Hello,

Hooray, a Mortal Kombat game! It's pretty strong for only four pages. Player-character creation is very neat, even exciting, with its colors. I really like the variety available in the characters, which isn't something I ordinarily favor in game design, but in this case is totally necessary. [music]"Liu Kang ... Scorpion ... Johnny Cage ... Sub-Zero ..." (c'mon, sing along you bastards, you know you know it!) Characters represent radical system differences, and given the utter sketchiness of the rest of the Situation (setting, etc), that's good.

At first I was struck a bit by what looked like high handling time for the critical and fumble outcomes, but then I realized that these results are really the meat of resolution, not exceptions. And since the basics are so easy, that handling time might be OK.

I also like the nice & quick improvement system, which as I see it, isn't really a central feature of the reward system, just a fun piece of "do more stuff" you can keep racking on as you go. As for that reward system, however ... here's where the game starts to lose its center.

Starting with the terms, Cosmos is weak as hell, a pure placeholder. The bad guys might just as well want to achieve "lunch" or "Tuesday" as take over the universe. Check out sources like Jack Kirby's New Gods or similar Cosmic Zap type comics; this thing does need a setting.

That leads to Fight, which is also, strangely, weak, because simply to-hit and how-much-damage mechanics are not, by themselves, actually a system for fighting. Fights are only interesting when they occur in situations. So what the game badly, badly needs a setpiece mechanism, some way for situations to arise which arouse interest in fighting. That also suggests that reasons/inspirations may arrive which pit player-characters against one another once in a while, because at the moment I can't see why they would ever fight. And what's the fun in that? That business about "brother vs. brother" at the very end simply isn't sufficient.

Similarly, let's think as well in terms of consequences for scenes. What does it matter whether a character loses a fight or not? Answering that question is what situations and scenarios are all about - not in terms of the ending of an entire scenario or session, but rather in terms of what happens next within it.

Is any of this supposed to be influenced by a GM? If so, how? When? In response to what events or mechanics during or after fights? Throughout the game, the actual functions and role of the GM are suspiciously absent, so figure out what you might say to describe what you know the GM obviously would do.

Now for some resolution questions ... let's see, negative score values all bump up one level of difficulty in addition to their actual negative modifier to the die roll. That sounds a lot like what I call the "double hose," which is to say, extra bad. Is that the way it's really supposed to work? The example makes it seem so.

Also, apparently it's possible for the number of of one's actions to be zero or less, which puzzled me. I like the fact that you can farm negatives into any traits you want at character creation, so if I want my Root, Crown, and Third Eye all to be zero or less, why should I get less actions than anyone else? And how should I play with zero actions, anyway?

Regarding defending, I understand that its level = same level of difficulty as the attack, but what trait does it use? Anything you want? That seems a little too open.

That's when I realized that I could not figure out how to play, and sadly realized that the game could not win an award. I pushed my scribbled character sheet over to one side and thought to myself, "Mischa better fix this, or I'm going to whip his butt with my No-Shadow Lightning Kick!" [music]

Best,
Ron