Outgunned: A Short Review

 

I had high expectations for this one. It's not bad. It's just ... not clicking with me for some reason.

I picked up Outgunned as part of a modern-to-sci-fi binge last year looking for a possible Mechwarrior alternative after running MW3E for a few months. I started in on it, realized it would not really work for that, and set it aside. This year I wanted to give it another look for a potential campaign after the Temple campaign wraps up. So I started back in from page 1.

It's 200 pages long with a nice modern look and layout. From the book's introduction:

Outgunned is a cinematic action rpg inspired by the classics of the genre, from Die Hard to True Lies, passing through James Bond, Atomic Blonde, Kingsman, Ocean’s Eleven, Hot Fuzz, and John Wick.

In outgunned, Players take on the role of action Heroes facing terrible odds. They will be constantly surrounded by enemies while trying to carry out their mission, be it robbing a casino or saving the day.

That's a very specific take and the game does live up to that. There is a constant emphasis on movies as a guide to how the game should feel. Players will take on one of ten roles, each with suitable movie character examples:

• Commando
• Fighter
• Ace
• Agent
• Face
• Nobody
• Brain
• Sleuth
• Criminal
• Spy

A sample:

You have Attributes (5), Skills (there is a list of 20), Feats, and a Trope.

• Attributes are Brawn, Nerves, Smooth, Focus, and Crime and are rated 1-3
• There are 4 skills tied to each of the attributes which are also rated 1-3
• There are 18 tropes and each character picks one. These are sort of templates/archetypes/personality types/alignment that grant some stat & skill bonuses and also tie in to how one wants to play their character. Examples are Bad to the Bone, Cheater, Good Samaritan, Jerk with a Heart of Gold, Leader, and more. 
• Feats let you break the rules in various ways - mainly through re-rolls or avoiding an in-game cost of some kind. They are heavily tied to the mechanics of the game.

Mechanics: It's a dice pool system. It's not an add-em-up for a high total kind of system (like Star Wars d6) but it's not a look-for- individual-dice-over-a-target-number system (like Shadowrun/White Wolf/etc.) system either. You are looking for sets, or matches - like Yahtzee or King of Tokyo or the One Roll Engine (Godlike etc.). 

Difficulty is set by number of matches needed, starting with 2 as a Basic Success ranging on up to 5 for an Impossible though you can get more. There are examples of each difficulty level, a discussion of 'Double Difficulty" for more challenging or complex tasks where one success at level X might not be enough. There is also an option to convert multiple lower success levels into a single higher success level so if you needed a Critical Success (3 of a kind) but rolled 3 pairs instead you can bump that up. There are also some options on how to spend any extra successes by taking extra actions.

There is a handy odds chart in the middle of this section showing the likelihood of success with varying numbers of dice at each difficulty level. 

I can't help but think of these while I'm reading this game

There is a metacurrency called Adrenaline that can be used along the way for things like +1 dice on a on a roll. 

There is a bigger metacurrency called Spotlight that lets you just flat-out accomplish some things - no roll required like an automatic extreme success, removing a condition, or "do whatever you want" - discuss it with the GM. Sure.

There are various ways to acquire each of these during an adventure and I suspect the reason there are two of them is to avoid the "I'm saving them" problem you sometimes see in games with a mechanic like this. Here, Adrenaline is meant to be acquired and spent all through the session while Spotlight is meant to be saved for those big moments, finales with multiple explosions and the like. I get it, I'm just still not sure if we really need two of them running in parallel.

Also much like King of Tokyo (and Yahtzee) there is an option to re-roll: If you don't like your results you can re-roll, and if you don't like that roll you can go "All-In" and re-roll again. There is a downside if you had any success as you can lose those if you roll badly but there are things like Feats that give you "free" re-rolls in certain situations that do not have these negative consequences

There are additional sections on how to adjudicate failure, conditions, combat and damage and death, equipment and vehicles, chases, enemies, and how to run an Outgunned campaign. A few notes from these:

• Enemies are very abstracted and feel kind of generic as they are dice pools with a few modifiers. The GM is going to have to work hard to make enemy mook group #1 feel different from enemy mook group #2. 
• There is a dramatic clock mechanic in "Heat" which makes things more dangerous for the party as the scenario escalates. It's fairly basic but it's a good starting point.
• Plan B is a great idea for changing up a bad situation. It's described as a sort of group spotlight. There are 3 options described in the rules and each can only be used once in the course of a campaign. An example would be "Backup" where in desperate no-win circumstances an outside force shows up to help the PC's out. It's a neat idea on how to salvage a potential campaign-wrecking moment.
• Time-Outs are another campaign type mechanic that's somewhere between a planning session and a pre-finale montage where they bandage each other up, modify the cars, "make some calls", or pick up some guns. There is a list of things the PCs can do - of which they can each do two - and then we move on to the next scene. It's a cool idea and completely fitting to the genre.

 The book ends with a sample adventure and it's probably fine. I have not dug too deeply into it.

Backup!

So there is some really good action movie stuff here buuuuut ... it's just not grabbing me. 

I think a lot of it is the dice pool. Pretty much all of the mechanics revolve around adding or adjusting or manipulating the dice pool for whatever it is you're trying to do and I've seen that in other games but compared to say, Marvel Heroic, where a lot of the fun is in justifying the inclusion of a particular power or trait or quirk there really is not a lot of that here. It reads as just being a mechanical exercise. I realize that might change with some actual play but it's a problem for me right now.

This feeds into a dissociated mechanics issue that I'm feeling as well. The basic system is stat + skill = the number of dice in the pool which can then be modified and I believe the GM (or NPC capabilities) is just setting the target numbers - the players make all of the rolls. Gear is typically a modifier to a die pool, Conditions are a modifier to dice pool, and even Adrenaline is likely to be used for that as well. Between that and all of the abstract approaches to things (like opponents) built into the game I'm not sure it's going to feel particularly visceral. I think my players are going to be busy focusing on the dice and not on the "fiction" of the scene. 

Remember - it started over a car

So yes, I should probably run it but I don't especially want to burn a session for my group to try it. It's not a bad game at all - I suspect for the right group it will hit all the right notes and it covers a lot of the expectations of the genre. That said I think there is a need in this kind of game for some specifics, particularly when it comes to gear. Players (my players at least) might be OK with a "car" with a speed enhancement but they would get a lot more excited and have a more specific mental image if they had say a 1987 Firebird Formula 350 with a supercharger. They'd be a lot more interested in a ".44 Magnum" than a "Revolver". Things like that. Even a feat to have a "signature" weapon or vehicle that does something special would be better. Right now an Ace is good at doing things with vehicles and a particular type of vehicle especially but their personal chosen & modified vehicle is just a generic thing with possibly extra weapons or armor added on. It's the same with some of the other Roles and guns. It's ... bland. Mechanically effective and quick in play - but bland, and that's the last thing I want in an action movie RPG. Give us a few specifics to hang some things on in this sea of abstraction and it might help.

So, final verdict - it's a well done game for a very specific genre but it's probably just outside my target zone for what I personally would want in a game like that. If you're interested though it is definitely worth a look. If I end up running a test game I will post about it here as well.