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RPG Review: Broken Compass & Outgunned
23 Plays18 days ago
This week it's another RPG review of the Broken Compass and Outgunned games from Two Little Mice. If you're someone who left every great action movie thinking "I want to play that RPG!" then this game is probably for you. Broken Compass and its refined descendent, Outgunned, are cinematic action games that focus on fast-paced, cinematic action. The mechanics are simple, which means they're fast, and the less you try to "win" as opposed to playing out a great cinematic scene, the more fun you'll have. We had a lot of fun with this game and we recommend giving it a try.
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Transcript
Introduction to a Dystopian World
00:00:01
Speaker
Just take a look around. Darkness rules the Earth. In a dangerous world... Governments crumble. Chaos reigns. In a treacherous time... there is opportunity in chaos.
00:00:16
Speaker
Evil is a fact. We shall succeed where they have failed. Drax is on a quest for a supernatural power. They know far too much. And courage. should Stop them.
00:00:28
Speaker
the only one who can. Is a phantom.
Nostalgia and 'The Phantom'
00:00:40
Speaker
Come get, get your tune up.
00:00:46
Speaker
It's time for your tune-up.
00:01:10
Speaker
Well, we are back for another episode of Tabletop Tune-Up. Mark, you threw me a curveball there. I thought we had kind of a... old timey sound but then we got some some ah something newer at the end there yeah well curveballs that's what it's all about hey do you remember that that film that we introed there at the start do you do you mean the phantom starring billy zane that nobody watched i watched it i know you did yeah i did not watch it uh newsflash man it's not very good
00:01:41
Speaker
It's not very good. It's got a ah charm to it that I think a childhood self would have liked. But you know watching it as an adult, I was like, boy, this kind of sucks.
00:01:52
Speaker
It wasn't good and it didn't age well. But, you know, Billy Zane, what are you going to do? Well, you could put him in a movie like Titanic. He stunk up ah the second season of Twin Peaks.
00:02:06
Speaker
Did he? Oh, no. The whole season of Twin Peaks, the second season was pretty stinky anyway. Yeah, it's a topic for another time. It is. You know what the
Introducing 'Broken Compass' and 'Outgunned'
00:02:14
Speaker
topic is for this time? This time are going to talk about Broken Compass here on the Tabletop Tune-Up Podcast. I'm your host, Ben Dyer, with my co-host, Mark Lehman. And this was a game I discovered actually in a bookstore and it was like nothing else I saw on the shelf. Oh, I can see why. That book cover is amazing.
00:02:33
Speaker
Yeah, it's this little kind of book cover that was kind of sitting on the, you know, on the RPG shelf. There's a lot of other very colorful stuff around it, but like this looked like an old school grail diary and I pulled it out and it turns out it's this high adventure, very cinematic game.
00:02:49
Speaker
ah For those of you that have not heard of this and want to go looking for it, I will say that it's actually out of print. You can still find copies out there, but it has a descendant, which is,
00:03:00
Speaker
Younger, sexier, maybe a bit more polished, and that is Outgunned. So if you're interested in either Broken Compass or Outgunned, it's the same developer. Generally, same rule set, but I think there's some refinements in Outgunned that you'll probably like more.
00:03:13
Speaker
I will say this. the I saw the covers and stuff for the Outgunned series, which are remarkable. They look fantastic. Do they have the intrigue of the leather-bound journal that you're going to find in that bookstore?
00:03:24
Speaker
I don't know, but they are gorgeous. They do they do have a good art department.
Crafting a Pulp Adventure Narrative
00:03:29
Speaker
I'll say one of the reasons also just to flashback to our intro, why we chose this pulp intro, because when we played Broken Compass, we played it like a pulp adventure game.
00:03:41
Speaker
That's right. We set up a kind of hunt for the lost city of Atlantis, which if you're going to do a pulp game, you know, go big, right? Yeah, that was good.
00:03:52
Speaker
And so we played, I want to say we played what, about six sessions or so of that game? or seven? I think that's about right. It took us about half those sessions to finally figure out what made this game special.
