In the tradition of RPGNet reviews, I am behoved to point out before we start that I am listed in the “special thanks to” section of this game, and thus could be considered to have a conflict of interest in writing this review. In my defence, however, I have no idea what I’m being thanked for, as I knew nothing of this game until it had gone to publication. Possibly I’m being thanked for this review, but that requires a discussion of multidirectional time flow which is outside the scope of this text.
Our discussion must instead focus on A Fistful of Dice, an RPG from new company Azathot LLC. A Fistful of Dice (hereafter AFOD) is a generic RPG system, intended to be coupled with upcoming supplements depicting a variety of settings. The core rules are sold separately so that you can pick and choose which supplement you wish to have, and buy more than one without getting the core rules twice. Since the game is a very reasonable US$10, this makes good economic sense for the consumer.
Buying two books also won’t strain your shelves, as AFOD is a slim-lined, A5-size stapled booklet of 80 pages. The dynamic front cover shows figures from a variety of genres exploding out of D6s, and the blurb reads “a bunch of dice and your imagination can be a heck of a good time”. Okay, so heck is a little molly-coddled, but it’s a strong opener.
Inside the covers, you’ll find nothing but a system – no setting, no adventures, no characters – not even a sheet, although one can be found at the website – and all with the general assumption that you’ve seen this kind of thing many times before. This is certainly not a book for the newbie. The text also has a no-nonsense cut-straight-to-the-chase approach throughout, which allows the delivery of quite a lot of information in this small space. A few times I felt things were too rushed or too skimpy, but this was a minor thing.
So what’s the system like? Well it’s a D6 dice pool system that borrows heavily from Over the Edge and/or RISUS, but with more structure, like GURPS or D6, and is more of a toolkit, like FUDGE. The central mechanic is simply rolling a bunch of D6s (between one and seven) and adding them up – beat the total rolled by your opponent and you succeed. If there is no opponent, the GM rolls a number of dice (1-7) depending on the difficulty. Roll all sixes and you can roll an extra dice (and if it’s a six, continue). Roll less than half the target and you botch, roll double or more and you crit. Bonuses or penalties to a roll are always in the form of dice (1-3). Everything, indeed, is done with one six sided dice.
Combat is simply skill versus skill. Initiative is decided by rolling all your Reflexes dice, then counting down from six to one – you can act once in each phase for every one of that number you rolled. Damage done is simply a number of D6s (per weapon type), plus a flat bonus equal to the level of the attack skill and any damage bonus. Roll armour dice and subtract, assuming your armour is of the correct type to prevent the damage type (there’s five kinds). Whatever’s left over comes off the hitpoints; run out of hitpoints and you die. Take more than half your hitpoints in a single shot and you get a persistent major wound.
Damage dice for a sword range from three to five (based on size), ditto for light to heavy pistols. That’s an average of 12.5 damage for a standard sidearm; the average hitpoints for a starting character with unexceptional Physical Toughness is about 8-12. (Joe Average has half that.) So, yeah, don’t get too attached to your character here – or wear lots of armour (plate will give you two dice against a sword – so pray they don’t have a claymore). Or have a medic to get you 1d6 back on a successful Medicine skill roll. (Remember, it’s 1d6 for everything.)
This is, of course, assuming you chose to take the skills in question. AFOD uses a freeform chargen, where players simply spend 30 points on whatever Talents (as they are called) that they want, bought on a triangular scale (1 costs 1, 2 costs 2 1=2, 3 costs 3 2 1=6 etc). Talents include attributes, skills and kewl powers, all handled identically in both chargen and application. This makes everything very simple and flexible, but it has one problem: there are some Talents which are so core to the system, they SHOULD be attributes. Namely Physical Toughness, the basis of hitpoints and Reflexes, the basis of initiative. Agility and Mental Toughness are also fairly key.
This is fixed by the fact that all characters have all Ordinary Talents (ie now kewl powers) at a level of one (novice) automatically – so everyone in the game can break into things, use a longbow, make forgeries and move in zero-G. As novices, yes, but it’s still a little odd – and it makes for a messy character sheet. And there’s no explicit indication about the importance of these key Talents - you have to infer it. There’s no character sheet to clarify this, nor even a character example to refer to – an egregious flaw.
The combat rolls that depend on these stats are as follows: Hit points involves rolling twice your dice in Physical Toughness and summing the best half. Mental Toughness does the same to provide mental hitpoints. Your movement is dependent on your Agility stat, and your Evade score (the dodge roll you get when you’re not getting a dodge roll) depends on Agility and Reflexes. These are all calculated before play starts, so it won’t slow down play, but it seems odd that such influential stats (spend 2 points to double your hit points??) are not treated differently.
This is the cost, it seems, of trying to be both FUDGE and GURPS at once. Later sections encourage the GM to refit and rename the Talents list to suit your game, ala FUDGE – but these derived value sections aren’t written with that in mind (unlike say, the way OtE’s were).
