Mint Plays Games: Laser-Ritter.
Over September and October, I played a Session 0 and three sessions of Laser-Ritter with my home group. Laser-Ritter is a space-fantasy ttrpg, currently in ash-can, that encourages you to create your setting as you play. There are five character archetypes that pull from common space fantasy tropes, but especially from media like Star Wars & Dune, with swashbuckling elements from media like the Three Musketeers and Treasure Planet.
The tone set by the book is very hands-off: similar to the tradition of OSR games, there are names and lists that hint towards a setting, but don't describe any of it in detail. The world of Laser Ritter is gestured towards, hinted, at, but definition happens as you play - particularly in Session 0.
Before you make characters in Laser-Ritter, the group collaboratively creates a few key details that give us an idea of what our galaxy looks like. Our group came up with a recent shift in power: a former criminal syndicate lost and shattered, and a hegemony comfortable in the money it carried to power. We also created a mysterious group called The Basalt Pillar, a secret guild of assassains that traded in tables that bore a dead language. Each detail was touched by four different people, which made the universe feel like it belonged to all of us.
The character options act mostly like playbooks: you pick a type and make selections within a limited range of choices. These playbooks encourage you to play to a certain type, and guide you towards a differentiation from the other players. Our group had two people both choose the Freebooter, but the players made an effort to pursue different choices within their playbooks, to make their Freebooters feel distinct and unique. Some of their strengths overlapped, but their motivations and inventory still made them feel like different people. These playbooks feel very similar to the practices of Forged in the Dark and PbtA: clearly defined roles with limited choices allow you to play into tropes that fit the genre.
When it comes to procedures of play, Laser-Ritter uses 2d10 for pretty much every roll. The numbers are added together with one of 4 stat modifiers, and must cross a threshold number in order to succeed: 10 being something easy to do, and 18 being something terribly difficult. In some situations, characters may experience fortune or misfortune, which is represented by a third d10. With fortune, you add up the two best, and with misfortune, you add up the two worst.
You can also gamble away parts of your character sheet: the integrity of your gear, pieces of your backstory, and even your fate. When you gamble a piece of your sheet, you gain fortune, regardless of the situation. However, if your third dice is not kept, you lose the wager and lose access to that piece, either permanently or temporarily, depending on what you bet. This feels directly connected to Pushing Your Luck in Forged in the Dark games, apart from the fact that the loss can feel quite a bit more permanent.
Another piece that felt resonant with Forged in the Dark is the Take A Breather process that happens between action scenes. When characters Take A Breather, they find new gear, repair their kits, or heal themselves, physically or emotionally. These are slower moments, more narrative than procedural, that allow us to observe the inner lives and struggles of the characters, fleshing out the world as they explore it in the search for an advantage.
When it comes to success and failure in Laser-Ritter, we typically had a pretty fair chance at success: most rolls beat a threshold, especially when players gambled, and if they really cared about something, they could spend a resource called Pathos to re-roll. My players might have been a bit more careful with Pathos if we had played a campaign, but we just stuck to three sessions, and I think it helped that they had an option during Take A Breather to regain some of their Pathos, and thus avoid a tragic end.
The lack of pre-established lore was the thing that stuck out the most to me, along with the apparent silence regarding GM advice. Laser-Ritter is in ashcan, so it's technically not a full release, and to me, the thing that feels like it's missing is more guides for the GM to help determine what kind of story you're telling.
Let me draw a difference between the two above points before I continue. First of all, I really really like the gesture towards lore, rather than a chapter that gives me a predetermined history. The gestures allowed us as a group to create the parts that really mattered to us, and we ended up with a galaxy that felt like ours. This is something I really value in roleplaying games, and the collaboration right from the beginning encouraged my players to make statements about the galaxy with very little prompting, even the player who was completely new to ttrpgs.
Where I personally struggled, was the lack of structure for GM's. The book contains a list of inspirations, which definitely suggests the kind of stories you can tell, but as a GM, I felt a conflict between what I was provided and what the players expected to do. I believe the tension here is possible due to the heritage this game pulls from.
In OSR games, players typically sit down to run through a module created for the game, or explore a map already drawn out, with detailed factions and lists of problems to run into. Since the beats are figured out while navigating these modules, the GM doesn't need to think too much about direction. The group figures out the direction, and the GM pulls from their materials to figure out what's on the other end.
In PbtA and Forged in the Dark games, players collectively contribute to the world, and the GM pulls from principles designed to focus on the tropes and themes that make the game and the story within it feel cohesive. They don't have to know what will be at the end of a player's choice, because the game has procedures to determine what has to happen. The GM's job is to think of possibilities, and to make choices to fit what the fiction demands.
Laser-Ritter pulls from both of these traditions, but it's result is that it isn't really either. There aren't any modules or maps: the world is created collaboratively, so I as the GM had to either create planets I thought might be interesting, or rely on what the players created. This meant that I couldn't plan ahead. There also aren't any GM principles: I don't know what the fiction demands, but instead have to guess. The result was an adventure that felt a little bit like a railroad, but because my players had the confidence that they could introduce new pieces as they played, I couldn't really stick to that railroad like I might be able to with a module.
The strongest example of this was a planet I'd written some notes about - an ancient planet, abandoned by modern civilizations and rediscovered by the Hegemony. A player introduced a piece of lore that placed them in the Hegemonic colonization of the planet, which meant that it couldn't be a secret: just a well-hidden, well-barricaded world. We still managed to make it work, but it certainly led to a lot of improv-ing on the fly. Improv-ing without the tools that I'm typically used to.
I think that OSR players might resonate with the limited gear and the stats with modifiers in Laser Ritter, but feel adrift at sea without some kind of adventure module. Fans of Blades and PbtA games might resonate with the world that you create as you go and the narrative consequences of Pathos, but might feel unsure about the types of stories Laser Ritter is hoping to tell, due to lack of direction for the GM.
I'd love to see a list of GM principles, or perhaps an example of play to demonstrate what a session of Laser-Ritter might look like. Even if it's difficult to create a module or map like the ones seen in typical OSR games, I think it might be helpful to throw out some story-seeds or a table of rumours, to hook the players' interest, and also give the GM something to pull from in a pinch. I don't think that these hooks or suggestions would take away from the players' agency; they might just help create a possibility cloud for a GM, and give them a bit of an idea about what a typical Laser Ritter session might look like.
If you like space operas and are excited by the blend of procedures or mechanics from various places, you might get a kick out of Laser-Ritter. You can pick up a copy of this game from its store page on Itch.io. You can also check out my online Google Sheets play-kit if you are interested in playing this game online!
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