00:04:03
Speaker
Yeah. And that's what we want to talk about. this's ah This is our game review of the Broken Compass-Outgun system. And it is one that it took us a while to wrap our heads around. You guys, I can tell you the gist of the mechanics for the whole game system right now.
00:04:18
Speaker
It's very simple. Task resolution is going to be whether you're hitting basic, critical, extreme, or impossible tasks.
00:04:29
Speaker
And those are difficulties two, three, four, and five. And what you're testing for is a match of results in a dice pool. So match meaning like if I roll two twos, then that's a basic success. Or if I roll three twos, that's a critical success and so forth. right So I want to see how many these I'm going to match and am I going to get two of a kind or three of a kind or four of a kind.
00:04:52
Speaker
That's the basic idea behind the mechanics. So interestingly, there's no math. You might add or subtract dice from the pool, but generally speaking, that's all you're going to roll. And you're going to kind of pattern match and find out how many successes you got that way.
00:05:06
Speaker
You know, when I hear no math, i always get excited. You know, here's the thing about it, right? The less math you do, the faster the game goes. And a lot of things in this game are really tuned around this idea of like, hey, look, just roll with it, go fast, and keep the adventure and the action going because this is fundamentally ah kind of an action game.
Game Mechanics and Setting
00:05:27
Speaker
ah The core rulebook for Broken Compass, the Broken Compass Adventurer's Journal, I think they call it, It's actually set in like the nineteen ninety s and it kind of gives you vibes like the Uncharted series, ah any of the kind of modern action kind of things.
00:05:43
Speaker
They liked 1999 though because there's less computers, less cell phones. When I was looking at that book, I kept thinking of that, the new Tomb Raider movie. Yeah. The newer one they made. It's kind of this, ah yeah, Uncharted.
00:05:56
Speaker
You kind of mentioned that one. these are These are adventure thrill seekers. That's right. Adventure hunters, you know, treasure hunters. And the core of any of these games, I believe the core of Broken Compass especially is we're searching for a treasure and we need to go find that thing. And one of the great little mechanics around it is that they have a clock and the closer that clock gets to midnight, the closer your enemies are to getting that treasure before you do.
00:06:23
Speaker
So every every adventure it basically like is a quest for a treasure and you'll have rivals that are trying to get it before you. We were talking about the mechanics a minute ago, about two, three, four of a kind on the dice rolls.
00:06:34
Speaker
One of the things that's interesting about that is that you'll only ever use those in three kinds of tests, right? You'll have kind of general skill challenges. You'll have dangers. And if you fail your roll against the danger, you'll take some luck damage. Damage is the wrong term, but basically you'll have about 10 boxes of luck.
00:06:51
Speaker
You'll you'll run low on luck eventually. Or if it's a danger you can fight, that's an enemy. So a group of thugs, a bunch of Nazis, ah you know, whatever it might be, some goons or it might be a big, powerful goon. Right. The game actually doesn't really care what the numbers look like, because when you get into a fight, this took a long time for me to work out. I think it took me like three sessions before we figured this out.
00:07:16
Speaker
Basically, everybody on one side rolls, everybody other side rolls, and that's kind of it. That's kind of how it works in Outgunned. In Broken Compass, it was just all your players roll to hit. If they succeed and take out the enemies, then nothing bad happens. If they don't, then they take some damage.
00:07:32
Speaker
And then they can repeat or not. But it's so fast. You did do round by round, but the rounds were generally pretty swift yeah as you kind of whittled the big groups down.
00:07:45
Speaker
But it was handled in a much more narrative fashion. This one kind of forced your hand. You had to explain away how you just punched out three or four people, right?
00:07:55
Speaker
Right. Yeah, I think what's interesting about this is that it treats combat more like a skill challenge in a lot of other games that are crunchier, right? And you're not used to thinking that way about combat. It's kind of like, did you succeed or did you fail?
00:08:08
Speaker
And then if you didn't, you know, succeed finally, right? Like bad guys had, I think, sort of like three kind of quote unquote hits you would do on them before they drop. And if you didn't get it done in one round, then you're going to take a little damage and choose whether or not you wanted to continue.
