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Law's Out - the Auction-Based Cowboy Adventure Game
by Michael I. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 08/25/2023 12:56:24

I was writing an RPG very much like this one but then discovered this one already existed! Well worth the $2.50 and reads like a fun storytelling game with bidding as the main mechanic



Rating:
[4 of 5 Stars!]
Law's Out - the Auction-Based Cowboy Adventure Game
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Panic at the Dojo
by Solomon K. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 03/31/2023 00:00:57

The good: It's a really great fight engine with a lot of dynamism and out-of-turn interaction. My group is going through a 5 fight adventure (just finished fight 4) that's been a ton of fun- an elemental-themed Frantic hero playing a variety of roles, a Fused Wardancer/Punk hero who's been using Forbidden Power Iron to hit like a truck, and a Fused Demon/Trickster who's been unreasonably disruptive with well-timed Challenges. Foes feel really good to fight- they have powerful-but-not-insurmountable abilities that we can counter with the right tools- and our GM has had a blast putting together cool builds for us to fight (personal favorite foe: a Overwhelming One-Two Trickster who played attack and defense at the same time)

Out of combat, we've basically been doing freeform RP. No issues there- the system gave us some adjectives to invoke in response to challenges and got out of our way. Because it's so modularized, it's even possible to swap out with another system entirely- I've had some thoughts about strapping PaTD to Blades in the Dark.

We found a heavily automated Google Sheets character sheet which helped a lot with organizing our styles and keeping track of foes.

The bad: It could have used another pass of editing. Questions came up regarding 'on damage/on hit' triggers interacting with Iron tokens and Armor (Is 0 damage still 'dealing damage'? One-Two form suggests yes, but Knockdown Style suggests no), and it took us multiple sessions before noticing page 280's limit on Iron tokens spent per hit (which is contradicted by Armored Style). These were subtly impactful issues that led to our GM needing to fielding Power foes in order to break through our defenses.

However, on the whole this is a really fun system! Foes are tricky but not unfair, and players have an incredible amount of versatility in battle that other systems struggle to match. Every fight has been incredibly distinctive- I'll remember the fight where our foes just kept tossing us into the big pit in the center, the one where the Crying Control foe destroyed the entire arena, and even the Some Guy gang (named stuff like Some Jerk, Some Punk, etc.), but the party has still had the tools to come out on top.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Panic at the Dojo
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Inverse World - A Dungeon World Supplement
by Mike I. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 05/10/2022 14:38:07

Based on read only: A brilliant take on Dungeon World (DW) that allows for Stardust (Neil Gaiman) like stories, Avatar: the last Airbenders stories, and various other interesting options. This is one of my favorite supplements for DW



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Inverse World - A Dungeon World Supplement
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Fellowship 2nd Edition - A Tabletop Adventure Game
by Mike I. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 05/10/2022 14:35:56

Based on a read-through only I had rated this 5 stars. Conceptually, it is brilliant! It looks easy enough to run and and play, thematic, and the articulation of how far narrative could you push a game like Dungeon World before you break it. Unfortunately, in play, I have found this game is pushing narrative moves so hard, it does break.

Both attempts I made to run or play lead to confusion and frustration immediately following the first move of particular playbooks. Unlike the best PbtA games where if you follow the genre conventions, you will find a move to use, Fellowship's move triggers are really awkward. The feedback loop can circle around over and over until you feel like you are playing a game of narrative Chess where the MC and the PC player sometimes stalemate by doing the same actions and getting the same results over and over. It made me wonder, does this game really follow the tenants of "failing forward" or not? I have asked other PbtA fans online about their experiences and everyone of them also mentioned that while they wanted to LOVE this game, it just lead to a similar experience to what I had. As my experience seemed to be fairly universal, I have updated my rating to fit what I have experienced.



Rating:
[2 of 5 Stars!]
Fellowship 2nd Edition - A Tabletop Adventure Game
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Fellowship Book 2 - Inverse Fellowship
by Michael I. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 05/05/2022 14:05:13

I'd highly recommend the Inverse World book for Dungeon World for the same setting and a superior game. the Fellowship PbtA moves all feel so forced. Dungeon World feels more trad but also more natural.



Rating:
[3 of 5 Stars!]
Fellowship Book 2 - Inverse Fellowship
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Fellowship Book 2 - Inverse Fellowship
by Kundan K. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 02/22/2022 13:48:08

Great alternative to D&D when trying to get into powered by the apocalyse games.

