SPOILERS AHOY!

Insofar as it is possible for a movie to be objectively bad (in terms of internal logic, continuity, and so forth), this movie is objectively bad.

Insofar as it is possible for a movie to be subjectively awful, for me this movie is awful. Almost unremittingly terrible. Total garbage.

As I wrote in my reaction to The Last Jedi, the sequel trilogy — as a result of the foundation thoughtlessly laid by J.J. Abrams in The Force Awakens — is fundamentally built on a nihilistic foundation that diminishes the original films instead of building on them: “If you accept the sequel trilogy as canon while watching the original trilogy, it makes the original trilogy films weaker and less powerful. And that’s really not okay, in my opinion.”

Impressively, with The Rise of Skywalker, Abrams has done it again. Not only does the film make the original trilogy exponentially worse if you accept it as canon, it manages to ALSO make The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi retroactively worse films if you accept it as canon.

We could talk almost endlessly about the myriad ways in which this is true — the incompetent damage done to the mythic arcs of Anakin and Luke by bringing Palpatine back; the retroactively neutered character arcs; the thematic incoherence; and on and on and on — but it’s largely pointless because the film is so godawfully bad that it just doesn’t matter.

Trying to analyze all the ways in which this movie is terrible is actually a fractal exercise in madness. You can talk for hours and not exhaust all the ways in which the film is bad, because the closer you look at the film the more flaws you discover. So rather than trying to do that, I will instead look at two significant ways in which the film is terrible and hope they will serve as exemplars of all the other ways in which the film is terrible.

PALPATINE’S FLEET

One of the film’s major problems is that it’s filled with nonsense. Palpatine’s fleet is a good example of this because every time the film mentions them, it seems really committed to making them even more ridiculous.

First, the ships were apparently buried and erupt out of the earth. This makes no sense. They aren’t designed to land. It doesn’t make sense that you bury them.

Second, they show a comically large number of them on screen. It seems as if the image is meant to be threatening, but it misses the mark and ends up in the comedic absurdity of a five-year-old who has just learned how to copy and paste in Photoshop.

Third, we discover that “his followers have been building [the fleet] for years.”  But… how? Where did the supplies come from?

Fourth, we’re told that in 16 hours “attacks on all free worlds begin.” This is an almost comically short amount of time for them to even pretend to deal with the problem, but don’t worry: The film will shortly make it clear that this is impossible.

Fifth, we’re told that the fleet will increase the First Order’s resources “10,000 fold.” Assume that the First Order has as few as 100 ships currently. We’re being told that Palpatine has one million Star Destroyers. The visual was comedically inept before; the dialogue makes it even more absurd.

And where are the crews for these ships going to come from? This scene also features First Order leaders declaring, “We’ll need to increase recruitments. Harvest more of the galaxy’s young.” Okay, great. Let’s say a star destroyer only needs a crew of a hundred people. So you immediately kidnap a hundred million kids and instantaneously have the infrastructure to indoctrinate and train them. Great. Your fleet will be ready to go in, I dunno, let’s say 10 years?

This is, of course, the fleet that’s supposed to be launching attacks in less than a day.

Sixth, it’s revealed that every single star destroyer has a Death Star laser strapped to its belly.

… no comment.

Seventh, we’re told that the ships can only leave Exegol one at a time by following the signal from a navigation beacon. This is, prima facie, stupid. The film will also contradict this claim multiple times. But whatever, let’s accept the conceit that you can trap the fleet on Exegol by destroying the navigation beacon.

But if this is such essential infrastructure, why would you only build one tower? And why is it completely undefended and unshielded? And given that it’s completely undefended and unshielded, why do the good guys need to land a ground assault team?

Seventh, ha ha ha. Just kidding. The star destroyers can totally have navigation beacons built into them that will allow them to leave Exegol without a ground-based navigation beacon. They just turn that ground-based beacon off and use the ship-based one instead!

But only one ship has it! Because why would you include “able to leave drydock” technology into more than one ship?

