Motocaust: The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

[Valamir]

Had an opportunity to play some Motocaust this weekend with some other assorted Forgites.  They may well chime in with some of their own view points.


THE GOOD

With somewhat varying degrees I think most of us really grew to like the card based vehicular combat system, or at the very least concluded there's a ton of GREAT potential (not all of it realized) there.  More on this below.  This is easily the coolest feature of the game.


THE BAD

There were two categories of things in the game that I would classify as "bad" and which were fairly chronic.

First, a lot of holes in the rules.  I can't say for sure if they were just incompletely explained, or down right broken but they did seem rather poorly tested.

1) Creating Necro characters.  Necros (zombie undead types) are listed as monsters.  In the monsters section they are given standard attribute ratings and standard equipment.  Mention is made that they can make interesting player characters.  However, in the character creation section the rules are hugely incomplete.  They indicate that necro characters are made up just like regular characters only with less skill points.  That didn't make much sense since it would leave these characters completely crippled.  We eventually decided that instead of randomly rolling for attributes that such characters would just automatically get the standard attributes from the monster section, which were higher and thus offset the lower skill points.  However the list of starting equipment given in the character creation section didn't match the equipment from the monster section.  This section needs to be MUCH more clearly written.

2) Armor Protection.  The rule says that any damage die that rolls less than the protection value is completely blocked by armor and any die that rolls equal to or more than protection isn't blocked at all.  Seems clear enough, except that melee damage is given in terms of XdY + Strength.  There is nothing in the rules to indicate what to do with the +strength part of the damage.  We ruled that if any of the multiple damage dice "got through" that the +strength applied in full and if none of the damage dice got through that the +strength didn't either.  It kinda worked but that really needs to be more explicit.

Theres also some very unclearly written rules that suggest that maxing out on a damage die roll automatically penetrates and reduces protection by one.  This would mean that against Protection 9 you'd rather be shooting a tiny pathetic d4 weapon rather than the nice big d10 weapon.  Clearly either I'm misunderstanding the rule and it needs to be clarified or the rule doesn't quite work as intended (since the game is very clear that big guns use big dice and wee little weenie guns use small dice)  

Other damage issues were equally squirrely.  For instance a Sword does 3d6+Strength while a Knife does 1d4+Strength.  Never since D&D have I seen a more pathetic knife.   I'd have thought by now gamers would have come to a much better understanding on how deadly a knife really is.


3) Maneuverability Loss for vehicles.  What exactly does this do?  In places it notes that Maneuverability (+ or -) modifies driving checks.  Is that it?  The scale is pretty odd too.  Maneuverability is typically -2 to +2 ish.  But its pretty easy to get a damage result that hits you with -12 Maneuverability.  What exactly does -12 Maneuverability mean to a car that only has a Maneuverability of +1 to begin with?  Does the -11 only have any effect the next time a Driving Roll is called for.  Is a Driving Roll called for immediately whenever a Maneuverability loss is suffered (seems to make sense and how we eventually handled it, but no rule for it that I could see)?  In the vehicle system the proceedure is very very carefully laid out.  Driving Checks are specifically called for in specific places by specific card play.  There is no where to indicate if or where in the proceedure the GM might call for a spontaneous driving check.


4) Pedestrians in Vehicular combat.  The card rules are obviously meant to be used for vehicle on vehicle mayhem.  There is a throw away line about using pedestrians in vehicular combat.  This needs MUCH more development.  The entirety of the rule boils down to "they are just like vehicles but can't use the Hearts suit".  Hearts suit is for acceleration and deceleration.  Diamonds, however, is for fancy maneuvering but the description of the Diamonds suit explicitly references using the Driving Skill.  Well obviously Pedestrians aren't Driving...so what skill do they use when they play a Diamond card?  I'd say something like "Athletics" but there is no such skill in the game.

