It turns out that business trips are poor places to work on posting challenges, especially if you’re horribly jet lagged and you have a lot of evening meetings. I’m gonna try and hit 31 of these anyhow, just not before the end of January.
I found myself thinking about action a lot, so now that I’m back in the US I’m gonna do a quick Outgunned character. Outgunned is designed as a modern action RPG, very much in the spirit of John Wick. Since it’s been pretty successful as measured by Kickstarter success, the designers (Two Little Mice) have added a couple of genre books packed full of potential settings — Wild West, space opera, etc. — and a second corebook aimed at 30s pulp action. This time out I’m doing the “A Kind of Magic” mini-expansion, or Action Flick. I’m going to frame this as modern espionage with magic, which seems like a fun game idea.
OK, let’s work through the rules! This game is huge on genre feel, so the character creation section opens with three things to keep in mind: you’re someone with a mission, which is incredibly important to you; you live dangerously; and you’re one of the good guys. You do not need to know your mission when the game begins, which is a good caution, that could be tough on group cohesion. I, however, will go ahead and decide that my character’s mission is to free Cologne from the magical jungle that took over the city in a single horrid night. So I guess she’s German, and a couple of random generators later, her name is Sara Fischer.
Step one is choosing a Role. This is the basic theme of the character, and because I read ahead, I know that it will be combined with a Trope to complete the picture. Basic Roles include Commando, Fighter, Brain, Criminal, Spy. The Action Flicks always contain a few more Roles: in this case, I’ve got Charming Bookworm, Silly Marauder, and The Chosen One as Role options.
I’m not feeling like going way out of the norm here so I’m picking the Agent Role, and since I would like to use magic, I will amend that to The Magical Agent, as per A Kind of Magic rules. This provides me with access to magical Feats. Hang tight on that, we’ll get back to it.
Picking a Role gives you 1 point in an Attribute and 1 point in each of 10 Skills. Sara’s Attribute point goes into Nerves, and her 10 Skill points go into Endure, Fight, Force, Cool, Shoot, Survival, Leadership, Fix, Awareness, and Stealth. That’s the kind of array I like — generally capable. I also get to pick two Feats from the Role list, except I can pick one of the Magical Feats instead.
I also get the Magic Feat automatically which just unlocks spells. I have Magical Dart as a free spell. Um… and I get additional spells equal to my Focus score. Holding off on that for now, till I know what my Focus score is. I like being flexible so I’m taking Magical Scholar as my first Feat; this gives me the ability to memorize spells I don’t know.
There’s a lot of flipping through books here; this would benefit from a well-designed character sheet for each Role. ANYhow. For my second feat I’m taking Lie To Me — Sara is hard to fool.
There are a bunch more prompts for each Role which I think are just flavor. Sara’s flaw is “I’m too arrogant and overconfident.” Why is “I never accept help and I don’t work well with others” a suggestion here? That’s a recipe for unhappy group play… anyhow. Her catchphrase is “Not in my city,” for obvious reasons.
On to Sara’s Trope. I’m taking Charming Bookworm here; I like playing smart characters and I also want that extra point in Focus. This is one reason I like playbook-style character generation sometimes — I wouldn’t have paired Charming and Bookworm but the combination really sets the tone for Sara’s personality. Tropes give you a choice of two Attributes, and I want Focus more than Smooth. She also gets more skills: Cool, Flirt, Speech, Style, Detect, Heal, Know, and Stealth. The overlap is fine, it just means Sara is more than usually Cool and Stealthy. I’ll take Outsmart as her Trope Feat, which allows her to use Know instead of any other skill at the cost of spending some Adrenaline, the in-game mechanics currency.
And I guess I get three more Spells: Focus 3 (you start with two points in each Attribute and one in each Skill) plus an additional one from her Magical Scholar Feat. That’s gonna be Arcane Shield, Hidden Spell, Reveal, and Open / Close, which seem like good choices for a sneaky Agent type.
Finally, two more free Skill points. One goes into Know, to make Outsmart better, and the other goes into Awareness.
So if I’ve done this right…
| Attributes | Skills | |||
| Brawn 2 | Endure 2 | Fight 2 | Force 2 | Stunt 1 |
| Nerves 3 | Cool 3 | Drive 1 | Shoot 2 | Survival 2 |
| Smooth 2 | Flirt 2 | Leadership 2 | Speech 2 | Style 2 |
| Focus 3 | Detect 2 | Fix 2 | Heal 2 | Know 3 |
| Crime 2 | Awareness 3 | Dexterity 1 | Stealth 3 | Streetwise 1 |
Looks about right. She also gets gear as defined by her Agent Role. A gun, handcuffs, a badge, you know.
Mechanically, for the curious, rolls are a d6 pool, size determined by Attribute + Skill. You’re looking to get two, three, four, or even more of a kind. The most common difficulty, Critical, requires three of a kind. You can usually re-roll dice that aren’t part of a set. It’s reportedly pretty clean in play. Thankfully there’s a difficulty table which tells me that Sara will succeed at Critical tasks with six dice 75% of the time assuming she re-rolls. There’s no such thing as failure, too; you just have to work harder to reach your objective. Consequences, in other words. The odds in this system seem slim enough for that to be important.
Anyway, fun little character generation game. It’d be way better if I’d been doing it on a character sheet with a pencil; I may do another go using a different Action Flick, in which case I’ll certainly print something out first.
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