Okay. Fine. It’s a very super-special navigational tower and it’s super-expensive and they can’t include it on every ship. Or even more than one ship. Sure. I mean, we’ll ignore the fact that the Rebels didn’t require one of these super-special navigational towers and Rey broadcast the navigation signal across hyperspace from an X-wing, but, sure, those are the “rules” and that’s just—

Eighth, GOTCHA! They blow up the super-special navigation tower, but the star destroyer can still send out the navigation signal! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Any star destroyer could do it, in fact!

Ninth, so they blow up the whole star destroyer! And that’s it! No way out now! Hee hee tee hee.

What’s that, you say? The ground-based navigation tower was never destroyed and could just be flipped back on? And then none of it matters anyway because they just blow all the star destroyers up?

Ho ho hee ha ha ha ho ha.

To be clear: The whole movie is like this.

Take virtually any element of the film and you will find nothing but nonsense. (Think about the Sith dagger for a moment if you’d like to see what I mean. Really think about it: Where did it come from? Why does it exist? What function was it supposed to serve? And how lucky was Rey when she walked up to that one specific, unmarked spot on the coast?) And many of these separate areas of fractal nonsense end up overlapping with each other, which serves to exponentially increase the stupidity.

ROSE

Beyond the nonsense, the other pervasive element in The Rise of Skywalker is the unrelenting retconning of The Last Jedi. It is not merely that the instances of this are so numerous as to be beyond easy cataloguing, it’s that they’re all so… pointless. For example, rolling back Poe’s entire character arc so that he’s once again not ready to assume the mantle of leadership doesn’t lead the character anywhere interesting, it just puts him in a stunted cul-de-sac. Kylo Ren reforging his helmet similarly doesn’t go anywhere; he wears it a couple of times, takes it off largely inconsequentially in the middle of a random scene, and then we just never see it again.

But perhaps the best example of this is how Chris Terrio & J.J. Abrams did Rose dirty.

Rose, of course, was the new major character in The Last Jedi who became an important mentor and friend to Finn before eventually falling in love with him.

And in The Rise of Skywalker, she is basically nonexistent: She pops up here and there to deliver lines as Generic Rebel Person, and is never given a single meaningful contribution or interaction with the other cast members.

Okay. That’s unfortunate. But maybe it’s just unavoidable? There’s already a lot of stuff going on in this movie and it’s possible there just literally wasn’t time to include more material for Rose.

Except, no. Because the movie goes out of its way to create a different female sidekick for Finn who can hang out with him for the final mission. It’s painfully clear that it would have taken literally zero effort for Rose Tico to fill that role. The only reason not to do this is because you’re deliberately attempting to erase The Last Jedi.

But just ignoring Rose isn’t enough. They even include a little scene where Finn says, “I’m going to sacrifice myself,” just so Rose can say, “Okay,” and contradict herself from the last film. (And then somebody else gets to rescue him anyway.)

Is it just sheer pettiness? An abject cowardice that waves the white flag to the most disgusting, misogynist, racist trolls in Star Wars fandom? It ultimately doesn’t matter. It’s a travesty.

To be clear here: It doesn’t matter whether you liked The Last Jedi or if you hated it. Expending all of this narrative energy in order to retcon the previous installments in a series for no other reason than to “fix” some abstract point of continuity that you consider to be “broken” is not how you make a good film. It’s not that continuity isn’t important; it’s that when you focus on continuity-for-the-sake-of-continuity, you are failing to do literally everything that goes into telling a great story.

There are whole scenes in this movie that exist for no other purpose than to say, “Remember this thing that happened in The Last Jedi? WELL, IT NEVER HAPPENED.” These suck the oxygen out of the room. They do not further plot or character or theme. They take up space and time that could be better focused on virtually anything else, disrupting effective pacing and structure.

CONCLUSION

There’s other stuff we could talk about here. Like how the film not once, but twice pretends to kill off a legacy character only to bring them back and then have them do literally nothing else of consequence for the rest of the movie. Or how the movie lacks any subtext, even going so far as to introduce a new droid whose entire job is to announce what emotion you’re supposed to be feeling at any given moment. Or that the movie is trying to cram about three or four times more content into it than the filmmakers are capable of integrating. Or some of the truly baffling editing choices that cut away from the action for no discernible purpose. But it’s all just variations on a theme.

And that theme is:

This movie is total garbage.

