Join Oliver, Alastair, and Divan as they use the Outgunned mechanics to rescue a lost boat of seamen from a watery grave and learn of secrets hidden in the deep.

Join Oliver, Alastair, and Divan as they use the Outgunned mechanics to rescue a lost boat of seamen from a watery grave and learn of secrets hidden in the deep.

How To Play Outgunned

Hi everyone, this is a special how to play episode of Firebreathing Kittens podcast. I’m the game master for an upcoming session using the rules for Outgunned. This episode is a summary of what I learned after reading the rule book. Hopefully this will be a handy guide for how to play for my players, will help me organize myself, and will be useful for you listeners, too, who are looking to play your own Outgunned game at home.

I’ll organize this how to play guide into sections.

Game category

Skills

Distances

Gear

How to attack

Grit

Conditions

Time Out

Reloading

Death roulette

Gambling

Cover

Adrenaline

Spotlight

Rides

Chases

Helping allies

Double difficulty

Weak spots

Re-rolling

Extra actions

Heat

Building a character

Game category. Outgunned is a cinematic action role playing game. We’ve all seen movies where heroes crawl through air ducts, keep a runaway bus above a minimum speed, face off alone against a dozen goons, look to the camera with a dashing cut on their cheek, a hero who walks in slow motion towards the camera while everything behind them explodes. That’s the type of game Outgunned is, and that’s the sort of hero you will be roleplaying as. A hero is someone on a mission who lives dangerously and is one of the good guys. Central to the theme of Outgunned is the idea that the hero is racing against time, making split second decisions with great consequence, never stopping to look back. There’s no rest for heroes. Your goal is to carry out your mission, whether that means avenging your dog, finding your kidnapped loved one, clearing out a bank vault, or something else. Mechanically, you will accomplish this by rolling multiple six sided dice, also called d6, hoping to get not high or low numbers, but matching results of two of a kind, three of a kind, or even four of the same number across multiple dice. Gear such as your weapon give you more dice to roll. Feats during character creation let you reroll failed rolls when attempting certain types of actions. If the going gets tough, you can spend the limited adrenaline and spotlight resources to pull off something really cool in an an epic scene.

Skills. When you want your character to do an action that has the risk of something going wrong, you will pick the relevant skill on your character sheet. You will roll as many six sided dice, also called d6, as you have as a number in that skill and attribute. There are five attributes: brawn, nerves, smooth, focus, and crime. Each attribute lists four skills under it.

You can and usually will pair the skill with the attribute it’s listed under, but you don’t have to. You’re not required to combine the attribute that’s directly above a skill on the character sheet. For example, the know skill is under the focus attribute on the character sheet. If you are at a fancy cocktail party before an opera and are trying to make a good impression on the mayor with your sophisticated knowledge of opera, you can roll the smooth attribute with the know skill. The know skill is listed under the focus attribute, but you can use the smooth attribute because it better fits what you’re trying to do.

Success on a skill roll. In Outgunned, success is determined by whether or not you got multiple dice of the same number. It doesn’t matter how high or low the number is. A one isn’t bad and a six isn’t good. Getting two ones or two sixes is what you’re looking for.

There are four difficulty levels: basic, critical, extreme, and impossible. A basic difficulty needs two dice to have matching numbers for you to succeed. For example, two twos. If you get a basic success after rolling the dice, you are eligible to reroll your dice that weren’t part of the combination once. A critical difficulty is cleared with three of a kind. For example, three twos. An extreme difficulty needs four dice to have the same number to pass. The impossible difficulty requires five dice to show the same number to succeed. What happens if you get six dice of a kind? If that ever happens, which it probably won’t, six dice of a kind is called a Jackpot. If you roll a jackpot, you become the Game Master, who is called the Director in Outgunned, for one turn. Players can roll nine dice at most. The probability table for how likely a player is to succeed at each of the four difficulty levels for rolling two through nine dice is on page 67.

Here is an example of a roll at basic difficulty, where two dice need to be the same number for you to succeed. Let’s say you are sneaking through an air duct quietly, infiltrating the compound stealthily, when suddenly a spider crawls on you. You try to stay as still as possible, because if you react loudly, your enemy could hear you. Roll as many dice as you have in nerves and cool. The Director says this is pretty basic. With two dice in nerves and one in cool, your odds of getting two dice to be the same number when rolling three dice is 45%. So there’s about a fifty fifty chance the spider crawls on you and you scream loudly, revealing your location, and a fifty fifty chance that you stay quiet.

Here’s an example of a roll at critical difficulty, where you need three dice to show the same number to succeed. It’s a time out and your friend’s arm is hurt. You offer to bandage them up. This requires the focus attribute and heal skill. You have a three in both focus and heal, and roll six dice. If three dice show the same number, you successfully healed your friend. On 6 dice, you have a 37% chance to succeed at a critical difficulty roll. With a reroll you would have a 75% success rate.

If you’re not certain what attribute and skill to roll, ask yourself how what you’re trying to do could fail. What is at stake here and what are the consequences of failure? Here is an example. You are driving at top speed towards a bridge when you see that the bridge is rising and a gap is opening over the water. What could go wrong? If you chicken out and stomp on the brakes at the last minute, your car might not have enough speed to clear the gap. Or if you drive poorly, you might launch the car into the river instead of onto the second half of the bridge. Because your nerves and driving skill are what could make the situation fail, roll nerves as your attribute and drive as your skill.

Distances. Outgunned’s distance ranges are melee, close, medium, and long. Melee range is within two meters. Close range is between two and ten meters. You can run ten meters with a quick action. Medium range is ten to fifty meters. You can use a full action to run medium range. Most weapons can hit medium range targets. Long range is fifty to three hundred meters. Out of range is anything beyond three hundred meters, which usually requires a special weapon like a sniper rifle to reach.

Gear. In Outgunned, your character will have at least one weapon from the gear table, something like a pistol, revolver, assault rifle, bow and arrows, or even rocket launchers. Every gear weapon has stats that explain how many dice you get to add to your roll when using that weapon at different distance ranges. A +1 at close range means you get one extra dice when you’re aiming at a target in close range. A minus two at medium range means you roll with two fewer dice when you’re aiming at a target in medium range. An X at long range means the weapon cannot be used against long range targets. If there’s a G next to the range, the G stands for gambling, and means the weapon could hurt you and your allies as well as your enemies. Use the gambling mechanic when attacking with that weapon. About melee weapons. The rule book says that melee weapons rarely make a difference, which makes sense when you imagine a baseball bat versus a rocket launcher. So there aren’t any stats in the gear table for melee weapons. During melee attacks, you simply roll your brawn attribute and fight skill.

How to attack. Attacking uses your skills, just like the other rolls. For example if your spy is firing their silenced pistol at a target at medium range, you would roll as many dice as you have in the focus attribute, for this spy that’s two in focus, plus as many dice as the spy has in the shoot skill, for this spy that’s two in shoot, plus the number of dice you get from your gear for that range. The silenced pistol gets zero extra dice at medium range, but it doesn’t alert the enemy or reveal your position. That’s two plus two plus zero equals four dice total. How many dice you need to see match depends on the enemy’s difficulty. This target has a basic difficulty, which means two of the dice you roll have to be the same number to succeed. Rolling four dice gives you a 72% chance of succeeding. If you fail to get two dice that are the same number, that’s the end of your action. If you succeed and get one pair, the enemy loses one grit. If you succeed twice, like if you get two sets of matching dice, then the enemy would lose two grit. Grit in Outgunned is similar to hit points in other games.

Here’s a second example attack. The villain is escaping in an armored limo. The ride has a critical difficulty setting, meaning three dice have to match to succeed against it. It has no armor left, and is spewing black smoke and screeching as it peels away. If you make this shot, the tire will burst, the wheel won’t be able to turn anymore, and the limo might even blow up. You have one chance to fire your weapon at long range to take out the tire before they get too far away to be hit. You can attack by rolling as many dice as you have in the nerves attribute, plus the dice in your shoot skill, plus the dice in your weapon at long range. A character who has three dice in nerves and two dice in shoot would roll five dice. If you’re wielding a rifle, you don’t get any extra dice at long range, but unlike people who have a shotgun or a throwing knife that have an X at long range, your rifle is allowed to attempt the roll. Five dice have a 21% chance of succeeding at a critical difficulty, to get three matching dice. With a reroll, that's a 47% chance of succeeding. If you roll the dice and don’t get three of the same number, you fail unless you spend a precious resource like an adrenaline or a spotlight. If you roll the dice and do get three of the same number, you succeed. The rifle bullet hits the tire, the wheel sprays bright sparks up from the road, the limo fish tails, and crashes into a light pole, and blows up, depleting six grit from everyone inside. Woo hoo!

Combat is a series of alternating action turns and reaction turns. On action turns, the heroes can attack or make any action roll they want. Heroes can take one quick action for free, such as picking up an item or reloading a weapon. Your roll is made against each specific enemy’s defense rating, which ranges from basic, critical, extreme, up to impossible. On reaction turns, heroes must defend themselves with a reaction roll. A lot of Outgunned enemies will attack all players at once, such as a spray of bullets or an exploding grenade. The game master for Outgunned, known as a Director, will tell the players what attribute and skill to roll to defend. Each enemy has an attack difficulty rating, again ranging from basic, to critical, extreme, and impossible. Basic means two matching dice, critical means three matching dice, extreme means four matching dice, and impossible means five dice match. If you score extra successes on your reaction roll, you can make a counterattack. For example if the enemy’s attack was basic and only needed two of a kind to succeed, and you get two ones and two sixes, you can spend the second success on a counterattack. The enemy loses one grit and you describe how you counter attacked them. An extra success at the enemy’s attack difficulty level can also be spent to protect a friend who failed their reaction roll. Your first success protects you, and your second success can protect your friend.

