In this post, I suggest new feats for guns — and other weapons — for Outgunned. But more than that, why not extend it to vehicles?
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24 February, 2024
Review: Blacksad Roleplaying Game
Posted by blackcampbell under Roleplaying Games | Tags: blacksad rpg, noir roleplaying game |[3] Comments
Funnily, I saw the Kickstarter for the Blacksad roleplaying game before I’d ever known about the comic books. The comics are written by a Spanish duo — author Juan Díaz Canales and artist Juanjo Guarnido. The six or so graphic novels follow the adventures of a private detective named John Blacksad and is set in 1950s America…kind of. In the book, however, all the characters are anthropomorphic animals — this is more to help define their personality traits. The comics are well worth reading, although I’ve only been able to find a few of the volumes in English, hardcopy; you can get the Kindle versions, however.
The art in the comics, which is used liberally in the RPG corebook and the GM screen is stunningly good. The background art, from city street scenes to the clutter of Blacksad’s apartment/office is highly detailed. Cars, buildings, clothes — everything is perfect. It’s also not a kid’s series — these are classic noir stories with femme fatales, people getting killed, drug use, etc. and the roleplaying game leans into the noir storytelling with rules that allow you to use and lose conscience points as the drag of evil pulls you in. The rule book is available in Spanish and English, and the translation to English was superb.
The Kickstarter campaign, like most that started in the midst of COVID, ran long on getting the physical materials out, but the PDF has been in my iPad since last year. This past month, the boys of Nerd Night™️ finally got a chance to kick the tires on the system. Our experience was, surprisingly, very good. One of the players has a soft spot for the anthropomorphic animal thing, and I will admit I was into Albedo and Fusion back in the 1980s. The others were more reticent about that, but two of the players are hard-core noir fans, so they were in. The story revolved around a group of ex-army buddies who fought in Europe together and have come home to varying degrees of success — a motorcycle gang member who does petty crime (a coyote); another that does “odd jobs”, Equalizer style (mountain lion); another who was a demolitions guy and now works construction (Kodiak bear); and their former captain, a banker (owl). Their friend, a member of a rival biker gang that the coyote, is killed — shot under mysterious circumstances, and they are hired by his brother to find out what happened. Over the next few weeks of play, complete with well-timed cliffhangers, they found out he had been involved in buying H from the local Chinese gang, apparently in an attempt to bolster their gangs position for a proposed merger with the Pissed Off Bastards (creating, eventually, the Hells’ Angels). They figure out his girlfriend, a Chinese white tiger, might have set him up, but it also appears their buddy’s MC president might have done the deed. Gang fights, gun fights, motorcycle chases, and a showdown between the coyote, the tiger, and the other gang leader ended with both gang boys being shot by the tiger — who skips town.
The story gave us the chance to work a lot of the rules. There are four basic characteristics: Fortitude, Reflexes, Willpower, and Intelligence. You can have from 1-5 in the characteristics and this allows a number of “action dice” to be rolled equal to it. You then top off your “hand” of dice with “complementary dice” of a different color. (Black for action, white for complementary is the norm.) There are also “tension dice” (red) that can be added instead of the complementary when the character is doing something agains their principles or giving in to their worst impulses. The action dice have a success on a 4-6; complementary a success on a 6, but a failure that negates a success on a 1; and the tension die give a success on 4 and 5, two successes on a 6, and a failure that negates a success on a 1.
Characteristics also give you the number equal to the dice in Traits. A Kodiak bear, with a fortitude might have Big & Tough +2 and a Hits Hard +2 and a +1 to their protection against damage as Traits for that Characteristic. You get these for each characteristic. This allows even a klutz with a Reflexes 2 to have a +2 in Steady Hands or something similar so that even though they aren’t the fastest on their feet or quickest to respond to things, they’re good with their hands. The traits can be added to any one of the dice rolled in the dice pool. That includes flipping a failure (say adding the +2 Steady Hands to a failure on setting a bomb). It allows for more nuances characters. We found that the die mechanic and the characteristics/traits really made it feel like the characters got to act like they should — with failures mitigated where they should be, and successes being — if not assured — certainly not as reliant on sheer luck of the roll.