There are a handful of moments that are legitimately beautiful or clever or poignant. But I mean that literally: I can count them on one hand. And they are fleeting and largely inconsequential to the whole.

I am certain that I will not dissuade anyone who was planning to see this film from doing so. But I honestly wish that I had not seen it myself.

Imagine The Da Vinci Code except (a) the writing is exceptional and (b) it takes place 9,000 years in the future. Or National Treasure if the American Revolution was a space opera. Or Indiana Jones as a Star Wars movie.

A Talent for War by Jack McDevitt is one of the best books I’ve ever read. So good, in fact, that after I finished it, I immediately flipped back to the first page and read it cover-to-cover a second time.

PREMISE & EXECUTION

Alex Benedict is an antiques dealer. He was raised by his uncle, an archaeologist, but they have become estranged due to his uncle’s disapproval of his “tomb robbing.” Nevertheless, when the passenger ship carrying his uncle disappears into hyperspace and never returns, Alex receives an enigmatic message from his uncle, delivered in the event of his death and describing an incredibly historic find, the details of which are too sensitive to trust to the message and have instead been left as an encrypted file at his uncle’s house. By the time Alex returns home, however, the file has been stolen and he is left with nothing but a few breadcrumbs and a tantalizing mystery to pursue.

A Talent for War is, of course, Benedict’s pursuit of that mystery.

The book opens with the loss of the passenger ship Alex’s uncle was on:

On the night we heard that the Capella had slipped into oblivion, I was haggling with a wealthy client over a collection of four-thousand-year-old ceramic pots. We stopped to watch the reports. There was little to say, really, other than that the Capella had not re-entered linear space as expected, that the delay was now considerable, and an announcement declaring the ship officially lost was expected momentarily.

Over the next few pages you get a taste – just a little sampling! – of both the rich, layered complexity of the novel and its melancholic-yet-epic scope.

You can see here that McDevitt has introduced the tragedy of the Capella in a completely personal-yet-irrelevant manner: The main character receives it as a bit of trivia on a news broadcast playing in the background; the way in which we so often learn of the myriad tragedies that afflict our world. From this simple point McDevitt builds outwards, step by step:

It’s happened before. But never to anything so big. And with so many people. Almost immediately, we had a hit song. And theories.

We delve into the people onboard who were famous and then into those who become famous because they were onboard. And the narrative moves from how the news was reported to how the event becomes history and even, to a certain extent, legend and myth.

And then, abruptly:

About ten days after the loss, I received a transmission from a cousin on Rimway with whom I’d had no communication in years. In case you haven’t heard, he said. Gabe was on the Capella. I’m sorry. Let me know if there’s anything I can do.

Tragedy and news and history and epic are all abruptly collapsed back onto our protagonist; the abstract weight of it all collapsing into something personal and painful and immediate.

This, by itself, is pretty great storytelling. But that’s not all that happens here. Through the lens of the Capella tragedy, McDevitt encodes a ton of essential world-building: how space travel works, how the human polity is organized into a confederation of colonies, how media and information technologies work, etc. And he’s also subtly establishing some of the major themes that will guide the entire book.

In just eight triumphant pages, McDevitt has completely drawn you into his world, his story, and his main character.

This short sequence, however, also demonstrates the difficulty of explaining what makes A Talent for War so great, because to at least some degree I have now spoiled the effect. One of McDevitt’s primary tools in the novel — and one which perfectly suits the nature of its narrative — is the masterful pacing, structure, and shaping of the revelation of knowledge. Thus, the more I discuss, the more I am robbing the book of some of its power.

So I will do my best at this point to speak in generalities.

At the time of his disappearance, Alex’s uncle was on the trail of a major archaeological find. The loss of his original notes forces Alex to dive in, partly following in his uncle’s footsteps and partly charting his own course. In its most basic form, therefore, A Talent for War is a mystery. (Or perhaps it would be more accurate to describe it as an interplanetary thriller.) What elevates this narrative, however, is the beautiful, multilayered texture that McDevitt lends it.

First, as we follow Alex in his investigation we become invested not only in the story of his life and the characters around him, but also in the historical story and personages he’s investigating.

