Once upon a time, RPGs were simple affairs. You were a Fighter or a Dwarf, you had stats on your sheet that were considered “dump” stats because they never really got used, and concepts like well developed NPCs and Joseph Campbell didn’t matter as much as +5 swords or a trusty 10’ pole. But time passed and the old way of looking at games lost favor. People wanted pathos and angst and Dwarven fighters with only mechanically relevant stats in their games. But some gamers and game developers went the other route. Rather than rejecting the simplicity of older game design, they pushed for further minimalization and
3:16 is firmly in this minimalistic camp.
In 3:16 characters are all troopers in the 16th brigade of the 3rd army of the Expeditionary Forces, recruits from Terra sent out to kill every other sentient in the galaxy whether they were a threat to Terra or not (better to get them while they’re still weak). All characters start out almost identical, the major differences being rank (which I’ll get to in a moment) and gear. In fact, characters are so close to identical they have a pool of 10 points to divide between their only two abilities: Fighting Ability (FA, which measures how good they are at killing things) and Non-Fighting Ability (NFA, which measures everything that FA doesn’t cover). Neither of these two abilities can be rated below 2 or above 10, ever. Rolls against these traits are with a d10, and are considered a success if they are equal to or lower than the stat rolled. The character with the highest NFA starts with a rank of Sergeant (with a d10 roll used as a tie-breaker), and the character with the highest FA is ranked as a Corporal, while everybody else is a lowly Trooper. Each rank offers two new different weapon choices (each weapon having different strengths and weaknesses as to how many kills it can rack up at various ranges), and higher ranks also have access to extra options like e-vacs, vehicles, or immense bombs. Oddly enough though, higher rank doesn’t really mean much else, which I’ll get back to in a bit.
Okay, so this is where you start fleshing out your character’s background and story, right? Well, not entirely. See, each character starts with an empty Strength slot and an empty Weaknesses slot. Want to win a conflict? Fill in that Strength slot, narrate a short flashback for your character that shows his strength over adversity, and that character wins the current conflict. And no one can negate his Strength once he plays it, or play a Strength of their own afterwards. (And yes, this can make player-vs-player conflicts boil down to the winner being whoever gets initiative and is willing to use a Strength to win.) Weaknesses work in a more limited fashion, allowing players to turn a fatal loss into a smaller loss (but still a loss) by creating a flashback where the character failed previously; the character isn’t dead, but he is not much better off (how poorly being a matter of player and GM consensus I’m guessing). Of course you can develop a personality and backstory for your character before play starts, but 3:16’s system of Strengths and Weaknesses encourages you to also develop such things as the game progresses.
So why do characters want to run amok and kill things? In setting it’s because Earth is too dull and Troopers want to experience adventure and ensure Terra’s continued safety (initially at least). But also in the true tradition of RPGs everywhere, killing things makes you more powerful. In 3:16, the player who kills the most enemies raises a level, and everybody else rolls a d10 with the highest roller gaining a level. Honestly, I’m a little torn on this mechanic: it seems like it would be fun, but it also seems to mainly reward the highest ranked characters and the characters that rack up the most kills. And since higher ranked characters get access to tools to kill more things, eventually the highest ranked character and the character with the most kills seems like they’d become the same character. If I’m reading it right, the lowly and unlucky Troopers will rapidly be left behind, and never get a chance to catch up. Good for stories perhaps, but not so great for hack-n-slash (or in this case “shoot-n-bomb”) gaming. Anyway, once a character gains a level, he gets to raise one of his stats; FA makes him better at killing things, while NFA increases his chances of impressing his superiors and getting a promotion (hopefully you can see how this helps to allow those who level to keep leveling at the cost of the rest of the group getting to improve). Characters that raise their level also get a Strength or Weakness slot, with a maximum of five Strengths and four Weaknesses per character. That said, at the end of a mission, everybody gets to improve their skill with one weapon of their choice (reflected in an increasing number of kills they make), and they make a Development Roll. Development Rolls are made against the character’s NFA and can be used to do one of the following: gain a rank, improve another weapon’s kill rating (you gain more dice to roll in determining how many kills you get with one class of weapon), or gain a new piece of gear.
Okay, I’ve talked some about character creation and advancement, and how it’s all tied around killing things. But what does that mean in this game? Basically, each campaign of 3:16 is broken into multiple “missions”, and these missions revolve around going to a world and killing everything there. To reflect the alien threats, the GM uses a pool of Threat Tokens. Troopers who encounter the enemy (represented by a number of Tokens) roll against their FA ability on a d10; if they roll their FA or less, they remove a Token, roll how many kills their weapon does against enemies at that range (each weapon kills differing numbers of enemies at different ranges), and proceed to the next round. It’s really, really abstract combat. One Token could represent one enemy kill or a hundred or a thousand, all depending on the weapon used. Once the Tokens for this encounter are used up, the Troopers move on to the next encounter. And once all the Threat Tokens for a world are used up, the mission is over and the Troopers move on to the next planet to cleanse. As for how many Threat Tokens a planet is worth, that number is determined by the GM taking the number of PCs and multiplying that by a number from 4 (a planet with limited Threat) to 6 (for a planet with a lot of Threat) with a multiple of 5 being a baseline. So if you have 4 players, 20 Threat Tokens would make for an average planet.
