Vs. Monsters Deluxe Edition
Vs. Monsters is not what I expected. And that’s OK.
I had heard of Vs. Monsters many times before actually getting to see the game. I was familiar with Phil Reed’s original design of the game as part of the 24 hour RPG project, as well as its subsequent release to the general public through his Ronin Arts company. Knowing Reed’s work mainly from his excellent d20 PDF’s, I assumed that Vs. Monsters would be another fantasy game about killing monsters and taking their treasure.
Consider me pleasantly surprised.
Vs. Monsters is tough to summarize, but in my pitch to my players when I presented the game to them I summed it like this. Imagine if Neil Gaiman and Tim Burton watched a lot of Buffy the Vampire Slayer while playing Over the Edge and then designed a game.
Boggles the mind, right? Let’s see if I can better explain the premise.
Players in Vs. Monsters take the role of early 1900’s Americans who live in “The Town.” The Town is surrounded by everything you could imagine fitting in to a horror move from that time period. You have The Village, The Church, The Road, The Forest, and The Mountains. Are you getting The Picture? The setting is vague, leaving room for the GM to add all the detail he wants. Need another locale? It shouldn’t be too hard to fit in whatever you need for your game.
Characters are created in a manner that reminds me favorably of Atlas Games Over the Edge system. Characters have broad traits that encompass everything they may want to do. Just assign four values to the attributes of Fighting, Defending, Thinking and Running and your character starts to take shape. Good Stuff and Bad Stuff act as a rudimentary system of merits and flaws, and either influence ability scores, grant powers, or alter the cards a player draws when determining the results of actions.
In a novel twist, the action resolution mechanic is Vs. Monsters relies on a deck of cards. It’s a clever, creative system and one simple enough to sum up in a single paragraph. Draw a number of cards equal to the appropriate attribute. Compare the highest card drawn against a target card. If your highest card is equal to or greater than the target card you succeed. If it’s lower, you fail. Reed goes on to list some combat modifiers, suggested values for differing difficulties as well as a system for opposed challenges, but this is not supposed to be rocket science. If you’re looking for the most novel, innovative, robust rules system around, keep looking. This is beer & pretzels land, and simplicity is king. The Vs. Monsters system is as intuitive as Go Fish, and so simple it makes “rules light” systems like True 20 and C&C look like calculus.
Of course, as a horror genre game, there is a basic system for fear and the effects of fright as well. Surprisingly though Reed has thought this system through enough to include rules for fairly complex stunts like called shots, initiative, surprise, and multiple actions in combat. Reed really covers all the bases. GM’s will be hard pressed to find an action that can’t be quickly resolved with the Vs. Monsters mechanics.
The GM’s section of Vs. Monsters is just a few pages long, but there is a lot of great stuff packed into this section. General themes for horror will be a big help to GM’s unfamiliar with the genre. Rules for creating specific nemesis characters to challenge your players, and a few sample adventure ideas are all contained in this section.
Of course what horror game would be complete without monsters? Vs. Monsters has your standard zombies and witches, but it includes a few surprises as well. The notes on different methods of “defeating” ghosts are very helpful, and add more flavor than just combat. There’s a section specifically for GM’s who want to run a Cthulu-esqe game, and a very interesting monster called “The Misters” that left me wanting more. Having read Gaiman’s Neverwhere, I’m pretty sure Reed is borrowing the concept of The Misters from there, but I’d liked to have seen more about the one monster that is specific to the VS. Monsters setting.
The whole time I was reading through Vs. Monsters, one thought kept running through my head. Namely, that this system is almost perfectly tailored to running a live-action game! Everything, from the half-sized format of the book when printed, to the use of cards rather than dice, to the simplified character sheet and mechanics just screams LARP to me. And that’s how my group play tested it. No, we didn’t use costumes, but we did move through the “Haunted House.” Much to my delight, the system perfectly suits my LARP needs! No more endless bouts of rock, paper, scissors for me. There’s almost no learning curve. I presented the game to my group, and had them playing in under an hour. There aren’t many RPG’s that can do that, especially in the horror genre.
Vs. Monsters is an easy to learn, quick playing game that manages to handle the spooky horror genre effectively while still remaining simple and flexible. For a game that started so humbly as a 24 hour experiment it out performs a lot of more “professional” RPG’s..