Second, and perhaps most importantly, that historical story is constantly shifting. Each new piece of information that we (and Alex) learn not only adds to that story, it also transforms our understanding of what we already knew. Thus the narrative is not linear; it is instead a holographic patchwork, the parts of which are in a constant state of overlapping flux. It is not one story, it is many stories; it is a myth told and retold not only on the page, but in our own imagination. The effect is electric, forcing us not only to deeply engage with the narrative, but also to immersively walk the same investigatory path that Alex does. We are Alex Benedict, uncovering the lost secrets of cosmic history, sharing in the satisfaction – and frustration! – of watching the puzzle pieces click into place.

Perhaps the greatest triumph of A Talent for War is that we do, in fact, care — and care passionately — about the fictional history that Alex is delving into. It’s comparatively easy for Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, for example, to make us care about the Lost Ark or for The Da Vinci Code to make us care about the holy grail because we are already living in the modern world, hate Nazis, and know the importance of Christianity and its lore. McDevitt has none of those advantages and must instead establish all of that from scratch. Impressively, he does it so seamlessly that you don’t even really notice it happening; you simply arrive at the end of the novel and discover that you are intensely invested in the outcome. Partly this is because McDevitt makes us care about the “historical” characters that are living the history that Alex is uncovering, but it’s also because he makes it intrinsically clear that the history is important to the “modern” world Alex lives in, and we see that reflected in every aspect of the world — politics, characters, architecture, culture. Everything.

And perhaps the most daring thing McDevitt does is to NOT provide an authoritative answer to every question. Thus we are forced to become active readers, piecing information together for ourselves and reaching conclusions that the narrative doesn’t deliver to us on a platter. In some cases, however, there is simply… enigma. Mysteries for which there is no solution. It is these little patches of uncertainty which lend the final patina of reality to Alex Benedict’s world and the immense depth of history which lies beneath it, for certainty and absolute truth can only be found in that which is artificially constructed.

As with the beginning of the novel, so at the end we find ourselves standing atop a pinnacle of myriad, kaleidoscopic complexity. One which is thrilling and epic, while simultaneously being melancholic and intensely personal. The personal is reflected into the epic, giving it humanity and truth; the epic is reflected into the personal, making it grand and true. Thus, like a house of mirrors, the totality somehow eludes your grasp.

Which is why you, too, might find yourself immediately flipping back to the beginning of the book and reading it once again.

If you do, what is most remarkable is that you will find yourself somehow reading a completely different book than the one you just finished. Everything which you have learned in your first journey along this road will cast a fresh light on each step of the story, utterly transforming your understanding of it. Even as you once again approach the end, the totality of what you have learned on your second reading will change your perception of what you thought you knew before.

And that is the mark of greatness.

GRADE: A+

A WORD ABOUT THE SEQUELS

Fifteen years after A Talent for War was published, Jack McDevitt returned to Alex Benedict and began writing sequels (starting with Polaris in 2004).

These are good books. They’re fun books. There are not infrequent moments when you’ll find yourself caught up in both the action and the enigma, unable to put the book down and staying up far later than you’d intended to compulsively turning the pages.

But sadly (and I say this mostly so that you can prepare yourself) they pale in comparison to A Talent for War.

First, they lack the incredibly beautiful, multilayered texture of the original. They are far more linear in their construction, with one revelation following another but never truly forcing you to revisit that which you already knew.

Second, they become increasingly formulaic in both their plots and prose.

Third, and perhaps least forgivably, they become lazy.

Where A Talent for War delves deep into the historical material being researched, allowing you to compellingly follow in Benedict’s footsteps as he pieces together the lost secrets of the past, the sequels generally just provide a rough summary of findings. Not only is this less thrilling, but it also means that the sequels lack the double narrative of A Talent for War: Where the original not only invested you in the story of Benedict but also the story of those historical personas he was pursuing in his research, the sequels lose that extra dimension and become lesser works as a result.

Most frustrating, however, is a complete lack of care for continuity. Contradictions abound, sometimes within books, but even more frequently between books in the series. For example, one book (Firebird) ends with a character stating that such-and-such an event will happen four years from now. The next book, Coming Home, is dated one year later, but the event has already inexplicably taken place. At another point in the series, the characters all appear to simply forget that the epochal events of Echo (the fifth book in the series) happened. The conclusion of A Talent for War, in fact, is apparently retconned out of existence, although it remains completely unclear to me whether this was an intentional choice or just another glitch. There even comes a point where one of the characters says, “How could we have missed this?!” while ignoring the fact that they literally discussed this very thing just fifty pages earlier.