00:08:23
Speaker
And yeah, That was just it. There's no like, there's a little bit of mechanics. It's like, are you getting behind cover or not? Maybe you're going to find a, some way to use the environment to your advantage. But as opposed to a lot of other games where there's like miniatures and positioning and complex maps and all those other kinds of things, that stuff is basically absent.
00:08:41
Speaker
All you're really doing is you're trying to get the results you need on the dice rolls and then move forward. Yeah. I think we, like we were saying, we were playing this game. we are we were struggling, folks.
00:08:54
Speaker
Yeah. First couple of sessions. Yeah, why is this not working? How do we approach this game? And we kind of had a bit of a eureka moment as we were playing. We just decided at one point, this isn't a game. We're we're characters in a movie.
00:09:09
Speaker
That's right. And we need to be playing this like like a movie. What makes best for the scene? what What's the best choice for the scene? it should go with that. And once we kind of had that that moment in our head that that's how this game is to be played,
00:09:23
Speaker
It was a lot of fun. Yeah, I think that's a really good observation. This is a game that really rewards that kind of cinematic imagination. And I think that you'll have a great time with it.
00:09:35
Speaker
You out there listeners, if you kind of approach this like, look, the mechanics are there to help you tell a story more than they're there to. give you a complex set of levers that you can adjudicate round by round to see if you win or lose.
00:09:49
Speaker
In fact, in Broken Compass, there's a lot of different cutouts and moments and sidebars where they're saying things like, look, failing is not bad. Failing is where you get into more danger and it's more thrilling.
00:10:00
Speaker
And that's a virtue, not a flaw. Yeah, and I think there's there's a lot of freedom in this game, folks. It's not like a real round-to-round kind of combat where you get into this initiative, which is a time. This is all done by storytelling.
00:10:15
Speaker
So you have a lot of creativity.
Embracing Failure and Narrative Freedom
00:10:18
Speaker
So if you want to take a moment as part of your action to tell a little bit of a story, maybe have a little bit more dialogue, that's all part of the game.
00:10:27
Speaker
That's all well and good. So one of the things that I think actually rewards that a bit or that kind of heightens that is this idea of risking dice rolls. Ben, tell us how that risk reward worked.
00:10:40
Speaker
Yeah. So let's say you rolled two of a kind, you rolled a basic success and your dice pool is like six dice, right? So maybe there's four dice that didn't match up. So they have a risk mechanic where you could, if you'd scored at least one success, you could re-roll the unmatched dice.
00:10:55
Speaker
And if you got any further successes, then great. You have now added to your success. But if you didn't get it, then you would lose that. What was interesting was that they also had this kind of mechanic called expertise in the outgunned edition. They call them feats.
00:11:11
Speaker
But essentially, the idea is that if you're somebody who's good at this, like let's say if you're good at using rifles as your expertise, let's say, or you're good at driving cars, then... that was something where when you made that risky role to try to get more successes, you wouldn't risk losing your prior success.
00:11:27
Speaker
But if you didn't have that, then you very well might find that if you didn't match any new dice, didn't get any new successes, you lost the success you had. So if you did get that, let's say if you get that third success, you get a little bit more success, but you don't have everything you need. You could also do an all or nothing. So this was kind of your, your second option after you'd tried the risk.
00:11:50
Speaker
was it Would this be like your Hail Mary kind of? Yeah, this was this was like any unmatched dice that you still didn't have matched. And you if you needed more success, you could try doing that. But if you failed, if you didn't get any new successes, you'd lose all the successes you had at that point.
00:12:04
Speaker
So... That was a ah fun, risky mechanic. All of these are ways of of heightening the suspense around a given dice roll. But because you're not doing math, you're just doing pattern matching, it all goes pretty quickly. And you can just do it without doing a lot of complex problem solving to see what the result was.
00:12:22
Speaker
Yeah, and you had a series of both stats like you would in where you'd have like you know strength, you know wisdom, all that.
00:12:33
Speaker
They broke theirs down into kind a more adventuristic kind of idea. So you had action, guts, knowledge, society, wild and crime. These were like your core you know things that made up your being.
