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My group and I sat down to play a session of Two-Fisted Tales this weekend. Holy wow what a great game!
The basic combat system is a little weak in terms of trying to figure out what happens in even the most basic group combats. But the advanced combat system is easy to implement piecemeal, and so that's what we did.
We played a session set in the world of Crimson Skies, one character used the Flying Ace template, another used the Brawler template. The first thing we noticed was that the power level scales up dramatically, very quickly. Between the Gritty power level and the Escapist power level was a huge amount of points that made all the characters extremely smart, fast, strong, and skilled. We can only imagine how powerful they would be at higher levels. I would almost suggest that the next most powerful level might even be a bit much for a Doc Savage campaign! It would also be increasingly hard to differentiate characters at those levels. Some attention to this in future editions would be appreciated. That said, the power level we played at was definitely well-defined enough to make the players feel their characters were proper badasses and not step on each others toes.
The dice system is a bit like Feng Shui, with a positive and negative d10 which are added up. (We had a hard time remembering that 9s exploded and 0s were zeroes, not tens.)
The author said that the system was intentionally deadly, in order to get players to actually take ambushes seriously. While it's true that "stick 'em up, flatfoot!" works a lot more in the pulps than it tends to in RPGs, I am not sure that a hyper-deadly combat system is the answer. I do not know the answer, but I am not sure that this is it. Fortunately for people like me who are full of such doubts the game provides a solid set of optional rules for making the game less deadly. These worked very well.
Another thing we noticed was that the luck cards replenished far too quickly. The rules say the luck cards replenish at the end of a session or when everyone has spent theirs. This led to players spending luck cards on nearly every roll! We did love the luck cards in general, though. I house-ruled halfway through that cards could only replenish "between scenes", when characters were going to be doing something different than what they were just doing.
I loved that there was detailed attention to nearly everything that heroes are constantly doing in the pulps - searching for things, charming people, and getting in chases. I would even suggest expanding these "situational rules" significantly. We didn't use any hypnotism or magic powers, though, so I can't say how well those work. I think their inclusion is good, but they don't need to be expanded unless there's a specific campaign world that requires them.
I strongly recommend this game for fans of Adventure! and other pulp games. I also want to add that the Pulp Villains add-on from this company adds to this game tremendously!
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