Further, what constitues a Pedestrian?  If I'm currently riding in a car as a gunner, and then I climb out the sun roof so I'm standing on the car roof, am I now a pedestrian?  As a gunner I'm not allowed to use Diamond cards (except for defense) because I'm not behind the wheel.  But as a pedestrian I can use Diamond cards to represent my movement on foot.  If I want to jump from my car roof into the bed of the nearby pick up truck...do I get to declare myself as a pedestrian...does the GM have to approve that declaration?  The rules leave you to pretty much wing it.

Additionally, what affect does a Club (cause a mechanical break down / Repair Roll) suit have when played against a pedestrian?  Anything?  Random environmental factor like a nearby steam pipe bursts?  Who'd make the opposing repair roll for such a thing?

But including Pedestrians at all opens an even bigger can of worms.  If I have 5 guys on foot in street having a running firefight with a dozen cops also on foot can we use the vehicular combat system because we're all technically pedestrians?  If not (and the default answer would seem to be no since the cards are explicitly stated to be for vehicular combat) what happens if 1 guy on each side is on a motorcycle...is it vehicular combat then?  If so, why not in the first example?  If the motor cycles get blown up does it stop being vehicular combat?


5) What happens to card hands when a combatant is eliminated?  If you have a car with 3 passengers who each has their own hand, and one of the passengers gets gacked, do their dealt cards stay around?  Can they still be used for defense (since defensive cards can be played by anyone and don't have a direct causal effect with the character whose card it is)?  Are they discarded?  If so when?  Immediately?  After the current round of 1 card played by each?  After the whole hand is played out are they just not dealt back in?  This is a pretty glaring hole in the rules.


Rules questions were not the only head scratchers we had.  There were alot of places where we were simply down right puzzled by the design choices.

1) Shadows.  Shadows are...undead ninja?  Motocaust takes place in the meteor blasted US, especially Texas.  Humans have been mutated by the meteorite.  Yet "inside each shadow is the soul of a ninja".  Huh?  Was this meant to be tongue in cheek, because it seems way off the scale of gamer geek campiness to me.  I had a lot of fun playing one but it really set a bizarre tone against the dark and gruesome Christopher Shy world.


2) Playing Motorheads and Shadows as PCs.  Beyond the rules issues discussed above with these...what gives?  Why are these guys relegated to a "it might be fun to play one of these guys if you really wanted...here are some rules" thing.  If we wanted?  We pretty much universally agreed that playing these guys was one of the more important aspects of the whole game (after toning down the Shadow campiness a few notches).

The idea of flesh eating zombies abandoning their brethren to join up with humans to fight evil is far too cool, full of imagery, full of conflict, and full of great roleplaying opportunity for this to be an "also ran" option.  This should be the front and center assumption that all play groups will contain one or more necros (after the rules get fixed.).


3) Vampire Gargoyles?  Aside from the seeming irrelevancy of naming blood-drinking, upside-down-hanging, bat-winged humans as Gargoyles instead of just calling them vampires...we were left with a decided "why?"  What purpose do they serve?  Just because the game has zombies doesn't mean all the rest of the undead need to be thown in.  And having them obsessively collect electronic devices for no apparent reason (like birds with shiny things) seems like an excuse to encourage players to go on a cave delving dungeon crawl in search of treasure.  Didn't like these guys, I'd scrap em right out of the game.


4) No Trucks?  No Busses?  No Vans?  No Armored Cars?  Motocaust is Mad Max plus zombies...how can the vehicle rules NOT include rules for Semis and Busses.  I realize that the car categories are intentionally very broad (we made a dune buggy out of a sports car and a Hummer out of the pick-up truck)...but how do you make a semi?  I was really jonesing to make a Firetruck which pumped flaming gasoline instead of water and had a machine gun nest up in the ladder basket...but with no stats even for a "bus" we couldn't do it without inventing it all ourselves.


5) Situational modifiers galore.  The game bills itself as "Fast and Furious" but NO game is fast and furious when you have tons of situational mods for everything.  If you've ever played GURPs or Car Wars you know the types of mods this game is full of: -X for shooting at the tires, -X for shooting while moving, -X for trying multiple actions at once, etc, etc, etc.