This becomes a constant, frustrating grind on the series, in large part because it is not just a matter of trivia; these continuity errors cluster around the major events of the plot, sapping credibility and the suspension of disbelief from the characters, world-building, and narrative.

I do not, however, want to leave you with a completely (or even predominantly) negative impression of these books. Like I said, they’re fun. I enjoyed them. You’ll likely enjoy them, too. But they ultimately do not live up to the astonishing triumph of A Talent for War.

A guide to grades here at the Alexandrian.

Momentum in 2d20 is generated when you roll more successes on an action test than required by the difficulty of the check. These points of Momentum can be spent to either immediately improve the result of the current check or saved to be used in the future, allowing you to build Momentum over the course of several lesser actions until you can accomplish big things.

Momentum can be spent to do stuff like:

• Add +1d20 to future skill tests
• Create obstacles for opponents (generally increasing the difficulty of their skill tests)
• Improve the quality of success
• Increase the scope of success
• Reduce the time required to accomplish a task
• Perform a normally noisy action stealthily
• Take an extra action in an action scene
• Boost damage on an attack
• Get a called shot
• Trigger program effects in Infowar

And so forth.

In Infinity we also specifically emphasized that Momentum is best seen as a creative tool for empowering the players. The GM is also given several structures for making complex rulings around Momentum (see p. 407 of the core rulebook).

One of these is using Momentum to model preparation. If the PCs want to take one action to set up or create advantage on another, the GM can call for a test on the first action (even if it normally wouldn’t require an action test) and then any Momentum generated on that test represents the advantage gained on the primary task.

One of the limitations to this approach, however, is that Momentum ablates over time. At the end of each scene, the team’s pool of saved Momentum is decreased by one. This means that if you want to set up an advantage in one scene that will benefit you for the next scene, it’s difficult to do that.

This problem can be solved by adapting a cool mechanic from Trail of Cthulhu: dedicated pools.

DEDICATED MOMENTUM POOLS

A dedicated Momentum pool can only be used in a given circumstance or in relation to a given subject. For example, you might hack the security cameras in a megacorp’s headquarters, creating a pool of Momentum that can be spent on things like Stealth and Observation tests when the PCs go to infiltrate the HQ.

GMs might also rule that certain resources simply grant a pool of dedicated Momentum. (Perhaps the patron who hired the PCs to steal the megacorp’s new research into captured Tohaa technology simply hands them the access codes to the security cameras as part of their briefing packet. They get the same dedicated Momentum pool even though they didn’t make any skill tests to obtain it.)

There are two advantages to a dedicated Momentum pool.

First, the dedicated Momentum pool does not ablate. The dedicated Momentum pool is separate from other saved Momentum and does not decrease at the end of each scene. This makes a dedicated Momentum pool a great model for preparations that play out over multiple scenes or which are made long before their intended use: The PCs lose some of the utility of the Momentum (since it has to be used for a specific purpose), but in exchange the Momentum becomes more durable.

Second, the dedicated Momentum pool can also create unique vectors that allow the PCs to take actions that they otherwise couldn’t. If you have access to the security feeds, for example, you can check them for activity in other areas of the building. If you have a copy of the religious text of an extremist Morat cult, you can reference it for information about their rituals that you would otherwise have no way of knowing.

These vectors can cut both ways, though! When the Momentum from the security camera pool runs out for example, it could easily justify the GM spending Heat to generate a complication in the form of the megacorp’s hackers realizing their system has been compromised and launching an Infowar attack on the PCs.

On page 33 of the Infinity roleplaying game, there is an “Advanced Rule” in a box:

As an advanced rule, instead of using a group pool for saved Momentum each PC can save Momentum and use it later individually. Players who have saved Momentum can spend it at any time to assist the actions of other player characters (or NPC allies) and otherwise influence the scene. At any given time, a player can save a maximum of six Momentum. In addition, any single action can benefit from a maximum of six saved Momentum. (For example, if two players had both saved four Momentum each, they still wouldn’t be able to spend all eight Momentum on a single action.) During Momentum depletion, each character loses 1 Momentum.

