Sunday 7 November 2021

Not Quite First Impressions: The Troubleshooters (Helmgast RPG)

 



The Troubleshooters

I've been looking forward to this.

When I was a kid my folks used to get me Tintin every year for Christmas; I've still got most of them, in less than pristine condition. Trained early on in the ways of evil I soon found myself in Belgium, agog at the one shrine that should be on every comic-lovers itinerary: the Comics Art Museum. So when I discovered that some mad genius was designing an RPG based on the comics I remembered so fondly, I did what I almost never do: I backed the Kickstarter to physical reward level.

See, I know the pain of international shipping. I've known it all my life, so I almost never have anything shipped to me if I can possibly avoid it. When in doubt, I fly to the States or the UK and buy from the store, and I don't often do that. Usually I get the .pdf. 

So picture my joy when, having backed to physical, the world's shipping lanes crashed to a halt, Brexit kicked the UK's shipping timetable in the Boris Johnsons, and COVID kept us all indoors forever. I consoled myself: it will arrive eventually. One day. One far-off day.

It's here! It's finally here!

Is it fun?

Yes!

How fun?

Well, put it to you this way: it's a moderately crunchy light-hearted fantasy tourism RPG in which you, as the hero of a ligne claire style narrative, go forth and do daring deeds. This week, you're hunting a long-lost sunken U-Boat and the treasures it is said to contain. Next week, it's hunting Minoan antiquities while avoiding the minions of a mysterious group known as the Octopus. The week after that, who knows? The world is your oyster!

Speaking of, yes, it is the world, as in the world you know and have been living in for however many years. There are some minor differences, and super science lurks in the shadows with all the mutant octopi and peculiar lights in the sky that entails. Feel free to slip in some references to Atlantis or the Seven Cities of Gold - it's that kind of setting. 

However, world history is broadly the same as it is in our world. Nobody dropped an H-bomb on Berlin, and Martians have yet to land on Golders Green. Kennedy (or possibly Lyndon Johnson) is in the White House. Khrushchev (or possibly Brezhnev) is in the Kremlin. 

Light-hearted means exactly that. Tintin never went to Vietnam, so neither will you. The Cold War might be turning Africa into a blood-soaked pin map and the Belgian Congo might be a nightmare's nightmare, but you're more interested in King Solomon's Mines. Heroes might get knocked cold, but they probably won't have their guts splattered over the landscape. This is a world for Studio Ghibli, not Heavy Metal

The rules are moderately crunchy. If crunch-lite is something like Honey Heist, modest crunch is BRP Call of Cthulhu, and major crunch is an Avalon Hill wargame, then The Troubleshooters is probably a notch above CoC but not quite D&D 3.5, in the crunch stakes. Percentile dice, lots of d6s, and a functionally ... odd ... combat system. 

Whoever on the team best loves miniatures combat was put in charge of fight scenes. When planning one of these your first task as Director of Operations is to sketch out the scene of combat and divide it up into zones, which have a tactical impact on gameplay. A street, a sidewalk, fountain, benches, cars parked nearby, all are zones, and some are made up of more than one zone. A car, for instance, is effectively two zones: car interior, and car exterior. If you wanted to make it more complicated you could divide car interior into more than one zone, such as passenger side, driver side, back seats, effectively turning the car into five separate zones. As the game suggests, "if the terrain is boring, add more zones!" 

Eeek!

OK, maybe I'm a psychopath, but when designing a scenario I don't sit down and plan out combat moments because those usually happen without my input. A player character punches a mook, and we're off to the races. Maybe every once in a while I set up, say, a casino floor, in anticipation of a John Woo style gunfight, but that seldom happens. The last time I went to the trouble of sketching out battlemaps, never mind elaborate battlemaps, I was in Uni, and had all the time in the world. Now I have maybe an hour to scribble some notes. Damned if I'm going to pretend to be a draughtsman for the sake of a donnybrook that might last less than 10 minutes at the table.

Moreover it will have to be a sketch most of the time, since zones affect character movement and a host of other tactical considerations, so the players are going to want to see what's going on. If you're not good at sketching quickly, Hergé help you. Nothing kills the mood like ten to fifteen minutes of impromptu drawing while the players twiddle their thumbs.

But you can ignore this, if you like. 

In the combat example given in the main book using the map I described zones do come into it, but only for the first few seconds of gameplay. After that, it's a pretty straightforward smackfest. In fact, zones only become an issue in the first few seconds because the Director is a stickler when it comes to a driver leaping to the rescue over the passenger side of the car (changing zones). If the Director weren't such a stick-in-the-mud, it wouldn't be a problem. There's a brief mention of a zone later in the example, but otherwise zones don't affect the outcome at all. 

