A role playing system designed to make you start quickly.
By quickly, think about 5 minutes after having a scenario idea.
Also there is no computations: game is played with cards, their suits meaning characteristics (like heart is body, spade is mind, club is social etc).
CHARACTER GENERATION
You draw cards for checks but you have a few ones you draw at game start that give your basic suits values (the more clubs you go the more social you are, the more diamonds the most dexterity and accuracy you have).
You can add a few suits levels by taking weaknesses.
The first trick is that you will keep these cards and use them like hero points. The second trick is that there is only the one you've chosen to put on your sheet that you will be able to use as such so you gotta chose carefully.
Lightning quick, and also tends to give a very balanced group because there are only 10 cards per suit to draw from and number drawn is limited.
SYSTEM
Checks are made according to a simple code with a suit and a difficulty number.
- Drawing the requested suit means critical success, the other suit of the same color is minor success, the 2 suits of the other color means failure.
- If your suit level is superior to the difficulty you get one free card.
- You can draw one more card to succeed at all or improve your result by sacrificing something (like takilng a lot of time to do the test, breaking a weapon etc)
- You can draw a last third card if you are ready to concede a fumble if the wrong color is drawn
Very easy, not that realistic but greatly improves players to GM relationships as you need to describe what you do but also HOW you do it.
Also there is quite nothing to remember in fact.
PROBLEMS
I've had minor issues like the character sheet that is not that much readable but maybe it's my pdf reader.
(edit: this has been changed their new one is way better)
But I still I miss settings specifics (magic, psionics, etc). I would say yes to a full book version with themes specifics.
UPDATED OPINION
Each 4 times i've played it now it works amazingly well all times (horror, sword-and-sandal without magic, medfan with ad&d rules, scifi with traveller's psis).
I also appreciate that they changed the character sheet when told the previous one was crap and added details lately on combat.
all in all, your scenarios starts quickly, the system works efficiently and all in all it's a very efficient little RPG system.
Will definitely keep on playing it.
It's something between my initiation system for newbies or my swiss-knife or first-aid kit forever.
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