Fastlane claims to be the game of "Everything, All the Time", and follows the sordid tales of people who live fast, burn out, die hard, and leave a good-looking corpse. Plus: the key mechanic is a based on Roulette. Who can ignore a setup like that?
You don't need a roulette wheel to play - so don't let that stop you - and I had a great time with Fastlane. But is it for you? Read on.
My Background
I was given a free PDF copy of Fastlane by Twisted Confessions, but my plan was to (1) delete the copy if it was not suitable for review, or (2) buy the copy if it was suitable. I ultimately bought the Print copy, and happily so. I'm judging this as a product I've put down my own money for.
More than anything, I want a game to promote and deliver the allmighty Fun. Beyond that: I'm always looking gaming for a game that's light, fast and to the point. It should also give the GM some tools for producing a good game, rather than showering her in excessive pre-game "crunch".
The Mechanics
The mechanics are covered in detail in Carl L. Congdon's excellent review of Fastlane, so I'd recommend looking that over if you want an in-depth look at the rules. My short version: you have a bank of chips to bet on the roulette wheel, and you have some stats (the Facets: People, Assets, Nerve, Guile, Sobriety) that determine your maximum bet. BUT: those Facets go down each time you use them, and the rules of roulette are, by their nature tilted against the players (toward the Croupier / House / GM).
The result is players consistently need to bet and win big to stay afloat, possibly using other resources (Lifes, Favors, Factions) to their advantage, although these are all two-way-streets. Specifically, the Lifes (in the form of "Fast Women are my life!", "Greed is My Life") define what drives your character. Once you lose all your Lifes, you are "burned out", and you have only one last spin before you're out of the game.
My players were an excellent bunch, and quickly picked up on the fast and furious style of roulette.
Gameplay: Heist at the Luxor!
We first had to decide the setting/genre we wanted to play. Given that it was an ad hoc game, we went with the natural choice: an Ocean's 11 style heist set in modern Las Vegas. I figured the style and genre conventions would be pretty universally understood, and I was mostly right.
The players created three characters: the Faceman (and/or Lady's Man), the Wheelman, and the Ninjagirl. (Full disclosure: the Ninja's player insisted that her character walk around in schoolgirl garb. I apologize.) Character creation was pretty fast (the main hangup being coming up with characters off-the-cuff), and the Favors phase was nicely bountiful. In this step, players create networks of people to whom they owe favors, and who they owe favors too, ideally introducing (and entangling) some interesting foils and NPC's. One really notable example was the Wheelman, who introduced his brother - he was to become a major nemesis / comic relief for the game. The Faceman also introduced the hard-boiled wife of the casino owner, who was to be his mark (and an unknowing key to the heist).
What followed was a wild and crazy heist of the Luxor casino in Vegas (whose vice president was the Wheelman's vengeful brother, who was himself entangled with the casino wife / Faceman's mark). They all hustled, scammed, got caught in compromising situations, and even put together a montage ("MONTAGE!") of calling in favors and hiring some patsies. There was the heist, and the players got out of the Luxor with the loot, while the Wheelman's brother got the crap kicked out of him by the FBI. In the process, the Faceman had (purposefully) burned out in order to ensure the success of the heist: he'd given up the life of a Lady's Man for love.
For what I wanted, the playtest was a success. Did Fastlane help deliver what I wanted? Yes.
The Damn Roulette Wheel
NEVER UNDERESTIMATE THE POWER OF COOL SHINY TOYS ON GAMEPLAY! Even with my miniature palm-sized roulette set, the spinning of the roulette wheel had near-hypnotic powers. Also, the rules of roulette only permit you to place bets while the wheel is spinning. The players enjoyed the way this kept things exciting and tightly paced. (On the other hand, there was some initial grumblings about players not reaching over to wheel fast enough to place enough bids. Make sure everyone can get to the betting layout easily, or else print out a separate layout for each player.)
