[Powers & Perils] Interview with playtester Winchell Chung

[Havard]

My friend James Mishler ran some articles on his blog about Richard Snider's Powers & Perils last year that I completely missed.

This interview with Winchell Chung, one of the games playtesters, gives interesting perspectives on the game and on Richard Snider, which ought to be of interest to this group: http://adventuresingaming2.blogspot.no/ ... -with.html

-Havard

[Rafael]

FWIW, Wenchell from "The Coward's Blade" is named after him. Not completely random, that one, but you might remember that I like "Tower of the Dead", which is basically the constituting adventure for the entire P&P setting - so that's where this is coming from. (Though I don't remember if Vlad was in that module, really.)

P&P, probably terrible rules, but I've been working on some stuff based on the old Heroes Mag, lately, and it's pretty solid, for its time, and for really working on a small budget, compared to TSR.

[gsvenson]

Nice article. Richard and I were room mates from 1973 until I got married in 1976. We played P&P when I visited him in Baltimore in the late 80's and early 90's.

[Havard]

Cool,
I have Powers & Perils and Perilous Lands, but I have not been able to get into the rules.

Greg, do you know if you played the game as written or whether Snider had modified the game for his own home games?

Was there ever talk of a 2nd edition for P&P?

-Havard

[gsvenson]

Greg, do you know if you played the game as written or whether Snider had modified the game for his own home games?

Was there ever talk of a 2nd edition for P&P?

I am afraid that I have no idea. I don't think he ever referred to the rule books while we were playing and he gave me a pre-made character, so I was not even looking at the rules, just playing. As for a second edition, again, I am of no help, as he never mentioned any such plans to me.

[Rafael]

Wikipedia, quoting: Shannon Appelcline (2011). Designers & Dragons. Mongoose Publishing. p. 177.

Powers & Perils was an unfortunate failure for Avalon Hill, despite their reputation for their high-quality productions; this failure was indicative of the company's lack of experience in the roleplaying field. Powers & Perils included stolen art traced from fantasy artist Frank Frazetta. Avalon Hill had no previous experience with role-playing games, being primarily a producer of strategy and war games such as Tactics II, Blitzkrieg and Squad Leader, and Powers & Perils died before its time. Overpricing and strong competition from first edition Dungeons & Dragons saw P&P on store shelves at two to three times the price being asked for its contemporaries.

Due to the general failure of Powers & Perils, Avalon Hill allowed the line to die after a few supplements were published in 1984.

Overalll, P&P is comparable to Rolemaster, in that character generation takes very long, and that the games' emphasis apparently is more focused on building a narrative frame together, than on the guts and bloods of dungeoneering. That said, the backgrounds are interesting enough, and, for the time, fairly elaborate. Seems to me, though, as if AH was very focused to establish a counter-brand to D&D with P&P, and didn't really understand what the individual strengths of the brand could have been. Tower of the Dead, for example, as written, is not necessarily a good adventure for the P&P ruleset.