Here is an example defense roll. The enemy is shooting at you. The Director tells you all to roll your brawn plus stunt number of dice at critical difficulty to dodge out of the way to avoid being hit and losing grit. Your character has two dice in brawn and three in stunt. Two plus three means you roll five dice total, giving you a 21% chance of getting three matching dice to defend against a critical difficulty attack. If you don’t get three matching dice, then you lose one grit.

Grit. Grit in Outgunned is similar to hit points in other games. When a roll isn’t dangerous, you’re not going to lose any grit. When you fail at a dangerous roll though, you lose grit based on the roll’s difficulty. Fail a basic roll and lose one grit. Failing a critical roll means you lose three grit. Failing an extreme roll means you lose nine grit. Failing an impossible roll means you lose all grit. The character sheet for Outgunned has twelve grit placeholders on it. When you lose grit, fill in that many grit boxes on the character sheet. Or if you’re not using that character sheet, keep track of the eighth position, which is labeled with these words, “bad, gain a condition”, and the twelvth position, which is labeled, “hot, gain two adrenaline.” When you reach eight and twelve, remember to do those things.

Damage control. Damage control is when you can use smaller successes to mitigate how bad the failure of a dangerous roll was. For example if the dangerous roll required a critical, three matching dice, and you only got a basic, two matching dice, then you can use the smaller basic success to mitigate the failure to the critical roll. For every basic success you roll on a critical difficulty dangerous challenge that requires three matches, lose one less grit. For every critical success you roll on an extreme dangerous challenge that needs four matches, lose three fewer grit. You can’t do damage control for an impossible roll. When all of your grit boxes are filled up, representing that you’ve lost all your grit, the next time you are supposed to add grit, you have to take a spin on the death roulette. You can’t use damage control to help your friends, only yourself.

Recovering grit. You can recover grit by sleeping, taking a break the Director agrees is appropriate for a full recovery, and at the end of the session. Your grit recovers back to full.

Conditions. When you fail a roll, the Director might tell you that you gain a condition. Your eighth grit loss, the box labeled “bad”, also gives you a condition. Conditions are written as a negative one. This negative one means you roll one fewer dice. For example, if you were going to roll six dice, but your condition says negative one, you would only roll five dice. Most conditions are linked to a core attribute, and apply to rolls made with that attribute. When you take a beating, or fall from a height or get blown up, you might gain the hurt condition. While hurt, your brawn rolls are made with one less dice. If you seek out and receive medical care, that can remove the hurt condition. When you survive danger by an inch, or your efforts fail, or you’re under a great deal of stress, you might gain the nervous condition. While nervous, your nerves rolls are made with one less dice. When you get embarrassed in front of other people, or give your friends a reason not to trust you or lose respect for you, you might gain the foolish condition. While foolish, your smooth rolls have one less dice. You can overcome feeling foolish by doing something that gets you recognition or respect. When you think about a problem for too long without finding a solution, or get charmed or confused, you might get the distracted condition. While distracted, your focus rolls are all at minus one, one less dice. You can overcome being distracted by spending two adrenaline on a focus roll. When you’re afraid of losing something or someone important to you, or suffer a great shock, you might gain the scared condition. While scared, all the rolls you make with the crime attribute are made with one fewer dice. You can overcome being scared by facing the subject of your fear and being victorious. You’re free to invent other conditions that fit this format. Page 93 of the rule book gives some examples like disheartened that gives you a minus one to all rolls requiring courage, angry that gives you a minus one to all rolls requiring calmness or precision, confused that gives you a minus one to all knowledge rolls, et cetera.

The tired condition isn’t linked to any attribute. You just look tired. You can overcome being tired by eating a hot meal and getting a good night’s sleep. There’s no dice rolling penalty, but being tired counts as a condition. The reason why how many conditions you have matters is because three conditions are fine, but the fourth condition you gain makes you broken, which means you roll a negative one to all your rolls. You can’t gain any more conditions when you’re broken. It’s already affecting all of your rolls. You can overcome being broken by spending a few days in a hospital, or if a friend rolls for focus and heal during a time out to treat your wounds at extreme difficulty, four matching dice. You can also spend a Spotlight to remove any one condition, including the broken condition. Two conditions can be removed per day, maximum.

Time Out. Your character can recover from conditions when they are completely safe from all dangers. One example of this is during a time out. A time out is a breather scene where you can recover a bit. There are five possible actions during a time out. Each character can choose two of the five time out actions. These actions are: investigating to find clues, healing oneself or an ally, fixing a weapon or a ride, shopping to buy weapons or gear or magazines, and working on something else. A time out ends once each player has had a chance to do two of those actions, or has said that they pass.

Failure isn’t the end in Outgunned. When you roll dice and it’s a failure, think of these four things you can roleplay doing that will progress the story, a type of ‘failing forward’. You can roll with the punches, suggesting an unpleasant consequence for either this scene or a future scene as a barter to the GM for letting you accomplish your goal. You can pay the price, offering to gain a condition or lose some cash or break a gear in order to achieve your goal. If you want, in Outgunned you can always choose to sacrifice a piece of gear to gain one more dice for an important roll. If a heal roll is really important, you can choose to sacrifice your clothes and become bedraggled looking to use the cloth as bandages and get an extra dice for your heal roll. You can take the hard road, not achieving your goal but instead gaining an important clue or information that could point towards a different path. Lastly you could face danger, which is when you encounter an enemy because of your failure. Players are encouraged to name these four options, roll with the punches, pay the price, take the hard road, and face danger, and present some ideas to your Director when you fail a roll.

Reloading. As long as you’re succeeding in your attacks, you’re not going to run out of bullets. There are only three ways to run out of bullets, which Outgunned tracks as magazines of bullets, or mags. The first way to empty your magazine is to roll a failure, such as when you shoot. Imagine that you just kept firing over and over and over until the click click click of a unloaded weapon told you that you not only didn’t hit your target, but you also emptied your magazine. Your Director can say your magazine became unusable from any failed roll in general. The second way you can run out of bullets is by choosing voluntarily to go what’s called Full Auto. When you want, you can opt to go full auto to get a plus one to your roll in exchange for needing to reload afterwards. More bullets makes you more likely to hit. The third way you can empty your magazine is choosing to offer covering fire to a friend. Your friend gets the plus one dice on their next reaction defensive roll while you lay down covering fire for them. It uses all your bullets to keep the enemy distracted while your friend survives. When any of these three things happen, failure, going full auto, or covering fire, you’ll need to reload. Spend a quick action and check off one of the magazines on your character sheet. If you don’t have any magazines left, you didn’t reload.

Death roulette. So it’s happened. You had been out of grit, all twelve of your grit boxes had been filled in, and now you’re supposed to lose more grit, but there isn’t any left. It’s time to spin on the death roulette. Outgunned’s mechanism for determining player character death is rooted in probability. Every character begins the game with one out of six bullet positions filled in. To spin on the death roulette, roll a six sided dice. The first time you roll, only rolling a one will mean your character is left for dead. A two, three, four, five, or six are fine, you’re safe. Describe how you narrowly escaped being left for dead. Every time your character spins the death roulette, one more bullet is added to it. The second roll, a one or a two will mean your character is left for dead. A three, four, five, or six, are still safe, a narrow escape. Anything that says it adds a lethal bullet to your death roulette increases that number by one. If a friend spends a spotlight to save you from a failed death roulette roll, the hero who used the spotlight describes the epic action they took to save your life. If nobody spends a spotlight to save you, your character isn’t necessarily dead, but they are left for dead, which means you get left behind or are unconscious or too scared to continue, et cetera. You can describe what’s stopping your character from being able to continue. A good game master, called a Director in Outgunned, will give you a character sheet for a non player character so you can still play in the session. It’s also possible for a character who was left for dead to rejoin the story at a turning point or during a showdown. Turning points and show downs are big boss fights, basically. A turning point is a really important boss fight that changes the whole direction of the adventure but isn’t at the end of it, and a showdown is often at the end, the final confrontation. When a character returns from being left for dead in a turning point or a showdown, they return with a scar. A scar is something that seriously affects your character going forward, like a strong emotional or physical change because of what you went through.

Gambling. When you gamble in Outgunned, a gamble has the threat of you losing more grit that you normally would. When you handle explosives, you’re gambling. When you drive at top speed, you’re gambling. If you’re firing at an enemy who is in melee range of your ally, you’re gambling. When you’ve attempted something truly insane that might pay off in a big way, your Director might tell you that you’re gambling. On a gamble, look at your dice for ones. Every one you roll is one grit you lose. Ouch. But gambles aren’t all downside. You can choose to declare a roll as a gamble, if you want. When you opt to gamble on a roll, declare that you want what you’re trying to do to be a gamble. If you Director agrees, then it is. Gain one extra dice on that roll, and report any ones. Each one you rolled is one lost grit. Yes, you can reroll ones, if you were gambling and got some ones and are able to reroll. Rerolling can help you get rid of some of those ones. Grit damage only counts the dice on the table at the end of all rerolls.