Criminally unrrated, play this now.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
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Fellowship 2nd Edition - A Tabletop Adventure Game
by Isaac M. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 11/12/2021 23:33:11

I love everything about this game. The art is a big part of that, to be clear, but as my introduction to the PbtA genre of systems, it was really eye-opening. I love the dedication to including the expected fantasy races, and also doing so in such an open-ended and customizable fashion.

The structure of play is grand, too. The focus on the party as a unit, and why it has to be, and helping people along the way, and community being strength rather than individual power being the be-all end-all... So much in modern fantasy fiction and gaming pulls from the aesthetics of Tolkein, but this is the first game I read that cared to emulate the heart of the LotR story: a mismatched, diverse, caring, and dedicated crew setting out to face an apocalyptic force with the backing of eveyrone they help along the way.

As a note: the on-the-spot imagination required to play this is daunting, and not common in mainstream TTRPGs as an ask of the players, so it's worth knowing that going in.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Fellowship 2nd Edition - A Tabletop Adventure Game
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Inverse World - A Dungeon World Supplement
by Jonathan T. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 09/19/2021 12:23:25

A world that makes your mind sparkle with ideas, even after years or DM-ing and working in the "use your brain to imagine thing" field for a good time.

A very solid world to put players one and see what happens.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Inverse World - A Dungeon World Supplement
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Panic at the Dojo
by Isaac A. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 09/08/2021 14:37:57

the game is overall a good one and has a good character creation system, but they forgot to include any type of character sheet in the book. Personally I feel that this was a mistake even with the simplistic game rules, as a sheet is just good for organizing character's statistic in a way that looks good and helps keep the feel of the game going. Speaking of the book, maybe I had some sort of printer error but the front dozen or two pages were some I Spy game for children ages 2-5, half printed on each page. Honestly this feels closer to a wargame than an rpg, as there is no advancement that I can see to make a hero more powerful and very little in the way of mechanics for out of combat stuff, with the somewhat weak justification of "If you have a skill that covers it you succeed, if you do not you just comically fail automatically." . The combat system is a very solid foundation but I feel that it is just that, a foundation, and to maybe come back and try the game again when it has actually built on it to make a proper rpg. As it is now I would reccomend Panic at the Dojo be kept an eye on unless you really need a kung fu fix, but not purchased until maybe some sourcebooks come out that make it a bit more playable as a campaign game rather than a single night of fun. The game has potential but it feels like it was so hasty about showing off this combat system that it neglected everything else.



Rating:
[3 of 5 Stars!]
Panic at the Dojo
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Fellowship 2nd Edition - A Tabletop Adventure Game
by Wouter E. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 07/01/2021 11:28:24

A great game all around. Dragged down in some places by poor choices in book layout. Most of all. I would say the game has an issue with a total lack of an extended play example to show how some of the more esoteric moves are supposed to be handled.

Most of all. This is signified by the move Paying a price. It's a very important move. Used constantly troughout the book. But because it only has a short and rather unclear description of what it does. I have found myself using it completely the wrong way for several session. Normally. I would look for a play example as a guideline for how the game is supposed to go. But that was lacking here. What makes this all the more exasperating is that there are several much simpler moves that do have attached play examples.

If these issues were in some way adressed. I would happily bump up my rating to a 5/5

Edit: All 4 books are out now and I can confidently say this is my favourite system of all time.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Fellowship 2nd Edition - A Tabletop Adventure Game
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Last Shooting
by Laura F. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 12/23/2020 20:57:46

The system of Last Shooting is elegant and brutal, and expertly entices the players to make cool, meaningful things, and then to have them destroyed in a magnificent, wrenching explosion. The pilot creation rulkes especially thread the needleof providing good guidance and prompting without being limiting. The qustions to answer befpre each scene are wonderful for centering the emotional stakes of the conflict. I enjoyed this tremendously and would recommend it to anyone whje loves mechs or emotional srama. I think it's really a game that rewards a willingness to let your character suffer meaningful loss, and open up to emotonal vulnerability. I've never played anything that distills the emotional drama of a duel as well as Last Shooting does. Get it, it rules.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Last Shooting
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Fellowship 2nd Edition - A Tabletop Adventure Game
by Meg Z. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 06/09/2020 10:10:09

I really, really want to like Fellowship. I love the pitch a whole lot: it's a high fantasy game for any kind of fantasy! Players have ultimate control over the world! The GM also has a character so they can get the serotonin hit of filling out a character sheet too! But I've played Fellowship a lot now. I've been in three games with false starts (one of them I GM'd) and one game that got past the first session that got to the end of gaining Fellowship with a community, and most of the time I enjoyed with those games, I wasn't engaging with its systems at all.

