rpg – Blog of Heroes

Caro Asercion, 1-5+ players, 2-3 hours, $7.77

⚫⚫⚫⚫⚪ — Ease of Play
⚫⚫⚫⚪⚪ – Replayability
⚫⚫⚫⚫⚪ – Fun

Dwindle is a self-contained indie RPG designed to let you run an “occult cyberpunk” scenario in the dying tech metropolis of Vector City.

VECTOR CITY used to gleam, its wireframe skylines shimmering against a perpetual pixel sunset. But the Vector’s heyday is long gone, and you — the ECHOES of this former metroscape — are left tending to the wreckage.

You’re no more special than any of the other stragglers stubborn enough to stick around; people here live hardscrabble lives full of risk and danger, and the difference between success and obliteration is as fickle as static in the wind. But without somebody to keep things running smoothly, it’s only a matter of time before the ghosts and the glitches and the corporate bastards eat away at every last bit of data and render this husk of a city entirely unrecognizable.

You won’t let it disappear without a fight.

Written by Caro Asercion, the game does a quite decent job of letting you generate characters (it can be played GMless if you like) and develop a scenario. Characters and the city are seeded (randomly, if you wish) by tables with interesting people, gadgets, goals, and problems to guide game play. There’s enough there I suspect for a number of replays before things might to seem repetitive.

One of the tables to help you build your character. Using an item from your pocket adds a die to your roll.

Dwindle’s most unique mechanic is its use of a grid to place seven dice into. The sum of dice for each row and column give you dice to roll for different actions/attributes (with bonus dice for reputation or use of a trinket in your pocket) — the highest die rolled provides a range of success or failure for the group to interpret.

The digital grid. I can see that one row means I have a Hack (modify tech) of 1 die, and the other column means I have a Heed (awareness) of 2 dice.

The trick is, those dice you rolled get removed from your grid, meaning, as the game name implies, your abilities and options dwindle over time, until you reach a situation where the highest die you roll (or, if you are at 0 dice available, the lower of two dice) scores a 1, at which point you can replenish the grid in whatever way you like.

It sounds a little complex, but it’s mechanically simple, esp. if you use the digital interface by Tim Busuttil. The main thing is figuring out when best to shoot big dice, realizing you’ll be seriously weakened until you can figure out how to replenish.

The Good

Intriguing setting, neatly set up for a variety of adventures.
Clean and pretty rule set, plus a text-only version if that’s how you roll.
Interesting attribute / rolling grid (with digital tool).
Great for a one-off / fill-in session.
Can be run without a GM.
Can be played tabletop or virtually (if you trust your players’ rolling).

The Not-As-Good

Limited replays without brainstorming some new elements for the tables.
Characters may feel a little generic, as dice can replenished in whatever arrangement you wish.
Most die results are mixtures of success and failure, making it difficult to feel an unalloyed success.
Attribute tags sometimes drive, rather than guide, the action (“I have dice left in this, so that’s what I should do”).
In the session we played, we dwindled pretty quickly, and didn’t have a lot of luck replenishing.

It’s a fine one-night stand-in when a key player or the GM can’t make it for the regular session. I’m glad we played it, and I’d enjoy playing (or even GMing) it again.

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Superrobotbear, 2-6 players, 2 hours, $10
I ran this as a one-night fill-in when my normal D&D campaign couldn’t run because of absent players. We’ve been playing in Roll20 as a Virtual Tabletop, so I wanted something that would use that. I also wanted something I was pretty sure would fit into one evening; picking a “short” D&D crawl was a recipe for it spilling into multiple weeks.

I ended up with One Last Fight, by Ethan Hudgins, released back in late 2019. Ethan describes the game as “A GM-less Card-Prompt RPG for 2 to 6 players,” and that’s pretty accurate. I purchased and ran this through Roll20, which seems like a much superior choice to buying PDFs and printing up your own copy of the game.

I say “I ran this,” but that’s not quite right. OLF is technically GM-less (I was GM as far as Roll20 was concerned, which was helpful with some card mechanics, and I knew the rules better than the players, but I tried to keep a distance regarding creatively guiding the game).