This is presented as an optional rule, but the truth is that, in my opinion and based on countless hours of playtesting, it is the only way that people should be playing the 2d20 System.

Let’s back up for a second and talk about how Momentum works in the 2d20 System, which was created by Jay Little for Mutant Chronicles and then also used in Infinity, Conan, John Carter of Mars, and Star Trek Adventures. When you resolve an action test in 2d20, you determine a target number based on Attribute + Skill and then you roll a pool of d20 dice — generally starting with 2d20, but expandable to 3d20, 4d20, 5d20, etc. You generate one success per die that rolls under the target number, plus an additional success if the roll is under the pertinent skill’s Focus. (So even if you’re only rolling 2d20, you’re often capable of generating up to four successes.) You succeed on the check if you score a number of successes equal to the difficulty of the task — so if the difficulty is 2, you need to generate two successes to succeed.

Here’s the final wrinkle: If you score MORE successes than you need to succeed at the task, those extra successes are converted into Momentum, which can be spent to enhance the current action or saved and spent later to gain bonuses to future checks, create obstacles for opponents, and other special effects.

At first glance, this seems fairly unremarkable. But in actual practice, it’s a really interesting system to GM for. As I wrote in the GM advice section of Infinity:

…setting a precise difficulty level is not a significant feature of the game. In fact, at least 95% of the time you will basically be deciding whether a task is of Average (D1) difficulty or Challenging (D2) difficulty. (The higher difficulty ratings of Daunting, Dire, and Epic obviously exist, but can be incredibly difficult or even impossible for some characters to achieve under normal circumstances. As such, they should be rare in their application.)

The reason for this is because the Infinity system is far less interested in the simple binary of passing or failing a check, and is instead intensely interested in the quality of your success, which is measured and leveraged through the use of Momentum.

So whereas a GM running D&D or Numenera or Feng Shui 2 is often giving a lot of thought to what the specific numerical value of difficulty for a particular test should be, the GM of a 2d20 game is instead generally just asking, “Is this check unusually hard?” If yes, then difficulty 2. If no, then difficulty 1. The mechanical focus of the game is (or, at least, should be) all in how Momentum is used after the check.

GROUP vs. INDIVIDUAL MOMENTUM

This brings us to saving Momentum. As noted, any Momentum generated by a check that isn’t immediately spent can instead be saved to be used in the future. The mechanical difference we’re talking about is whether you:

• put your saved Momentum into a group pool, from which any player can pull Momentum to spend; or
• put your saved Momentum into a personal pool which you control

The distinction between these points has little or no impact on game balance. Personal pools can theoretically allow a group to save more total Momentum, but in practice this rarely happens, it’s counterbalanced by the fact that every pool ablates a point of Momentum at the end of each scene (so the group loses saved Momentum faster), and the amount of saved Momentum that can be spent on a single check is capped at the same amount.

(We also playtested a variant which was completely equivalent mechanically: Total saved Momentum in the group is capped at 6 and the group collectively chooses which saved Momentum is lost during scene ablation. This makes bookkeeping more complicated and also tends to result in a pointless little “Momentum dance” where players spend their saved Momentum in order to open up cap space for the current player to save their Momentum.)

So if it’s basically mathematically equivalent, what’s the big deal?

Primarily, off-turn player engagement.

Consider a typical combat system: Everybody rolls an initiative and, when their initiative comes around, they take their turn. What happens when it’s not their turn? They just wait for it to be their turn again. The longer the wait, the more likely it is that they will become bored or tune out.

You can counteract this by giving players off-turn engagement. I discuss one example of this in The Design History of Saving Throws: D&D saving throws mechanically engage a player (i.e., let them roll dice) when it is not their turn. It’s a very basic form of engagement and doesn’t involve player agency, but it is physically engaging and that’s enough to break up the routine “it’s not my turn” cycle of tuning out.

When you used a group pool of saved Momentum that anyone can pull from, the player generating that Momentum gives up ownership of it. The only player engaged when the Momentum is used is the active player who is choosing to pull from the pool.