Milestones give two elements of the characters past — like Grew Up in the Wilderness or WWII Sapper — and two that tie to the character’s nature, like Easygoing or Defender. These traits are there to help the player direct their actions. There’s also the Complications — the weakness of the characters — and these can led the GM to push Conscience checks on some things. There are rules for resisting temptation and corruption by doing things that are morally damaging. We saw these in use for characters taking actions that were a bit outside of being the “good guy” — like shooting an attacker when they couldn’t see the character and were unable to defend themselves; or when the coyote character was duped by the white tiger girlfriend of his dead buddy.
The mechanic is simple — beat a number of successes needed for a task. An average task might be a two difficulty, negating the first two successes a character might roll. Anything more and you pulled it off. In combat, it works the same way. Most characters start with a 2 Defense, requiring three successes to really do damage. (It’s pretty easy to pull this off.) Get more than one success through, you multiply the damage by the number of successes. If you shoot a guy in a darkened alley who can’t see you, the dark and his lack of seeing the danger he’s in might cancel themselves out — he’s got a 2 Defense. The character blasts away with four successes…his Walther PPK .32 does 6 points times 2 [the number of successes that got through] = 12. The target’s in some trouble. There’s some derived combat scores like Endurance — typically about a 4. In the case above, the guy would have also suffered a serious injury (a concussion or a broken bone) from the attack being three times his endurance.
The rules only take up 50 pages of the 160 total run deal with running the genre well, NPC portraits based on the set piece for a scene — like a pool hall or the like. I would have liked a bit more fleshing out of the chase rules, but outside of that, the game is rules light and simple. It was fun to run and easy for the players to pick up how things worked.
So, is it worth the $40ish bucks? Overall, I’d say yes. We really enjoyed our trip back to 1948 San Francisco (where I set the adventure) and I could see us playing this regularly on our game rotation. You could conceivably just run a straight noir game with the ruleset and just ditch the anthropomorphic characters, if that’s not your bag (baby!) You can find Blacksad at Nosolorol’s website.
7 January, 2024
Battle of the Sad Space Cowboys: Initial Impressions of the Cowboy Bebop RPG and Orbital Blues RPG
Posted by blackcampbell under Roleplaying Games | Tags: cowboy bebop rpg, don't panic games, orbital blues rpg, soul muppet publishing |Leave a Comment
Space Cowboys are cool. Since the release of Cowboy Bebop, and followed up with spiritual cousins Firefly, Serenity, The Mandalorian, and The Expanse (at least the TV series) — people getting by with existential issues in space has given us some of the best sci-fi TV ever.
So I was pretty excited a year or two ago when the Cowboy Bebop roleplaying game rolled up on Kickstarter from a little company out of Italy (and if it’s not Sweden, most of the really good stuff is coming out of Italy, right now). I got the PDF in a few months back and perused it and was…underwhelmed. I held off of any kind of review, though, until I had the physical product. I’ve noticed, of late, that when I read the PDF of a game, I don’t always get what I’m looking at. Something about the screen (usually an iPad) and my periodic astigmatism makes it a pain to read for long periods of time; and the inability to quickly index back and forth means I don’t always get a clear picture of mechanics if they are quirky (as is the case here) or badly written (pretty much trying to find rules in any Modiphius product. Seriously — editors and a good index, guys.)
Well, I’ve go the book and GM screen in and it’s time to give a first impression. I’m not going to call this a review until I’ve run the game. I get the impression a lot of my issue with the game comes down to verbiage and not how the game would actually run. More on that in a minute.