OLF’s premise is that a party of 2-6 is ending a long campaign/quest against their nemesis: slowly approaching where the nemesis is located, fighting their way in, then engaging in final battle. All of this is guided by a structured card deck built from separate decks for each phase of the approach. Twenty-five cards are dealt, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but the games generally seem to take a couple of hours.

There are really two games in OLF. One is a structure for conflict resolution. Character cards have simple combat attributes, bolstered by items/treasure acquired. Those attributes represent the number of dice to be rolled vs the challenges on the Adventure Cards. The Adventure Cards are flipped from the deck, and may force a solo challenge (which can be passed on to another player) or a group challenge (faced by each individually). These could be a bad guy, a group of opponents, a trap, a challenging situation, etc.

One Last Fight - character card — Character card with questions, special powers, and conflict attributes. This character has one each of the Key, Crown, and (through a treasure item) Magic attributes.

So if the conflict has Swords and Magic as vulnerabilities, and I have two Swords and one Magic, that gives me three dice, plus the free one I get, so I am rolling 4d6. If the conflict shows “4 4” as the difficulty, then on the individual dice I’m rolling (sums make no difference), I have to have two dice that have 4, 5, or 6 on them.

While many conflicts have the stake of losing life vs gaining treasure, quite a number have a different win/lose effect, sometimes being a matter of “this helps the party a lot” vs “this helps the party a little.”

Conflicts get hairier as the adventure progresses, until you finally get to the nemesis, the titular Last Battle, where it is kill or be killed.

Additional variation in play — beyond the randomizing of the built deck — come from the characters chosen: a variety of archetypes with both different strengths (conflict attributes) and various ways they can break the rules, from changing die rolls to providing assistance to other players.

But that brings us to the second system present in OLF, because, beyond a solid conflict mechanic, OLF is first and foremost about storytelling.

A game can be set (as a collaborative decision) in any setting — high or low fantasy, science fiction, the Old West, spies, comic books, named franchises or generic pastiches. The cards and actions are set as archetypes, without any particular setting in mind — a character’s description as being able to tell the future could be magic, it could be psionics, it could be the Force, or it could be a powerful computer. This gets determined by the group defining the setting, and by every card — nemesis, characters, gear, and adventure cards — having a series of questions that describe the present or fill in the past.

One Last Fight - nemesis cards — Some of the Nemesis cards. Collaboratively answering the questions help create the game setting.

Those questions may be answered by individuals drawing the cards, or by group efforts. And while the story built by those questions and answers don’t actually affect the mechanics, they can influence how the individuals play, and, when all is said and done, the create the story that players will remember long after they recall a given die roll.

It’s those questions and answers in the end that make OLF special, from “What does this statue ask of you” to “For whom in the group would you take an arrow? Why?” to “How did you allow this enemy to escape before?” to “What does the nemesis mutter as they cling to life?” You could play without that storytelling, but ultimately they are what, to me, makes the game what it is.

And even when you reach the end, and the Nemesis is defeated (one hopes), there are final questions — the inevitable (and often most dramatic) where does you character go from here? (Or, if your character died — quite possible — how are they remembered?)

The Good

Well done storytelling prompts.
Good conflict resolution mechanic.
Pretty easy rules.

The Bad

Storytelling and conflict resolution don’t really link together.
Roll20’s card deck mechanics can be irksome.
No physical printed version available; printing PDFs would be painful.
Very indie, so not a lot of info out there about it (by no means the game’s fault).

Overall, One Last Fight is a flexible and entertaining and imagination-stretching game, perfect for fill-in sessions or killing a couple of hours. The rules setup (at least in Roll20) was a bit sketchy and disorganized, but the gaps are easily filled in; the game’s rules are picked up pretty quickly in play. It’s available on Roll20 for $10, or on the author page for the PDF version (same price).

Vigorously recommended.

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Tag: rpg

Game Review: “Dwindle”

Game Review: “One Last Fight”