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by Cynthia Celeste Miller and Eddy Webb
Z-Man Games
6 Alan Drive Mahopac, NY 10541 www.zmangames.com
Spectrum Games
805 S. 200th Street (E-3) Pittsburg, KS 66762 www.spectrum-games.com
ISBN 1-93174818-7
Copyright 2004
$24.95
192 pages perfect bound
Grade: C+ (would be a B if not for the text glitches)
reviewed by Lisa Padol
80s Cartoon Consultant: Joshua Kronengold
This is a game about the Saturday morning cartoons of the 1980s. If you managed to miss all of those, the illustration on the front cover will give you a very good idea of what to expect. Josh, my 80s Cartoon Consultant is more familiar with them than I, and we found that the game anticipated some of his questions. Yes, the authors mention Thundercats. Yes, there is a mechanic for the after-show message.
As Josh noted, the authors did not attempt to create a single setting that somehow allowed for the existence of every kind of 1980s cartoon all in one place. This would be difficult, but not impossible; however, the authors took what was probably the wiser course, making the game a toolkit for creating a variety of cartoon worlds, illustrated with a plethora of examples to keep readers from getting lost in the sheer variety of the genre.
The book opens with a forward by Jason Blair, singing the praises of the genre and the authors. As I have enjoyed his work, I took this as a good sign. The first chapter, aka "Channel 1", is a brief, 2 page introduction to gaming. I have read more of these than I care to recall, and this ic one of my favorites. It's short, sweet, and stylish, making important points without condescending to readers.
The next chapter covers character creation. It starts of simple, then hits the crunchy bits. Cartoon Action Hour uses a points build system. Players buy Traits, which are an interesting cross between stats and skills. Nearly everything else is bought as a Special Ability (SA), from lasers and healing powers to horses and spaceships to guns and psionics. After all, if a character in an 80s cartoon owns a gun, that is the character's special gun, and it would be unlikely that another character would use that gun. 80s cartoon characters tended to stay in their niches.
While the system is hardly as complex as Hero or GURPS, character creation is more complicated than I prefer. This is probably inevitable, given the scope of the source material, and I think most of my confusion stemmed from two sources. First, Animal Companions and Vehicles are created with both character points (CP) and with a special pool of points called Special Character Points (SCP). CPs are used both to buy the SCPs and to pay additional costs, as animals and vehicles are types of Special Abilities. However animals and vehicles can have their own SAs, such as a snake's with a poisonous bite or a starship's laser beams. The various acronyms and subpools were confusing to read about, but less confusing during the actual process of character creation. However, it would have helped if the already detailed examples of animals, vehicles, and characters were even more detailed, showing the exact breakdown of positive and negative costs, CPs and SCPs for every line of the description, along with indications of which points were CPs and which SCPs, and so on.
The second complicating factor is actually a feature. I found it hard to come up with a concept in a vaccuum and hard to figure out how many points to spend for the base cost of my character's SAs. This is because character generation depends, even more than is usual in an RPG, on interaction with the GM and the other players. Almost everything follows from the setting, and it just isn't as much fun to try to grab every cool ability available as to pick a classic role within the chosen setting and focus on the abilities that should be associated with that role. This wasn't a question of not being able to build what I wanted; I had no trouble figuring out several ways to do it. In an actual campaign, the GM would let me know what was appropriate and which numbers to use.
As I said before, I wish the sample characters had been detailed more fully. That said, the authors show a wide range of genre possibilities, from Teen Angels to Transformers. This was enough to help me pick a hypothetical setting when testing the character creation rules.
The system rules are in the third chapter, followed by combat in the fourth. The former takes up a mere 2 pages, while the latter is longer, taking 10 pages. In contrast, character creation takes 30 pages. This seems a decent ratio to me.
The system is fairly straightforward. You roll a die and add the appropriate skill or trait, matching the result against either a difficulty number or an opposing roll. There are only a couple of oddities here.
First, the die used is a d12, rather than the more common d6 or d10. For some reason, this struck me as goofy and retro, fitting the mood of the game perfectly. Second, while a roll of 1 is an automatic failure, a roll of 12 is not, as one might expect, an automatic success. It is a critical success, and the player gets to add one or two extra numbers on top of that. This makes success likely, but not guaranteed.
The third unusual factor is the existence of superhuman stat ratings. Stats for most traits go from -4 to +4, and the modifier is added to the die roll. If superhuman trails are allowed, they run from +4 (2) to +4 (5). The number in parentheses is the number of d12s rolled by the player, although only the highest die is counted. The number in parentheses is sometimes often added to or multiplied by other numbers for other purposes.