Heres the kicker though that makes this firmly in the "The Bad" column and not simply a matter of personal taste.  The mods are not to scale...at all.  Resolution is on 2d10 sum and roll low.  The mods are routinely adding up to -5, -6, -7 to the (already low to begin with) Target Number.  -6....on 2d10 is statistically HUGE.

But it gets worse.  A head shot is a -4 modifier...what does that get you?  Nothing.  There are no rules for double damage, instant kill, or anything.  You do the exact same hitpoints of damage as you always do...why would you ever do a head shot?  Oh, because there's zombies right?...you've got to head shot the zombies.  Nope.  There's no rule that says zombies can only be hurt by head shots.  In fact, they get damaged pretty much identically to humans.  There is virtually no mechanic differentiation between a human and a necro in the game.  Where'd the rules for head shots go...and why a -4.  For starting characters with a typical target number of 12, the difference between 12 or less and 8 or less on 2d10 is HUGE.

This is not to mention the huge Death Spiral of megative mods for damage that characters suffer.


6) No advancement system?  I've got no problem with games that have no advancement system.  But this one starts you off as the weeniest of weenies, then declares that "cold killers have skills as high as 10, but you'll need lots of experience to get there" and then provides...far as I could tell, no rules whatsoever for experience or skill improvement.

Something was left out of the PDF I expect.



THE UGLY

Ok, now for the ugly.  Two words...Whiff City.

Attributes are rolled on 1d6 with 3 extras points to spread around.  
20 skill points are used to buy skills to a max of level 6 with 1 favored skill being higher.

Given that the random character generation is roll 3d6 and arrange the dice among the 3 stats, your average starting character is going to have stats of 5 or 6.  

Resolution is Attribute (5 or 6) plus skill (5 or 6) roll equal to or less on 2d10.  Ok...so I have about a 50% chance of success for skills that I'm good at, much much less for skills that I only have a couple points in.

If I hyper specialize I can get my single best skill up to 15, but the rest of my capabilities will suck beyond belief

This is before the situational modifiers.  The game is quite GURPs like in its overreliance on situational modifiers.  +1 for this -2 for that.  As always the negative far out weigh the positives.  The vast majority of skill checks in our game were in the 6-7 range with 3-5 being more common than 8-10 and several checks rendered auto fail from the mods.

My Undead flesh-eating, blood-drinking, shadow ninja character whiffed repeatedly with his katana, was unable to dodge out of the way of a speeding truck (fortuneately the truck rolled to miss me) and failed in his sole attempt to use Acrobatics in a colorful ninja esque way (to jump from car to car in the middle of a running highway battle) because the odds of failure were just ridiculous...

Some ninja.

This game was quite simply, one of the single worst whiff inducing games I've ever played in.  Halfway through the whiffs started becoming fewer because the players simply refused to ever roll anything except their best skill or two.

Another problem with the high whiff in this game is that heavy weapons do oodles of damage.  You have 20 hitpoints.  Most every car you encounter is armed with weapons that do 2d10x3 or 2d20x4 damage.  Ok...that's kind of brutally realistic.  Shouldn't expect to live through getting smacked with a 20mm machine gun after all.

Except that even if you use all of the smart tactical skill in the world to make sure you get the jump on your opponents, the high whiff factor means your initial attack has a high probability of failure at which point life and death boil down to who gets lucky enough to not whiff first and vaporize their opponent.



The Card System

Ok, back to the Card System, because it was the really shining feature of the game and I wanted to end this report on a high note.  The card system is REALLY REALLY intrigueing.

Once we got passed the "here's what I want my character to do" mentality and started getting into the "here's what the cards are telling me my best options are at the moment" mentality it really started to click for us (something that probably should be made more explicit).

Basically everyone has a hand of cards and the sides take turns playing them 1 at a time.  Suits tell you the type of action you do and the value gives you a bonus to the action with face cards being super special moves and aces being REALLY cool counters (where I steal the card you just played and use it against you and you get stuck with my Ace which is only worth +1).

The suits are:
Spades: attacking
Clubs: Cause breakdown
Hearts: Change speed
Diamonds: fancy maneuver.