Overall, the wheel - and the overall game of roulette - was good for the game, although it took us a few spins to understand how roulette works. (This is rather sad, since roulette is such a brutally simple game.) The wheel does present a problem, namely the $10-$20 you need to pay for a wheel that won't really have much use, otherwise.
If you're already a collector of gaming novelties, the wheel is probably a welcome addition. Otherwise, I definitely recommend trying out the dice rules (using two dice and a table to generate the roulette results) to see if a wheel is worth the cost.
Mechanical Wrinkles
I had a bit of initial trouble explaining the difference between your bank (what you have to bet) and your Facets (your limits to what you can bet), but the players got over that quickly. Also, winnings: these had to be spent between overcoming the obstacle itself, replenishing your own stats, saving in the bank, and (I didn't even get around to introducing this, as it wasn't quite necessary) "humbling" other characters, which is spending your winnings on screwing them over. It's all quite simple, but needs to be explained the right way.
There was also a bit of confusion when I introduced the game's "burning" concept, where you sacrifice your character's stats to eke out a win after you've lost on the wheel. You can only burn your stats, not from your bank - it makes sense (since Fastlane encourages fast-and-awesome burnouts) but again, I could have explained it better.
The bigger problem with burning was that players were usually able to burn off their Facets in order to pull off a win, so there weren't enough fun complications along the way. The rules suggest that both sides can go back and forth, burning stats until everyone's is satisfied; as a GM I could have (and should have) just kept on burning my NPC's stats in order to throw more compliations at the players. Beyond this, I'm worried that burning is still too much of an "out" for players to avoid bad outcomes; I'm still deciding if its worth keeping for next time.
One more wrinkle: the stats have little in the way of real-world analogs: having a facet of People 6 doesn't mean that you're inherently charismatic or well-connected, but merely that you can lay down that many chips on a spin of the wheel. You're may be more effective when dealing with People conflicts, but even that is uncertain.
There was a small bit of shock, but the players adapted surprisingly quickly, and on the whole it wasn't much of a loss. The players' Facets are designed to be incredibly dynamic (again, they decrease with every single use), and characters can really define themselves through their Lifes and Styles, rather than their Facets. (Styles are one-phrase embellishments of the Facets, such as "Ferrari", "Dead Sexy", etc. that can be used to earn bonus chips.)
The Croupier's Point of View
In the setup, each player has 36 chips with which to make their character; similarly, the Croupier (i.e. the house and/or GM ) gets 36 for each player currently playing. Just as the players spend some of their chips for character creation, the GM spends hers on setting up NPCs. The GM spends chips to create an Obstacle; the players spend chips to bid against it on the wheel. As you can see, Fastlane has the GM and the player situated pretty evenly.
The near-equal initial footing suggests that that the Fastlane GM should be slightly adversarial. I say only slightly, because there is still a good deal of leeway for the GM, specifically with Obstacles. By spending out of her Bank, the GM sets up the difficulty for a given conflict, and this is how much the players must spend from their winnings in order to succeed. For example, the GM will spend seven chips on "the Cops Are Chasing You"; the players then need to earn and spend more than seven chips to beat out this problem. The GM's seven chips are lost in any case.
So, how much should the GM spend on a given obstacle? The author has some thin guidelines - for example: how much to invest in NPC's, how conservatively to play, etc. - but it's mostly given over to dramatic tension, pacing and trust of the GM. This is just fine for me, and I don't think that more firm guidelines are necessary. However, if you or your group have misgivings, I'd definitely recommend hammering out some firmer guidelines about the difficulties the players can expect to encounter. Something as simple as a difficulty ladder - "Easy = 3-6 chips, Medium = 7-12 chips" - could be enough, although I'd be curious if that would actually work in a game where the GM needs to be conscious at all times of conserving her bank. As the author points out, the GM is responsible for managing the story's entire backdrop via her chips.