Besides the ordinary talents, the game deals with two other types that work slightly differently. Firstly, there’s Meta Talents, one of the best bits of the game. Characters can spend points on three talents named Courage, Ingenuity and Style. Should their hero want to do something beyond their dice pool, but fitting their idiom, they can draw dice from the appropriate stat for said action and add it to their dice roll. These work like a dice source; they replenish to their starting value as frequently as the GM wishes. Like so much in AFOD, this is a breathtakingly simple mechanic, yet clever and inventive, and offering a lot of potential fun and inspiration to any game on the pulpy side of things. Indeed, if there’s a problem with Meta Talents, it’s that they’re dealt with so quickly, you might miss them – and that would be a damn shame.
Far more expansively covered are the second type of Talents – Extraordinary Talents. These cover any sort of funky powers that you want to model differently from skills. The basic mechanic is the same – roll your skill dice and beat the difficulty level, but there’s a few twists. Namely, you have to concentrate for as many rounds your skill is below the target difficulty level to “cast” your “spell”, and every failed use drops your stat by one point until you get a good night’s sleep. This predicates a rather specific mould for all your powers, but they’re easily changed or discarded, and the effects are so much in the player’s control the powers are going to remain interesting. Guidelines are given for adjudicating different uses for powers, doing tricks, or pushing their limits, and players can get better at these new manoeuvres as time goes on.
Not quite sure how to model a specific power? Then turn to Appendix A where, after all the ordinary talents, there are provided a fairly detailed (by AFOD’s brusque standards, that is) discussion of 24 different powers, from classica;l magical (Alchemy, Necromancy) to supers (Cryokinesis, Deconstitute), from horror (Summon and Bind) to psionics (Psychometry, Precognition). There’s also a (alas very brief) guide to designing powered objects. They’re not exactly the most brilliant, complete or expansive rules in the universe (just fairly common sense guidelines on suitable target numbers, durations and effects) but it’s very handy that they’re there in the first place.
Speaking of handy….there’s four more appendices to come. Indeed, the appendices here make up more than half the book – 34 pages of system, 46 pages of appendices. Appendices B through E are weapon, armour and equipment lists for four general tech levels – up to the middle ages, the modern era, near future, and far future. Again, these lists aren’t exactly frighteningly comprehensive, but they do work hard to be a very good summary – lists that hit all the high points and touch all the bases. The first two eras have more than twenty weapons listed, and the shooty things presaged for our future are good fun. More importantly, each era has a list of standard equipment, focussing on exactly the kind of things players want to carry and play around with, each with a description and a simple line of rules (if necessary) for their application. The lists are short, yet we cover espionage, medicine, incendiaries and lifestyle equipment, and the future sections also provide details on cybernetics, robots and computers.
These lists manage to balance being short with covering the bases so well that I think AFOD will prove useful as a reference guide even if you never use the system. Need a simple but useful equipment list to hand your players, it’s here. Or if your players ask for something and you want a quick guide on how to rule on it, it’s here. And hell, if you’re using OtE or RISUS, then you’ll barely have to convert the rules.
This is the chief thing that sets AFOD apart from the many generic systems out there which it resembles: it doesn’t just stop with providing the system. Although example characters would be useful, it compensates by providing lots and lots of examples of Talents (both ordinary and extraordinary), and lists the basic building blocks of any setting (weapons, armour, equipment). And everything comes with rules, and there’s also a few guidelines for shaping, designing and flavouring Talents and rules to suit your game. And because of the sharply economical writing style and unified simplicity throughout the system, it manages to pack all this information into a tiny space and very few words.
Of course, it’s miles away from being as flexible as FUDGE, or providing as many building blocks – but then FUDGE is a lot longer. GURPS Lite is longer too, but AFOD isn’t far behind in terms of rules support offered, and is much simple. OtE and RISUS lag behind in the detail…but they compensate with more flexibility and far more brilliance in their core design. AFOD will appeal if those last two were too floppy for you, or if GURPS or D6 were too detail-heavy, or if you liked the idea of FUDGE but you didn’t like the core dice system therein.
If all these games seem to be blurring together, that’s because they do. And ultimately, AFOD has little to distinguish itself from them. It’s solid, and it works, but it’s just another generic D6 system. And the truth is, all the other systems mentioned are either free, or – in the case of OtE, attached to a very interesting setting.
So this is going to be the key for AFOD. Supplements are already in the pipeline (go to the website at http://www.azathot.com/rpgames/afod.html to read about them); on their shoulders will the game rise or fall. If they catch your imagination, and you like the sound of the system as I’ve described, you can save yourself a lot of bother by picking up this book along with your favourite so that you can run it straight out of the box. And in this busy age, that’s not something to sneeze at, particularly since the whole package is still going to cost you less than the average RPG.
However, as a stand-alone book, it’s not really much more than functional. I mentioned in my Little Fears review that that game was flawed but extremely interesting. AFOD is the opposite – it’s a solid, simple yet comprehensive, hard-working, quick-starting and quite playable system, right out of the box. But in a game market where these things are becoming more and more common every week, this isn’t enough to be interesting.
Still, if the quality and value for money is maintained in the supplements, this may change. We can only wait and see. (Note: assume a linear, unidirectional time flow again here.)
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