But the alien threats aren’t entirely reliant on large pools of Threat Tokens to provide a challenge. They have an Alien Ability score, or AA, which takes the place of FA and NFA for all enemy rolls. And if they roll their AA score or less (on a d10), then every trooper who rolled less than their AA roll (or failed) takes a “kill”. If a Trooper takes three “kills” (not to be confused with the “kills” Troopers cause) in the same conflict, he’s dead. On the bright side, between gear, Weaknesses, Strengths, and so forth, Troopers are somewhat tricky to dispose of. Plus, Troopers that survive an encounter heal one “kill” level. Before you think Troopers have all the advantages though, each alien race encountered has a special ability to help give them a fighting chance. Some aliens regenerate Threat Tokens, others deny the use of E-vacs, some can deny Troopers their ability to heal between encounters, and so forth. And of course, any good alien needs some description and a home world worth defending, and 3:16 generously provides some random generator tables for GMs to pick or roll on.
So how do you pull it all together? Well, the GM rolls on a series of tables to determine the planet type, the alien type, the Alien Ability score, and the special ability the aliens’ of that world possess. There’s even a convenient table for naming the planet (openly based off of the names of famous artists, in a rather clever little move I think). And then the game kind of falls apart.
What do the players do? They travel to the world, kill monsters, survive or die, and then rinse and repeat, and eventually they come to hate Terra (Hating Terra is the final Weakness all Troopers earn, and it’s even listed as such on the Character sheet). 3:16 is excellently structured around its combat and randomly generated worlds and foes, but it also reads almost like a dice game. There are a handful of nods to scenes that aren’t combat and role-playing, but not really enough. And beyond aliens, NPCs aren’t even mentioned (except in a sample combat scenario). Remember I mentioned that higher rank for PCs doesn’t mean much beyond more gear? In 3:16, PCs are part of a larger military force, but NPC troopers aren’t covered or mentioned anywhere. How many NPC Troopers land with the PCs on a planet? How many NPCs can a PC Major call on? What happens when the PCs all hate Terra and want to use NPCs Troopers to help them destroy the Earth? There’s a huge potential for the role of NPC Troopers as political allies and social foes, or even details on using actual Troopers as threats but 3:16 is silent on all of this. Generic “Corrupt Troopers” are listed as an option for an alien “basic creature form”, but mechanically they’re no different from any other bug.
Style: Writing is crisp, concise, and generally engaging with no typos that I recall (a feat these days it would seem). I found myself having to double-check a few things to make sure I understood the mechanics, but the layout was fairly decent. All art is done by the author, and while that can be a warning sign, here it provides a nice unifying theme throughout the book; honestly, I find the art to be a bit like Larry MacDougall’s less detailed B&W work from the 90’s, but with more relevance to the subject at hand. One special note should be made about the book size: it’s 8.5” by 5.5” and printed landscape, meaning that its 96 page book size would be less than 48 pages if printed in a more traditional manner. It looks slick and light, but people hoping for a more standard-sized tome may be disappointed. All in all I’ll give it a solid 4 for style. It tries to stand out, it has a nice unified feel in its art, and it’s well written. It’s no work of high art, but its presentation is good.
Substance: For a minimalistic game, 3:16 does a lot right. World creation, alien generation, and encounter creation is handled very nicely. The balance between characters need FA and NFA is nicely done, and weapon choice is a valid concern for characters. The “instant win/save” nature of Strengths and Weaknesses is clever as well. But it also outright ignores things like the role of NPC Troopers in the game, and in a game about military conflicts where PCs are expected to raise in the ranks of command seems like a huge oversight. Also, some guidelines on how to structure a conflict against Terra (remember, all PCs are genocidal killers who eventually come to hate Terra) really should have been included. The game feels like it’s possibly only a few pages short, but those would have been vital pages I think. I can’t help but find it feeling a bit incomplete and needing some work from GMs, but there’s also a lot of goodness in a little package here and clever GMs should be able to patch the holes with a bit of work. I know plenty of people are having a blast with it, so maybe it's just not clicking in my puny head. For Substance I’ll give 3:16 a low 3 on the chance that I'm missing something or that I'm being overly demanding, otherwise it would have been a solid 2.
Who Should Get This: People who like minimalist game design, or are looking for some light mindless bug hunting fun will probably be happy. This is the kind of game people can sit down and be playing in a matter of minutes over beer and pretzels, or run an ongoing campaign of during lunch breaks. It’s fast and simple. And the random tables to generate everything and minimalist focus of the game on combat easily allow for player absenteeism and rotating GMs, something few games can do as efficiently.
Who Shouldn’t Get This: If you can’t get past your character having two stats and a handful of earned defining traits, or are looking for more complex stories than “go here and kill everything, rinse and repeat” than 3:16 probably isn’t for you. The random generator tables for aliens, worlds, and so forth are fun, but not really worth the price of admission for those just looking to idea mine the (also minimalistic) setting.
Conclusion: 3:16 is a slick looking game, with some clever and light mechanics, that never really manages to live up to its full potential. Reading it makes me want to run a game of it, but then I hit the stumbling block of doing anything but killing aliens with it and decide to go run something else. It makes me think of a complex and possibly engaging dice game, with parts of an RPG bolted on.
Review Summary