Fastlane has a few features that makes the GM's life much easier. For example, NPC's are defined only by their Styles and a single stat: "Appraisal Value". This is basically like a catch-all facet, and can be "burned" when the GM wants to sacrifice for a win; it's also similar to Lifes in that the NPC can be removed from the game only when the Appraisal Value has fallen to zero.
Meanwhile, the game's other features make it easy to lay out a web of supporting characters, while holding some potential "trouble" in store for later in the game. The Favors system is especially useful in this regard.
Day in the Life
The "Life" mechanic is supposed to be the crux of gameplay, identifying what drives your characters, and being all that stands between you and being written out of the story. You can work with your various Lifes in two ways: you can take it for a bonus, risking losing some if you fail ("putting your life on the line"; or you can take it as a penalty, but bumping up your life score if you manage to win ("threatening your life").
The game is all about taking your Life by the horns and getting tossed around. In many ways, it's quite similar to Dust Devils, where the Devil mechanic similarly works as a double-edged sword for the players to work with. (The author mentions Dust Devils as an influence, and I enjoy both games greatly.)
In our playtest, Lifes came up surprisingly rarely.Granted, our game was short, and I didn't push the Lifes very hard; but I also suspect that unless the players were really desperate, they might not gamble with their Lifes quite so much. (My players tended be lucky, and hit 37:1 payouts on single bets at least twice. Argh!)
Frankly, I don't think this is a big problem. Throwing your Life into the story remains squarely a player's decision, and your group can pace the gameplay to your own preferences. (Personally, I'm looking forwards to putting Lifes on center-stage for the sequel!)
Just a Heist Game?
Is this just a heist game? The author certainly doesn't think so, and suggests lots of settings that fit into the Fastlane mileau but are literally beyond this world - seedy steampunk cities, sci-fi frontier colonies, even a zombie outbreak! Fastlane was built as a truly generic system, but for a certain kind of play. For example, although I've never really been a Vampire-gamer, I'd definitely be up for running a game of vampires - of the sexy/fast/deadly kind - in Fastlane.
So why, of all things, did we play out a heist movie?
Well, it was a damn good time, and there's no shame in a game doing something really well. Next time I'm in the mood for some hardcore scamming and scheming - maybe more like Blake's 7 than Ocean's 11 - Fastlane is the game I'll pick. Meanwhile, the roulette wheel brings some great flavor to the table. Fastlane can support a wide variety of settings, but if heist or casino mischief is what you want, then live it up!
The Prose
The text is written clearly with mechanics explained piece-by-piece, each building upon the previous one. This kind of clarity is the foremost job of the text; so far, so good.
Also, this rules text is interspersed with blocks of play excerpts. Not bits of fiction or anything like that, but a narrative of how play actually works, showing how the players' social dynamic works with the game mechanics and the GM to create a story. This is fantastic, and should be in every game product, ever. More than anything, these excerpts are excellent for giving the GM some grounding in how to run the game and what kinds of social dynamics and gameplay will evolve.
The text isn't without flaws. Some of the explanations could have been more consise, and sometimes the author slips into telling you about what he's about to show you, rather than just showing the damn thing. In an ideal world, there's a magical editor who could pare down the prose slighty, rendering this book as clean as whistle. This isn't the case, but it's still essentially clear and thorough.
Style & Substance
I'm happy to give Fastlane scores of Style 3 and Substance 4 - with minor reservations on each point..
In terms of style: I don't object to the lack of art, but the design is still somewhat plain, and a bit "texty". (Politically Incorrect Games has excellent examples of sharp layout without using heavy art.) But, it's clean, it's solid, it's easily readible, and the design doesn't get in the way of me enjoying the book. That's good enough for a 3 in my book.
In terms of substance: The tone of the writing isn't perfect, and I might have organized the book differently. But seriously: the concept is well executed, the details are clearly explained, the play excerpts are fantastic - absolutely a 4.
Fastlane was a great buy. Now I'm just waiting for my print-edition to hurry up and arrive!
Help support RPGnet by purchasing this item through DriveThruRPG.
