So, time for an after-action report, of sorts. If you followed me this month you know that I set out to answer the January Character Creation Challenge this year by making only Outgunned characters, each day getting served two Action Flicks via random roll to use in the creation. These Action Flicks are mini-expansions with rules to adapt the basic Outgunned action RPG to a specific genre. Or the Outgunned Adventure pulp RPG as that may be. Initially, I also took that to mean that I have to use Tropes and Roles from the two Action Flicks.
That last one? Not a good idea. While there are a whole lot of Action Flicks for the system by now there were by necessity a lot of repeats, and no one wants to see, say, the 5th Rookie for the District 77 Action Flicks. It just gets a bit too boring, and too restrictive. I ditched this rule halfway through, which I think was the right idea. Even if it watered down the influence of the respective Action Flicks a bit I think the resulting character set is more interesting.
Another mistake was that I chose to keep the system description fairly short. This helped me a lot, both to keep the time invested limited and to avoid repeats of paragraphs describing mechanics. But it caused in my opinion two issues – I assume this was fairly hard to follow for anyone who doesn’t know the system, and in my opinion more importantly this massively reduced how much you readers might be able to see what each Action Flick brings to the table. Many contain rules beyond the character creation, and that is of course completely lost in the way I wrote things.
Now onto the good things, though there will still be some criticisms. First of all, this was the easiest ride I had through the challenge. The randomly chosen Flicks gave enough of a hook to come up with characters easily, and each character took maybe 15 min on average including writing. As an aside, this time I decided to have a week's worth of characters as a buffer, which I made mid-December. But I found that within around 10 days I had made all 31 characters and written all entries, five of which were spent on actually doing what was needed. So, I was done with the challenge before Christmas. Mea Culpa. That said that also turned out to be beneficial – there are a few characters I didn’t find too fun (and I think their entries reflect that) – I am just not too inspired by things like cartoon characters, or the virtual reality thing. But many others were a joy, and I realized that I like to play with Neon Noir and Old Ones. Not surprisingly, I like Cyberpunk and Horror games. Overall, I do think Outgunned does deliver on the ability to make interesting and diverse characters, even with its mechanical focus on the seemingly limited action side of things.
As another plus, I still feel excited about the game, and have indeed prepped to run an Achtung! Cthulhu One-Shot using the Old Ones Action Flick. And now I have a very good idea of how the different Action Flicks function, though I really want to see most of them in play at one point.
The whole list of Outgunned characters on this blog lives here. I also want to highlight a few that I think would be fun to play.
The Cyberpunk Crew (with various other Action Flicks as support):
Karen “Wild Thing” DeFouchier (Neon Noir & Old Ones)
Lareina Rojas (plus A Kind of Magic)
Shao Müller (plus Rising Dragon) – the only one I would probably replace since I think Wuxia clashes too much with Cyberpunk.
Les Herbig (plus District 77)
This is a heady mix of five (!) Action Flicks. I am not sure how well it would play, but I do think the world sounds fun and interesting.
Others:
Kaleb Cassidy (Army of Evil & A Kind of Magic)
Shristi Goyal (Wild West & Midnight Wars)
Ulfgrim (Mighty Swords & Killing Aliens)
Gustav Mueller (District 77 & Midnight Wars)
Nathan “Red Nate” Marsters (A Kind of Magic & Wild West)
Rose (Neon Noirs & Midnight Wars)
Maisie Masterson (Great Powers & Old Ones)
Of these I am most surprised by Gustav Müller - I am not a fan of cop shows. Les in the Neon Noir crew is a bit of cheating since he essentially stopped being a cop; Gustav is not. That said, the idea of an old vampire as some kind of strange supervisor has appeal.
Ulfgrim is also a bit strange since the combo weirded me out at first. But I think he is a great kernel for another wild mix of Action Flicks, probably with an Everything All At Once character thrown in for good measure. The others are really just fun characters for combinations I liked and think I had the best ideas for.
Final thought – as much as I liked doing this, I did prefer last year's approach of making parties for different games. The mechanical variety helps. But I am happy I chose Outgunned as the one game for this year, and think that overall it worked very well indeed.
And with that, I will say - Challenge Met!
Thanks to TardisCaptain for the challenge, and the good folks at the RPG.netforums for far too many far too cool characters to list here – the amount of systems on display was nearly as astonishing as the abundant creativity!