Like the character creation rules, combat is more complex than I prefer, but not too difficult to grasp. There are a few exceptions, particularly in the case of parrying. The rules for parrying seem to be contradictory. Readers are told that making a parry means that the parrying character can make no further attacks that round, but can continue to parry attacks during the round. A parry forces a re-roll of the attack, and the new roll might actually be better than the old. Furthermore, each additional parry gives an attacker +1 on the re-roll. If I have my character parry 4 attacks in a round, the first attack is re-rolled normally. 1 is added to the re-roll of the second attack, 2 tothe re-roll of the third, and 3 to the re-roll of the fourth.
So far, so good. But the example shows a character attacking after making a parry. This should not be possible. The character gets a +1 to the attack because of the parry. That is not a bad way to do things, but it is not how the rule was just described. And, confusingly, the parry is referred to as a "failed parry", even though, as far as I can tell, it succeded. I am not sure what the authors actually intend the rule to be. The confusion is compounded later, when Oshida, a sample character for the Iconia setting, has a special attack that can only be used after a successful parry.
Apart from that, the rules should work as designed. The combat example illustrates many of the crunchy bits nicely, as well as the proper mood of the game. I think one of the damage totals should have been a 17, rather than a 14, but I had no trouble following the action, and I really appreciated the variety of situations illustrated within the example.
Chapter five begins with miscellaneous rules. The rules for awarding experience points have some interesting twists. Villains and other NPCs can earn experience. While I do not object in theory, this seems like a lot of bookkeeping. On the other hand, the authors recommend experience points only be spent between "seasons" of the show, not after every session. This might mitigate the extra bookkeeping, at least a little bit.
Then there are character hooks and goon squads. I have seen both of these before, in 7th Sea. The idea of character hooks is that, rather than getting character points during character creation for disadvantages, players get extra experience points for sessions where these disadvantages come into play. Each character is allowed a maximum of five plot hooks, including those for any vehicles (Experimental Prototype) or animal companions (Steals Shiney Things). A Goon Squad is a group of nameless thugs who attack as a single unit. Cartoon Action Hour's rules contain explicit guidelines for gauging a Goon Squad's strength, something a GM must know, and for determining how many squads a villain has at his disposal in a scene.
The next section has advice for GMs. As many games do, Cartoon Action Hour gives an example of a GM's description that lacks detail. This is followed by an example of a description that contains too much detail, and a description that the authors feel has just enough detail. That second example makes the section work especially well,and is something I do not recall seeing before. Describing too much is as fatal as describing too little.
Genre conventions are described, along with tips for using them in games. Yes, this includes the after-show message. Hey, you get experience points for this! There are examples of genres and villains, followed by an overview of the structure of a typical session, aka episode, of Cartoon Action Hour.
Chapter six has sample campaign, or, more properly, series settings. Three appendices follow. The first has optional rules on topics such as jazzing up Goon Squads and transforming robots, magic, and metagame considederations. Magic is divided into broad areas, or spell clusters, and the exact chrome is left to the players. The magic rules can also be used to create trenchcoats full of weapons (your basic offensive cluster) and utility belts involving as many clusters as a player likes. The spell clusters, like the SAs, are useful mechanics for fitting many different things into a few broad categories. After all, a portable forcefield is functionally identical to a defensive spell.
I have seen games that use metagaming conceits such as a character's popularity with an imaginary audience. Cartoon Action Hour is the first game I have seen that uses these conceits as optional rules, rather than trying to make them integral to the game. This was a good decision, for Cartoon Action Hour works as a long term RPG without the metagame rules, while the games where such rules are integral never struck me as particularly interesting or viable for much more than a one shot.
The other appendices have a glossary, and recommended viewing. The game is rounded out by the authors' retrospectives, the character sheet, and the sheet for the GM to set the guidelines for her series. I would probably have eschewed the lines in favor of white space. For some reason, I would find that less cluttered.
The cover proclaims that Cartoon Action Hour is two books in one, and so it is. The second part of Cartoon Action Hour describes a sample setting, Iconia: Warriors of the Cosmos in loving detail. In these days of rising costs, it is nice to see a book that contains both the complete game and something another company might sell as a standalone supplement. Even if one does not use the setting, this extra material is a godsend for GMs trying to get a handle on the sheer variety of the game's source material.
Warriors of the Cosmos is clearly modeled on He-Man. It is very corny and quite true to the genre. Covering the "history" of the show's creation, the action figures, locations, guidelines for character creation, descriptions of series regulars at two power levels, and the episode guide, this is extremely useful for GMs who want to see how to put all of the pieces of a series together. This setting is followed by the index for the book and a summary or the character creation process.
The art of Cartoon Action Hour is exactly what it should be, an homage to the genre complementing the text perfectly. The editing could use a bit of work. I hit several sections where text was either missing or misplaced. Note: I am available, and my rates are reasonable.
While I could wish for somewhat simpler rules and better copy editing, Cartoon Action Hour does an excellent job of covering its chosen genre in loving detail. And how can one resist a book that got the would-be world dominator Kargorr to illustrate its examples?
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