Over the Edge: The Role Playing Game of Surreal Danger by Jonathan Tweet

Over the Edge: The Role Playing Game of Surreal Danger Reviews

• 
  Matthew

  Conspire Like Its 1992—A retrospective review of Over the Edge: the Role-playing Game of Surreal Danger published by Atlas Games and designed by Jonathan Tweet and Robin Laws.
  
  
  http://rlyehreviews.blogspot.com/2018...
  
  
• 
  Jason

  I was brought to Jonathan Tweet’s Over the Edge from reading Ron Edwards’s GNS theory articles from his Forge days. The books seemed like a major enough influence on the indie RPG scene that I should give it a read.
  
  I didn’t finish the book, but not because it wasn’t good. I don’t have any intention to play the game itself, I just wanted to familiarize myself with the game and its mechanics and focus. The rules of the game are only a single chapter long. The rest of the book is all about Al Amarja, the setting for the game. Al Amarja is an independently owned nation-island in the Mediterranean Sea with plenty of weird things going on. Players are invited to read the first chapter on the rules and the second chapter on the basics of Al Amarja, but everything else is for GM eyes only. A lot of the game focuses on mysteries and the unknown, and the game wants not on the characters to be ignorant but the players too. So most of what I skipped were the details of the businesses, NPCs, organizations, and various plots of the island.
  
  I can see why the game was inspirational to a set of players in 1992 when it came out. Character creation is focused on the narrative aspects of your character rather than the mechanical abilities. There are no skill lists; you determine your skills loosely from your named traits (which are again made up in broad strokes by the player rather than dictated by a contained list). One of my favorite details is that each trait you give your character must be accompanied by a “sign,” some visible representation of that trait. When you introduce your character to the table, you recount their signs rather than their traits. It’s an excellent way of grounding those intangible features in communicable fiction. Other fiction-focused design features are giving your character a “motivation” for being in Al Amarja and a “background” that led them to Al Amarja. By the time the game is underway, your character has all these meaty narrative hooks for the GM to latch onto and intertwine these elements with the plot they want to tell.
  
  The design here is really sharp and I was surprised by how much had been incorporated into Edwards’s Sorcerer. My understanding is that this is not the first RPG to use pools, but it has certainly explored a lot of what can be done with a pool. Bonus and penalty dice, experience as a dice pool to add to rolls as you want to, how helping translates into pool additions—these and more are laid out in the rules. Combat uses the same pool mechanic without a separate roll for damage, translating the margin of your victory into damage, just as Sorcerer does. All the optional rules are evidence that Tweet brainstormed (and playtested) long and hard over what could be done with the mechanics and we see that those discoveries are still being used 25 years later.
  
  I have already alluded to the thing that doesn’t sit well with me about the game—the role of secrecy and the almighty power of the GM. The GM is given fiat power over every decision, and in the GM section about the rules (a separate section that modifies what the players were told in chapter one) the GM is advised to roll dice behind the screen and then ignore them to make whatever you want to happen happen. Reading through this, I thought I saw the roots of what Apocalypse World’s insistence on honesty and openness from the MC. The text of Over the Edge is very buddy-buddy with the GM in a conspiratorial sense. Certainly, they are conspiring to give the players what they hope will be a thrilling game, so their intentions are presumably pure, but the tone and approach is very difficult to handle from a modern indie sensibility.
  
  The game gives you a million story seeds and plot hooks if you are willing to take the time to learn the world inside out. It’s a big investment on the front end, but it’s the kind of game in which the investment can pay big dividends if everyone likes what is happening at the table.
  
  While I have no interest in playing the game, I’m really glad I read it and took the time to understand it.
  
• 
  Malum

  I see this as less of a complete game and more of a manual about how to "level up" your roleplaying while giving you the outline of a game.
  
  The rules remind of a proto Fate system, where you make up your own attributes and use keywords to describe your character. There is a lot of the book giving you several rules for the same thing and/or just telling you to do whatever you want. There is also a lot of good GM advice in here.
  
  The main point of the game seems to be to create a system that is abstract enough to let you do anything with it without it constraining your imagination.
  
  Other than that, the setting is very interesting and the writing is fun and funny. I think if I were to run a game like this, though, I might use Unknown Armies or Call of Cthulhu instead.
• 
  Javier Viruete

  Un juego de rol imprescindible. Una obra maestra
• 
  N. Eric

  Way ahead of its time in the story heavy, mechanics lite style of RPGs. Easy to learn, fast to play, and confusing as hell, well, to burgers that is. Its an island that is a mix of Casablanca and Weird Science. This island you have never heard of, yet it seems like it is the vortex of the world's strangeness. For me the best part is that the background can suit almost any concept you want, even outrageous ones. I highly recommend, and thankfully, its all out in PDF because the books are hard to find.
• 
  John

  fiction,fantasy,science fiction,role-playing game
• 
  Nick Carter

  Interesting dice mechanics/open-ended char creation. Fun, zany setting where almost anything was possible. One of my first RPGs.
• 
  Errin

  still awesome
• 
  Michael

  I wish I had discovered this back when I RPG'd.