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Last Minute Panic Games

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A member registered Jun 06, 2020 · View creator page →

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I  am a huge fan of this, and I had a blast reading parts of it aloud to my partner. Every one of your PC concepts is awesome; please keep the literal bear in some form. I like the flaw-injury system a lot; it adds some exciting choices, taking disadvantages vs. forgoing advantages and mitigable vs. permanent conditions. The tiered abilities play well with my sense of symmetry and also add some meaningful decision points around resource use. I instinctively got what a few of your Stats were for without having to read the description, but not Booty or Omens. Heat and the multiplicity of adversaries is an interesting twist on reinforcement rules; it does add a fair amount of crunch, especially for the GM. Your structure of major and minor/side objectives gives the players and GM a lot of narrative freedom while providing a nice clear plot skeleton and game arc. At one point in your rules you refer to "advancing an objective clock" rather than removing resilience, and I think this way of framing it actually adds a mechanical contrast that might help make Havoc games more legible. +1 vote for ending the campaign with a set-piece ship battle; just a capstone Objective would work great.

I would suggest that, once all companions are rescued, "Now it's time to end this horrible regime once and for all" would be a perfectly adequate motivation for the final mission.

Flattening out the distinction between Objectives and Threats is an interesting choice. I know that in both EtR and my own game, I've had the problem of "why bother spending your successes eliminating Threats when you can just do the Objective as fast as possible?" I think you've got a good framework for a solution with your multiple sub-Challenges and wide variety of challenge characteristics, but again, I'm not always seeing the mechanical incentive to complete the sub-Challenges first. I understand you're going for a much more narrative-forward experience so maybe it's not that important, but if so, the narrator needs to really put in the work to get the players invested in doing the thing. I also note that there don't seem to be any mechanical adverse consequences for players, unless I'm not reading the rules right. I do like the idea of abstract character traits as Stats; I can see it forcing the players to be creative with their verbs, and I think you've included enough for each character that they have a variety of options for how to proceed. I might suggest, rather than spending a whole turn replenishing Reserves, giving the option to spend a success one-for-one to get them back. The characters are a good motley crew with a lot of variety; absolutely love the idea of a talking goose as a PC.

I love your motorcycle-riding goblins, zombies, etc. and the concept of a genre-agnostic interdimensional apocalyptic road trip on sentient motorcycles. Petrol as an essential resource to be rationed and then refueled is a cool take; Resources seem to be a place where a lot of innovation is happening. At first I didn't realize the petrol gauges on the character sheets were intended to track Petrol, and was confused because I couldn't figure out where it said how much Petrol you get. I like the contrast between the PCs as a whole having a shared Formation ability and each different Rider reacting to Bliss and Road Rage in different ways; having everyone have a degree of control over Formation while players have essentially no control over their own Bliss and Road Rage abilities is an interesting choice, and I think I'd have to play with it to know how I feel. Also, the table of petrol station encounters? Amazing.

I'm definitely on board with Eat the Reich reimagined as a stealth infiltration mission instead of a murder spree. Really like the theme of the occult experiments from the original game living on past the death of the Nazis to infect the new world order. The DEFCON mechanic of brinksmanship with character abilities is really cool, and I like giving the players that immediate reward for eliminating threats. Just "Something Bad" at the end of the track is hilarious, and please keep it this way. The Cryptid Corps are cool but a few of them could use a more unified mechanical identity. I note that with the removal of Blood from the game, there seems to be no way of healing conditions beyond a couple of character abilities. I can see this being a deliberate choice to incentivize hurrying up and being sneaky, but I worry that the characters might be a bit too fragile.

The layout in this book is off the chain, and the character art is amazing. Your PCs are mechanically distinct and have a lot of personality, and you've come up with a lot of neat hacks of the basic Havoc Engine rules for their abilities. I like the idea of the mutations, but I'd like to see combination of positive and negative in them. I also see the mutations stacking up pretty quick and downing characters; I might suggest separating mutations from conditions inflicted by adversaries or as suggested, make mutations a bit less likely to actually occur. Separating stress from conditions is an interesting choice, and I like the Overdrive ability being a pure positive to give that burst of power as things heat up. Your adversary and location descriptions give the perfect combination of funny and horrible; I do worry that the number of powerful adversaries at some locations could be overwhelming. It would be nice for the companions to be foregrounded more mechanically to emphasize the connection between pet and owner. Overall, a really solid entry with a lot of room for growth.

Seems like a great game to just pick up and play with zero preparation. I'm going to add to the chorus and say the tables are awesome (I hope I roll cheesemonger!) I like the tonal variation, both fictionally and mechanically, provided by the contrast between human scale and mech scale. You do a great job of concisely communicating your vision of what a play session looks like. The verbs on your equipment are very concrete and straightforward, which I think is the right choice here. And your adversaries have so much character in a small package. Really cool!

Lol, my "in-house artist" loves your comment about the Firebrands. Your suggestion is interesting; I could see potentially adding a couple of Heat thresholds to put the squeeze on players by making Cash more difficult to use or come by.

The idea of different character working different mechanically is really cool, and I would love to see that leaned into even more. I do worry that only three relatively narrow Traits will limit what verbs are accessible to players. I love the concept of Belief and I like the Belief consequence chart very much; the consequence of completely resetting the Objective is maybe too much of a feel bad, but the rest add interesting wrinkles to play. The Threats could be distinguished a little more, and having the Threats always show up again if you don't address them might overwhelm the players; I'd like to see alternative methods of getting them off your tail. You've got good bones and some innovative ideas here, I'd definitely be interested in seeing it after some refinement.

This is a really neat transcription of the rules and conventions of beat-em-up games into tapletop form. Clean, straightforward, though as mentioned, the rules for combos aren't fully explained. I assume filling the combo box is something that's supposed to occur repeatedly over the game, since the conditions are so simple to fulfil? The limit break, using adversity as fuel to build up to a powerful move, is spot-on, and the thing about earning arcade tokens for extra lives with high scores and items you get from breaking stuff  gave me some serious nostalgia for the 80s. The fonts work well to evoke that feeling too, though the readability isn't the best for this aging GenXer. I had a lot of fun imagining all the cool art that's going to be in your book, so thanks for giving my imagination the workout!

The visuals in this book absolutely pop; the illustrations are amazing, and the bright CMY colours really give that four-colour-comic vibe. The arachno-nerd characters are exactly the right combination of funny, stylish, and ick. I like the addition of the Responsibility system; it provides an interesting source of narrative tension and impactful decision points. The random tables for generating setting, scenarios, and villains are a lot of fun and would make the game really quick to pick up and play, though I can see some GMs having difficulty improvising around them on the fly. A default scenario and villain might be a worthwhile inclusion, with the random generator as an optional replacement. Overall, I really liked this.

I really like the addition of the dice chain mechanic and building dice pools from many different sources; Drives, Roles, Aspects, Affinities, Assets, Resources, Foe Dice, and the Havoc Pool all feel fictionally distinct and I like the fact that characters have diverse sources of strength. The combinatorial character building system also appeals to me. These rules have a lot of moving parts, with multiple different rolls that are all resolved in different ways, and I had a little trouble wrapping my head around how the pieces mesh together. The visual presentation is very polished and I'm definitely interested in seeing the Adventure scenario when it comes out.