00:12:49
Speaker
And then with any each one of those, had some subcategories. For instance, action would have something like, you know, stunt work. That could be part of it. So you would kind of combine these things a little bit to make skill checks, which made for a real fluid experience at the game table when you're just wanting to, as a GM, you want to make a role for something. you want the players to make a role for something.
00:13:12
Speaker
You could say, you know, just give me this this check here. And you might even be able to mix and match these a little bit to get the kind of, you know, fine tune that you want. Well, and also they had this thing, where this is a kind of a neat mechanic. They had this thing they call feelings, right? And so if you did especially well or especially poorly um in one of those roles, then you might have a ah certain kind of feeling that would then influence subsequent roles of that kind. So for example, I'm going try to roll a society charm role and schmooze my way around a party.
00:13:42
Speaker
If you roll super poorly on that, um Or if you've done that in such a way that the the you failed in some way, like the GM might actually say, like, you know, you've incurred a negative penalty. You now have a feeling and this feeling is embarrassed because it's a society role.
00:13:58
Speaker
And that means you're going to get a negative dice to your pool when you try further society roles. Or if it was say a guts roll and you'd failed that, especially you might be shocked.
00:14:10
Speaker
Or if you were doing especially well, maybe you had a really inspiring moment, right? There's a positive side to that too. You could feel confident instead of embarrassed with a society roll, or you could feel daring instead of shocked with a guts roll.
00:14:24
Speaker
And these would give you bonuses or penalties more or less dice in the pool when you roll that in the future. And again, at first we were, the first few games, we were looking at these stats thinking, well, some of these are obviously more important to the game than others.
00:14:38
Speaker
That was our initial thought. But once we kind of keyed into the fact that we're not, we're scenes in a movie, we're playing scenes, then we were like, okay, these stats have weight and importance of their own, just like they would in ah if you're making um a film. Right.
00:14:57
Speaker
Like the character isn't just Indiana Jones doesn't just punch his way out every problem. Yeah. Sometimes you have charm his way through. Exactly. He has to do charm. Sometimes he has to be sneaky.
00:15:08
Speaker
There's all these different things he has to do to make that film exciting. And that's what we're kind of going for with this game. You know what I love about this though? yeah It reminds me of that bit from ah Indiana Jones and Last Crusade where he's talking about Marcus.
00:15:23
Speaker
you know He's got a two-day head start, which is more than he needs. He's got friends in every market. He knows 10 languages. You're never going to catch up with him, right? And of course, the next thing we flashed to is Marcus being utterly kind of hapless in some market in Cairo.
00:15:37
Speaker
Right. And it's that's sort of a good observation about like, yeah, no, you're going to need everything, right? You're going to need your your're social roles. You're going to need your roles that get you through foreign places.
00:15:47
Speaker
So lot of really interesting stuff here. And knowing that you're playing a scene in a film in the case gave us a lot more freedom to be a little bit like, o okay with failure.
00:15:58
Speaker
Yeah. In most games, we were so fixated on like, we got to succeed with this. Part of the fun in a film was when a character fails. So we were okay with that because it still served the scene. It was still fun.
00:16:10
Speaker
Yeah. One of the things we did in this game, which I see very, very rarely in most other RPGs is you guys got captured. we if We were okay with it because it still was like, we got a chance to kind of have moments with the the villain and have some conversations.
00:16:26
Speaker
You have that fateful dinner across the table from the villain. you You'd be looking for a moment to turn the tables on them when you're working your way through the sunken city of Atlantis, that kind of stuff.
00:16:36
Speaker
And I think we would have been fighting that tooth and nail if you had done that maybe the first couple sessions. But once we kind of figured out what type of game we wanted this to be, it made that whole being captured kind of
Simplicity and Luck in Gameplay
00:16:51
Speaker
fun, actually. We had a good time with it.
00:16:53
Speaker
This is really a game that can accommodate virtually anything because frankly, you don't need to stat up a lot of stuff. It's just here are the bad guys. Are they basic, critical, extreme, and so on.
00:17:04
Speaker
And for players, one enjoyable thing that I liked, it which I referenced in our Traveler review, is that everything you need is on your character sheet ah from a player standpoint.
