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Now here's a strange combination. A French roleplaying game translated into English by someone called The Duckmaster, and published in Australia. Perhaps the most amazing thing about Trauma is that it is available in America and actually getting some distribution.

Trauma is a compact game, at 56 pages, with a fair amount of white space, some decent art and generally pretty pedestrian graphics. The entire production is in black and white, but the cover is nicely done and pretty eyecatching.

What makes Trauma most interesting is the subject matter. It's basically a game about violent people doing violent things and getting killed for their trouble. The setting is contemporary and the action is centered around incidents of crime, violence and death. It's basically a game about how well you can fight for your life in the violence of modern society. To keep players from getting too discouraged characters who are killed get to return to life indefinitely.

The actual mechanics of the game are less than 30 pages long. Ten characteristics are rolled on 4D6. A number of secondary characteristics are determined from there. Initial skills are determined from your characteristics and increased from there by spending skill points. A lot of calculation is involved in figuring out the points you have for skills and how good you are with your skills. The selection of skills is pretty basic, oriented towards covert action and combat, but the system is such that it would be easy to add more skills. The emphasis in combat is on missile combat, particularly firearms. This system seems to be overly complex. A great deal of detail is provided on differentiating skill with different types of weapons at different ranges and there's lots of emphasis on situational modifiers. There's also a 'response' system, which is basically an initiative system. Damage is differentiated by type of ammunition.

And finally there's a detailed hit location system, but it doesn't include any provisions for aimed shots. The hand to hadn combat system is simpler, but goes into a lot of detail on different techniques of hand to hand combat, though the actual mechanical differentiation between them is insignificant. On the whole, the combat system is pretty realistic, except for the lack of aimed shots of any kind, very deadly, and probably way too complicated for most players. A lot of this compelxity really doesn't add enough realism to be justified, and it slows down the pace of combat, detracting from the otherwise pretty intense 'feel' for combat which the game tries to generate.

Also included in the rules are massive stats on all sorts of firearms, a special section on playing yourself as a character, two rather sketchy and extremely violent adventures, plus a character sheet and a section of charts and tables.

Mechanically Trauma is playable and fairly well designed, though there's a fair amount of math and the combat system is unnecessarily complex. The basic concept of the game is interesting, putting normal people in violent situations to see what they do. The problem is that this doesn't leave a lot of room for roleplaying and aside from the extensive rules on mental instability there isn't much emphasis on developing characters as more than cyphers with guns in their hands and targets on their back. Trauma was originally serialized in a French magazine and little effort was made to build anything more onto the basic framework when it was compiled together and translated into English. The result is a game which is playable and fun within a limited context, but ultimately not satisfying for long-term play.

Style: 4 (Classy and well done)
Substance: 3 (Average)