Clubs are really cool.  Basically, its a post apocalyptic world where you're driving around beat up jury rigged Mad Max-esque cars.  They're going to break down at the worst possible times ala the Millenium Falcon.  The card system gives your opponent the opportunity to tell you when something is about to break down (by them playing a Club on you) at which point your mechanic has to make a Repair check (representing the quality of previous maintenance) to avoid the effect.

One potential weakness here is that there are ALOT of Clubs in the deck, most of the deck is going to get dealt out in nearly every sizeable battle, and Repair Rolls (due to the whiff factor) are very difficult to make.  This means that most vehicles will drop out of combat due to break downs long before you destroy them with guns.  Remove the high Whiff Rate and this might not be so bad.


In our after action report we talked about a couple of other issues with the card system

1) Getting dealt no Spades makes it very difficult to shoot effectively (you can pretend you have a Spade at 0 bonus, but when the opponent defends with a Spade you'll have such a huge penalty you'll never hit.) This hit the Gunbunny in the party especially hard.  It essentially meant that the non combat grease monkey was more effective at manning the guns (from the bonus from the cards) than our gunnery expert was (with no bonus from the cards).  A definite violation of niche protection.


2) Hearts and Diamonds seem pointlessly divided.  We spent too much game time trying to evaluate when they applied.  The examples in the rules were always straight forward but the reality of real players in a real game...not so much.  If you want to ram someone from behind on a winding road is a) Hearts because you're trying to speed up to nail them, or b) diamonds because trying to nudge the rear quarterpanel just right while whipping around hairpin turns at 80 miles an hour is a fancy maneuver?

Also is it possible to defend against a heart with a diamond?  Not according to the rules but I should be able to dodge and weave (a diamond) to prevent someone from passing me (a heart).


3) Pedestrians ignore hearts.  The rules don't say what to do with the hearts since technically the hand doesn't end until all cards get played.  But why have a suit that doesn't apply to everybody.



RECOMMENDATIONS

Our group came to the following recommendations (some more universally supported than others).

1) merge the hearts and diamonds suit.  Dump hearts, and make diamond the maneuver suit...speed, maneuvering, in a car, on foot, doesn't matter.  Since both hearts and diamonds are just Driving Tests anyway there is no need for 2 suits that are essentially the same thing.


2) Make hearts into the "Favored Skill" suit.  All character classes get a favored skill already.  Drivers drive, gunbunny's shoot, grease monkey's repair, etc.  Make hearts a suit that just lets the character class use their favored skill.  A gunbunny can thus shoot with either spades or hearts.  A Driver can thus drive with either diamonds or hearts.  A grease monkey can thus repair with either clubs or hearts.  This give ALOT more niche protection and makes it unlikely that the specialized characters will not get any cards useful to their specialty.


3) Make the Clubs suit into a broader "environmental effects" suit which could include possible breakdowns but could also include road debris to make drivers checks against.  Fog to make shooting tests against.  etc, etc.  This will reduce the "falling apart jalopy cars" effect of having too many Clubs played and also make the suit meaningful for pedestrians.


4) After the change to hearts and clubs, pedestrian combat will thus work identically to vehicular combat (with the exception of needing a skill to replace Driving with for Diamond checks...like "Athletics" which the game doesn't currently have) and so the very cool card system can be used for all combat situations not just car on car.


5) Eliminate the obscene Whiff factor.  

I personally would go to a die pool system because whiffs are much less likely to occur in such a system.  a) Many of the game effects refer to the amount a roll succeeded or failed by which is easily handled by successes in a die pool, b) adding or subtracting dice on the fly is a much easier way of handling situational modifiers and much gentler on the probability curve than -4 on a 2d10 roll, c) the damage system is just half a step away from a die pool system anyway with each die being compared to a protection value seperately.

