I’ve wanted to get Outgunned to the table for a while; last weekend I finally had the chance. (Thanks, Josh & Lisa & Gareth!) I ran the quickstart/back of the book adventure, with the goal of getting a feel for the mechanics and finding out if the game is really the general-purpose pulpy action game of my dreams. My benchmark is of course Feng Shui, which holds up pretty well in 2025.
It went fine! None of us had ever played before. Josh made up a character on the fly and it only took him around ten minutes. Overall, we got through two fight scenes and a chase scene in about three hours; I like that. I think we would have shaved some time off that if we were all familiar with the system. The core mechanic has you rolling a pool of six siders, counting the number of matches, and under some circumstances rerolling. In practice this meant we spent a little time reading off the initial results of a roll, understanding how good the roll was, and then talking about re-rolls.
Speaking of which, the math is kind of tricky. I haven’t found a source of truth I trust for a probability table, including the one in the book. If you do trust the book, it’s worth noting that a five die pool would give you a 47% chance of a Critical success level, which means PCs are going to whiff about half the time when fighting entry level thugs like the ones in the first combat encounter in the quickstart.
I didn’t love the quickstart adventure, might as well say that now. Before I get into that, though, more about the game.
You don’t stat up individual NPCs – all the enemies in a given fight scene have one pool of Grit, which are essentially hit points. I had trouble signaling how well the players were doing in their fights, because OK, you’ve done five points of Grit to the thugs and that means what exactly? I was reluctant to narrate the thugs going down proportionally, because that opens the question of whether or not they’re getting less effective. By the rules, they are not; NPCs remain fully effective until they lose their last point of collective Grit. I’m sure experienced Outgunned GMs know how to signal properly, I just didn’t.
The chase rules worked well for me. I did notice that they weren’t terribly simulationist. The mechanics strongly support PCs who aren’t driving doing interesting things during the chase; on the other hand, those interesting things don’t include reducing the Grit pool of any NPCs who are involved so it could easily feel weightless unless you’re careful about scenario design. Or unless you ad hoc it a bit. Not a huge deal.
Character creation is breezy and satisfying. The Feat list would be too long if it wasn’t for the fact that you’ve already whittled it down to a list of six choices by the time you get there. Even the freeform choices (Catchphrase and Flaw) have pick lists to help people who don’t want to think quickly on the fly. Solid work.
So overall I’m happy. I don’t know that I’m aching to get a campaign going, but I’d pull this out again if I thought of a campaign that would suit it. And it’s nice to get something I crowdfunded to the table.
Did I whine about the quickstart adventure? I did, so let me say a couple of things about that…
I think the first fight is too hard for someone’s first encounter with the system. My PCs wound up feeling like they were overmatched and bailed early. (There is a lack of rules for running away, so I ad libbed.) It’s appropriate for the level of opposition, it just sets a somewhat intimidating bar. Possibly if I’d been running for four players, this would have been fine. If that’s the case, the quickstart needs to say “reduce Grit by X if you don’t have 4 players.”
OK, I literally just noticed something while I was cross-checking this post. The quickstart adventure is the same as the one in the back of the core rulebook… and the one in the back of the core rulebook gives those thugs substantially less Grit. That’s a change worth making given that some number of people will play the quickstart before buying.
Anyhow. The transition between the last couple of scenes is awkward. I won’t spoil it just in case, but there’s a scene where you can interact with a bunch of hostile mercenaries followed by the actual fight scene. Any action hero worth their salt is going to want to start the fight earlier than the quickstart calls for, which I happily accomodated as smoothly as possible. The difficulty of the rolls to avoid getting hurt changes for no clear reason between scenes, though! I am not the kind of player who demands utterly realistic interactions. I still found this puzzling.
And then there’s a bit where someone is running away, which I guess gives me those rules I was just complaining about not having. None of this prevented us from having fun, to be clear. If you’re running this one yourself I would just strongly recommend being prepared to ad lib a lot. Make some notes about what kind of reaction rolls you’re going to ask for. That sort of thing.
Other advice from the lofty perch of someone who’s only run this once… make sure you’re handing out Adrenaline, the bonus currency of the game, aggressively. Everyone laughs? Someone deserves a point of Adrenaline. The core mechanics assume that players are boosting their dice pools with Adrenaline often.
And it’s an action game; frame your descriptions as action movie sequences.