New Avalon – Review by Anon

By: Anon
Originally posted: 08.03.2017

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NEW AVALON REVIEW

Disclaimer: I’ve never played a game of Changeling: The Lost before.

New Avalon is a series of one-shots in which Vox constantly asks for feedback about his mechanics. I doubt he actually cares for feedback about anything else, but I’ll share some of my thoughts anyways. I’ll also be concise to the point of being curt, because otherwise, I’d feel like I wasted my time writing it.


KING OF NEW AVALON

This is the first one-shot. The writing starts off awful to parse, but it gets better. The prose also has a wonderful cadence that results from Vox attempting to shove as many adjective clauses and unnecessary commas in the middle of perfectly fine sentences. It gets better, but never disappears altogether.

The story is simple and fits a one-shot format: you’re Arthur, and you’re on a quest to find Excalibur. Except it’s in magic Baltimore. And you’re an ogre.

You are immediately thrust upon a slew of proper nouns. There’s enough context clues to explain half of them. At about halfway through the thread, the other half are laid out in paragraphs OOC. It’s mostly Vox jerking off to the setting.

A lot of the characters are bordering on the edge of passable. Most of them have no impact; anything interesting is gone after a few lines. The main character is fine as he is, although there’s some wasted potential from Vox being too afraid to take control from the players.

I’ll take about mechanics later.

If you don’t know the setting, you probably shouldn’t read this.


SCARRED BY THORNS

Vox has now decided to interject non-necessary information by parentheses (there’s no way this is awful at all), even after all those em-dashes, colons, and semicolons.

Action is more descriptive and drawn out. Someone loudly complained earlier. Guess Vox listened a little.

The story is about a Changeling who just comes back to the mortal realm. You do a thing, and then it’s all over; it blows its load too soon. It’ll leave you hanging, panting, and wanting, and your only option left will be to read something genuinely good, like /qst/ plays Myst. Even the epilogue is incredibly unsatisfying.

The exposition’s fitted into story through ham-fisted dialogue. It’s somewhat entertaining, so it’s passable. Personally, I would prefer a combination of this and the ridiculous immersion from King of New Avalon. Vox does this once with the word “Fetch,” where right after the narration also highlights this bluntly. You know, just in case you didn’t get it, you fucking retard.



Characters are garbage. The sole purpose of most exchanges is moving the plot forward and not for characterizing the speakers in a memorable way. Also, Vox believes in providing the MC’s jump-off point for the players to then characterize. Please realize the bottom of the ocean is not a jumping point. Here, MC is incredibly passive and reactive in terms of story progression. The group of people who finds this interesting probably overlaps with those who eat paper.

This one-shot is extremely short. It’s also extremely insulting to your time.


JULY AT CHRISTMAS

Vox suddenly decides to not write like trash.

July at Christmas is about a pyromaniac wrangling with political affairs, and it’s dialogue intensive, as it should be. MC deals with a myriad of assholes. She’s also an asshole.

There’s too many aggressive assholes. Vox, you don’t have to leave an impression with your fists. Still, interactions between the characters carry the story easily, rather than the setting being in the front. Conversations are interesting for once.

Should you read this? …I guess?


MECHANICS

Alright, Vox. I know this is all you care about.

Die are with best of two using 1d10 + modifiers. Critical overrides are disabled, because that’s a special kind of stupid with 1d10s. Modifiers are explained in a character sheet, and the cost of using bonuses is “Glamour” or nothing if circumstances will allow. Glamour is your currency for saving rolls, and it’s capped so that not every roll can be saved. Jokes on you, Vox is so soft you can use it every failed roll.

The length of a one-shot makes it so that this isn’t a resource you have to manage. The DC on most rolls are so pathetically easy that every time someone fucks up, you can patch it up with Glamour and there’ll be no disaster. This is painful to watch in the third one-shot, where Vox gives handouts every time you’re low on it. Also, fucking up a roll and losing health doesn’t do anything, because the one-shot would end before you actually die.



Rolls. Okay, it’s a best of two because a best of three makes it harder. It also means the rolls are more variable. Having to rely on two anons to ruin everything instead of three means every roll is even more nail-biting than before. But rolling poorly means being punished for luck and not the players’ actions. It goes against what Vox seems to be looking for: having players properly assess a situation. He drops down a character sheet— which lists multiple usable skills—an attribute list to give bonuses in specific situations, and DCs for each prompt when needed.

There was a mention that the collection of Glamour was an issue. Maybe blend it in narrative and use it as a reward rather than a task that the players have to go through. Smart choices result in Glamour down the line. This way, the story doesn’t have to take pit stops often, and players are incentivized to think harder. I mean, Vox is already carelessly doing this without even prompted to. Want to take time to make Glamour collection a part of the story as an interesting way to help characterize people? Small arc to collect it. Don’t want to slow the plot? Put it at the end of threads, or end of days in the narrative.

And for skills in the character sheet, at least mention them in the story loosely before letting the players use it. Ease them in. I’ll always think that these things add too much complexity too fast and are awful, clunky crutches that help tide over the fact that the system couldn’t be streamlined smoothly into the prompts.

Glamour and bonus providing skills have made the dice a joke, and by extension, the prompts that ask for them.


I SHOULD WRAP THIS UP

Enough overzealous potshots. Vox’s style of writing is by no means boring. Between the vivid imagery and varying sentence structures, it’s all fun to read. To boot, the setting is, admittedly, very interesting.

I have attempted to plot a diagram of the level of quality of these one-shots. Despite the difficulties of creating a trendline with a lack of data, I’ve manage to salvage some comprehensive findings that will assuredly determine the quality of the up and coming “Cinderella Sanction.” This name is easy to remember because Vox repeats it constantly to remind you. He’ll run it in Fall, he says? Yes, advertising a quest he won’t run until months later when no one remembers.

But holy mother of fuck, of course I’ll be there. Just look at the projections on the graph, it’s all too telling! Jaw dropping, really. There's no scale for quality, but who needs that when you can easily see that it’ll be around three times better than “July in Christmas”?

Well slap my ass and call me a bitch, that does it; better hold out for Vox’s real Changeling quest.