Cover. If you spend a quick action to duck behind partial cover in Outgunned, you roll with one extra dice on your rolls during the reaction defending phase of combat, and roll with one fewer dice during the action phase of combat. If you spend your whole turn getting fully covered, completely covered, then you automatically succeed on reaction defending rolls, but your attack rolls are made with three fewer dice. Yes you can push someone else behind cover in Outgunned. So the target of your cover quick or full action can be yourself or an ally. If you want to try to dive behind cover and take a friend with you, too, you can do that, roll for an extreme difficulty which needs four dice to match to succeed.

Adrenaline. Every character starts the game with one adrenaline. You can spend adrenaline to gain one extra six sided dice, also called a d6, on a roll. The most dice you are allowed to roll is nine. Some feats require adrenaline to activate them. If you have a lot of adrenaline, you can exchange six adrenaline for one spotlight. More adrenaline is gifted by the game master, called a Director in this Outgunned game, as a reward for doing exceptional things. You might be gifted an adrenaline when you make a great sacrifice, induce strong emotions, have an idea that rocks the story, everyone cheered what you did, etc.

Spotlight. Every character starts the game with one spotlight. You can have at most three spotlights at the same time. You can spend one spotlight to gain a success without rolling dice, to remove a condition, to save a ride that is about to be destroyed, to barter with the Director to do something you normally couldn’t, or to save a friend who lost at the death roulette and is about to die. After you spend the spotlight on most things, flip a coin. Heads you spent the spotlight and it’s gone. Tails you immediately regain the spotlight as if you hadn’t spent it. The only spotlight expense that works differently is when you used the spotlight to save a friend. If you saved someone and flip tails, they gain the spotlight. Maybe they’ll save you next time, who knows. How to gain spotlight. The two main ways to gain a spotlight are that you can say your catchphrase to conclude an epic, dramatic scene, or you can invoke your flaw to make your situation incredibly, terribly worse. If it’s not cool or impactful enough, the Director might give you nothing or an adrenaline instead of a spotlight. You can spend six adrenaline to gain one spotlight.

The circumstances of the scene can affect your roll. If you’re setting up the roll favorably or making a smart choice, the Game Master, also called the Director in Outgunned, might reward you with one extra dice to roll. If you’re acting recklessly or the circumstances are against you, the Director might make you roll with one fewer dice.

Rides. In Outgunned, your character can drive bikes, cars, boats, jet skis, helicopters, planes, tanks, and any other type of vehicle. Each ride has a speed stat of zero, one, two, or three that represents how fast your starting speed at the start of a chase is. Rides start out with armor, which you can track on your character sheet. They can lose armor as a consequence of rolling a failure, if you land the ride poorly after a jump, or if an enemy attacks you. Once your ride has been hit three times, it is out of armor and begins to smoke and is harder to steer. If the ride is hit one more time, it bursts into flames and blows up. Any hero still on board when a ride blows up loses six grit. Rides that have the armored ability, like tanks, start with three extra armor. Heroes can repair rides in scenes where they’re out of danger. Roll Focus and Fix during a time out. If you succeed at critical difficulty, the ride recovers one armor. If you succeed at extreme difficulty, the ride recovers two armor. If you succeed rolling focus and fix at impossible difficulty, the ride recover all lost armor.

Chases. One cool thing about Outgunned that not many tabletop roleplaying games have is official mechanics for how chases work. There are two scores to track during chases: Need, and Speed. Need represents the objective of the chase, such as the heroes need to escape, or the heroes need to catch the villain. Need is a number you can whittle down, like grit, or hit points. You’re actually building up to it, but it’s a similar idea. Need will range between six and eighteen, averaging ten plus or minus two. Speed represents how fast the heroes are going. Vehicles, called rides in Outgunned, each have a speed stat that is how fast they start out going during a chase. This speed stat ranges between zero and three. At the end of each turn, the heroes fill in as many need boxes as their ride’s speed. For example, if you have a car with a speed of one, at the end of that first turn, you’ll fill in one box of need. Chases have action and reaction turns just like combats. During your action turn, you can try to boost your speed by pushing on the gas pedal, or finding a shortcut by rolling nerves plus survival to go off road, or you can decrease your enemy’s speed by hanging out the car window and opening fire on them. You would roll nerves plus shoot to fire at them. Decreasing your enemy’s speed number mechanically increases your speed because it’s a relative pace between the two rides. Chase actions that succeed on a critical difficulty, three matching dice, increase your speed by one. Chase actions that succeed on an extreme difficulty, four matching dice, increase your speed by two. If you fail to get even a basic success, two matching dice, on a roll during a chase, describe how your ride’s speed decreased by one. Reation rolls made during a chase are dangerous, which means that when a hero fails a roll, they also lose grit. There are some example of rolls you can make during a chase on page 153, such as suddenly stepping on the brakes by rolling nerves plus cool, while everyone else rolls nerves plus awareness. If your speed ever drops below zero, the Director can erase an already filled in Need box. If your speed ever hits five, you’re going super fast. All action rolls at speed of five or more are gambling. If you reach a speed of six, that is top speed, and the driver has to suffer a minus one to all of their rolls, rolling with one fewer dice as you struggle to control the ride. Once you have filled in all the need boxes, the chase is over. If you don’t succeed at a chase, some potential consequences are that your ride lost all its armor and explodes, or the heroes lost all their grit and pass out, or the chase countdown ran out and the enemies got away or caught you. For Directors, if a chase has gone on for three turns, you can roll a dice and if the result is higher than the players’ speed, the chase could end there. There’s a list of complications to throw at your players during a chase on page 160. These special actions are things Directors can do with clearly defined consequences if the heroes fail. You can do them after 3, 6, and 9 need boxes. The players receive an adrenaline, and the Director does the special action on the list.

Helping allies. If you give up rolling your dice to help an ally, they can get one of three options. The Director picks which option happens. The first option is a plus one, which means an extra dice as they roll. The second option is an automatic success without rolling any dice. The third option is that in a situation where the friend had no chance of success and wasn’t even going to be able to roll the dice, they now have a chance to roll.

Double difficulty and alternatives for success. The double difficulty roll on page 64 of the rule book is an example of one mechanism for making more difficult rolls feasible. With double difficulty, you break up a single roll into multiple thresholds. The player rolls once but is looking for two successes amongst those rolled dice. A double difficulty basic success roll requires two basic successes. This means the player needs two dice to have the same number, twice. Like one set of threes and one pair of fours. If the player gets one of the successes they need, they can avoid part of the consequences. If they get both of the sucesses they need, they can avoid both consequences. An example situation where a double difficulty roll can be applied is if the player is trying to catch a data drive with secret information in their hands mid air while a thug is diving to tackle them. One success can apply to catching the data drive, and the other success can apply to avoiding the mid air tackle. Double difficulty rolls are just one example of how you the Director can break down difficult and complex scenarios into multiple individual challenges. There are two other ways.

Degrees of success. A second method to make more difficult rolls feasible is that you can also grant degrees of success, such as the example given on page 65 where on a challenge to search for weapons the players can use, the player who got a basic success finds a chair they can break a leg off of to use as a bat, while the player who got a critical success finds a pistol taped to the underside of a drawer.

Three smaller successes equal one larger success. A third method to make more difficult rolls feasible is to add three smaller successes up to be worth as much as one greater success. For example on page 67, the rule book discusses how three basic successes can combine into one critical success, and three critical successes can combine into one extreme success. So double difficulty, degrees of success, and combining three smaller success into one larger success are all alternative conditions the Outgunned rule book suggests Directors can use to determine success.

Weak spots. There are three types of enemies in Outgunned: goons, bad guys, and bosses. If you’re fighting a really tough boss and things aren’t going your way, players, consider trying a roll to find their weak spot. It takes an action roll, which is basically like not getting to attack that turn. You roll your focus and your detect number of dice. The difficulty is equal to the enemy’s defense. If you succeed, the Director has a table they can randomly generate right in that moment what the enemy’s weak spot is. For Directors, that’s on page 147. Each weak spot on the table grants the heroes plus one dice to a specific way to attack the enemy.

Re rolling. Re rolling is sort of a strategy topic. Page sixty eight suggests that players should reroll at least half of their rolls. There’s no guaranteed right answer and the choice to reroll or not depends on the situation and the player’s assessment of risk, so I’ve put it at the end of this how to play guide. Re rolling doesn’t cost any resources in Outgunned. On page 68 the rule book says that for rolls where players get at least a basic success, which means at least one pair of matching numbers, they can choose to reroll the dice that didn’t match. If they reroll the failed dice and get more of that matching number, that’s great, they got that new level of success on the roll. If they reroll the failed dice and don’t add any extra dice to their pair, then not getting a better result loses their former success. Losing a basic success means you can’t spend it to mitigate the grit loss. Remember, if you got at least a basic success, then failing on a critical doesn’t hurt as much. Rerolling a second time is called going all in. On a first reroll you lose one of your successes. On an all in re roll, you lose all of your successes. There are feats and gear that grant the player what’s called a ‘free reroll’ in a specific situation. This phrase, ‘free reroll’, means when rerolling fails to add any more dice to the match, the player doesn’t lose that initial success. So it’s free because you don’t risk losing your initial success. There’s no possible cost.

