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A review by mburnamfink
Beam Saber by Austin Ramsay
4.0
Beam Saber is a FitD game about mecha pilots embroiled in a multisided eternal war. It's a good game, but not a perfect one. First published in Feb 2019, two years after the paper release of Blades in the Dark, it has lots early Blades-hack cruft, and the new systems are not fully integrated.
First the new. This is a game about mechs, Armored Walking Vehicles in the parlance of the setting, and along with the standard BitD actions, there are six more vehicle actions (Battle, Destroy, Maneuver, Bombard, Manipulate, Scan), and a system of vehicle quirks which are expended like Pilot stress. Drives are a new mechanic, two 4-segment clocks recording character ambitions. One or more full Drive clocks can be spent to permanently change the setting, or more boringly, negate harm/damage, make any roll an automatic 6, or provide a mega-assist to another pilot. Drives represent a solid way to align the mechanics and fiction, and provide a crunchy reward once you get there.
Similarly, Connection clocks provide mechanical support to bonds between characters, though with less impact as they only provide a trickle of XP. Having to be explicit about what your character believes about the other characters is likely a good practice at any table. Downtime has also been revamped, and there's new reputation and trust mechanics linking your squad to their faction.
As for the old, playbooks and special abilities are reskinned versions of the Blades defaults. The squad system, with strong and weak holds, is over-complicated for representing how the war is going, while not offering a ton of support for who the opposition is. There's an augmented reality / rogue AI sideline, which seems to be there to parallel the ghost field from Blades.
The setting is... fine. The galaxy is divided between five warring factions: Democracy, Theocracy, Corpocracy, etc. You're on a planet called Earth, which might actually be the ancestral lost home of humanity. Whether it is or not, a Kessler shell of debris makes getting to and from the surface difficult, so this war is fought in the mud.
I've got high standards and opinions about both FitD games and mecha games, and Ramsay has made design choices I don't agree with. Namely, in a mecha game I want support for the following questions.
First the new. This is a game about mechs, Armored Walking Vehicles in the parlance of the setting, and along with the standard BitD actions, there are six more vehicle actions (Battle, Destroy, Maneuver, Bombard, Manipulate, Scan), and a system of vehicle quirks which are expended like Pilot stress. Drives are a new mechanic, two 4-segment clocks recording character ambitions. One or more full Drive clocks can be spent to permanently change the setting, or more boringly, negate harm/damage, make any roll an automatic 6, or provide a mega-assist to another pilot. Drives represent a solid way to align the mechanics and fiction, and provide a crunchy reward once you get there.
Similarly, Connection clocks provide mechanical support to bonds between characters, though with less impact as they only provide a trickle of XP. Having to be explicit about what your character believes about the other characters is likely a good practice at any table. Downtime has also been revamped, and there's new reputation and trust mechanics linking your squad to their faction.
As for the old, playbooks and special abilities are reskinned versions of the Blades defaults. The squad system, with strong and weak holds, is over-complicated for representing how the war is going, while not offering a ton of support for who the opposition is. There's an augmented reality / rogue AI sideline, which seems to be there to parallel the ghost field from Blades.
The setting is... fine. The galaxy is divided between five warring factions: Democracy, Theocracy, Corpocracy, etc. You're on a planet called Earth, which might actually be the ancestral lost home of humanity. Whether it is or not, a Kessler shell of debris makes getting to and from the surface difficult, so this war is fought in the mud.
I've got high standards and opinions about both FitD games and mecha games, and Ramsay has made design choices I don't agree with. Namely, in a mecha game I want support for the following questions.
- The Pornography of Mechanized Violence: The whole point of the genre is big-robot-go-boom. I want guns, I want explosions, I want lasers, I want to feel like an angel of death bestriding the battlefield. FitD can do that, but it isn't great at it. The quirk system and AWV loadout system is similarly adequate.
- Pilot // Machine: In this game, pilots much more support and mechanical complexity than the mechs. In particular, there is not much support for taking a new vehicle for a special mission, and the six mech actions have lot of overlap.
- Your War vs The War: Tragedy as an inciting character moment is a useful reminder that the war has touch you individually, and while the game seems to say that the factions are big and essentially enemies of peace, it's hard to link that to good fiction about the rivalries and friendships between pilots.
I'm still waiting for my perfect game in this space. Guess I'll have to write it.