Appearance

The Good: For a free PDF written by a single author, the graphics for Final Stand are somewhat impressive, and the actual paragraphs are often labelled, making scanning through the printout easy and manageable. The fonts are clear and easy to read, and thankfully the font is slightly larger than your normal print RPG... which makes reading the page easier on the eyes.

The Bad: The layout, however, is horrible... a drunken monkey banging his head on the keyboard with Adobe Pagemaker open could have organized the content of this RPG better. To make matters worse, there is no table of contents or index to help alleviate the pain. This sort of sloppy work makes it a chore to read through... All these problems, however, are not truly difficult to overcome, as the book is a lightweight, weighing in at only 23 pages, including the title page.

One other minor problem is that there is no summary of all the Stereotypes, Styles, and Forms. It's not a major problem, given the book's size and relatively small selection of character types, but it's still one of those things which would have been nice to have.

The Crunchy Bits

The Good: Where to begin?

For one thing, character generation is extraordinarily quick. Characters are defined by three traits, to begin with. Their stereotype (which is anything from old 80's and 90's martial arts films and animes, from the Mysterious Stranger to the Good-at-Heart Rogue, to the Old Master) determines their Quirks (which provide small mechanical bonuses for roleplaying) and some of their Skills. Next, the player defines their character's Way... which is broken down into Style and Form. Style provides a base for the character's Energy and Action, as well as granting the character some special moves. Form also provides Energy and Action, and provides the character with access to more special moves. After that, all the player must do is name and describe their character, and they are finished.

I'd like to take some time to highlight the game's skill system. It's extraordinarily simple, but works very well for the Genre. If a character gains overlapping skills from his Stereotype, Style, or Form, his success (which is guaranteed when using the skill) is better than that of someone without overlap. So a character who has Persuasion three times will be a honey-tongued diplomat able to talk his way through practically anything, while a character who only has Persuasion once or twice will have more difficulty and will be able to accomplish less. Having no skill in something, they simply fail.

Combat is at once simple and deep. Characters assign divide their actions between Punch, Kick, and Throw moves, and then roll to see how many moves they can make during a single Round. Making attacks means sacrificing some of your moves to make, and each move you have has a Punch, Kick, or Throw move cost. You can continue to make attacks untill you've used up all your moves or you choose to switch to defending, saving some moves for the opponent's counterattack.

Chi can be used to modify your attacks and defenses... as well as giving you more Energy and allowing you to use special moves more often. Energy can be used in a similar, if more limited manner, as well as providing the game's health system. To quote an old saying: "The candle which burns brightest, lives shortest." really applies to the Energy system in the game, since a player can potentially sacrifice his Energy to cause more damage to an opponent.

Defending is a little different, but works surprisingly well for the game's combat system. When you defend against an attack, you potentially sacrifice a move to attempt the defense... which requires rolling and generally has a small chance of success (4+ or 5+ on a d6). If you succeed at defending, however, you don't lose the attempted moves which succeeded (so, you choose to use two defending moves against an opponent and one succeeds, you block the attack and only lose one move) and you are then the attacker. This makes for some surprisingly intense rounds of combat, and the attacker can switch often enough to dizzy even the most observant watcher.

Even more impressive are the rules for handling Mooks. Simply put, a mook is a true mook, in Final Stand. In game terms, he's probably about 1/10th as powerful as a starting player... but he could attack with 20 friends and still be up the creek without a paddle, since groups of mooks don't have Chi and don't really have a variety of special moves... Plus, as a group of mooks energy (which count them as a single opponent) is whittled down, they lose Actions.

Character advancement is actually very impressive. Instead of a crude experience point system, at the beginning of each session players each define one reward (such as +2 Energy, Learn one special move, etc) with the GM throwing in an extra reward. During the course of the session, characters gain Standing... Which is, in short, a measurement of how much ass the character has kicked. Characters gain Standing by winning fights with powerful opponents (unless there's a group, Mooks don't net a single bit of Standing), accepting challenges, winning challenges, and other suitably genre stuff such as fighting under a penalty hand (tied behind your back), or showboating (wasting a move during a Round to gain Standing). Characters lose standing by being KO'ed, refusing challenges, and losing challenges. In general, it's a friendly contest between players to figure out how much ass each has kicked. At the end of the session, the players take turns picking the rewards for their characters, which are crossed off the list, leaving subsequent players with fewer and fewer choices for which they can take. It's a really unique system for advancement, and can make for enjoyable games as this encourages players to earn Standing by fighting under penalties and by showboating against weaker opponents... Which can make for some exciting narrations.