Let’s take a moment to talk about probability. There are four difficulty levels: basic, critical, extreme, and impossible. Basic difficulty needs two dice to match numbers for the player to succeed. Critical difficulty is cleared with three of a kind. The rule book says a Director, which is what Outgunned calls Game Masters, should in general set all rolls at critical difficulty. An extreme difficulty needs four dice to get the same number to pass. The impossible difficulty requires five dice to show the same number for the player to succeed.

There’s a probability table on page 67. The rule book lists how likely it is to succeed at each of the four difficulty levels for players rolling two through nine dice. If you’re running Outgunned as a Director, you can take a look at that table to pick the probability of success that is appropriate for a player’s roll. The rule book recommends usually going with the critical difficulty where three dice match. If you look at the basic difficulty, getting two numbers to match is 91% likely to happen when rolling five dice, so it makes sense that a 91% chance of success isn’t what the rule book recommends. But looking at the table carefully, it’s worth noting that although most tabletop roleplaying games average about sixty to eighty percent chance of success when a player attacks or does a skill, Outgunned at critical difficulty lists a 21% chance of success on five dice, 37% chance of success on six dice, 54% chance of success on seven dice, and 70% chance of success on eight dice. The extreme difficulty is 2% likely to succeed on five dice, 5% likely to succeed on six dice, and 11% likely to succeed on seven dice. So if rerolling didn’t exist, or your players don’t know to do it, then when a player rolls their five dice there would be a huge drop off between a 91% chance of success to get two matches, a 21% chances of getting three, and a 2% chance of getting four matches on five dice.

This probability spread is probably why rerolling is an option granted to the players. With rerolls, a critical success happens 47% of the time with five dice, 75% of the time with six dice, 89% of the time with seven dice, and 99% of the time with eight dice. The extreme difficulty that had an 11% chance of succeeding with one roll now has a 51% chance of success on seven dice after a reroll. So as the Director, do look at the reroll column in that table. The players have no resource they spend and run out of that limits how often they reroll, so the reroll roll columns for probability prediction probably will get used a lot during play. Unless your players don’t re roll, for some reason, I mean people make choices, and then they are really out of luck.

Extra actions. If you score more successes than were required, then you can do extra things. An extra basic success means you can take a free bonus quick action. Quick actions include grabbing or throwing an item, reloading a weapon, reaching partial cover, etc quick things. An extra critical success lets you take an extra full action. Full actions include breaking through a door, getting behind total cover, finding a clue, etc things that take moderate effort. If you get an extra extreme success, you can do a free bonus cool action. Cool actions include jumping off an exploding building without getting hurt, hitting a tiny target while you were running, hiding a tiny listening device on your sworn enemy, etc unbelievably cool and difficult actions. Some feats can be activated by an extra action. You can also use your extra action to help a friend. For example if you and your friend were jumping in between buildings with a critical difficulty rating and they got a failure and you succeeded twice, you can give your second critical level success to your friend to both jump safely across the gap and both land on the building.

Heat. Heat is a mechanic for playing Outgunned long term as a campaign. The pressure on the characters changes based on how they’re doing. When the heroes fail an objective or the villain wins at something, the heat reflects that. Things happen at different heat numbers, like at heat six all heroes add a lethal bullet to their death roulette, at heat nine all enemies have one extra feat point, at heat twelve all heroes get one more adrenaline and a lethal bullet, etc. Firebreathing Kittens plays oneshot one session adventures so we won’t be using the heat mechanic, but it’s cool to mention that it exists and is available to help Directors run longer campaigns.

Creating your hero for playing Outgunned involves making about ten choices. You’ll choose a role and a trope, which will determine your attribute and skill points. You’ll choose three feats, which are listed in your role and trope. Your role will also give you some gear to pick from. And lastly you’ll mark one adrenaline, one spotlight, and one cash, and all new heroes get two free skill points wherever they like. You’ll write all of these details and your character’s personal data on your character sheet.

Let’s create an example hero together, Michelle Breton, a non player character from the episode Rewind To Remember. She’s a half elf artificer who is currently lost in a different dimension. I pull up the character sheet and start writing on it. There are ten roles to pick from. The role that most matches an artificer is probably The Brain. Brians get one point to their focus attribute and one point each in ten skills, so I write those on the character sheet. The ten skills that I boost by one point each are: drive, leadership, speech, style, detect, fix, heal, know, dexterity, stealth. Next we choose two from the six listed feats. Page 52 explains what those six feats do, and, reading them, it seems like Mastermind, where we can repeat one roll of any kind, ignoring all negative ones from conditions and circumstances looks good. And so does Scientist, which lets Michelle choose a STEM discipline (i.e.: engineering, chemistry, botany, etc.). Michelle’s specialty is machines. Gain a free re-roll for all rolls regarding your chosen discipline. The Brain role also gives Michelle some gear, a portable computer, a notebook, and a pencil. After filling in some personal data, such as her name, job as a researcher, age as an adult, catchphrase and flaw, we’re done with the role section of making a character. I like her catchphrase, which is, “With the right lever, I’ll move the world.” As an adult, Michelle has no advantages and no disadvantages, but if you’re roleplaying as a kid or someone older, they get special customizations described on page 38.

The next part of character creation is to choose one from the eighteen tropes. Some example tropes are bad to the bone, jerk with a heart of gold, lone wolf, trusty sidekick, free spirit, vigilante, etc. Michelle has definitely had some moments where when everyone else is hyped, she’s spotted something she needs to point out that unfortunately ruins the moment. That cynical streak can be useful to a team’s survival, though, so this trope called Party Killer is worth having on the crew. Choosing a trope lets you put a point into an attribute, I choose the nerves attribute, instead of the crime attribute. We also get one point each in the eight listed skills, which are force, stunt, cool, shoot, leadership, awareness, stealth, and streetwise. We also pick one feat from the four listed, picking Head On A Swivel, which gives Michelle a free re-roll when preempting dangers or ambushes, or trying to locate lurking enemies.

Lastly, we mark one adrenaline, one spotlight, and one cash, and all new heroes get two free skill points wherever they like. I put those two skill points in the fix skill and the know skill. Michelle didn’t start with a weapon, so I can spend her one cash to buy a pistol on page 103, and fill in the weapon’s stats of zero, zero, zero, negative two for its melee, close, medium, and long range modifiers. The weapons page says all weapon purchases come with one magazine of ammo, and if this is during character building, page 57 says that starting character creation weapons start with two magazines of ammunition. One magazine starts in the weapon ready to be fired, and the second is written on the character sheet by filling in one of the bullet placeholders. Michelle Breton is a completed character, voila, done.

I like how fast it is to create a character in Outgunned. It reminds me of Smash Up or No Place Called Home, where you pick two things and put them together and you’re done. There is an alternative strategy you can use when creating a character if you want to spend a bit more time. That is to pick three skills you want to be amazing at, from the list of twenty skills, and find a role and a trope that gives you the most points in those three skills. Each point is a dice you get to roll when doing that thing. After making a few character sheets, that’s the method I ended up going with, honestly. It’s nice to be good at the three skills you’ll do most often.

Here's some character building strategy for when you make your character. During the game, your actions are going to be you rolling your choice of trait + your choice of skill 's number of dice. Specialized gear can boost certain types of actions with an extra dice. The feats let you get a free reroll at the types of actions you're good at. The normal difficulty is that you'll want to get three dice to match one another. You'll need a reroll usually to succeed at getting three matches with five dice. So I just want to point this out here: the average success rate on a not-rerolled critical challenge for five dice is 21%. Twenty one percent chance of success means a seventy nine percent chance of failure. That's why you want to pick the role and trope that boost the attributes and skills you're gonna be using and give you access to feats that let you reroll the types of actions you're gonna be doing, and a gear that gives that type of action one extra dice. Let’s say you want to build a James Bond type character who succeeds most times he flirts. If you build a character with 1 dice in the smooth attribute and one dice in the flirt skill, and no gear to give you +1 dice and no feats to reroll when you flirt, you'll be bad at flirting, James Bond. With your two dice you would have a 0% chance of successfully beating a critical difficulty roll which requires getting three matching dice. But if you want to build a James Bond who is good at flirting, you absolutely can with this system. Pick a role and a trope that give you three in the attribute smooth and three in the skill flirt, so that your base dice is six, pick a gear if you can that gives you +1 dice on flirting rolls, and pick a feat that lets you reroll flirting actions for free, you're at seven dice with a free reroll, you have an 89% chance of succeeding at critical difficulty when you flirt. So that is something I am pointing out about character building. Build a character with points in the trait and skill you think you’re going to use the most, look for gear that will give you an extra dice to roll when you do that skill, and look for traits that will give you a free re roll when you do that type of action.

For players in my upcoming Outgunned game, when you build your character, please follow the starting character rules, and get an additional five cash to spend on your choice of gear. Also gain two skill points to assign to the skill or skills of your choosing, one feat of your choice, and one extra adrenaline.

Hopefully this little rules chat helps my players build their characters and understand how to play. For everyone listening, if you’d like to hear an example adventure, the episode of Firebreathing Kittens podcast right after this is a demonstration of us playing Outgunned in a oneshot game session. We invite you to listen to it to hear an example of Outgunned in action. We encourage you to find the Outgunned rule book yourself, and play a game with friends.