In fact the entire map, with all its zones, is completely ignored except for the little bit in between the two cars. So all that sketching went for nothing. In the example, mind you, which is meant to show off every aspect of gameplay.

Which suggests to me that you, as Director, could probably ignore sketches and zones altogether and still have a perfectly satisfactory fight scene.

There are a few odd touches like this. An entire page is devoted to the techniques of kodokan judo, both those allowed in competition and those that are not, which I thought was interesting until I realized that it had no practical effect on gameplay. It's essentially a page of flavor text.

There's a moment where the text discusses Roles Within the Team (Doer, Muscle, Investigator, Fixer, Specialist) and on the page opposite the example character Elektra shows off an eye-catching drawing of her apartment in Paris, which is the team's base of operations. Under Doer, which is the first item on the Roles list and is specifically mentioned as a team leader type, it says among other things '[the Doer] frequently controls some key asset for the team, such as their base of operations.' OK, I think, so Elektra's the Doer. Nope. On the page following, she's listed as the Muscle; Frida, an example character who doesn't get as much screen time as Elektra, is the Doer. 

That's the kind of thing that causes a head-scratching moment; it's not wrong, but it contradicts the text for no good reason, and at this point I'm hoping that everything in the examples reinforces the text. After all, why wasn't it Frida's apartment? Why isn't Elektra, the one who gets most of the screen time, the team leader character?

Then there are Plot Hooks, which are specific to a character and hook the character into a scenario. Say, Do-Gooder (You can't help it! You just have to help others.). The text says 'There are only 11 Plot Hooks. It may seem like too few, but the low number is intentional: to make sure there is guaranteed overlap between the Plot Hooks of the characters and the startup handouts in the adventure books.'

Which is a reason, but not a good reason. Again, perhaps I'm a psychopath (whoops! where's my cleaver?) but I intend to write my own scenarios most of the time. I could care less about the startup handouts in the adventure books; those are optional anyway. So why not stuff in as many Plot Hooks as you like? 

Later in the text, in the Director's section, it talks about Other Genres. 'Bande dessinée are broad and span over several genres and styles, from fantasy and history to present day to science fiction, from drama and romance to action and adventure, and yes, erotic stories too. We have focused on international mysteries and adventures in the modern era, but there's nothing stopping you from experimenting with other genres and eras.'

Shoot, why not devote a couple pages to different eras and genres? It would have been at least as interesting as a page devoted to kodokan judo. Or earlier in the text when it talks about different styles of story (curious adventurers, sleuths, agents, heists) - why not devote a page to each style, rather than a column?  

OK, I've spent enough time babbling. What do I think?

I think it's great! 

I think the overall aesthetic of the book matches the desired flavor and theme. I particularly liked the little touches, like the character portraits at the frontispiece (reminds me of Tintin) or the use of expressive symbols rather than swearing - though I also appreciated the list of period-specific curse words in the appendix. Nom d'une pipe! Cornegidouille! 

Character design is clean and well-presented, and I love the idea of having passports as character sheets - though if you think I'm ordering new ones from my friendly local game store, Helmgast, you must be off your Swedish trolley. My friendly local game store is several thousand miles across the ocean; I shall use the .pdf, thanks all the same. ;) 

I think the rules could perhaps have spent a little longer in the oven, but they do the job they're intended to do which is all that can be asked for. I particularly appreciate the use of Story Points, handing control of the narrative to the players. There are some problems with the examples given in the text, but nothing that breaks the game. For those who fear crunch, it's only slightly al dente.

I think the loving care expended on the background, replete with Weird Locations, is delightful - and yes, Helmgast, I did notice 'Skull Island, Bermuda: an island hidden in the mist, where an abandoned British destroyer from the Second World War is anchored in the lagoon.' Cheeky sods!  Bon sang de bois! Cuistre!

I like the idea of the Octopus, a villain group designed to be a source of adventures. Apart from anything else it does the same job SPECTRE did for Bond; it gave him a target to punch that wasn't the Soviet Union or any real-world government. I also like the nod to queer-coded villains in the Director's section.

The accompanying scenario, The U-Boat Mystery, is solid and gives the adventurers some globe-trotting and Nazi punching to do, which is always a good thing. I did get a chuckle when I recognized the source material, but there's nothing wrong with borrowing inspiration from anime or manga. 

Would I recommend it? Sure! It's not a bad purchase for beginning Directors and fans of the source material. I look forward to more stuff from the creators - so long as they don't expect me to draw anything!

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