Be rewarded for being awesome: A review of Outgunned

Outgunned in a genre action TTRPG that lets you play games like The Fast and the Furious, Kingsman and Bad Boys.

The RPG cites movies like Die Hard and John Wick as inspiration, too, but in these, the focus is mainly on one hero. There is a duet mode in Outgunned, but the truth is the game is best with three or four proactive players.

I made the mistake of thinking Outgunned Adventure was a supplement for Outgunned. In truth, Outgunned Adventure is both a standalone RPG and an expansion for Outgunned.

I had also made the mistake of thinking that since I had a copy of Broken Compass, I didn’t need to look at Outgunned.

The creative team of Simone Formicola, Riccardo Sirignano with illustrator Daniela Giubellini are behind all three, but Broken Compass was bought by CMON. Outgunned is the RPG created afterwards, and I suspect this is a case of a ‘second chance’ or a ‘do it again with hindsight’ opportunity for Two Little Mice. As readers, we benefit from the prior experience of the design team.

The crowdfunding campaign for Outgunned Adventure is live (at the time of publishing), well over the goal, and racing to 3,000 backers. These stats tell me the proof is in the pudding; people liked Outgunned.

I rectified my mistake, bought the Outgunned PDF from DriveThruRPG, I’m glad I did, and here’s my review.

What is the Outgunned TTRPG?

I’d call Outgunned a rulebook rather than a world book because the 224 pages are spent on rules, not worldbuilding.

Except, I can’t.

Pretty much the first words in the download are, “These are tools, not rules”.

There’s a paradox here. Outgunned is not a crunchy system. You add two values together to get your dice pool, then roll all those d6s, and you’re looking for two-of-a-kind, three-of-a-kind, four-of-a-kind or even more impressive matches.

Challenging tasks require more impressive tallies of matches. You can’t fail. If you don’t get the results you need, you fail in a cinematically dramatic and appropriate way. Playing a Mad Max-style car chase and the dice are cruel? You might pull ahead of the bandit, but your two cars clash, and now there’s steam pouring from yours.

What is the weird fact that turns this straightforward approach into a paradox? Outgunned uses a huge chunk of its 224 pages to walk GMs/directors through situation after situation, covering all the action movie scene styles to ensure you get how the system works in that scenario.

Furthermore, a clever, tense economy is built into the system. You can gamble small successes on re-rolls to try and get better successes. You can spend or earn spotlights and other points to try and improve your chances. Over time, your Grit, which is that remarkable thing that makes you a hero, gets whittled away until you’re rolling the dice on the Death Roulette!

In Outgunned, you’ll want to gamble, you’ll be rewarded for making dramatic gambles, and it’ll always pay off — until it doesn’t.

In contrast, there’s no worldbuilding in the book. We’re not given a government agency, a secret crime-fighting organisation, a cabal of fighter pilots, or a network of street gangs to tell stories around. Two Little Mice makes the safe assumption that you know what an action movie is like, know our real world well enough, and are left to inject heroes into our contemporary setting.

However, there is an introductory one-shot called Race Against Time, so you can at least have an example.

Outgunned heroes

I like the Outgunned system, which is known as the Director’s Cut, but my favourite part of the TTRPG is the character generation approach.

Outgunned‘s opening pages are about creating a character. It’s appropriate because the larger-than-life heroes in the action genre define the world. For example, suppose you make a bunch of heist specialists. In that case, you’re probably in an Ocean’s Eleven-style setting. If you go with honourable adrenaline junky rule breakers, then you’re in something like The Fast and the Furious.

For character generation in Outgunned, you pick a Role, fill in flavour details, pick a Trope, mark up the appropriate Attribute and Skills you’ve just selected, add two free points, three Feats, some Gear choices, and some of your ‘tension economy’ stats, like Adrenaline points.

If you pick a Young or Old hero, there are positive and negative modifiers to these defaults.

Roles describe what sort of Hero the character is. There’s;

• The Commando
• The Fighter
• The Ace
• The Agent
• The Face
• The Nobody
• The Brain
• The Sleuth
• The Criminal
• The Spy

And, yes, ‘Faceman’ Face from the A-Team is an example of ‘The Face’. +1 nostalgia points to Two Little Mice

Roles have Flaws and Catchphrases which add both flavour and offer rewards if you can work in the behaviour into the game. For example, a Commando catchphrase is “If it bleeds, we can defeat it”.

Then, Tropes layer on some details with personality archetypes. There are 18 to pick from, and I bet they all look familiar to you.

• Bad to the Bone
• Cheater
• Cool but Distressed
• Diehard
• Free Spirit
• Genius Bruiser
• Good Samaritan
• Hot Stuff
• Hunk
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold
• Last Boy Scout/Girl Scout
• Leader
• Lone Wolf
• Mentor
• Neurotic Geek
• Party Killer
• Trusty Sidekick
• Vigilante

These choices influence where you can spend points in Attributes and Skills, plus which Feat you get. For example, “Cool but Distressed” characters can put a point in either “Nerves” or “Smooth” and can pick a Feat from either “Detective”, “Gunslinger”, “Proven Driver” or “Silver Tongue”.

Even better, Two Little Mice stresses that these are archetypes and not stereotypes. Heroes can change and these are guidelines for you and others, not processes for a robot to follow.

Perhaps my favourite Hero rules in Outgunned are the best practices. In this TTRPG, players should share the responsibility so that they can help describe great scenes and suggest ideas, live in the moment, and leave room for others.

Outgunned look and feel

Outgunned is crisp and clean. I wish I had the physical book, which is nice and compact and would surely shine with production quality.

The PDF is bookmarked and well formatted but struggles on a small screen. The TTRPG’s contents are often one column, filling a page, but sometimes there’s a chunky sidebar to provide space for commentary. I started reading on my large smartphone but moved to reading on my desktop, asking my browser to display the PDF two-pages side-by-side.

The art by Daniela Giubellini is fantastic! Our heroes look the part and aren’t all white men. The cover for the TTRPG will speak for itself, but I’ve included some examples in this review.

There are special dice for Outgunned, which I don’t have and which the rules reference. However, all these special dice do is use icons rather than dots or numbers on the d6. Why? Two Little Mice says this helps spot the two/three/four-of-a-kind results, and sometimes the icons have special values (like snake eyes). The designers might be right, all I can say is that I’ve used traditional d6 for my one-shot test game of Outgunned and it was no problem at all.

Outgunned overall

I really like Outgunned and the Director’s Cut system.

However, I’m mixed on the paradox of being rules-lite and rules-situation-heavy. I think I’ll appreciate all the extra rules (like car chases and heists) as I continue to play the game more. On my first read-through, I was more impatient with a “Yes, I get it already!” reaction.

I’m sure Outgunned will be a game that new roleplayers pick up quickly, and veterans, even those coming from very different systems like 5e, will adopt easily.

Outgunned keeps the promise of a TTRPG system that lets you create games like action movies. I totally see why Outgunned Adventure, which adds pulp adventures and Tropes to the rules, is doing well on Backerkit.

Recommended.

Quick Links

• DriveThruRPG: Outgunned.
• BackerKit: Outgunned Adventure.