The physical book is very well done. The paper and binding quality is easily on par with most stuff on the market. It’s chock full of official artwork and screencaps. The layout is double column and in a very readable typeface. It was written in Italian and translated to English, and the translation is top notch, with only a few spots when a better word choice might have been appropriate. It’s edited well — I caught no typos or layout issues. The book runs 272 pages — about normal for an RPG corebook. The GM screen is on solid cardstock with a wraparound on the front of the crew of Bebop, and the basics for running the game on the back. And I do mean the basics. As screens go, I found this one lacking a lot.
Allora, onto the meat. The system is a d6 die pool based on the approach you want to take to solving a problem, what “tab” you are in, and whether or not your approach is narratively appropriate to the story. To explain: the session is essentially split into what most of us would understand as “acts”, like in a play or show; they call them tabs. I should have a look through the Italian version to see if they use act there. You get a die for the first act, 2 for the second, and 3 for the third; the difficulty of tasks also increases. Roll the dice and beat the target number. Simple there.
How you approach the task is important. The approaches are essentially “attributes” — rock is trying to act under pressure; dance is more related to a combo of dexterity and stamina; blues deals with spirituality or self-awareness…wisdom, if you will; tango is a charisma-based approach; jazz is smarts, skill, improvisation. The music-based nomenclature is appropriate to the source material, but could be confusing as hell to those who might be looking for a more traditional set of attributes for their character. I will admit I really liked the idea on first read, changed my mind on the second reading and thought it overly subjective, but now I’m leaning a bit back to my initial impression. I can see, however, this will be a point of failure for the game group at first.
Another aspect of the system is the use of “clocks”. This is the number of successes needed to pull off a objective. There are multiple ways to bust up these clocks — 4, 6, 8, etc. Hell, you could do a 1 or 2, I suppose. There can be a few of these running coterminously; you could have an investigation clock looking for your bounty, and have a threat clock pop up due to a fight scene. You need to succeed at one or more of these for the act you are in. The GM or Big Shot — in keeping with the in-show TV program alerting bounty hunters to marks — can also have clocks running for the opposition. If they get the clock cleared first, that’s a failure.
There are hits and shocks as “damage”. Hits are the successes of the players; shocks are the GM’s game currency and can be spent to increase difficulties later. Shocks are gained when the players roll a 1 or based on the something in the act. You absorb these by taking a wound on your approach. Two wounds and you can’t use the approach for the rest of the session. You can also clear a shock by marking a “bullet” — this is a clock of sorts where you get six bullets before something in your past comes up to haunt you. There are examples of play in the book that help with all of this, but on first read it was confusing as hell. I think if the GM can come to grips with how this works (or just ditch it for a number of successes must be accrued by a certain number of tests) the game will run smoothly. But there will be a learning curve for the GM. The players will have an easier time of it once they get past the approaches idea.
Each of the approaches also gets a trait that, if the player can weave it into their description of what they’re doing, aids in the die pool. This can be things like a personal description, a piece gear, clothing, etc. You have a key memory and a “groove” — a basic schtick you can use in play.
The group gets to choose a “mothership” — their base of operations — and a personal vehicle, either a small spacecraft like Spike Spiegel’s Swordfish, or the like.
The rest of the book is a guide to the Bebop universe — the criminal factions, corporations, and other players in the solar system. There’s source material on the gate system that allows the characters to get around space, the various worlds and asteroids, and an episode guide that is, I think, too long. I would have liked a bit more background material, but they stayed very faithful to the anime. (I may be in the minority, but I rather liked how the live action series buffed out some of the universe.)
So…is it worth it? I honestly don’t want to say, yet, but would prefer to kick the tires on it and see how it plays. That said, if you are a Cowboy Bebop fan and want to support officially licensed material for it, or you are a completist that wants to have all the hot steamy jazz you can get…go for it.
