it’s that you should always take the chance to look and learn from your choices. 

That’s where this post comes in! I’m going to look back and reflect on how Tales of the Magical West shaped up three years after its initial release. 

First, I’m going to focus on the positive notes, the things I’m still proud of after seeing some time pass. These will be the qualities that I think should be maintained, and even bolster further, as I continue to develop Tales of the Magical West.

The Good: Chaos on Players’ Terms

Something consistent in every game of Tales of the Magical West I ran was the propensity for unexpected encounters, mostly because player’s would use their abilities in ways that affected the environment for themselves and their opponents (purposefully or not.) 

This was when the system worked best, both in encouraging these hectic situations and letting players use their tools to get out of them. Writing has taught me that stakes and danger reveal the true qualities of a character, and giving player characters the opportunity to create and correct these stakes organically leads to better roleplay. It's also just fun seeing all the wackiness stack turn after turn. I may be biased, but my players tend to be more engaged by the encounters that reciprocate the chaos that they bring to an encounter. It becomes a true powder keg.

The Good: Unique Character Building

The biggest, easily communicable quality of Tales of the Magical West is definitely its list of over 500 abilities. I'll be the first to admit I went overboard, but that was the best way to create a system that resulted in characters that break the mold of conventional classes and play styles. 

An on-rails class structure can make a system more approachable, but can also stifle the most important quality about ttrpgs (to me): translating a character and their qualities into actionable mechanics. The roles of conventional characters are still there, but there are hundreds of ways to build a tank, healer, ranger, wizard, etc.

I wanted to make sure that each ability a player choses was a choice their character was also making, not just what was up next on their level-up grid. I think I succeeded.

The Good: A Grounded, "Hard" Magic System

Another goal I had in developing this system was to create magic that felt more concrete and less hand wavy. A system with rules, consequences, and a sort of logic that can help build a world. The way magic users manipulate their world has some sense to it, and no one can just create something from nothing or cast Wish. It might be easy to see the inspirations, things like Avatar: The Last Airbender, Dishonored, and Bioshock.

This is less about mechanics (though it does influence how I design abilities) but more about the feeling of the world. The chaos of the magical west can really only be interesting if it feels like it could be tamed in some way, but ultimately never can. This quality, in my eyes, was a success.

Those are the major victories from my first pass at the magical west. Any attempt I'd make in the future with the system would hopefully continue to excel in these things. But there are less-than-major victories, maybe even almost-maybe-okay victories. 

This category is for the qualities that were alright. Not outright failures, but not the best execution on the idea; the Not-So-Bads.

The Not-So-Bad: The Setting of The Magical West

"Alternative History Fantasy Western" isn't exactly a genre you hear about everyday, but it isn't terribly unique either. Weird West is a genre that pairs the classic western vibes and setting with the occult and supernatural. This doesn't exactly match the magical west, which is more about pairing westerns with a not-so-secret magical world more akin to classic fantasy. It's a distinction, but not one I felt was communicated well enough. 

On top of that redirection from genre, working with the Alternative History aspect is a challenge, especially when the text of the world building doesn't read as largely divergent aside from the magical elements. Other alternative history stories and systems push for bigger, more dramatic changes. 

Part of that is inevitable the result of what happens the farther and farther you get from that point of divergence, but only when you have the confidence to pull towards either historical or ahistorical. Future magical west developments should be more descriptive in how the secret magical world being discovered has changed both sides of the equation, both the normal world we know and the magical setting we don't.

As a writer, part of me wants to take this system somewhere else that's entirely fictional to give myself and other creators more control, but that's offset by the opportunities to use history as the inspiration for creative ideas. So we'll see.

The Not-So-Bad: Being the Game Master

Pivoting back to game design, the topic of GMing in the magical west system is difficult for me to discuss because of two big reasons. Firstly, it's a system designed around my own personal philosophies about GMing, but probably more important is that I don't have a lot of data surrounding others who have been a Game Master for the system. With some feedback, however, I have been able to come up with some qualities to work on.

The big one is enemy design. The magical west system is flush with resources, actions, niche engagement opportunities, etc. All of these may be fun for a player, but it's not scalable when controlling multiple characters in an encounter. While I've tried to mitigate some of this by simplifying resources for creatures and making their actions straight forward, there's a lot of work to be done to make it more approachable from the otherside of the GM screen.

And now it's time for the Ugly; the things that I feel the worst about making it into the final result. It's important to understand your shortcomings and why they happened, so I can't shy away from the problems of the magical west system.

The Ugly: Many, Many Editing Mistakes

This one is plain as day and the most embarrassing. The core book is still rife with errors both grammatical and mechanical. I won't go through the ordeal of highlighting each one, but I will have to reflect about my own personal problem with reading my work thoroughly.  While I did have the help of fantastic friends to read through and catch things, these are problems that should have been caught by me.

The Ugly: Micro Abilities

I know, I know. Just a few paragraphs ago I commented on how the massive number of abilities is a good thing, but it isn't that simple. The means of how players get abilities requires them to pick up frivolous abilities that are either circumstantial beyond belief or outright useless. 

This ultimately just adds to the cognitive load of the players as they read through each ability that passively gains along their journey each turn, or worse, they forget an important one because it's hiding between trash. I'd estimate that about 10% of abilities fall into this problem and some curbing/replacing should be done in the future. 

This should also be combined with a redesign of how players gain abilities, making actionable choices with what abilities they have so they can be more familiar with their toolkit. I'm already brainstorming and testing alternatives that make me a lot happier than what is present in the first edition.

The Ugly: Mana and Resources

Through the early design of the magical west, a problem I was confront with was a translation from my major inspirations, video games. Unfortunately, banking on players to work with mechanics usually sussed out by a computer led to a lot of trouble and things changed. Unfortunately, I don't think I squashed every bug from that era of design.

Mana being a number resource is unwieldy, difficult to design around, and usually didn't matter anyway. While letting players customize how they engage with Mana was interesting, refresh rate largely out did max storage everytime. Additionally, it often slowed down turns to do the math on how much Mana is needed to do a series of spells.  Chaining abilities together is part of the loop I wanted, so it's downright silly that I made that process more complicated.

Originally, my idea for balancing resource mechanics was that if there was one a player didn't want to engage with, they could opt out and take their character down a different direction that didn't use it. An easy solution, but one that fragmented the gameplay experience. Mana's workflow just exacerbated it and should be changed into something that is universally understood, even by characters that don't use magic.

And those are my big reflection points when it comes to the magical west. I hope I can find the time soon to reexamine some other design choices I made along the way. I've got plenty to learn about design, but there's nothing better than trial and error learning (as long as your not learning to fly a helicopter.)

Until next time!