But there are less drastic courses of action that can be taken.  Such as:

a) up the starting ability scores.  Instead of just rolling 3d6 and arranging, roll 4 or 5 d6 and keep the highest 3.  Add 6 points instead of 3.  Or just start each stat at 2 and then add the d6.

b) up the starting skill points.  Instead of 20 skill points with a max of 6 to start and 10 ever, give 40 skill points with a max of 10 and 20 ever.

c) Roll 2d6 instead of 2d10 (or even 2d8 would help)

d) REALLY REALLY REALLY reconsider the situational modifiers and dump all but the most major penelties greater than -2 and eliminate most of the more frivolous, action slowing, collection of -1s


6) Break away from the "start as weanies and advance" routine.  Recognize that quirky settings like Motocaust are rarely likely to ever be the center piece of a 3 year campaign.  Treat starting characters as if they're already among the best in the world.  This not only makes short campaigns much more enjoyable but it also recognizes that your game is fun to play in its own right.  You don't need the pavlovian exercize of leveling up to hold player's interest.  Maybe provide a social reward such as reputation or wealth level and watch the players be more than satisfied with in game rewards without needing to "level up" (as long as characters aren't complete weenies).

I was far more interested in getting my hands on a shot gun than on leveling.


CONCLUSION

If I had to evaluate the game in its current condition with a letter grade, I'd probably give it a D.  That's even with massive bonus points for the pretty cool card system.  Part of this grade reflects my own personal abhorance of whiffing.  I deduct HUGE points for whiff prone games.
For gamers who are more Whiff Tolerant and "go ahead and just fudge it anyway" types I'd bump that to a C.  

If this were a free beta I probably would have given it a B because most of the issues above (unclear rules and excessive whiffing) are exactly the sort of thing that beta playtests are supposed to catch.  So if you think of this game as a beta, don't be overly discouraged by my review.  As a beta its a good solid "B" game.  But as a $10 for sale "final version".  No.  I'm sorry to say its really not yet ready for prime time.

I would have been ALOT more lenient in my evaluation if the game had come with a caveat requesting feedback and indicating that revisions would be made and provided for free to purchasers based on feedback.  Because then basically you know you're buying a beta.  

I've got no problem with asking people to cough up a little cash for a beta version of a game.  In fact, I think this is an EXCELLENT business strategy.  It helps gauge interest.  It limits feedback to only those really interested in the game, and eliminates all those folks who'll bitch incessantly about free games and then never buy your game even if you make the changes anyway, and is just a great way to get much more thorough playtesting than you could ever do yourself.  PDFs are ideal for this sort of thing.

But in the absence of such a caveat (not just in the game but on the RPGNow page) I have to grade the game as if its a finished product.


As a beta its a "B" with good potential to become an "A" with several more rounds of playtest and revision. I wanted to draw attention to this lest my review make it sound like the game sucked.  It didn't suck.  It's just not finished.

But as a finished game its a "D".


I really hate to be so brutal about a fellow indie game, and am especially sorry that I didn't have the opportunity to be a playtester during the open call for playtesters Phil made a while back...

But I do have to comment that some of these issues may well be the result of there being only 2 weeks between the time the call for final playtesters went out and when the game went up for sale on RPGNow.

I have trouble envisioning how effective playtesting, playtest reporting, evaluation of playtest reports, incorporation of suggested changes, playtest of incorporated changes, and final evaluation can all occur in such a short time frame.  Given the issues I raised above, I'm inclined to think, they can't.

[montag]

Thanks.
A suggestion to fix the whiff factor (stolen from new German post-apo game DeGenesis, available for free (all 400 pages) at www.degenesis.de): add the modifier to the bottom of the 2d10. For success one has to roll above the modifier/difficulty and below the stat.
That way, the modifier doesn't hurt so hard initially, but gets some real bite even for the pros when accumulating above 7-8. (Degenesis also allows for specialisation in particular areas which doesn't increase the upper level but is subtracted from the lower threshold. So the pros can do the crazy shit again, but don't benefit that much in average situations.

(FWIW, I didn't buy the game precisely because there was so little time between playtest and release.)

[Jake Norwood]

I was one of the players for that game (in fact, I was the other Necro, the Motorhead Driver).

I'll echo what Ralph said alongside my own feelings.