Contrasting Cowboy Bebop is Orbital Blues — a “…game of sad space cowboys, your crew of desperate and downtrodden outlaws do what they can to make ends meet. They travel across a music-infused space-western universe filled with retro-future technology, plagued by heartbreak and the haunting shadow of the blues.” This rolled up as a Kickstarter a few months back for Afterburner, a new expansion to the original book. Since the original was included in one of the bundles for a reasonably price, I jumped on it, as I was still as bit on the fence about Cowboy Bebop. Soul Muppet Publishing is out of Nottingham and publishes a number of rules-lite games.
Right now, I only have the PDF for Orbital Blues, but the layout allows for easy reading. It’s filled with retro artwork, a clean layout that looks like the print book is probably on the size of the 5×7″ Fate books. The typeface is clean — Helvetica Neue, I’m guessing — and sized well. We’ll see how the physical book looks when I get it.
Orbital Blues is a rules-lite system trying to do a lot of the same things that Cowboy Bebop is doing, but without a lot of the chaff, which you can see in its 108 pages. The characters have three stats: Muscle, Grit, and Savvy — easy enough to intuit what they do: physical stuff, willpower stuff, and smarts/skills stuff. Stats run from -1 to +2 and get added to a 2d6 roll when something happens that requires an ability check. If you have some form of advantage (“The Upper Hand”), you get an extra die and drop the lowest; when disadvantaged (“Against All Odds”) roll three dice and drop the highest. Beat the target number…which is always an 8. If it’s harder than usual, it’s “against all odds”, and when easier “the upper hand”. Gear can also provide bonuses. Dead simple.
A note on mechanics: if this sounds a lot like Traveler, I agree, except the main mechanic is also used for combat, so that isn’t more complicated than a normal task — something that does crop up in other rules-lite systems. A target of 8+ on two dice is about 41.6% to succeed. That seems pretty low. Admittedly, the 3d6 of “the Upper Hand” should mitigate that with about a 68ish%. (Keep in mind, I’m really not a mathematician — so be kind, numbers people!)
You have health for physical injuries, and Blues for a rating of psychic impact of things happening to you or what you have done. Get enough blues, you will accrue a “trouble” — something karmic this way comes. You start with a trouble and a gambit — a schtick you can use. For every two troubles, you get a new gambit.
Like Cowboy Bebop, you choose your ship and gear and get rolling. Ships and vehicles have three stats, as well, and take damage directly to the stat. Once they’re at zero, the ship is either dead, dead in the water, or blind.
The rest of the book is given to 40 pages of example NPCs, bad guy groups, and vehicles. The last 50 pages or so outline one particular star system, Sutler, is great detail with locations, groups, NPCs, etc. The Orbital Blues setting is interstellar, not interplanetary like Bebop, and is an excellent jumping off point for crafting one’s own setting.
At $20 or so, is it worth it? I’m willing to jump on this one untested and say yes, if you are looking for a space RPG that’s lightweight, has room for expansion, and you’re on a budget.
So…which one is better for Cowboy Bebop? I honestly, at this point, don’t have an opinion, but if I had to guess, most folks will be more happy with the simplicity of Orbital Blues. We’ll see how some testplay on CB goes, then I’ll revisit this.
10 September, 2023
Set Phasers to MALKY…Where’s That Rule? My Summer Running Star Trek Adventures
Posted by blackcampbell under Roleplaying Games | Tags: star trek adventures |1 Comment
The game group finally came to grips with the 2d20 system when one of the players relieved me as GM to run Fallout back at the start of the summer. The system was manageable and with some knowledge of how it worked, I looked over the Star Trek Adventures core book I had a PDF of and decided “what the hell” and picked up the hardcover core book, the Utopia Planitia guide, and the Discovery guide, as well as a GM screen and the dice sets.
Quick backstory: back in the midsts of time, our group was one of the playtest groups for John Carter of Mars when Modiphius was rolling it out. We had found the rules almost indecipherable — not so much that the core mechanic is difficult (but it is a bit overly complicated), but that the writing was disorganized and, well, bad. We wound up dropping out of the playtest because we couldn’t get through an evening without throwing our hands up and making it up as we went. I didn’t touch 2d20 again, and avoided the games tied to it like the plague. Fallout seemed a bit better written and not running it meant I could learn the system without the annoyance of running the game, as well.
