First impressions on the Wild Imaginary West game system

A few weeks ago, I said that I needed to run a game in the Wild Imaginary West (WIW) setting to get a feel for the system and see if it would fit my need for a West Marches-style game.

And I can now say that I did!

I ran two small sessions for a friend. They included some classic exploration, an introduction to two of the pre-written factions, a fight with a monster, and a peek at the main plot point I might use to add more players into the game and turn it into a West Marches game.

In this post, we’re going to talk a bit about the system, what was fun, what was simple or difficult for me to DM, what I didn’t get a chance to use yet, and the next step for this game.

Character creation

We’re starting with a bland one, but it feels right to start with it. Character creation is alright. I mean, that’s it. There really isn’t a lot more to say about it. I presented the universe to the player, they answered a few questions provided by the book to help them give some life to their character. And then, they split their points between their skills, chose a class, a starting gear, and done!

This could be more fun, but it has the merit of being short and straight to the point. It’s working.

Skills distribution

There are only four skills in WIW, and no abilities! I found this unusual compared to the game systems I usually play. It works super well!

You’ve got:

• Charm: everything social, sweet-talking, intimidating, calming someone…
• Finesse: anything that requires concentration and that is somewhat dexterous
• Intuition: when you gain information, observing, deducing, sensing something off
• Nerve: when you use strength or agility to face a challenge

And that’s it. No other skills, no abilities that are linked to a specific skill to determine how many dice you’re rolling and which buffs you get. No bonus depending on whether you’re cooking, fishing, or hunting. You describe how you want to do your action, and the DM picks which of those four skills will be used. This makes the system super simple. There aren’t any tricks to confuse players or slow down the game, that’s a big plus for me.

This setup does create a situation that I found surprising at first. If you shoot with a pistol, you don’t use Finesse. If you slash at someone with an axe, you don’t use Nerve. Each weapon has a number of dice attributed, and that’s what you’ll roll with when fighting. It’s not dependent on a skill from your character. That’s like if you only rolled damage dice on other TTRPGs but no roll to hit your target. This means that in combat, the skills are less impactful. They will be used for some improvised actions, but everyone using the same pistol will roll the same number of dice. This does not mean that players cannot customize their characters if they all use the same dice on the same weapon, talents are here for this, and I’ll expand on them later. After thinking about it, I think it fits the system. This reduces the number of rolls, keeping the game simple, while still leaving room for customization in other ways. It allows players to create a bigger range of characters since a specific arrangement of skills does not push you towards a certain weapon. You can be strong and fight with a shotgun. You can be smart and fight with a shotgun. You can be charming and fight with a shotgun. You can be agile and fight with a shotgun. Other systems might have pushed you to pick a shotgun, a rifle, a pistol, or a knife, respectively, if you wanted to optimize your build a little.

Dice

You use custom d6s to play WIW, black dice, and their upgraded version, gold dice. A black die has 2 blanks, 1 spur, 2 hits, and 1 ace. A gold die trades 1 blank for 1 hit. To get your success, you just count the hits, and one ace counts as 2 hits.

Fairly simple. If you roll a spur, you can reroll this die if you’ve mastered the talent linked to the roll. If you’ve got the talent for Nerve, you re-roll spurs for your nerve rolls. If you’ve got the talents for Pistol, you re-roll spurs when using your pistol.

When starting a character, most of their gear uses black dice, and their skills are only black dice as well. Gold dice are then introduced when players spend prestige to upgrade some of their skills, or when they acquire items or upgrades that grant them gold dice.

Trades

Trades are the “classes” of WIW: you’ve got Doctor, Gunslinger, Hunter, Trapper, Mechanic, Sheriff, and Prospector. You might think that they dictate a lot about your character, but actually not so much!

Each trade has six abilities and two Ace-In-The-Holes (ultimates), with only 1 ability and one Ace-In-The-Hole unlocked at character creation. Those abilities are strong, they grant you passive buffs or active abilities that can be used a few times per day. They give you tools that are interesting and add flavor for your character. But that’s it. They don’t lock you out of any play style. They don’t require a minimum value in a skill (even if there may be some synergy). They do not force you to play certain weapons either!