Juneau and Muriel help unravel Newson’s past while fighting off deadly plants. Will Muriel’s elemental magic kill them all? Bodies Botany and Bleeding Hearts is an actual play podcast of Dragonbane.

Juneau and Muriel help unravel Newson’s past while fighting off deadly plants. Will Muriel’s elemental magic kill them all? Bodies Botany and Bleeding Hearts is an actual play podcast of Dragonbane.

How to play Dragonbane

Hi everyone, this is a special how to play episode of Firebreathing Kittens podcast. I’m the game master for an upcoming session using the rules for Dragonbane. This episode is a summary of what I learned after reading the rule book. Hopefully this will be a handy guide for how to play for my players, will help me organize myself, and will be useful for you listeners, too, who are looking to play your own Dragonbane game at home.

I’ll organize this how to play guide into sections.

Game category

Attributes

Skills

Pushing

Conditions

Dragons, demons

Boons, banes

Initiative

How to attack

Zero hit points

Sneak attacks

Actions and reactions

Armor

Weapon durability

Movement

Terrain

Encumbrance

Resting

Magic

Building a character

Game category. Dragons, demons, and player characters of fantasy races. Magic, mystery, and adventure. Dragonbane is a tabletop roleplaying game designed in the mirth and mayhem roleplaying style. Mirth and mayhem means there is room for laughter and a pinch of silliness, and also brutal challenges for adventurers to face in combat. Dragonbane is a translated and updated version of the Scandinavian game Drakar och Demoner, first released in 1982. Its main author Tomas Harenstam intended Dragonbane to facilitate fast and furious play, with less prep time than other d20 based ttrpg systems. Players embody characters whose professions give them specialized skills and weapons, to roll four, six, eight, ten, twelve, or twenty sided dice to fight against enemies such as harpies, minotaurs, giants, manticores, griffins, wights, trolls, and of course, dragons.

Attributes. Your character has six attributes: strength, constitution, agility, intelligence, willpower, and charisma. The character’s ability to do everything from wield their weapon, to sneak undetected, to barter with a shop keeper, to how many hit points they have, is derived from their numbers in these core attributes. You’ll determine those attribute numbers by rolling dice during character creation, and I’ve gone through an example of character creation at the end of this how to play guide to show you how attribute points are rolled. But basically, the higher the number, the better your character is at that thing. Here’s an example of the attribute number ranges. A five in the strength attribute would mean you’re not great at lifting or carrying things. Your inventory would be scant, and you’d get over encumbered easily. A ten is pretty average for an attribute. A sixteen in the strength attribute means you’re really strong, and are way better than a regular person at brawling and axes.

Skills. Every Dragonbane character has a number in thirty skills. Some example skills are the agility attribute based acrobatics skill, the charisma attribute based persuasion skill, the intelligence attribute based languages skill, and the strength based brawling skill. To see if you succeed when doing one of your skills, roll a twenty sided dice, also called a d20. If the dice result is the same as or lower than your skill level, you succeed at what you were trying to do. If the dice shows a number higher than your skill number, then you failed.

Here is an example skill roll. You want to spot something hidden. Your spot hidden skill is a 14. You roll a d20. If the dice is a 14, 13, 12, 11, etc, down to 2, you see the hidden thing, yay. If your dice is a 15, 16, 17, 18, or 19, you don’t see the hidden thing. The higher your skill number, the more likely you are to succeed. If you fail, that might impact the story. Not only do you not see the hidden thing, which could allow an enemy to deal extra ambush damage to you, but also it might cost you more time, risk, or gold to achieve your goals. Failure never stops the story completely, but it is expensive to some of your consumables.

Pushing. Failing a skill roll doesn’t have to be the end. You could choose to push, which means gaining a condition in exchange for rerolling the dice. To push, first explain how the condition you’re choosing to gain results from the action you’re performing. You can’t choose a condition you already have. And then roll your dice again. Whether or not your new roll succeeds, you have gained that condition. A small note, if the first dice was a twenty, a demon roll, it can’t be pushed.

Conditions. There are six conditions, one for each attribute. The conditions are: exhausted for strength, sickly for constitution, dazed for agility, angry for intelligence, scared for willpower, and disheartened for charisma. For as long as you have the condition for that attribute, roll it with bane, meaning roll two dice and keeping the higher of the two numbers, whichever is worse. You can recover from conditions by resting.

Here is an example of pushing to gain a condition. You went fishing as part of a diplomatic delegation with a prince. The fishing roll was an 11, and you have a 10 in fishing, it’s a failure of a fishing trip. The prince is getting pretty frustrated because you and him haven’t caught anything and it has been hours. You’ve been out since the crack of dawn, and it’s getting hot, a trickle of sweat runs down your skin, and the flying bugs are swarming, and it’s really unpleasant here on the water with no shade. If you two could just catch one thing, you could go back in to shore and the fishing trip would have been a diplomatic success. The happy prince would be more likely to continue the marriage negotiations with you, lots of good stuff, all hinging on this one rod and reel. So you decide it’s worth it to push. You name a condition, sickly. You explain how this condition results from the action you’re trying to do. The action is that you are going to bait the hook not only with those fancy designer reusable lures, but you’re going to actually bait the hook with a live bait. It’s gross and you feel a bit sickly, but the live bait gives you another chance. You roll again. A nine! Success! You and the prince finally catch something, turning the fishing trip into a good day. The giant pike you pull on board is an excellent platter on the royal dinner table tonight, facilitating smooth communication between the political parties. However, if someone sneaks poison into your portion during the dinner tonight and you have to roll a constitution attribute check to see if the poison hurts you or not, the sickly condition bane means that you would have to roll two dice and keep the worse, higher number.

Rolling a dragon. When you roll a 1 on the d20 dice, that’s called rolling a dragon. It’s good. You want that to happen. In combat, rolling a dragon is a critical hit. You can choose from one of three combat effects for rolling a dragon: doubling the number of dice rolled for your weapon’s damage dice, or immediately performing a second attack, or if you’re doing piercing type damage you could choose to ignore armor on this attack. Outside of combat, rolling a dragon is also great. It can be interpreted a number of ways by your game master. One example is that if you were making a perfomance check, you impress not only the target but also everyone around you. A crowd gathers because of how cool you are. A second example is that if you were doing a seamanship skill check to navigate the ocean, not only do you succeed and the reach the port successfully, you also shaved off twenty percent of your travel time, arriving early. An action can be performed faster than usual when you roll a dragon.

Rolling a demon. When you roll a 20 on the d20 dice, that’s called rolling a demon. A demon roll can’t be pushed. Outside of combat, like on a skill roll, rolling a demon means the roll not only fails, it also has an additional negative effect such as you damage yourself or someone else or an item, or you make a fool of yourself in front of everyone, or you make a lot of noise. In melee combat, rolling a demon means you miss your target, you cannot push the roll, and you roll a d6 to see which of the negative effects on page 46 happen. The d6 table is: one drop your weapon. Picking up a dropped weapon costs an action. Two the enemy gets a free attack that can’t be parried or dodged. Three your weapon gets stuck and requires a strength roll that takes an action to pull the sword from the stone. Four you accidentally threw your weapon, and have to go move to it and then spend an action to pick it up. Five the weapon gets damaged and attacks with banes until it’s repaired. Six you hit yourself with your weapon. That was the melee combat effect of rolling a demon. The ranged combat effect of rolling a demon is on page 49 and is similar, with appropriate differences such as a ranged demon roll can make you run out of ammunition, and have to get more before you can use your ranged weapon again. For magic users, rolling a demon means you will roll a d20 on the magical mishaps table on page 60 to see if your character is now dazed, or suffering a strange magical effect such as vomiting frogs every time you lie, or that any gold or silver you touch now withers into dust. Rolling a demon when casting magic can result in summoning a literal demon.

Boons and banes. A boon means that you roll two dice and keep the lower one. That’s a good thing. A bane means that you roll two dice and keep the higher number. That’s a bad thing. For example if you have a boon on your myths and legends roll, instead of rolling one dice and trying to get equal to or lower than your 10 skill number, you get to roll two dice. If either dice is a 10 or a 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, etc, you succeeded and remember that myth or legend you were trying to recall.

Initiative means turn order. At the start of a round of combat, everyone draws from a deck of cards whose cards are numbered one to ten. Number 1 can go first, number two can go second, etc until number 10 goes last. A round of combat, where everyone gets a chance to perform an action, lasts for ten seconds. After the round is over, a new round begins and everyone draws an initiative card again. There are six rounds in one minute, so after one minute you will have drawn initiative six times. If a monster has multiple attacks, it might be drawing multiple initiative cards.

Surprise. If you and your allies surprise attack an enemy, you and your allies can pick and share any initiative card you choose. The targets you’re surprising draw from the remaining cards.

Waiting. You can choose to wait instead of acting on your initiative. To wait, swap initiative cards with another player character or NPC who has a later initiative card than you. You can’t swap initiative with anyone who has already taken their turn or who themselves had chosen to wait, earlier in the round.

How to attack. Everyone can move and can perform one action on their turn during combat. If you choose to attack, use the skill for the type of weapon you’re using.