Back to Trek: I had run a “season” of Star Trek using the old Decipher rules, set in the second season of Discovery thanks to the excellent addition of Anson Mount’s Captain Pike. The writing was tighter and better than the uneven first season, and since the drop of Strange New Worlds, I’m a Trek fan for the first time since Enterprise screwed the pooch back in the early aughties. We had a good time with a system that was still mostly familiar, although it has some stumbling blocks.
For “season 2”, I swapped us to 2d20. The characters ported over very easily and were pretty close to what they were in Decipher. The combat monster Andorian was a bit more combat monstery, and the hot shot pilot was even better, but most of the characters were spot on. We built them up out of the book, then I double checked what I was doing with an excellent STA website. Our ship — USS Fearless, one of the last of the Walker-class, came together nicely, as well. The characters are defined by six attributes and six skills called departments (science, command, etc.) and it works nicely — though there can be some confusion as to which attributes handles what, and with a good argument, I let players use alternate departments. There are focuses which give extra successes, and values that can generate advancement milestones and determination points — one of the game currencies, in addition to momentum (called threat when the GM gets momentum, because two names for the same thing isn’t going to confuse some folks…)
I banged up a few “short treks” to ease the players back into their characters and system (a shore leave, then a save another ship from a strange anomaly adventure) before diving into our first action episode. I quickly started ignoring the Determination points rules; like Fallout there’s two different meta-game currencies…one too many. Another problem was that the determination rules’ index location was not where the actual rules for their use was.
The characters escorted a convoy of humanitarian aid ships to Coridan — a major producer of dilithium that was hit hard by the Klingon War, only to find out the Orion Syndicate had been “aiding” the world…by repairing then running their dilithium mines for the Coridanites. There was a street fight after making contact with a Starfleet Intelligence agent (and Orion female — their abilities are sharply curtailed in STA). The fight went great until — where are the stun rules for the phasers? A quick flip through the book to phasers…then to combat… turned into a long flip through the book. While another player tried to find the rules, I hit up the interwebz…nothing. Some players have loads of stress points, but the average seems to be in the range of 16. You’re not getting that kind of stress in a phaser rifle hit, so you can’t emulate the show where most humanoids go for nappy-time when you stun them. In the end, I house ruled that the character or NPC hit had to do a Fitness+Command or Security vs. the number of stress they took, or be stunned and unable to do anything for a number of rounds equal to the stress hit (or however long the plot needed them out for.)
The rules for extended tests work pretty well — we have a hacking scene where the characters had a gated activity: get onto the roof of a building (they beamed in overhead and paraglided in), patch physically into the building antenna and make it look like the hack was local and not from the starship, get past the security, and download the material. I set the Work rating as 10 successes and a Magnitude 1 (they would need to successes to succeed). Worked well, no issues. There was another fight using our stun rules, though it went lethal quickly.
After their missions to the surface, the Orions overreacted to the Federation agents getting data that showed the Orions were trading Coridan’s dilithium for Klingon surplus ships (I was using the Eaglemoss ships from Discovery for their cool gothic aesthetic…I have to admit, I hated the Disco Klingons, at first, but warmed to them when you could actually see what the ships looked like) and this led to a four on one fight between Fearless and a Bird of Prey, and three Orion Interceptors. This was our chance to try out the starship combat for STA, and I figured this was going to be as muddled as finding a straight answer to how quickly to healed stress and injuries. (Again…half the stuff you need was not where the index said it was.)