But if you use personal pools, then the player who controls the saved Momentum has off-turn engagement when they spend it to help the active player. This is off-turn engagement with the dial turned all the way up, because even when they’re not actively spending Momentum, the player is constantly looking for the opportunity to do so.

The other factor here is ownership. When a player dumps Momentum into a group pool it is almost immediately anonymized. When that Momentum is later spent by another player, the original player doesn’t feel any ownership over that; they don’t feel the direct connection between the thing that they did and the thing that the current player is doing. When Momentum is spent from a personal pool, on the other hand, the player has immediate and visceral agency. This usually also bleeds into the game world, with the player spending the Momentum explaining how their character is actually contributing to the current action.

This sense of collective contribution to success creates a group camaraderie that, once again, tends to transcend the specific moments in which Momentum is spent: The group is mechanically encouraged to view their successes collectively and take action collaboratively instead of focusing on individual accomplishments.

DESIGN HISTORY

So if I feel this strongly about personal pools being the correct approach for Infinity, why is it pushed off into an optional sidebar?

That’s a complicated question.

When I first became the Lead Developer for the Infinity RPG, the only 2d20 game in print was Mutant Chronicles. I was handed a mechanically complete lifepath system (that needed setting content slotted into it, but should otherwise not be touched) and a half-finished system that needed to be finished. So I spent a couple of months doing that and then turned my attention to developing the setting material for the core rulebook and the scenarios for Adventures in the Human Sphere, Quantronic Heat, and other supplements.

It was at this point, however, that the development process hit several problems. Basically, right around the time that I was declaring Infinity to be “system locked” (like picture lock for a film, I think of system lock as being the point where the mechanics are nailed down to the point where you can confidently develop supplementary material) there was a simultaneous project inside Modiphius to develop an internal 2d20 SRD that would create consistency between all published versions of the game.

In developing the Infinity version of the 2d20 System there were a couple key design principles I had established.

First, because we were going to be developing full-fledged systems for Warfare, Infowar, and Psywar, I felt it was important to streamline and simplify the core of the system. The complexity of the game would come from having these robust scenario/game structures, and therefore other sources of complexity in the system should be smoothed out.

Second, the 2d20 System in Mutant Chronicles — like the pre-Genesys system Little had designed before it — features a set of core mechanics designed to empower players and give GMs tools for making powerful, robust rulings, but then surrounds those mechanics with a ton of mechanically crunchy specificity. The core mechanics of the Momentum system, for example, are beautifully designed to empower player creativity and improvisation, but then the system works relentlessly to lock that down by providing a laundry list of specifically defined ways that you’re allowed to spend the Momentum. My own design predilections, on the other hand, lean the other way: Ditch all the hand-holding and just leave the powerful core structures.

These two principles worked well with each other: Focusing on cruft-free core structures simultaneously simplified the mechanical core so that it could be developed through the new functionality of Infowar and Psywar rather than a lot of situational rules.

But the principles didn’t work well with the new guiding principle of unifying all 2d20 System design to match the new SRD. The result was a tug of war for the heart and identity of the game, complicated immensely because we had a dozen freelancers working on supplemental material that had to be constantly revised every time the core mechanics were violently yanked in a new direction.

I won some of those battles. I lost others. In the end, the only way I could keep the personal Momentum pools that I felt so passionately about in the game was as an optional rule, and even that was a fight.

But, seriously, if you’re running a 2d20 game — any 2d20 game! — swap to personal Momentum pools.

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I’ve talked about Numenera and the Cypher System it spawned quite a bit in the past, both here on the Alexandrian and elsewhere. Often what I’m talking about are the GM intrusions, which are one of the best and most innovative elements of the system.

When saying that intrusions are innovative, however, I’m not infrequently confronted by people demanding stuff like, “Have you ever read any Fate game at all?” It’s an ironic comment because it’s an accusation of ignorance which is, in fact, born from ignorance. But it’s happened often enough that I feel a need to just write up a definitive explanation that I can reference in the future.

First: Yes, I’m familiar with and have played (and run) Fate.

