As much as I love pulp adventure games, I was a little hesitant when Outgunned:Adventure was first announced. I first came to Two Little Mice through Broken Compass, of which Outgunned was a refinement of the system and mechanics. Did I really need another game to simulate my favorite movie series? I decided to take a risk based on Riccardo “Rico” Sirignano and Simone Formicola’s previous work. The Kickstarter recently delivered. Is it a treasure worth seeking or just another false grail on the table? Let’s play to find out.
The Outgunned system uses d6 dice pools for task resolution. Rather than a specific target number, the game looks for matching dice. Most of the time, you’re looking for three of a kind for success, with various character abilities allowing for rerolls to get the proper matches. One of the main evolutions of Outgunned from Broken Compass are more details in what happens when players succeed and when they fail. That includes things like rolls that require separate sets of matches, using extra match sets to help out fellow players and specifics on what the stakes are should the dice come up short.
The system is built around a fail forward philosophy which helps to simulate that beat down action hero look as the story moves on. Player characters rarely die in this game, but they’ll lose points of Grit, watch as treasured gear falls into the pit below and give their Rival points of Heat that can be spent to enhance the actions of the Rival that’s out hunting the same artifact sought by the players this week.
For example, players can get conditions that impose penalties like You Look Hurt which reduces a character’s Brawn. There are also custom conditions like You Look Poisoned or You Look Tired, which imposes no penalties but makes it easier to hit the You Look Broken condition which is a -1 dice pool to everything. While Grit comes back during camp scenes where everyone takes a breather in between breathless escapes, getting rid of conditions requires some sort of downtime action. Broken Compass treated these moments as video game checkpoints to rest and recuperate, which made sense given the game’s focus on feeling like games such as Uncharted or Tomb Raider. Mixing in downtime actions open up some fun roleplays moments, such as the heroes figuring out how to beat their rival to the forbidden temple or fix up their trusty seaplane that barely survived the zeppelin attack.Focusing on a specific type of action makes Outgunned:Adventure a stronger design. The structure of a campaign is straightforward. There’s a treasure, the players have the key to find it and they’re trying to beat the rival to the artifact. The game offers solid advice on how to build each of these items like giving the rival strength but also weaknesses to exploit. There’s a section on supernatural threats that opens with asking the GM to figure out if the fabulous artifact is actually magic, a well-oiled machine that presents as such or just a regular old clay amulet that’s had thousands of years of legend hype up its abilities.
My favorite section of the game focuses on traps. While traps are a part of many RPGs, Outgunned:Adventure puts a spotlight on them because of how central they are to pulp adventure stories. They discuss different types, the resources they can cost players who don’t deactivate or figure them out, and how they have something of a Chekov’s Gun position in these stories. “A trap is a promise” they say and discuss how the trap can still be used to push the story forward even if all the players perfectly avoid it. Maybe it shuts an easy way out behind them. Maybe the Rival triggers it just to show the horrible death they avoided with their excellent rolls. It’s a fascinating discussion that I’ll use whenever I design traps for any other game I’m running.
The main caveat I have for anyone interested in the game is that the designers will be the first to tell you this is not a game for a years long, zero to hero campaign. They suggest each campaign will run between 8 to 10 sessions and that anything longer should be structured like a movie sequel where characters start over. There are rules for advancement, once when the players hit a Point of No Return and once right before the final confrontation to stop the Rival from claiming the Treasure, but if small, incremental increases are a part of your joy in playing these games, that’s hard to find here.These characters start out heroic and stay that way. At this point in my life, 8 to 10 sessions of anything sounds epic but I realize that my preferences are not the only way to do things.
If I put together a campaign I think I would plan seven sessions, one on each continent so I can zoom around the plane on the world map I got as a backer. I would also consider one or two more set in the final temple and that sounds like a blast.
Bottom Line: Outgunned:Adventure is the Indiana Jones RPG I’ve wanted ever since I was a kid.
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