Crafting a Fantasy Game

Since I’m going to be doing a lot of work playing with it as my tabletop flavor of the month: what is Fantasy Craft?

In 2000, Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition came out, featuring the d20 system, one of the more divergent games was Spycraft. Eschewing D&D 3e’s fantasy trappings for modern espionage and action, it introduced a number of mechanics that made it significantly different from its parent game, including:

• Action Dice, a limited number of dice that can be added to the usual d20 roll by each player each game session.
• Chase mechanics, an abstracted way of representing vehicle and foot pursuits.
• Critical Threat and Error, where people spend action dice to activate high and low rolls respectively, rather than having automatic success or failure.

With over a dozen books printed out for it, Spycraft was later revised as Spycraft 2.0, with great changes to just about every mechanic that made it essentially a different game, even if a lot of the framework was similar. The big addition was Dramatic Conflicts, where the chase rules were expanded to represent a great number of opposed efforts – infiltration, seduction, manhunts, etc. Another significant addition was attempting to divorce the rules subtly from the original espionage genre, trying to make it into a more flexible modern action RPG. Supplements like Origin of the Species and Spellbound introduced more fantasy options for Spycraft 2.0. Lastly, the addition of Campaign Options codified rule changes to support different play themes – making combat more or less deadly, changing magic, or making characters more or less capable.

Why go over all this? Well, the answer lies in the current addition to Spycraft – Mastercraft. Mastercraft was not intended as quite as genre-specific as Spycraft, and the first product in that line in Fantasy Craft. One should understand that with two editions behind it, Fantasy Craft has taken quite a different trajectory than some of the other games that have evolved from Dungeons and Dragons 3e, such as Dungeons and Dragons 4e or Pathfinder. It represents a change smaller than D&D 4e but much greater than Pathfinder (which has been dubbed D&D 3.75).

When I went to come up with a game a year ago, I know I wanted to do an original world (or at least a bog-standard fantasy world) of my own. Originally it was planned for D&D 3e, but I was dissatisfied with a lot of the design aspects of the game. I wanted classes and magic items and funny ears but some aspects of the game left me cold. Namely, the love lavished on magic-based characters and skill or combat-based characters were left out in the cold. Though there were books and books of added traits for skill and combat characters, magic trumps them at every turn. There are an insane amount of spells that magic users have to cover every contingency, leading to the so-called “Batman wizard”, characters that can do anything competently given a bit of foresight.

But I didn’t want to jump ahead to D&D 4e. D&D 4e is a very fun system – within its purview. It doesn’t have much room for campaign customization, other than what classes and races you allow. I didn’t want somebody playing a fighter to have more options than ‘which of these four attacks do I take’? Pathfinder presented the same problems as 3e. Arguably, it makes them worse, making some spellcasters even better and offering other classes abilities that amount to chump change.

What I was going to do was make a 3.5 game using House Rule #2, based off this comprehensive D&D class tier list. That’s the way it went for the early stages of planning…

… until I learned about Fantasy Craft.

It was a big jump to learn (and I’m still learning), but my players have loved the game, some even hinting at using it as well. If you have any fondness for D&D 3e, I highly recommend it. It’s more flexible than D&D 3e, with characters getting more abilities (and thus more customized characters, and having the classes be more balanced and robust, with no need to take special advanced classes (though they’re still available) to be viable. There are very, very few “junk traits” that players have to take to get to where they want to be. Monsters level with players, meaning you don’t get artificial superhumans through leveling. Which isn’t to say characters get more competent, but it’s through gaining extra tricks, versatility, and abilities that both deepen specialties and broaden characters. Mages are still probably too good, but it’s a slight advantage rather than overall dominance.

I’ve run it for about a year, and I still want to come back to it sometime. I don’t say that for many systems I run that long, and whether I do something with Fantasy Craft or Spycraft, I actually look forward to my side of the mechanics. Fantasy Craft gives a gamemaster a bit of a game all their own, and I’d like to play it again now that I know so much more.