Pop Culture | Roleplaying Games

‘Transformers’ Without Politics is Boring and Stupid

The Transformers Roleplaying Game is a boring salute to the most boring version of the franchise with the most boring version of Megatron

The Good

The game’s existence is a dis track to Wizards of the Coast

WotC is a Hasbro subsidiary. Transformers is a Hasbro brand. It must have been humiliating for WotC to learn that they wouldn’t be making a Transformers roleplaying game.

Instead of greenlighting a 5e Transformers game, Hasbro let Renegade Studios make a Transformers game AND a G.I. Joe game AND a Power Rangers game with a whole new ruleset. At this rate, Renegade will make the next edition of Star Frontiers.

This is a good thing because WotC makes D&D and should be punished for it.

Three dimensions of distinction

Most RPGs have one or two “splats”; classes, roles, archetypes, whatever. D&D has Races and Classes. Cyberpunk RED has only Roles. Sigmata is “classless” and characters aren’t boxed in at all.

Transformers has THREE splats.

Influence is your background. It describes who or what you were before the war, and you can have more than one if you want. Influences determine your Hang-ups, which cause minor inconveniences because everyone has issues.

Origin is your function, which determines the form of your chassis. Lookouts are small vehicles, like compact cars. Seekers are flyers, like jets. Rainmakers are military vehicles, like tanks.

Finally, your Role describes what you do now. Analysts analyze. Field Commanders command. Mode Masters do weird stuff with their transformation. Roles determine most of your stat bonuses as you level up and your special abilities, called Perks.

Between 12 Influences, 8 Origins, and 7 Roles, each of which has 2 sub-roles called Focuses, you can dial your character into exactly what you want them to be before you even get to General Perks, core stats (called Essences), and Skills.

Weapons are generic but upgrade-able

Weapons are reduced to generic descriptors, like Close Combat Melee and Long Range Rifle and Artillery Cannon. But, you can then upgrade those weapons to be Nonlethal or Scary or Automated or Eruptive.

There are 30 weapons and 64 upgrades to mix and match. Tinkering with combinations is fun and will produce an exceedingly cool weapon.

The Bad

Too complex

The game is painfully exacting. Granted, the rules are more concise and less crunchy than D&D’s, but it’s still too exacting to be fun. A grid map is recommended for combat, and range and movement are measured in feet instead of abstracted. How is that level of granularity fun?

For comparison, this game is more complex than Lancer, and I disliked that system too.

They glossed over beast modes

Each Origin lists vehicle styles for your character’s alt modes, but you can say your alt mode, or your robot mode, has an animal shape. There’s a very brief hack included in the text to make that work, but mostly it’s about what your game master will let you do.

This is horseshit. The game wants exactitude but skimps on a very common aspect of Transformers. If this was a more narrativist game, it would be fine. But a game with this much specificity should have included specific rules for beast forms.

The text states that a future supplement will address beast modes in more details, but there’s no telling if that supplement will materialize before the game line ends. It definitely won’t be before ‘Rise of the Beasts’ releases.

All Earth, no Cybertron

Since the game focuses on G1, you’ll be playing on Earth. Boring old Earth. There is little to no information on Cybertron.

This is a big letdown. All the cool stuff happens on Cybertron. Who cares about Earth!? We’ve all seen Earth!

The Ugly

There is no politics

The Transformers RPG depicts the Autobot/Decepticon War as purely a resource war, and it never digs into ideology. Each side wants energy for its own sake, and their motives aren’t examined much. The game doesn’t even discuss the horrors of war, as ‘War for Cybertron’ does.

But the last decade or so of Transformers comics, and some prose stories, have shown that Transformers is best when it’s political. Functionism, Cybertron’s former caste system, existed in at least two continuities. Beast Wars: Uprising was crammed with sociopolitical references. In the most recent comic book series, the Decepticons began life as a populist political party. And all of these stories and more are about class warfare. But almost none of this makes it into the cartoons or movies because Hasbro sells toys and Michael Bay thinks war is cool.

The game’s text touches on functionism and Megatron’s revolutionary roots, but that’s about it. It doesn’t mention how Prime supported Megatron in the beginning, it doesn’t mention how corrupt Cybertron’s senate was, and it certainly doesn’t mention that Megatron was right…before he became a Tankie.

Hasbro never valued this kind of depth in their IP about good robots that turn into cars vs bad robots that turn into fighter planes. Rumor has it that Hasbro kneecapped these profound and riveting stories because they didn’t lead directly to selling more toys.

What’s worse, this led to the game using the most boring version of Megatron. Apparently it was too much to ask for Sparticus-turned-Stalin Megatron or Scheming Populist Megatron or even Reluctant War Criminal Megatron. Instead we got the evil-for-the-sake-of-evil Tankie Megatron.

I don’t know who the Tranformers Roleplaying Game is for. It’s NOT for Transformers fans who have never played an RPG. It’s not even for Transformers fans who are gamers, otherwise Origin would have been called “Function” and followed the Grand Cybertronian Taxonomy.

This game is too granular and it doesn’t respect your time. It’s an over-engineered pile of mechanics for the sake of mechanics. You can hack and house-rule it if you want, but why pay for a fixer-upper game?