00:17:16
Speaker
You don't need to look into the book for anything. It's all in your character sheet. And that made it a lot more enjoyable to be in your character and engage with the people at the table.
00:17:27
Speaker
Yeah. I want to pick out one of the mechanics that I especially thought was fun, which was the luck coin. So you remember earlier we were talking about how if you fail in rolls to beat a danger or an enemy, then you would lose some luck.
00:17:41
Speaker
You know, what's interesting about this game is that it's your luck that saves you. It's not hit points. You don't kind of quote unquote take damage and the luck that you lose isn't luck damage. It's not like I'm bleeding or this or that. It's it's that your luck is running out as you.
00:17:55
Speaker
fail to overcome these enemies, right? The robots may have blasted the thing you were just behind, or you escaped from that car that was going to go over the cliff by the skin your teeth, right? There's there's all these where you're going to lose luck. But once you run out of luck, then you face certain death. Because after all, you're out of luck.
00:18:12
Speaker
And so now the question is, are you going to die from it? And so they have a luck coin. Everybody gets a luck coin. It's a little bit like inspiration in some other games Benny's if you play Savage Worlds, but think of it as being a little bit more rare and When you spend it, there's a fun thing that happens is that you then flip the coin and let's say you call heads.
00:18:33
Speaker
If it comes up heads, you get to keep it. And so you don't have any of your 10 points of luck back, but you've survived certain death. If you continue to face dangers and things that would deteriorate your luck, then you're going to have to keep flipping that coin. And one of these days, your your luck's going to run out finally. But I love that there's that little kind of random mechanic at the end ah that gives you that.
00:18:57
Speaker
Is it unlike a death save? Not really, but flipping a coin to see if your life gets saved and if your luck has finally run out, that seems very pulpy, high adventure fun.
Modern Action with 'Outgunned'
00:19:07
Speaker
So Ben, we're here talking about Broken Compass, which, you know, as you mentioned, it's they're no longer making this book anymore.
00:19:13
Speaker
You can probably find it various places, but not going to be too long before you're to just, it's going be just something people are just not going to remember. And it's most likely going to be a book that's hard to find.
00:19:26
Speaker
So what's this new product? You actually picked it up. I have not actually seen it. I've just seen the covers, which I think look beautiful. What is this new game outgunned? So Outgunned is more like modern action.
00:19:40
Speaker
And I think the idea is that it's less focused on the treasure hunt. So that concept earlier of the clock doesn't sort of show up in this one. They've done a little bit to change and tweak character creation. So instead of expertise, which in Broken Compass was really, you could write in kind of whatever you wanted to. It was just more like a keyword that you'd come up with.
00:20:00
Speaker
Here they have feats, which are a little bit more defined and they're a little bit more uh defined by your character type when you were playing broken compass you'd choose what they call tags and so a tag might be daredevil or soldier or pilot or something like that and then that would come with a certain package of skills and things here when you get a role that role is one role you only get one not two tags and that role basically defines all of those skills and other things, and it defines your equipment, and it defines um what feats you have access to.
00:20:35
Speaker
Feats are the new name for expertise that let you make those risk-free roles that we talked about earlier. So there's a lot of stuff that's a little bit more defined in Outgunned, and I think the system benefits from that.
00:20:48
Speaker
The other thing that's interesting is that They do give you a little bit more resources to kind of play with and they they separate out some of the stuff you could do with a luck coin. They have sort of this spotlight mechanic, which I'm still reading about.
00:21:00
Speaker
But there's a lot of things that are new and there's a lot of things that are kind of better defined so that you can play specific kinds of games. And in Outgunned, you have, frankly, a couple different versions of it. One is much more like modern action games like Die Hard, Mission Impossible, that kind of stuff.
00:21:16
Speaker
And so those are the kind of games you're going to play here. Then they have kind of a ah an adventure 1930s version, which is very much that kind of pulp game that we've talked about before. What's interesting is on the cover of Outgunned, it says cinematic action role-playing game, which is kind of what took us three sessions of Broken Compass to figure out what this game was.
