Why the Vaesen RPG isn't for me (debrief after 11 sessions)

I applaud how you tried something new, and gave it a  shot. I also think it is great that you realized that a game can be good (or even great) and still not be fun for you and your players. Sometimes being an adult is fun.

Your review actually made me feel MORE interested in the game. But that's just a tribute to your clarity and coverage of every important element of the game. Great review!

I appreciate the way you've organized this as a sort of post-mortem. I've played Vaesen once and enjoyed it, but we didn't really get to dig into the castle mechanic. I have limited experience with YZE, and having your careful thoughts on this is really useful.

I appreciate the thoughtful review, sharing what worked and what didn't. I'm new to the game so your thoughts offer further insight that may help me in learning and exploring this game.

Explicit investigation TTRPGs are an interesting challenge I've never mastered, I think because it fully depends on having very consistent worldbuilding and story execution to run an investigation, and when a system is pure investigation, you don't have a lot of fallbacks to smooth over any mistakes - for example, you can't just throw in a fun, mechanically-focused fight scene to advance a plot and improve the pace. It's also hard to make the plot come to the players, because usually in an investigation, you're either trying to prevent the plot from happening, in which case the plot happening is a fail state, or you're trying to discover what the plot was after it happened, in which case the plot is now over. This means that when the players get stuck, which can often happen in mystery, there's not a lot you can do to push them in the right direction short of giving them some answers.

Just a small obs on scandinavian folklore and the churches. Churches are almost always built on pre-christian "power sites". Its often presented as a destruction and victory of what was by christianity. But in reality its more of a continium and the whole conversion and the following peasant christianity was very syncretic. Churces are drenched in lokal superstitions, a lot of them rooted in modes of thought predating christianity... Everything is very fluent and mixed

Thanks for posting this, I thought that I was the only one. 👍

I do not have the same amount of experience as you do, having played in 4 sessions and GMing 5 sessions but I appreciate your insights. I am thus far enjoying Vaesen as both a player and GM. I find the rules light aspect of the game very freeing. I started GMing by running a home brew mystery. I am currently running Dance of Dreams. Regardless of systems I find running homebrew easier than running a published adventure. I hope you find a system that fits you and your groups style. Thanks for the video.

Very good and honest review! Thank you for your point of view and another opinion on a good RPG.

Good assessment of your experience. I enjoyed listening to your report and thoughts on your reactions~

Appreciate this review! It's great to hear from someone who has also played the game and come up with different experiences and thoughts. I would say - however - you had me until you said that you had me nodding along with you until you said about the level of 'crunch' in the system. Gotta disagree there, the YZE is as light as it gets while making thing meaningful, all the other stuff is just fluff. I say that based not only on my experience but also feedback from players who dislike the complexity of say D&D or even Savage Worlds. Anyway thanks again! I appreciate you being open and honest on your thoughts. I have about 5 minutes left in your video as I write this - but I guess you've not played any other Year Zero Engine games?

Thanks for sharing your opinion. A video like that is way more interesting than "reviews" that are solely based on reading the book or playing a single one-shot. YZE didn't really click with me, even after trying several of them in one-shots and small campaigns. I really wanted to like them because settings and artworks are usually very nice.

I'll have to pick up Vaesen to check out all those cool things. Maybe they can be lifted and dropped into something more playable for most. Honestly, seems like you need a ring binder on the table to play.

From my take away from the rules this seems like a system that benefits from having a structured GMing set up. Things like count down dice for the crisis tracks, note cards to give players and journals for everyone. That's not my preferred method either.

I'm new to Varsen, I've only run 1 scenario (the one in the rulebook), and I really like it. I think some pf the problems you had won't be problems for me, but I appreciate you pointing them out, and some of the others definitely rang true for me (eg. the information really isn't easy to find on the fly). Thanks for the review, I appreciated tour insight.

A fist bump from someone who also uses Miro!

I'm with you about the light hearted games! Thanks for this review, great to get insights from someone who has played the game a fair bit :)

Yes my experience of the Year Zero engine is meh - its very swingy in play and the consequences of that swingyness can be quite harsh and compounding. It "just" works. I find the implementation in BladeRunner and Twilight 200 to be a bit better but the "push" issue still exists which is a clear weakness in all the games.

Excellent review, critics coming from actual gameplay experience

This is an excellent review. I certainly empathize with many of your points about the style of game just not being for you. I also think I tend toward a lighter more “fun” game in tone. I think Vaesen is beautiful and there’s parts of it I like a lot but… 🙂