First of all: this is a game that, in all the times I've played it, is a resource management dungeon-crawling game, first and foremost. It has better capabilities for roleplaying and worldbuilding than a game like Dungeons & Dragons, but it still leaves a lot to be desired on that front. My main group is extremely into inter-character melodrama, and if there are any lulls in the action we will spend hours talking to each other in-character. Not a lot of systems explicitly support this, but Fellowship explicitly discourages this with its "rest" systems; taking any time to do scenes not directly related to dungeon-crawling makes the next encounters more difficult for really no reason. I wouldn't mind this so much if I was playing a very crunchy numbers game, but when I want to tell a character-driven story, Fellowship is more or less incapable of delivering an experience I want.

Another thing related to the game's inflexibility: the playbooks and worldbuilding associated with them. Fellowship's main selling point is that you get to decide what your fantasy culture looks like, with a lot of flexibility. In play, however, I found this flexibility was a lot less open than I would have liked. If you're playing the Elf, you're more or less locked into playing a holier-than-thou character who can commune with nature. If you have a different idea for an elf, you're going to be fighting the system a lot to put together the moves for your vision. Once, I tried to use the Orc playbook to make a character whose people were known for their ingenuity, even when that, in the past, meant giving up their humanity and bonding with parasitic fungus; after taking just my two starting moves, however, I ran out of playbook moves that fit my vision.

This is already getting long and I haven't touched on my frustrations with the moment-to-moment gameplay, or the frustrations the GMs of my groups have run into. Let me touch on the former (where it doesn't relate to the latter) briefly: advantage was not adequately explained in the original edition, and putting it entirely in an appendix for the revised edition is less than ideal; I already mentioned before that decompressing after long action sequences is basically impossible. The latter is a huge problem that bleeds over into the moment-to-moment gameplay, and most of it boils down to two things.

First, giving the GM a playbook makes them rather precious over their Overlord and General characters and fosters a hostile relationship between the players and the GM. In my experience, since the GM knows their villains are finite, they scramble to find reasons why the PCs can't kill them right now, and often resort to underhanded tactics. All the GMs I've played with have said they felt incentivized to give threats secret stats that negated certain attacks, creating an atmosphere where players were too nervous about wasting any moves in case they activated the GM's trap cards. Second, though the second edition is a marginal improvement, there's a notable dearth of information on how to be a good Overlord. The newer GMs struggled to find a footing or guidance in the GM's sections at all, and more veteran GMs were frustrated by lack of guidance for creating tailor-made threats/setpieces for whatever unique world the players created.

If you're really desperate to play a PBTA version of D&D, I recommend Fellowship over Dungeon World as it's slightly more flexible. But, honestly, I'd give both a pass. It's a shame and I miss playing high-fantasy adventure games at my table, but Fellowship doesn't scratch the itch for me at all.



Rating:
[2 of 5 Stars!]
Fellowship 2nd Edition - A Tabletop Adventure Game
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The Clock Mage - A Dungeon World Playbook
by Umberto M. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 04/01/2020 16:55:52

The biggest problem with this playbook is the "Death Move: Borrowed Time" move: It has the major flaw of focusing the whole fiction on that single character and a huge amount of play time. Also allowing you to do whatever you want without consequences has the huge defect of ending any problem in the game world, in addition to leaving the most unthinkable legacy to the characters that remain (just be imaginative in what you do). This brings you a bitter taste in the game and the disappointment of the players. I was forced to look at it and make it more interesting and beautiful...



Rating:
[1 of 5 Stars!]
The Clock Mage - A Dungeon World Playbook
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Dungeons With Dragons - A Lasers & Feelings hack
by Mark E. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 08/30/2019 10:05:51

I played a session of Dungeons with Dragons with the "We be goblins" adventure today, and it was so much fun!

I had a couple of plyers who had never played a TTRPG before and they loved how easy it was to pick up and join in



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Dungeons With Dragons - A Lasers & Feelings hack
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Fellowship 2nd Edition - A Tabletop Adventure Game
by Julian H. [Verified Purchaser] Date Added: 02/01/2019 10:41:27

This game is pretty awesome for people like me, who want a straightforward but also very clever made fantasy-PbtA-game without having to stick to the DnD-isms of Dungeon World.



Rating:
[5 of 5 Stars!]
Fellowship 2nd Edition - A Tabletop Adventure Game
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