Here is an example of a melee attack. Melee attacks must be made within two meters of the target. Brynri is in the grid space next to her target, a bear that leapt out of the forest and swiped its claws down her friend. She draws her knife as a free action. The knife skill on her character sheet is ten. To see if she hits with her knife attack, Brynri’s player rolls a twenty sided dice, also called a d20. If the dice result is the same as or lower than the skill level, she hits. So on a 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, etc, her knife hits. If the dice shows a number higher than her skill number, then she fails. So on an 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, etc, her knife misses. For this example, Brynri rolled a 7, and her knife hits. How much damage every weapon does is listed on page 74 of the rule book. Knives do a d8 of damage. Brynri’s player rolls an eight sided dice and gets a four, meaning her knife attack dealt four damage to the bear from the knife itself. She also gets a damage bonus equal to her weapon’s attribute. Knives have the attribute of agility, so if Brynri’s agility was really high, she would get to add a damage bonus onto that four damage. But her agility attribute is only 11, so her damage bonus is zero. To summarize that attack, Brynri rolled a 7 on her d20, which was below her 10 knife skill so her attack successfully hit the bear. Her damage bonus is zero and her knife roll was a 4 on the d8, so she dealt 4 piercing damage to the bear with that successful knife attack.

There are situations where you get special bonuses on your attack. For example if you roll a dragon, which is a 1 on a d20, then that is a critical hit. You can choose to either double how many dice you roll for damage, or immediately perform a second attack against another enemy, or ignore armor on the critical hit. Another special combat bonus happens when you attack a target who is laying prone on the ground. Prone targets are hit with a boon and the attack gets an extra d6, a six sided dice, of damage.

Here is an example of a ranged attack. Brynri’s friend Liam has a short bow. He wants to help out and attack the bear, too. He is at more than two meters and less than 30 meters away from the bear, so he doesn’t have to roll with a bane on his short bow attack. Liam can see the bear clearly, so he doesn’t have to roll with a bane for the target being partially obscured. His bow skill is 12. He rolls a d20 to see if his arrow hits. On a 13, 14, 15, 16, etc, the arrow would miss. On a 12, 11, 10, 9, 8, etc, the arrow would hit. He rolls a 5, so his attack hits. The weapon table on page 75 says that short bows deal a d10 of damage, so he rolls a ten sided dice and gets a five. His damage bonus is plus one, so five plus one is six piercing damage to the bear when his arrow hits it.

If he had rolled a one on the d20 dice to hit, that’s awesome. When you roll a dragon for ranged attacks, you can choose to either double how many damage dice you roll, or ignore armor on the attack. If he had rolled a twenty on the d20 dice to hit, that’s called rolling a demon, which is bad. There’s a mishap table on page 49 that Liam would have had to roll on to see what negative thing happened, such as dropping his weapon, running out of arrows, or hitting an ally with that arrow instead.

Zero hit points. What happens if, during a fight, your character reaches zero hit points? They fall to the ground prone, can’t move, and can’t do any actions. Each turn afterwards, they make a death roll. Death rolls can’t be pushed. Roll a d20 and compare the result to your constitution attribute. If the number is equal to or less than your constitution, then that is one success. For example, if your constitution is 14 and you roll a 14, that’s a success. A 13, 12, 11, 10, 9, etc is also a success. Rolling a dragon, a one, counts as two successes. If the number is greater than your constitution, then that is one failure. For example, with a constitution of 14, a 15, 16, 17, 18, and 19 would all fail. Rolling a demon, a 20, counts as two failures. Note that if an enemy hits you and damages you when you’re making death saving rolls, that hit counts as a failed death roll. If you reach three failed death saving throws, then your character dies. Your Game Master will hopefully present you with some NPC options for NPCs you can play as for the rest of the session. If you reach three successful death saving throws, then your character rallies. You recover a six sided dice, also called a d6, of hit points, and stop making death rolls, and your failed death roll number resets. It’s possible that being at zero hit points left you with a severe injury. Roll against your constitution attribute. A d20 dice result higher than your constitution is a failure. A d20 dice result equal to or lower than your constitution is a success. If you succeed, you’re fine, you didn’t suffer a severe injury. If you fail, roll on the severe injury table on page 51, which contains a list of injuries, how they effect your character, and how long it takes to recover from them.

Rally. If your friend is down on the ground within ten meters of you and is making death rolls, you can help them with the rally action if they can hear you. A successful persuasion skill roll will let your friend move and act like normal, although they still have to make death saving throws. Sometimes, being able to move and get out of the way of an enemy to prevent themselves from getting hit can be really helpful. You can try to rally yourself, which works by rolling against your will attribute at bane, which means that you roll two dice and keep the higher, worse, number.

Healing. If your friend has zero hit points, you can roll the healing skill to help them. A successful healing roll gives the friend a d6 of hit points, and they stop making death rolls and roll to see if they got a severe injury. If you don’t own bandages, your healing skill roll is made at bane, which means that you roll two dice and keep the higher, worse, number.

Instant death. I mentioned earlier that enemies might still be attacking and hitting you while you’re making death saving throws. If they reduce you to your maximum hit point score in the negative direction, your character dies instantly. From a strategy point of view, that’s one reason why rallying and moving out of the way of continued attacks can be a good idea.

Sneak attacks and ambushes. There is a mechanic for sneaking up on enemies during a fight. Sneak attacks are between one individual player character and one individual enemy. First, make a roll using your sneaking skill. When you are within melee combat distance, which is two meters for most enemies, roll with bane, meaning you roll two dice and keep the higher, worse, number. Further than melee distance, roll normally. If the result was higher than your sneaking skill, then you weren’t stealthy enough and the enemy saw you coming. Draw initiative, and start combat. If the result on the twenty sided dice is equal to or lower than your sneaking skill, you succeeded, and your attack has the key word of being a surprising attack. Pick any initiative card you want between one and ten. Gain a boon on the attack, which means rolling two d20s to hit and keeping the lower, better result. If you are using a subtle weapon during your surprising attack, roll one extra dice, for example two d8 instead of one d8, for damage.

Ambush. An ambush is a sneak attack that can be made against more than one enemy. It works when you hide and wait for the enemies to come close to you. Each enemy makes an awareness skill roll to see if they spot the ambush or not. Every enemy that fails gets the bottom initiative card, starting at ten and counting up.

Melee and ranged attacking are two of many actions you can choose to spend your action on during your turn. The other action options are: Dashing, parrying, dodging, picking up an item, equiping armor, unequiping armor, first aid, rallying, breaking down a door, picking a lock, using an item, activating an ability, casting a spell, helping an ally, and a one round rest.

Dashing. Spending your action dashing lets you move twice your movement rate in one round. For example if your movement is normally eight meters, if you dash then you can get sixteen meters in one turn. Dashing takes your action, so you can’t attack and dash.

Parrying. You can use your action to parry on an enemy’s turn during a round. If you parry, then you can’t also attack on your turn because you used your action to parry. Parrying a ranged attack requires a shield. You can’t parry if you’re prone on the ground. Monster attacks can’t be parried. To parry, what happens is first you were hit by an attack while you were holding a weapon or a shield. Declare that you are going to parry before the attacker says how much damage they’re doing to you. Roll a d20 and see how it compares to your skill level with your weapon. If you were holding a shield, roll against your strength based melee skill, because there is no shield skill. If your result is equal to or less than your weapon skill, then your parry works. If your result is greater than your weapon skill, then your parry missed. If you succeed, then you can move both yourself and the enemy two meters without counting towards anyone’s movement for the round or triggering any free attacks. Instead of taking damage from the enemy’s attack, on a successful parry, you take no damage and the weapon or shield takes the damage for you, reducing its durability. If the weapon or shield gets reduced to zero durability, then it can’t be used again until it is repaired with a successful crafting skill roll.

Dodging. You can use your action to dodge on an enemy’s turn during a round. If you dodge, then you can’t also attack on your turn because you used your action to dodge. You can dodge while laying prone on the ground. You can also dodge monsters. To dodge an incoming attack, first declare that you’re dodging before the enemy says how much damage they’re doing to you. Roll your evade skill. If your result is greater than your evade skill, then your dodge missed, and you still get hit by the attack. If your result is equal to or less than your evade skill, then your dodge works. You evaded the attack and take no damage. You can move up to two meters in any direction without triggering a free attack from an enemy. The attempt to dodge consumes your turn, and you can’t attack.

Picking up an item. If you want to pick up an item or weapon from the ground, that takes your action. You can’t attack that turn.

Equipping and unequipping armor. If you want to equip or unequip armor or a helmet during combat, it’s going to take your entire action for that turn. It might be worthwhile in some situations, though, because armor restricts your movement.

First aid. If you have a friend who is at zero hit points, you can roll for the healing skill on your turn as your action. This might result in saving your ally’s life. But it will take your entire action for that turn.

Rallying. You can use your persuasion skill to rally your friend who has zero hit points to be able to move and take actions like normal. They still will make death rolls every turn, but being able to rally and then move out of the way of future enemy attacks can sometimes be very useful because every attack they receive while at zero hit points counts as a failed death roll.

Breaking down a door. Doors have hit points in Dragonbane. Attacking one to break it down is going to take your full action for the turn.

Picking a lock. You can roll your sleight of hand skill to try to pick a lock. Owning lock picks means you don’t have to roll with bane, which is when you roll two d20s and keep the higher, worse number. If your result is equal to or less than your sleight of hand skill, then you pick the lock If your result is greater than your sleight of hand skill, then you fail to pick the lock. Either way, trying to pick the lock takes your whole action for that turn.