I have to flunk the game. I thought the setting had good potential, and that the car chase rules, even as written, were the best such rules for car chases that focused on the driving and manevuering more than the shooting and endless re-rolling of drive checks endemic in most games that involve chases (however the cost in the current edition is that shooting during a car chase is pretty dried out). So that's the good.

But...

Character creations rules: bad. I don't normally mind whiff factor, but even with my "game breaking" necro driver I had a 5o% chance of failing a simple driving roll...and fighting was out of the question. In short, nothing worked the way it was supposed to, and the game reeked of having never been played. Ever. That's a pretty stiff accusation I realize, but I mean it.

So here's my dilemma. I liked the setting and see enough potential in the card mechanic that I'd like to have the game, if only to monkey with it. But I find it reprehensible to financially support a "finished game" that isn't even playable on the most basic level without a GM house-ruling everything on the spot (which our GM, Ron, wouldn't do...we wanted to play the game "as written"). I really like Phil's ideas, which makes me want to buy more of his games, but now I'm afraid that they'll all be unplayable setting-books-disguised-as-games.

So check out MotoCaust (really), because you'll find yourself wanting to play. That's a good thing. Play it as written, though, and you'll feel cheated. That's a bad thing.

I've probably shot my chances of working with Phil in any capacity now (oh well), but I was painful to see a game with soooo much possibility fall so short. I would drop $30 for a mechanically finished and tested version of this game with the same amount of setting material in a heartbeat.

Jake

[philreed]

I've probably shot my chances of working with Phil in any capacity now (oh well), but I was painful to see a game with soooo much possibility fall so short. I would drop $30 for a mechanically finished and tested version of this game with the same amount of setting material in a heartbeat.

Jake

Not at all. In fact, this makes me more interested in working with you.

I'm watching comments and reviews and taking my own experiences into account. We'll be revising and expanding the game before sending the print version off. And, as always, those who already bought the game get the revision at no charge.

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

I was the GM! The group numbered six people; three of them were my long-term group Tod, Julie, and Maura, and the others were Jake and Ralph, obviously.

Quick note: Ralph, I found the rules-detail that solves the weeny-gun vs. tank problem - the points done by the die (its highest value, in this case) must be over half the Protection value for the ablative effect to occur at all.

I enjoyed the card system a great deal, and I'm torn between two interpretations:

1. Since there is only one draw per entire combat, the character who doesn't get cards corresponding to his or her specialty is hosed. In our scenario, the two gun bunnies (Julie and an NPC) were pretty much, as Julie put it, "breakdown shamans."

OR

2. Since there is only one draw per entire combat, the character who doesn't get cards corresponding to his or her specialty is automatically less important ... but this isn't a bad thing. All running-car battles differ, and fight A might be mostly about breakdowns, and fight B might be mostly about shooting, and fight C might be a mix of breakdowns and maneuvering, and ...

The question comes down to a matter of enjoyment. In our case, especially with five players, Julie's gun bunny hadn't had much chance to do anything until the firefight (except get bitten very badly by a skinthirst). She wanted to unload some whoop-ass bullets, and I want to emphasize that in this game, the point system of character creation enforces major niche specialization. You can't be generalized or your character will feebly flop about. So I think Julie felt that she got cheated of her schtick.

But then I got to thinking, well, what if everyone initially bought into the idea that firefights are going to differ, and that you simply know, as of the card draw, whether you're going to make a proactive difference in this one or not? After all, my system in Zero at the Bone is predicated on this principle, which I'm starting to think is fundamental to any card system based on drawing a hand and working from it, relative to how long a hand "lasts" in real time.

For this to be fun, car battles have to be frequent, so that the differences among them can be appreciated in real time, and also so that the character who doesn't get his or her moment to shine in fight A will indeed get it at least by fight C.

And if this logic is to apply, then the alternative to using your specialty also has to be fun. A person who doesn't have cards corresponding to his or her character's specialty automatically knows that it's time to take a defensive role ... and to revel in it. So defense needs to be a bit more fun in some way, I'm thinking ... perhaps you can play an additional card to screw up an opponent's next action or something like that, as well as deal with the current one. That's not a deeply-considered recommendation, merely a quick thought.

