BREAK!! RPG Review

I never thought I'd like an Anime RPG

BREAK!! is an easy-to-play tabletop RPG of exploration & teamwork, its gameplay and aesthetics are inspired by classic anime and SNES era videogames, along with wistful fantasy novels and movies!

BREAK!! RPG is an anime-inspired role playing game designed with a decidedly OSR/old-school ethos. Written by Reynaldo Madrinan and with editing and layout by Carlo Tartaglia, the pair prove to be an effective duo as it’s one of the better RPGs that I’ve seen published in recent years.

When I first heard about it I thought I probably wouldn’t really be the target audience. I’ve seen anime before, mostly popular series that often get suggested like Cowboy Bebop or Fullmetal Alchemist or Avatar the Last Airbender or Delicious in Dungeon. I’ve enjoyed them but am definitely not what you’d call a super fan and find a lot of the more tropey anime a bit much for me. Anime is kind of a whole thing that I find has so many shows in so many different genres, some with hundred of episodes, that I can’t bother to get involved in or try and keep up with.

Anyways, after reading BREAK!! I could really tell how much of a well thought-out passion project it seemed. It’s left me impressed in a number of areas.

The Layout

The first thing you notice about BREAK!! is it’s layout.

It’s probably got the best layout I’ve seen of any RPG ever, including big publishers with actual money. It really puts WOTC to shame.

To some extent I think it might be a bit overkill at times where sometimes it feels a bit more like a webpage than a book. I found the flow of my reading it interrupted at times, but in terms of being a reference manual and not a book (and most people probably don’t read RPG rules like a book like I do), it’s layout and graphic design is amazing.

All the rules are broken down into little sections with their own little headers and often in boxes. You have breadcrumbs in the page sides to let you know where you are in the book, and it uses graphics and icons to draw the eye and really convey information at a glance.

It’ll definitely serve as a source of inspiration if I ever try to layout my own ruleset.

The System

BREAK!! is probably one of the most comprehensive RPGs that I think I’ve ever read. What I mean by this is it’s got rules for downtime, for crafting your own items, for injuries, for fighting colossal creatures, for multiple armour and weapon types, for negotiating, for journeying, etc.

None of these modular rulesets by themselves are particularly crunchy. They’re all fairly straightforward and have been designed with the OSR ethos in mind. But take all together it does begin to feel a bit overwhelming.

I find there are often two types of RPGs. Those that kind of run a bit more on vibes where you have a base set of rules and lots tables and stuff for inspiration and advice on how to make rulings instead of describing everything for you.

And the more fully mapped out systems where a lot of time and effort and thought has been put into how everything fits together and what to rule in what scenario and reading them feels a bit like reading a very technical manual.

BREAK!! definitely falls into this later camp. In this way even though the rules are simplistic and borrows a lot from the OSR, it is a very modern feeling system. I have mixed feelings on this as I think I tend to have a preference for the first style of ruleset, although I think both are valid and it’s a matter of preference.

I find it’s also a bit of a paradox where if you’re new to RPGs BREAK!! is probably easier to understand as it explicitly details things more and relies less on unwritten ‘play culture’ for the reader to understand how to run it. But at the same time, because it’s so explicitly written out, it’s a bit more boring to read and I wonder if a new player or Referee would be left feeling overwhelmed at the end of it by the sheer amount of rules.

I also kind of wonder how ‘focused’ BREAK!!! is. Focused in the sense that in providing rules for so many different things, are they focused enough to be equally engaging? Like the crafting system, would it be easier for my character to just buy or find a magic weapon than craft one? I know I could use the crafting system. But am I really incentivized to? Or some of the class abilities. There are a lot of them. Are some more useful than others? Being able to do so much in the game, are the things my character is good at going to come up often enough?

Now, I don’t have answers to these questions, and to be fair, with how time and effort the authors have put into this game, I think the answers to these questions would probably be positive. But it all made me think about RPG design and what I want out of a ruleset where is more always better?

The Classes and Setting

The anime world of BREAK!! is a loose one and probably contained mostly in the classes and the general setting chapters. It’s a setting that’s meant to be abstract enough that you can run with it and make it your own.

Overall I found myself liking the setting. The classes, although probably big tropes in anime, I found kind of refreshing. They differed from your standard fantasy D&D classes, but not so much that I couldn’t see myself or others being excited to play them.

Like the Murder Princess or the Sage character classes. They were really interesting and seemed like they’d be really fun to play.

There were also a couple of innovations to the classes and advancement that I found absolutely brilliant, the most notable being having set attributes for a roll under system:

Where you have 5 main ability stats. And most checks are handled by rolling under them. But unlike other systems where you still have to roll 3d6 down the line to determine them, in BREAK!! they’re set by class and slowly improve by level.

This solves the very awkward situation where you can generate two characters and one have really shitty stats and the other have really good stats and they’re just going to be like that for the rest of time for all their roll under ability checks which for OSR play, is a lot. This gets even more awkward if one of the characters is like a thief with shitty dexterity but the wizard rolled high dexterity and so is technically better than the thief at thief type stuff when rolling under the stat.

Anyways, this was a brilliant little innovation that I thought showed a deep understanding of some of the problems inherent in OSR style systems and how to fix them.

Should you buy this?

This is a bit of a tough one. I would say for most people the answer is yes. It’s a fun refreshing system that seems very, very well designed. Will I run it? Yeah, probably at some point. It’s classes and world are interesting, it’s got some interesting rules for stuff that would be fun to try out, like fighting colossal creatures. Will I run it as my next campaign? Probably not, but more out of personal preference than anything I think.

If I did run it I would probably ignore certain subsets of the rules to have a bit more focused game. But that is probably partially the beauty of the ruleset. It’s fairly modular and suited toward long term campaign play, so you can just ignore certain subsets if they’re not relevant to the type of campaign you want to have or just introduce things slowly.