Once again, I really like this! If you want to play a doctor with a shotgun, you’re not going to have to min-max and fight some of the mechanics of the game to make it work. It’ll be alright out of the box. You can play a Gunslinger with a bow!

The abilities are fun, but more importantly, since they are an extra “add-on” to your character and not dictating every single build choice, they are perfect to get homebrewed. As soon as I read them, I knew that I’d offer the option to create new ones to my players. This could lead to some interesting quests to learn a new skill with a master, uncover a secret artifact, or simply to give you the place for some… experimentation? And with the quantity of passive and active abilities that you can find in the datasheet of every NPC and monster in the book, there is plenty of inspiration available. It should not complicate the game at all, you’ll just get more choice when spending your experience.

Exploration and Setting

On the first session that I ran, I had only a very small idea of an event that would happen, and improvised a lot before and then after that to react to what my player did. It was mainly a few exposition scenes to let them get a feel for the universe, and it included some non-combat encounters to play with the tension and the stakes. I don’t have a lot to say about those kinds of scenes, because there aren’t specific rules about them! The four skills system meant that it was fairly easy to know what to ask for when a roll was necessary, and the scenes moved along really fast (this is also because I had only one player).

I’m going to use this as a transition to speak about the setting, and here I had some trouble! I’m not an expert on the Wild West period, but I know enough to paint a reasonable scene. However, the lore of the Wild Imaginary West introduces some very big changes, and I wish the book contained more information on how those changes impacted the world. Trying to figure out some reasonable consequences of a world with many monsters in it, with the technology that was created to fight and repel them and the other uses people have of that technology, was not trivial. The amount of lore I have feels like it’s enough to create cool hunts, encounters, or short localized stories, but maybe a bit light to create a full campaign easily all over the west.

Now, is this an issue? I guess not, to be honest. This will require more preparation on my part to try and make the world alive, and to give concrete motivations and goals to the factions in play. Which is the part I’m the worst at as a DM currently, in my opinion, so it’ll be good practice. I have to say that there are two extra books in the WIW setting. One is the East Portal Guide, which I read a few months ago, and it gives plenty of information on a specific town, with tons of NPCs and quest hooks. The other one is a full pre-written campaign, which I have not read yet. It might contain a lot of cool details about the world that could be really useful to know, even if I’m not planning on running the module.

Combat scene

In the second short session, there was a fight. I picked a monster from the rulebook that felt appropriate enough for my player and the few NPCs he had joined, and that’s how a Chupacabra attacked their camp at night.

First of all, with only one player, I knew the fight would be messy and that I’d have a few NPCs helping. The game is clearly designed around having more players at the table.

But the fight system worked really, really well. Characters have six “Grit”, which are “Action points”, and every action costs a certain amount of grit. For players, it’s indicated on their weapons or items. For NPCs or monsters, it’s written in their stat block. Add a few default actions available for anyone, and you get a lot of options every turn. Since movement isn’t free, it’s a real choice to move or not, take a better position at the cost of shooting only once instead of twice. And with multiple actions available on enemies’ stat blocks, there is enough room to make surprising actions every turn by combining different actions with different costs.

It runs fast, and once again the dice system proved to be interesting enough that you didn’t miss damage rolls or more stat checks.

And to go back to the stat blocks, each monster has three or four pre-written actions, but there are so many monsters in the book, I think it’s easy to read a few actions and adapt a monster to make it more unique, proficient in a special environment, or just more dangerous.

Didn’t try yet

There are a few mechanics I didn’t try yet, and they are important ones, which is good, because the system is already great without them, so those elements are not required to have a good session.

I need to try the mechanics around horses, mechs, and forstalls. My goal is to introduce maybe two of those mechanics in the next session, probably with two players this time!

Final words

So all in all, I’m very satisfied with the game. I think it might work for my West Marches game, and I’m therefore starting to advance my preparation on a few plot points to make it work.

I’ll obviously have to adapt a few things and still need to play way more before having a more definite opinion, but it’s definitely interesting enough to keep going and start planning my game in this universe.