#min-maxing at its maxiest

[fantasyfantasygames]

Monster Wranglers

Monster Wranglers, Pamphlet Play Press, 2009

It's Pokémon X Monster Rancher, with a standard 2d6+skill roll-over system. You know this setup. Most of you could write it yourself. Let me get to the interesting parts.

The corebook for Monster Wrangler is a 24-page center-staple production, at 5.5x8.5 size. Layout is nice. Short, compact, no wasted space but doesn't entirely eschew whitespace. Monsters peek in from the margins rather than taking up a lot of the page. It lays out the premise, gives you some stats, provides a map of your monster caravan loop, gives you some rules for monster catching, breeding, and battling, and provides 8 monsters.

Only 8 monsters? Well, only 8 in the corebook. There are about 300 total. Because there are 163 supplements for this game.

One hundred and sixty three. Across fifteen authors.

Each of them is a single-page tri-fold pamphlet. There are usually two monsters, one on the outside and one on the inside. Each one gets an illustration, base stats, leveling formulas, a few techniques, and notes about where they can be found. The techniques are all keyworded, so your older monsters can often use techs from later supplements.

Some of the pamphlets are just one monster - a jumbo-sized behemoth with more techniques and a piece of microfiction to go with them. These were generally my favorites. They just drip flavor.

Naturally, just like in most of these games, the monsters are not particularly well-balanced against each other. You'll see this issue show up again in an upcoming review about a game with 150 classes - only about 20 of these monsters are really viable, and you're going to spend your time catching them and ditching your old pals. They clearly tried to tweak the leveling formulas to account for this, but they didn't succeed. That goes double for multi-monster interactions, when one player's monster can buff another's in a repeating loop while a third shields them all.

The supplements got weirder and worse as time went on. The layout kind of degenerated, and there were too many variants on the same techniques. Occasionally you'd get one where it was clear that one author hadn't read another's pamphlet and there was no central database, because two techniques would end up with the same name and keywords but different effects. The original four artists moved on, and the ones they got to fill in had totally different styles. Still, each supplement was only a dollar, so you can't complain about the price. At least on an individual level. If you want to catch 'em all it starts looking a little steep, but if you just want to pick up the few that were good fighters and cool-looking, you could throw down ten dollars and get exactly what you want.

Notorious tongue-twister Pamphlet Play Press eventually got bought up by would-be gaming conglomerate Megagame, who went bankrupt in 2011 after finding out that there are dozens of dollars to be made in the TTRPG industry. All their stuff is out of print now.