To our pleasant surprise, starship combat really worked well. We had a station card from the GM screen for everyone — pilot, ops and engineering, tactical, and the players used the inspired “minor character” rules where they could quick generate a bit player they could play to assist them in their actions. (It’s also excellent for when a character isn’t present — now you’re playing Ensign Snuffy in the redshirt… now find out how the monster works!) Initiative usually starts with the PCs and each station gets an action that can aid the others or can do their particular schtick. The bad guys get an action between the PCs, and the players can choose who goes when on the PC turns. We found this worked very well and allowed the players to strategize their actions and feel like they were actually more than just there to roll for a hit on another ship. Ops and Engineering don’t just fix damage here; there’s a lot of planning — fix some damage or manage the power track? Like the shows, the ships blow power on their maneuvers and firing, etc., and that has to be replaced by the operations manager or engineer, or you’ll find yourself unable to do much. By doing this, they were able to evade fire, set up advantages for a firing solution, manage the shield damage, and badly wreck the Orions while taking minimal damage themselves. Of all the sections of the game mechanics, this was probably where Star Trek Adventures shines the most.
The rules aren’t bad. For most basic tests, it works just fine. Combat is a hot mess once you aren’t punching or using melee weapons. Like many RPGs that tried to tackle the ST universe, they often run afoul of the damages the weapons do: phasers just vaporized people in the show. That could make for a short run for a character in combat. You would also think, for a show where the phrase “phasers on stun” is uttered a lot, having stun rules would be a good idea. Starship combat? Excellent.
Advancement is based on “milestones” — did you use or buck your values? Did you stick to the regulations, screw up, lose people under your command, etc.? These stack up and give you the ability to swap ratings on things, or with the arc milestones increase scores, add foci or values. One excellent bit — you can spend your milestones on minor characters that regularly aid you or the ship. The milestones also gives you dice to roll against your Reputation — another aspect of the game that the index doesn’t send you to “how to bloody use it” but rather a bland — you have reputation blurb. It can be spent for medals and commendation, or promotions. It looks like it was also supposed to be able to be used for social tests, but that’s not in the core book — it’s in the Klingon sourcebook. Helpful. There’s almost no real direction given on reputation and I’ve been house ruling on it.
But now for the real problem with Star Trek Adventures…it’s badly written. The rules should be easy to parse out, but there’s so much side chatter about momentum and determination that you can miss the main rule mechanic — roll two or more d20, get below the combo of attribute and department. If you get below the department — that’s an extra success (or two if it’s a focus.) Momentum can be used to buy extra dice, or a number of other things; determination does much less. you could easily combine the two into one currency. The problem with STA and other 2d20 products is that the rules are haphazardly scattered about the book — sometimes in places that defy reason. Worse, the index page is utterly f$%king useless. Half the things you would look for aren’t there, are under a different name, or send you to a page that the thing is mentioned but the use of which is not provided at that spot. Like determination. Or reputation. It feels like the book was churned out fast, an editor was employed sporadically, and they chucked it out the door. It’s been a few years since STA debuted…by now they should have fixed some of this with a second edition. (And the Klingon campaign book does, to an extent.)
So…is it worth it? This one’s a bit tough. The system is perfectly serviceable for most situations. It’s (I think) supposed to be on the rule light side, but isn’t. Personal combat needs serious reworking and starship combat is excellent. Advancement — both the milestones and reputation mechanics are half-baked. Character creation is quick and easy, and creature creation similarly easy. NPCs can be presented as novices or experienced, etc. with stock ratings like Attribute 9 and department 2. The ability to create a background character on the fly and let a player run it so they are in the scene is inspired. There’s a lot of good, but just as much that’s just…not finished for a major licensed product that’s been out for a while. Lastly, it’s a hot, damned mess from a writing, editing, and indexing standpoint, and that’s just not acceptable for a $60 book. So — if you want to run a Star Trek game and don’t want to do the heaviy lifting to write up material for a system you like, yeah, it’s sometimes a pain in the ass but worth it. If you are looking for the system that really captures the flavor of the series-eses, it’s not quite there. If you want a seamless play experience — nope. We’re at least six weeks of play into the season and I’m still looking rules up while trying to run the game.
But, as always, your mileage may vary.
The Black Campbell 