IceBear wrote:Any details on the session Blackhawk?
I keep meaning to update, but I keep remembering when I'm knee-deep in something else.
First off, understand that we have a diverse, but utterly irreverent group. Parcheesi with this group plays like Cards Against Humanity, so things got a little... out there.
~We had Angelique, a cross between Foxy Brown (the film, not the rapper) and The Bionic Woman, who also happened to be a mafia moll on the run.
~Fro Lee, an Asian martial artist with an inexplicable hairstyle,
~[Character Name], a hard-boiled female detective,
~[Character Name], a country girl turned hardcore mercenary,
~And me, Jerry "Bull" Booker, a Hollywood stunt man from Muskogee, appearing with his car, Beauty, a customized '68 GTO. I based the character largely on Burt Reynolds' Hooper character from the film of the same name.
A picture of Fro Lee:
Character creation was a snap. With none of us knowing the system, it took about an hour, including all of our bullshitting, which is a lot. Choose one background and one job, assign five stats from an array, then pick one or two skills and write down the equipment. After that, make a background connection with the other characters and you're done (for example, Bull (me) had been in New York shooting a film and ended up helping Angelique escape the mob, went to high school with the country girl, picked up extra cash freelancing for the detective, and had butted heads with Fro Lee while serving as a stunt coordinator in a film he was in.)
The feel is very much 70s action films, exploitation films, and serial TV shows. It covers (and mentions by name or reference) stuff like Shaft, Hooper, The Dukes of Hazzard, The Rockford Files, The Six-Million Dollar Man, Wonder Woman, The Fall Guy, Starsky and Hutch, Foxy Brown, Enter the Dragon, The Warriors, Dirty Harry, Death Wish, and Velvet Goldmine.
Gameplay is fast. I haven't played Apocalypse World of any of its progeny, but I'm guessing that it is similar. You describe whatever action you want to take, then roll 2d6 and add your stat bonus (which is from -1 to +4 - a standard character would have 0, 0, +1, +1, +2, for instance.) 10+ and it goes off like you described. 7-9 and you succeed with a penalty. 6 or below and you fail. The only modifiers are 'Something Extra' and 'Something Less' (roll 3d6 and take the best/worst two dice, respectively.)
The only other thing is that you have a few (probably 3-4) 'Moves' that let you do special things. My stuntman had, I believe, one that toughened any car he drove (stunt driver), one that increased the armor value of any armor he wore (extra padding), and one that let him do automatic minor damage when a melee attacker missed him (sneaky fighter.) That was just about the whole character.
There aren't a lot of stats. As I recall, armor ranged from 0 to 3 or 4, cars had three stats, there were four or five levels of damage, and just a few ranges (hugging distance, arm's length, in a room, shouting distance, long ways away.)
Beyond that, everything is narrative. The story is king, and if the player thinks his character would do something, what he needs to do it is simply there. If you start a bar fight and imagine your character would be grabbing a guy and running him head first into a jukebox, then the jukebox is there, right where you need it to be. The DJ (GM) doesn't say anything about pool tables in the bar, but you can still grab a pool stick off of one - the table is there because you put it there. It shifts the events away from what the DJ describes/plans and into collaborative storytelling.
It is an absolute blast, but would take the right group. If you have a group that likes detailed rules and tactical gameplay, but avoids actually roleplaying their characters, they'd likely just stare at their character sheet in Spirit of '77 looking for the rule that tells them what to do.
I loved the game. I'd play it regularly if I could (or something using the rule system), but I don't know that my second group could grasp the narrative gameplay.