Using an item. If you want to drink a potion or use some other item that’s within two meters of you, that takes your entire action for the turn.

Activating an ability. You can use an innate or heroic ability as your action for a turn. If you do, you can’t also attack that turn because activating the ability took your action.

Casting a spell. Most spells are considered actions. There are some spells that take less than one action, and some spells that take more than one action, and those are labeled on the individual spell. You have one action per turn, so if you cast a one action spell, which is most of them, you can’t also attack with a weapon on your turn.

Helping an ally. You can spend your action to give an ally a boon on their roll in the same round. A boon means they roll two d20s and keep the lower, better, result.

Reactions. A few of the action options listed above, such as parrying an incoming attack and dodging an incoming attack and some spells, are reactions. Reactions happen on the enemy’s turn but use your action for the round. If you’ve already gone in the round, then you can’t use a reaction such as parrying or dodging. If you’ve parried or dodged, then you can’t do any other action when it comes to be your turn.

Free actions. Dropping to the ground and shouting a few words are free, and do not cost your action for the turn. You can only do one free action and it has to happen in turn order, so if when it gets to be your turn, you shout a few words, then you can’t also drop to the ground. Drawing your weapon is a free action.

Armor. Wearing armor lets you take less damage from physical attacks. Subtract the armor rating from the incoming damage. For example, if you were going to take 3 damage, but your armor has a rating of 1, you would only take 3 minus 1 is 2 damage. Each armor has a note for how much it limits your movement. They might also have a note about the types of damage they are better at protecting against. There are three physical damage types in Dragonbane: bludgeoning, slashing, and piercing.

Weapon durability. Each weapon on the weapons table has its own durability score. If your armor can completely negate the incoming damage down to zero, then the attacking weapon takes the damage instead. For example if you had an armor rating of 3 and the incoming damage was negated down to zero, the sword that swung at you would take the 3 damage to its durability. If the sword’s durability drops to zero, the sword breaks. A broken weapon can be repaired with a successful crafting roll. Roll a d20 dice. If the result equals or is less than your crafting skill, you repair the weapon. If the result is higher than your crafting skill, you failed to repair the weapon.

For example, if the combat earlier had been against an enemy with armor instead of a bear, it would have gone like this. Let’s say that they were attacking a demon with an armor score of 4. Attacking this demon enemy would be very dangerous for a person wielding a knife. Brynri’s 4 damage that she dealt would be completely canceled out by the demon’s armor score of 4. Her knife would take the 4 damage instead, reducing its durability number from 9 to 5. If the knife’s durability drops to zero, then the knife would break. A broken weapon can be repaired with a successful crafting roll.

Movement. Everyone can move and can perform one action on their turn during combat. Distances in Dragonbane are measured in meters. The movement score on your character sheet is how many meters the character can move in a round of combat. Six things can affect movement, and those are: dashing, crouching, leaping, doors, enemies, and free attacks. If you want to move twice as far as you normally can, say that you’re using your action this round to dash. If you want to drop to a crouch on the ground or get up, you can make those movements for free, but only on your turn in the initiative. If you want to leap across a horizontal distance, make an acrobatics skill roll. If you’re successful, then you can leap up to half of your movement rate. If the distance is a quarter of your movement number, you don’t have to roll acrobatics to succeed. Doors. Opening an unlocked door and going through it costs half your movement. Enemies. If you want to walk past an enemy, they have to be either at zero HP or on the ground, or else they stop your movement by blocking your way. Free attacks. If you start within or travel through the area within two meters of an enemy and try to make a movement that would take you away from that enemy, roll for your evade skill. Evading doesn’t take your action, but if it fails, the enemy gets a free melee attack against you that can’t be parried or dodged. If you end your movement purposefully within two meters of the enemy, they don’t get a free attack. If your movement was involuntary, such as being thrown past them in the air or sliding down a slope, involuntary movements don’t trigger enemy free attacks.

Terrain. If you are moving through a cramped cave with a low ceiling, through rough terrain, or through a dimly lit area, these environments affect your movement. Cramped spaces with low ceilings make it difficult to swing melee weapons such as swords. All melee and subtle weapons except for piercing weapons get a bane on all rolls, which means that you roll two dice and keep the higher, worse, number. Rough terrain such as swamp water up to your knees or thick forest underbrush means when you try to move, you have to roll an acrobatics check. If you fail, you stop moving and fall prone. Dimply lit environments cause a bane to all attacks, which means that you roll two dice and keep the higher, worse, number.

Encumbrance. Except for your weapon, items that are larger than can be concealed in a closed fist count towards your inventory. Your inventory size before encumbrance is half your strength rounded up. If you have more items than that in your inventory, then you are over encumbered and would have to make a strength roll every time you try to move. Fail the strength roll, and you can choose to either stop moving or drop items until you’re down to half your strength rounded up number of inventory items. All people carrying someone else are automatically over encumbered.

Resting. Resting is how you recover hit points and willpower points. The shortest rest is a round rest, when you take a turn off in combat to get your breath back, understand the situation, and strengthen your resolve. A one round rest takes your full action for that turn in combat. Recover a d6 of willpower points, but don’t recover any hit points. That’s a round rest. How about a stretch rest? When you see the rule book refer to a stretch rest, a stretch means fifteen minutes. You take fifteen minutes off to recover a d6 of willpower points and from one condition. You also either recover one d6 of hit points on your own, or two d6 if someone succeeds on a healing roll to heal you. The healer can’t rest if they’re healing you, and they can only heal one person per stretch rest. You can round rest and stretch rest once each per six hour shift. Those are round rests and stretch rests. What are shift rests? When you see the rule book refer to a shift rest, that means six hours. When you are in a safe location resting for six full hours, you recover all your hit points and willpower points and recover from all conditions.

Magic. If you are roleplaying as a mage in Dragonbane, then you can add a school of magic as a skill to your character sheet. The three schools of magic in the core rule book are animism, elementalism, and mentalism. Your number is derived from your intelligence attribute. The base chance derived from your intelligence on page 25 is also the maximum number of spells you can prepare during a shift rest from the list of spells you’ve learned and written in your grimoire. Magic tricks don’t count towards your prepared spell number. Learning a new spell and recording it in your grimoire takes one shift, which is six hours long. You can cast a spell from your grimoire that you haven’t prepared, but it takes twice as long. If you lose your grimoire, you lose all your spells. Mages aren’t compatible with metal. If you’re wearing metal armor or holding a metal weapon, your spells all fail to be cast. You can carry small metal items in your inventory and still cast spells. If you roll a 20, a demon roll, when casting magic, roll on the magical mishap table.

To cast a spell, spend willpower points based on the spell’s power level, and roll for your skill level in that school of magic. The power level of the spell is one half the number of willpower points it takes to cast the spell. For example a power level one spell takes two willpower points to cast. If a spell doesn’t say its power level, it costs two willpower to cast. If you’re out of willpower points, you don’t die like you could if you run out of hit points, but you can’t cast any more spells without draining your own life force. To drain your life force, roll a dice of your choice, d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, d20, etc. The number you roll is how many willpower points you gain and have to immediately spend or else lose, and is also the number of damage you take to your hit points after the spell is cast. Casting a spell takes your full action during your turn, or on an enemy’s turn if it’s a reaction. All the spells listed in the general magic section can by learned by any mage.

Here is an example of casting a spell from the school of animism. You want to cast lightning bolt on your turn in combat. The spell’s text says it takes an action. First, spend twice as many willpower points as the spell’s rank. Lightning bolt’s rank is two, so you spend four willpower points. Then, fulfill any spell requirements, which for lightning bolt is making a gesture. The spell’s text says its range is up to 40 meters, so you gesture at an enemy twenty meters away. Lastly, roll a d20 dice against your skill in the magic school of animism. Your skill number, which is based on your intelligence attribute, is 12. You roll an 11, so your spell succeeds. You call down a bolt of lightning and the spell’s text says the enemy suffers two d8 damage. You roll two eight sided dice and get nine total, so the enemy takes nine damage from your lightning bolt. There’s more text in the lightning bolt spell for additional enemies that get hit, if there were additional enemies present.

Here is an example of casting a spell from the school of mentalism. You want to read someone’s thoughts. The spell’s text says it takes an action. First, spend twice as many willpower points as the spell’s rank. Telepathy’s rank is 2, so you spend 4 willpower points. Then, fulfill any spell requirements, which for telepathy is saying words and making a gesture. The spell’s text says its range is up to 10 meters, so you point at a person 9 meters away, and mutter words at them. Lastly, roll a d20 dice against your skill in the magic school of mentalism. Your skill number, which is based on your intelligence attribute, is 10. If you were to roll an 11, 12, 13, 14, etc, your spell would fail. You roll a 10, the same number as your school so your spell succeeds. You can hear the surface thoughts of your target. Telepathy lasts as long as you concentrate.