Second: Yes, both games feature a mechanic in which the GM offers a point of meta-currency to a player to achieve an effect which the player can cancel by spending their own meta-currency. But the similarity is superficial, in much the same way that saying “in Magic: The Gathering you play cards from your hand and in Dominion you also play cards from your hand” is a superficial comparison of those games.

Let’s break this down.

GM INTRUSIONS

I discuss the GM intrusions of the Cypher System in much more detail in The Art of GM Intrusions, but the short version is that the function of a GM intrusion is for the GM to say, “I’m going to do something that the rules don’t normally allow me to do.”

GMs will, of course, do this from time to time in any system. But there’s generally a limit. For example, if a GM’s response to a successful attack in a typical RPG was to say, “Yeah! And you hit the mammoth-saur so hard that your axe actually gets stuck in its side! And then it rears back and rips the axe right out of hands!” the players would generally say (or at least think), “This is bullshit.” Because punishing people for making a successful attack is bullshit; it’s a violation of the rules we’ve all agreed to abide by.

But hitting something so hard that your weapon gets stuck in it is actually pretty fucking badass. And what the GM intrusion mechanics basically let the GM say is, “Wouldn’t this be cool?” (by offering XP) and for the players to say, “Fuck yeah!” (by accepting the XP) or “No, I don’t think so,” (by spending an XP to cancel the intrusion) within the rules we’ve all agreed to abide by.

We could, of course, just chat this out without the mechanic, but (a) you can really say that about any mechanic in an RPG and (b) in practice, making it an explicit mechanic lubricates the interaction so that play doesn’t bog down on these points.

This simultaneously lets Monte Cook, the designer, keep the system streamlined by binning all the special case rules. The example he gives in the book basically boils down to, “The reason other games have attack of opportunity rules is to eliminate weird edge cases where turn-based combat creates odd and undesirable outcomes like being unable to stop someone from running past you because it’s not your turn. Instead of having a whole heap of special case rules trying to weed out those corner cases, the GM should just use the intrusion mechanic to deal with them when and if they’re important.”

Basically, any time the rules would discourage something awesome from happening or result in one of these weird edge cases due to their streamlined abstraction, the GM instrusion provides a mechanism for resolving it.

FATE COMPELS

Let’s compare this to Fate in which the GM can identify a specific Aspect belonging to a character and compel it by paying a Fate Point to the player. (And the player, in turn, can cancel the compel by instead spending a Fate Point of their own.)

As we’ve noted, the form of the mechanic is superficially similar. But the function of the mechanic has a completely different feature set.

I’ve been spending a lot of time with the Dresden Files RPG lately, so we’ll use that as our primary example. It includes two types of compels: Limitations and Complications. Limitations are the GM forcing the player to take a specific type of action (which, you’ll note, is not something that GM intrusions do at all). Complications are similar to one variety of GM intrusion (by introducing elements that are disadvantageous to the PCs during play), but note how the actual execution of the mechanic is almost completely inverted: Compelling an Aspect isn’t providing mechanical support for unanticipated edge cases; they’re explicitly the core rule by which Aspects (which are one of the primary ways of describing your character mechanically) are mechanically implemented.

Here’s one way to clearly perceive the distinction: If you took GM intrusions out of the Cypher System, nothing on your character sheet would change. If you took compels out of Fate, you’d have a whole bunch of negative-leaning Aspects on your character sheet without any mechanical hook for using them.

WHY DOES THIS MATTER?

Because the misapprehension that GM intrusions are supposed to be used like compels in Fate appears to be causing a lot of Fate players to misuse and dismiss one of the most useful innovations in RPG design in the last decade.

If you believe that GM intrusions are just “watered down compels from Fate” (as one Fate player told me), it means that you’re not only limiting your use of GM intrusions to one very tiny part of what they’re capable of, you’re also saddling the GM intrusion mechanic with an entire ethos (being the primary mechanism for leveraging character traits into play) which GM intrusions are not mechanically capable of robustly supporting (because, again, that’s not what they’re designed to do).

The opposite, of course, would also be true: If you tried to use Fate compels as if they were GM intrusions, the result would almost certainly be a very sub-optimal use of the Fate system. However, I don’t think I’ve ever seen this in actual play or online discussions, which is why my discussion here is primarily focused in the opposite direction.