Another point which I really enjoy about the character advancement is that it allows players and the GM to determine their rate of progression. Games can increase at a lightning quick rate, or move more slowly and sedately. It's just a nice aspect of the game which shows that the author really put some thought into the game.

The Bad: One thing I disliked about the game's system was it's reliance on each character having either a worthy opponent or a group of mooks. No rules are given for two characters teaming up against a single opponent of roughly their power level, and the game assumes that every encounter will feature enough opponents to go 'round. I would have liked to see a more open-ended battle system, with a melee-ish approach to things... Something which allowed more Final Fight-style brawls than Street Fighter matches all the time. It'd be easy to work out something like this with a few houserules, but it's still a point which bugged me.

I would have preferred a more point-based system, perhaps as an optional way to make wandering warriors who pick up their techniques here and there, instead of forcing characters to choose from the different Styles and Forms which limit character creation. It's a minor point, especially since it's doubtful ANY two characters (even ones with the exact same Stereotype, Style, and Form) will look the same after a few sessions.

The only real problem I have with the game's system is that a GM could potentially have some problems with running the game quickly with larger groups. Given the game system's dynamics, this is probably much better suited to no more than three or four player gaming groups... Which is kind of a shame, since the game is so much fun. However, the problem becomes especially apparant when the GM is running five or six fights against players at once, especially with the game's reliance on good narration.

The Fluffy Bits

The Good: For a game which models it's writing techniques after Feng Shui, the game has a surprising level of fluffy bits to it. Players are repeatedly encouraged to roleplay their characters completely, and actually almost ensures it by forcing the characters to rely on gaining Chi by roleplaying their character's Quirks, and since Chi is such an important part of the combat system (while not strictly required to win fights, a character with a lot of Chi is virtually unstoppable when pitted against a character of similar power and no Chi), this means that players will be often describing their actions with great detail. In the group I played this with, players had a lot of fun destroying their opponents and my carefully described environments with their descriptions.

Even more fun is the simple way the game handles power levels... Since the game is intended for anything from Bruce Lee style street fighting to planet shaking bouts which'd make Goku envious. Instead of handling this via a crude scaling system as some RPGs do, players are simply told to keep their narrations within the game's volume level... Which can range from Quiet (think a Bruce Lee movie) to Blow the Amp (here's where we get into Dragonball style powerlevels). Since Mooks are virtually powerless anyways, this makes for a well rounded system which is handled solely via fluffy means.

The Bad: The game's setting of Big City (and to a greater extent, the Empire) is poorly described, at best. The vast majority of any GMs games will be largely influenced by his own personal experiences. Not necessarily a bad thing, but it's annoying to have to do a lot more extra work in establishing the imagery of the game, since each player's vision of the game's setting could be vastly different compared to the GMs.

One of my personal problems with Final Stand is it gives the players far too much leeway in terms of what they can and can't decide. While this can be easily remedied by the GM taking a firmer role than suggested in the book, the GM feels more like another player than an actual GM.

Conclusion

Style: 3 (Average)
The game's layout and some minor formatting really bring down the grade of what could be an outstanding game. I almost wish that some company would pick this up for publication, since this game would be fantastic with some better production values in the layout and art departments. The game lost two points from having the perfect score for the problems with the layout and lack of an index or table of contents, which make navigating the book a pain.

Substance: 4 (Meaty)
The game's system is absolutely fantastic, and the game fits the genre perfectly. I was tempted to drop the score of the Substance by a point because of the slight problems I had with the game's combat and character creation, but decided to leave this at a solid 4 because of the absolute enjoyment I got out of a simple playtest session. The only thing which dropped the score was the game's problem with larger gaming groups.