Here is an example of casting a spell from the school of elementalism. You want to summon an undine. The spell’s text says it takes a stretch, which is fifteen minutes. First, spend twice as many willpower points as the spell’s rank. Undine’s rank is three, so you spend six willpower points. Then, fulfill any spell requirements, which for undine is having some water available, saying words, and making a gesture. The spell’s text says its range is up to 4 meters, so you pour some water on the pond in front of you. Lastly, roll a d20 dice against your skill in the magic school of elementalism. Your skill number, which is based on your intelligence attribute, is 14. If you were to roll a 15, 16, 17, 18, etc, your spell would fail. You roll a 2, so your spell succeeds. You summon the undine. The spell’s text says that it stays around for a stretch, which is fifteen minutes. The undine has the movement, HP, weapons, and resistances listed in the spell text. While here, it looks like a tidal wave whose crest is shaped like a watery woman. The undine is a monster during combat, see page 84 for general monster combat rules, and acts independently on its own initiative, staying in sight of the mage who summoned it and following their commands as a free action. You can make free actions to tell your undine what to do on your turn in the initiative.

Let’s roll an example character, Brynri Flintkind, a non player character who appeared in a few adventures. Creating a character in Dragonbane means picking something for thirteen categories. These categories are: name, age, appearance, kin, innate ability, profession, attributes, trained skills, heroic ability, weakness, gear, memento, and calculate your derived ratings.

Brynri’s name is Brynri and she’s a two hundred and ninety seven year old mountain dwarf. Her appearance is that she’s four feet five inches tall, has graying golden hair, and weathered tan skin. As a dwarf, she’s got an analogous kin in Dragonbane, but for people in my game who will be adapting a variety of fantasy creatures to this setting, pick the kin that has the innate ability that best suits your character. In Dragonbane, dwarves come with the innate ability that they are unforgiving. Unforgiving means that when dwarves attack an enemy who has dealt at least one damage to them in the past, they get a boon, which means they roll two dice and keep the lower, better number.

You will also be picking a profession when you create your character. For Brynri, she’s a retired adventurer who now runs the antiques shop called Mountain Matron's Relics. That matches with profession number eight, merchant. This profession determines your character’s key attribute, skills, heroic ability, and gear. Merchants have the key attribute of charisma. Merchants also have the trained profession skill list of awareness, bartering, bluffing, evade, knives, persuasion, slight of hand, and spot hidden. Keep those in mind for later; six of your trained skills have to come from your profession’s list. And the gear of a dagger, sleeping pelt, torch, flint, tinder, hemp rope, donkey, d6 food rations so rolling that now that’s three, and d12 silver so rolling that now that’s five silver. I add those on the character sheet.

Let’s determine Brynri’s attributes. We are going to roll four six sided dice, also called d6. We will roll four d6 and remove the lowest dice, leaving the three highest dice. We’re going to do this six times, and that will determine our six attribute scores. You must assign your attributes in the order you roll them, and then at the end you can swap any two. For Brynri, that’s 12 strength, 14 constitution, 13 agility, 9 intelligence, 17 willpower, and 16 charisma. Note that if any of the rolled results are higher than 18, their maximum starting number is just 18. We can swap two scores if we want. Those actually look pretty good so I’m going to decline the swap, which was phrased as a “you may” thing. She does get some attribute modifiers because of her age. Her strength, agility, and constitution are reduced by two, and her intelligence and willpower are increased by one. So her actual numbers are 10 strength, 12 constitution, 11 agility, 10 intelligence, 18 willpower, 16 charisma. Those are the numbers I write on the character sheet. I can also write down her movement, which is calculated by adding an agility modifier to her racial movement number. Based on how she is a dwarf with an agility of 11, page 25 shows that Brynri has a movement speed of 8. Weapon and agility damage bonus. On page 25 we see that because her strength is 10, her strength based weapon damage bonus is zero, and because her agility is 11, her agility based weapon damage bonus is also zero. Because Brynri’s hit points are equal to her constitution, that means her HP is 12. Because Brynri’s willpower points are equal to her willpower, her WP is 18.

There is a table on page 25 that tells you what your base chance is for a skill based on the attribute related to it. The attribute is abbreviated in parentheses after the skill. For example acrobatics parentheses a-g-l means that the agility attribute determines your base chance for your skill. Let’s go through Brynri’s attributes one by one to determine her base skill chance. Her strength is 10, so her skill at crafting, axes, brawling, hammers, spears, and swords is a base chance of 5. The next attribute, constitution, doesn’t determine any skill base chances. Her next attribute, agility, is an 11, so her base chance is 5 for the skills acrobatics, evade, hunting and fishing, riding, sleight of hand, sneaking, swimming, bows, crossbows, knives, slings, and staves. Her next attribute, intelligence, is 10, so that means her awareness, beast lore, bushcraft, healing, languages, myths and legends, seamanship, and spot hidden all have a base chance of 5. The next stat, willpower, doesn’t determine the base chance of any skills. Her last stat, charisma, is a sixteen, so Brynri’s base chance is 7 for the skills bartering, bluffing, performance, and persuasion.

Trained skills. Training a skill doubles its base chance. Six of your trained skills have to come from your profession’s list of trained skills. Page 24 has a table of age and number of trained skills. For old people like Brynri, she has six profession trained skills and six we are free to choose. From the merchant’s trained skills list, I will pick these six: awareness, bartering, bluffing, evade, persuasion, and spot hidden. On the character sheet, there’s an empty diamond next to the skill that you can fill in to show it’s a trained skill, and you can double the base chance number that was there. We have six left. I’ll reserve one for the weapon we end up going with. Or actually, based on her starting gear of a dagger, that should be knives. I mark the diamond next to the skill and double knives’ base chance. For the other five, let’s go with knowledge type skills that older people might know more about than younger people. Beast lore, bushcraft, hunting and fishing, languages, and myths and legends. I double their numbers and mark the diamond next to those skills.

Merchants have the heroic ability of treasure hunter. The profession page doesn’t expand on what that means, so, using control f to find the words treasure hunter later in the rule book, it says that treasure hunter has a requirement of having a bartering skill of at least 12, which Brynri does. Hers is 14. Treasure hunter says it takes 3 willpower points. At a crossroads, activate treasure hunter to learn the direction of greatest treasures.

Weakness. There’s a list of weaknesses to pick from on page twenty six. For Brynri, the person who created her character said that her flaw is that she has a hard time relying on others too much. Quote, “If I want it done right, I have to do it.” We can use that as her weakness, or we can use number twenty from the list, haughty.

Memento. There are a list of mementos your character can start with on page 27. If you don’t already have a memento, pick one or roll one from that list. Brynri’s carrying number 17, a bone whistle.

Encumbrance. Your inventory size without encumbrance is half your strength rounded up. For Brynri, that’s five items. Hmm, but she’s currently carrying seven. That weapon, the dagger, doesn’t count towards encumbrance, but that’s still six. Good thing she has that donkey, which can carry ten items. Without that donkey, she would be over encumbered and would have to make a strength roll every time she tried to move. Fail the strength roll, and you can choose to either stop moving or drop items until you’re down to your inventory size number, which is half your strength rounded up. All people carrying someone else are automatically over encumbered.

Armor. Brynri didn’t get any starting armor. As a starting character with less than a gold to her name, she doesn’t have enough money to afford to buy any of the armor listed on page 73. So I guess that’s that. No starting armor for Brynri.

Brynri does have a dagger that she started with. It’s the last thing on the character sheet we haven’t filled in. The dagger’s stats are on page 74. I write the dagger stats on the character sheet. It’s a one handed weapon grip, whose range is determined by strength, that deals an eight sided dice or d8 of damage, has a durability of 9, a value of 1 gold, a supply of common, and has the features of subtle, piercing, slashing, and can be thrown. Subtle weapons grant a boon when performing sneak attacks. Piercing and slashing damage are damage types, which matters for some armor’s ability to reduce incoming damage types. And lastly the dagger can be thrown as far as Brynri’s strength, which is 10, and means she can throw it 10 meters.

For players in my upcoming Dragonbane game, when you build your character, please follow these starting character rules. Please pick your choice of any armor, page 73, and any clothes, page 75 of the rule book. We will represent how we’re higher level than starting characters by increasing our heroic abilities and gear. Please pick two extra heroic abilities, for three heroic abilities total. You will need to meet their requirements. For gear, please pick any three things of your choice from the gear section, pages 72 to 81. We will also make advancement rolls, which are explained on page 29 and which increase your skill number to make you more successful when rolling dice to do a skill check. I estimate that at our power level in the year, you should make 25 advancement rolls on the skills of your choice. A skill can advance to a maximum of 18.

Hopefully this little rules chat helps my players build their characters and understand how to play. For everyone listening, if you’d like to hear an example adventure, the episode of Firebreathing Kittens podcast right after this is a demonstration of us playing Dragonbane in a oneshot game session. We invite you to listen to it to hear an example of Dragonbane in action. We encourage you to find the Dragonbane rule book yourself, and play a game with friends.

Wilford, Hefty, and Deli have been invited to a special opening of a market but something else has also arrived, and it's draining the life out of the place. Death Comes to Market is an actual play podcast of the Fudge Lite system. 

Wilford, Hefty, and Deli have been invited to a special opening of a market but something else has also arrived, and it's draining the life out of the place. Death Comes to Market is an actual play podcast of the Fudge Lite system. 

Deli Kincaid Interview

A silent monk exhorts Belle, Hefty and Newson to visit a remote monastery in search of a powerful, cursed relic. They’ll lose their memory and their voice, but will they keep their life? 'Dust To Dust' is an actual play podcast of Into The Odd.