ICON Final Impressions

The ICON campaign I was playing in wrapped up a couple of weeks ago, totalling 28 sessions in 9 months. I’m not going to write up a big comprehensive review^[1]. Instead I’ll just touch on a few things that I think are most interesting.

The Campaign

Briefly: I had a lot of fun in this game. My character was an intentional break with my usual “witty and sarcastic” fallback archetype. I played a jester named Yorrick, who had a penchant for explosives and capital-a Anarchism. She was probably my best-loved PC yet. The scenario we played through was enjoyable, and followed an escalation curve one might expect from ICON’s chapter system (local, then regional, then global adventures).

Earlier Questions Answered

I had two questions at the end of my first impressions post:

1. Will the combat system’s complexity continue to slow down play over time?
2. Will character growth stay along an appropriate curve?

To the former question, yup! The complexity got more manageable, but it never felt simple or smooth. Even after nearly 30 sessions, I am the only player in the group that knows all the movement types without looking them up^[2]. We knew vaguely what each status does, but interactions between different rules still required consulting the book fairly often. I would say that many of the issues we faced could be fixed with some streamlining, rather than a rework of the game’s bones.

To the latter question, we have to look at combat and narrative separately.

Character growth in combat felt perfect. Numbers don’t really go up, so we weren’t dealing with “oh, this always hits now” or “this early game option doesn’t work at all anymore.” Instead we just ended up with wider, more interesting builds. On the flipside, those options did accrete over time and slow the game down.

In narrative, things are a mixed bag. My experience is that Blades characters tend to grow their attributes to the point where the game breaks down, because every roll is a hard 6. ICON solves that problem, by giving players a finite and slower-paced set of attribute improvements.

On the other hand, its narrative powers need a little re-tuning. Some sound good, but never really felt right in play:

Gaia Compass - You have a knack for navigation. You always know the distance and direction of the nearest (I) village (II) town (III) settlement of any kind. You can sense dungeons within a few miles, and get a bad feeling when one is about to surface.

We just didn’t spend that much time lost or near soon-to-surface dungeons. Other abilities look fun, are fun, and grow into game-breaking demigodhood:

Habitual Line Stepper - 2/session - You instantly disappear from sight and re-appear somewhere:

• I: Nearby
• II: Within two or three hundred paces
• IIII: Within a mile

You don’t have to see your destination, but you are shunted back to your starting point if it’s occupied or obstructed (like trying to hop into solid rock, for example).

This was the first ability I took for my character, and I used it to its fullest. If I were running the game I’d probably change the ability to require line-of-sight to the destination, because “you can teleport anywhere within a quarter mile (or a mile)” is too powerful a tool. As we increased in chapter, play increasingly warped around instant-win abilities like Habitual Line Stepper. Opportunities for creative problem solving, spiraling consequences, or unexpected characterization could be tossed aside, which is a shame.

The Two-Game Experiment

Over the campaign I came to think of ICON as a statement: roleplaying and tactical combat don’t mix, and if you want both you want two different games. ICON provides both games for you. The gossamer-thin connection between the games is character advancement, where each level grants both narrative and combat benefits. Otherwise abilities, character states, and even the environment around you shares no continuity. In my first-impressions post I praised the game for its honesty in this regard. “There are two games and never the twain shall meet” seemed like a way to cut through the contradictions of the roll-d20-to-hit lineage.

I was initially very resistant to the idea that harm would be separate, though. What, you mean if I fall down a shaft and break my leg it doesn’t slow me down in a boss fight right after? Or if I’m riddled with wounds after a disastrous ambush, I can scramble up the side of a building no problem? I decided that I was probably being unfair, and that this sort of situation would feel natural in play. The reality was sort of in the middle. This dissonance popped up a few times, but we sort of ignored it and moved on.

There did end up being some friction from having two separate sets of capabilities. My character could teleport across a battlefield as long as she wasn’t fighting, and could pull bombs out of her sleeves as long as she was. Outside a fight I would start to say “oh, I can just use my bombs here” only to remember I didn’t actually have any? Again the solution is to ignore the discrepancy and move on (begrudgingly - I wanted those bombs).

Where the experiment actually fails for me is the gravity combat exerts on the rest of the game. Because the combat system requires the prep of selecting a group of foes and designing an arena to fight them in, fights were rarely spontaneous. Usually they were more like setpieces, which the GM needed to set up in advance and the players knew to steer towards. We would also play very differently leading up to a fight, because we knew the narrative situation would fall away in the face of the combat rules.

Strangely the core issue is that combat is just too meaty and interesting. When we started play each battle would run about half a session. By the end of the campaign, we were regularly taking a session and a half. As fights grew longer they felt less related to the narrative play that surrounded them; it was like a second game we happened to be playing. It’s a weird complaint, but it was one that pressed on my mind the longer we played. My roommate, who also played in the campaign, put it best: “I like Magic the Gathering, but not in the middle of an RPG session.” Making the system deeper and more fun doesn’t mean it better serves the play experience.

I come away from ICON really impressed by its grid-based combat, which is the best of all tabletop games I’ve played or read. The narrative rules are a good time, and I love when people take what works for them from Blades without bringing the whole 800 pound gorilla. I also come away from ICON with an increased conviction that I’m not interested in games designed with a skirmish wargame subsystem. I definitely don’t want to break one one out every session. To a large portion of the hobby, crunchy tactical games and roleplaying are like chocolate and peanut butter, two great tastes that taste great together. To me it seems like they’re a different food metaphor that I can’t think of, two meals that I’d kind of rather have separately.