00:21:38
Speaker
It was a cinematic action role-playing game. Yeah, I'd say if you're at all interested in this kind of stuff, if you want a fast play action game that is, frankly, I picked it up in one day at Gen Con and that evening ran a four hour game that we kind of improvised and worked our way through. It's super easy to prep. It's super easy to play.
00:21:58
Speaker
And it's a lot of fun, especially if you have a very creative set of players. Yeah. I would recommend Yeah, I would highly recommend too. it's ah It's a fun experience. And I like actually look forward to playing Outgun now that we've had bit of a taste with Broken Compass.
Gen Con Experiences
00:22:16
Speaker
So folks, we don't have a tune-up today, but I have some questions for Ben. Uh-oh, here we go. Ben, you were at Gen Con. I was. I want to hear about it. Like what, let me just, let's do a Gen Con breakdown folks.
00:22:31
Speaker
Okay. Yeah. The Gen Con breakdown. That's the sounds of the stuff. Hey, maybe I can get that back in post.
00:22:42
Speaker
Ben, tell us about Con. What were your, what was your highlights? And then I'll get to lowlights later. Oh, no. Yeah. um Well, the highlights. ah First of all, I did meet the Broken Compass outgunned guys actually at the booth where they were doing this.
00:22:57
Speaker
Oh, yeah. That was really neat. I got a chance to say, hey, thanks for giving us a great game. I said the art in here was amazing. And the guy turned to his girlfriend. and He goes, oh, yeah, that's hers. She does all the art. And I'm like, oh, my God, that's that's a lot of art. And it's really good.
00:23:11
Speaker
Way to go. Nicely done. Yeah. So I was very happy to meet them. thought they did a great job. ah Other things that were highlights. Highlights are always when you find things that you couldn't otherwise get at your local game store.
00:23:25
Speaker
ah So out of print books. I picked up the Savage Worlds Adventure deck, which I think has some really great little... rando things to throw into ah your games. um I picked up some battle tech miniatures for standard unarmored, unempowered infantry to get squished. Always seem to come back with a few more battle tech, don't you? A few more battle tech things. That's right.
00:23:48
Speaker
Using mostly for alpha strike these days, but yeah, that's a, don't know. I feel like I'm starting to hit my limit though, in terms of how much stuff I've got, because I'm, I'm i'm going to be honest. I don't play it as much as, as I probably would justify having that much stuff.
00:24:02
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, it's tough. um But the books are nice. that You know, that coming back with those books is fantastic. I'll give you a little tease, though. um They introduced a new thing this year on Battletech. They're called Battletech Gothic. And it's got little shades of like...
00:24:20
Speaker
It feels like they're kind of poaching a little bit of the Warhammer 40k crowd with this one. i think they've got some some kaiju in there. I'm not really sure. Some genetic engineering. So they really kind of said like, hey, what if we kind of took the usual battle tech lore and we kind of did a little side trip into a sort of an alternate universe version of it that was a little bit different and darker in some ways.
00:24:39
Speaker
yeah And so I saw one of the guys there from Catalyst and I said, you know, how's that selling? Is it going well? Do people like it? And ah he's like, yeah, he says, you know, we like kind of doing these little side trips, you know, the whole main kind of Battletech universe is pretty well explored. And so he thought it was neat to do that.
00:24:55
Speaker
And then I said, well, so are you going to do more of this kind of thing where you take these interesting sites? He goes, yeah, you know, he says, I think next year we're going to probably do like ah like a retro Adam punk kind of Ray gun themed version of battle tech.
00:25:07
Speaker
And I was like, I would buy the hell out of that. That sounds amazing. It does sound pretty cool. They really do always, it always felt like they were occupying the same space as Warhammer and Warhammer just takes up all the oxygen in the room. You know what I mean? Like it's tough playing in star Wars and star Trek. So, you know, you know, like when you're in the same sandbox as these big juggernauts,
00:25:31
Speaker
yeah It's tough to compete, but hey, they've done a good job over the years keeping up with their own stuff. I think they're kind of at their most popular ever. ah So I think that's a... ah They're having a good moment right now. I'll just say that. yeah um They're selling well, and I think they've got great stuff.