Here are a couple more considerations about the game ...

1. The Ninja Mummy with a Palm Pilot is an extremely diverting concept ... and by "diverting," I mean exactly that - it focuses attention completely away from anything else that might be going on. I appreciated Ralph's occasional attempts to keep his character from becoming a big deadly Toon running around in our gritty, greasy scenario, but frankly they were not successful. It's a mummy ... with martial arts! and a palm pilot! Which means that everyone else in the game becomes a foil for this character in two ways, both bad: they can't do flippy leapy martial arts and other stuff as well, if at all; and they simply aren't as absurd, in fact, far from it.

2. The breakdown table definitely needs more fire. Only one out of ten options catches the car on fire?? Bah! Zombie Bob say, more fire. We came up with the idea that every odd result includes catching on fire in addition to whatever else.

Whew. What about the scenario itself? I decided that the obvious McGuffin had to be a fragment of the meteor, and then casually decided that touching the thing induced zombification in living people, and also the return of memory and eventually actual life to zombies. This was kinda cool in play, as I think Ralph was a little stunned by suddenly having to take his Toon more seriously as a person, at the end.

I also liked the idea of well-fed Europeans showing up in raddled, blasted, living-corpse-infested Texas, looking for said fragment. Given that and a few moments for me to scribble NPCs into a little matrix of numbers, we were off to the races.

Best,
Ron

[jrs]

Yep, as the gun bunny whose two major skills are vehicular and modern weapons being dealt a handful of clubs and hearts sucked.  Whadayamean I can't fire the canon or the machine gun???  I was seriously bummed during the climactic car chase scene.  

It was definitly one of those games that started with a lot of excitement and then just got bogged down in trying to apply or understand the rules.  

The group car creation is cool.

Julie

[Valamir]

Quick note: Ralph, I found the rules-detail that solves the weeny-gun vs. tank problem - the points done by the die (its highest value, in this case) must be over half the Protection value for the ablative effect to occur at all.

Right...I did forget that part.  Although that still means that a d6 would be superior to a d10 vs Protection 10.  Which is pretty much the same problem.  Also, come to think of it, I don't remember if the rule applied only to guns or if they forgot to exclude melee weapons...meaning my 3d6 sword might wind up being a great anti tank weapon...


I also forgot to mention one other recommendation I had for the system, and that was to allow rolls to provide bonuses to other rolls.

A Driver ought to be able to play a diamond and make an incredible fancy maneuver to line up a perfect shot, than then provides a bonus (amount won-by perhaps) to the Gunbunny's next shot.  The Gunbunny ought to be able to play a Spade and after shooting the enemy vehicle have the amount they hit by provide a bonus to a subsquent Club play (representing a breakdown chance caused by the gun fire), and so on.

It's a mummy ... with martial arts! and a palm pilot!

Yeah, I tried to embrace the geekiness of it, "of course I can do that...I'm a ninja" but it was really far too silly for the game...I mean they have throwing stars for chrissake.  IMO any game with "Acrobatics" as a skill is destined for silliness.  Replace Acrobatics with Athletics and use it as the pedestrian equivelent of Driving and I think that would work much better.

[Jasper]

Thanks for posting this, Ralph.  I had seen Motocasut come up on RPGNow and was interested but skeptical.

This is a bit of an aside, but maybe you should consider posting at least some of these thoughts on RPGNow itself.  I noticed that the other two comments are quite glowing, with one having only a single reservation-- that he prefers dice to cards.  Not that you should try to prove these other posters wrong, but it seems like they might not have actually played the game yet, and other potential buyers deserve to hear some of the game's problems too.

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

Let's keep this discussion focused on actual play experiences. Ralph's or anyone's other choices are either private or better suited for other forums.

Best,
Ron

[Valamir]

Hey Phil, I'm glad to hear you'll be providing free revision updates.

I'd be interested in your thoughts on the issues raised: which of these items you've confirmed in your own play, or which your own play refutes, or which are new to you; and what you think of the recommendations we came up with, particularly in regard to the card system and the whiff factor.