00:25:48
Speaker
They've got great lore. And I think some of the things that are attracting a lot of Warhammer players to... Games Workshop players, I should say broadly, to Battletech is that it's kind of cheaper to get into and easier to play.
00:26:00
Speaker
There's a lot of Warhammer that's focused around tournament play. And I think Battletech's a little bit more relaxed in the community. And I think that is welcoming to people. So that's good. Other role-playing games, role-playing books, lots of role-playing accessories, all kinds of stuff out there. And of course, as you walk through the vendor floor and you see all that stuff, you're just like, wow, this looks really neat. And I will probably never use it.
00:26:22
Speaker
Well, we've talked about the highlights. There were there were some lowlights though, weren't there, Ben? Oh my gosh. I got sick on Friday night and basically canceled my Sunday flight home and came home Saturday instead and was sick for a week and it was awful.
00:26:37
Speaker
But that's the price you pay, man. It's a 70,000 person super spreader event they got going on in there in Indianapolis. so So you got there Thursday, right? Yeah. Well, Wednesday, and then the whole thing starts Thursday.
00:26:49
Speaker
Played some fun games, played a game of... D&D fourth edition, which I hadn't played for a long time. would you Why would you do that? You know, there was somebody else in our party who wanted to play that. And so was like, all right, ah sure. Let's see what that's out. Nope. This is exactly what i remember.
00:27:03
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. um Also played a game of champions, which I thought was really well done. Yeah. yeah ah Listen, when it's done right by people that know how they're doing it and they've got some great set pieces, I should show you some of the pictures. This guy had is his end piece, this kind of great bridge ah where bad guys were wasting civilians and cars and all this stuff. And there were miniatures for the whole thing. And it was great.
00:27:28
Speaker
We had people getting knocked off the bridge, but then ah second later, because that's how fast our superheroes are moving. Somebody will fly down and swoop them up and save the civilians who are still in the act of falling toward the water.
00:27:42
Speaker
That sounds like a lot more fun than fourth edition D&D. I'll tell you that. I'll say it this way. I think it was. But the fourth edition guys knew their stuff. So it's kind of like, do you like fourth edition D&D or not, really? No.
00:27:55
Speaker
Yeah. yeah I could do a whole podcast of my dislike of fourth edition. But you know what? The thing is, there's other editions to enjoy. Last thing I'll say is I also picked up a copy of Daggerheart. And so I'm starting to read through that.
00:28:07
Speaker
And that looks interesting. That's our new game from the Critical Role guys. And looks interesting. They got a lot of neat concepts and a very narrative focused, but not in entirely narrative focused game. A lot of times when you say narrative focused, people think that's very, very rules light. Yeah. I think there's enough here to keep...
00:28:23
Speaker
crunchy players satisfied but i honestly have i don't know anything about it i just saw the cover thought the art design looked fantastic yeah river did that cover did a great job it just looks really inviting but beyond that i don't know anything about it i'd never really watched critical roles so i'm kind of in the dark critical roles always you use dnd rules so yeah as yet they started they started with pathfinder right ah Yeah, like like very, very early on. But like as soon as they started, that was the home group did Pathfinder. And then as soon as they started playing on ah streamed service, they started playing with D&D.
00:28:59
Speaker
Well, there you go. Well, folks, we had a good time today.
Conclusion and Tune-Up Sign Off
00:29:04
Speaker
We did. Lots happening in this space. um Stay tuned. And we'll be back in a couple more weeks with another episode of Tabletop Tune Up.
00:29:12
Speaker
I think it's episode 50, Ben. We've got a milestone coming. That's right. that a milestone? All right. Well, folks, new surprises have a great week. Have a great two weeks. And we'll see a couple.
00:29:23
Speaker
That's right. And by the way, until then, keep those dice rolling. Well, get your tune up.
00:29:32
Speaker
It's time for your tune up.
00:29:38
Speaker
Your game needs a tune up.
00:30:06
Speaker
Tune up, tune up Tune tune up Tune up, tune up
00:30:44
Speaker
Step, get your tune-up. It's time your tune-up. Your game needs a tune-up.