One of the best things to come out of Google+, besides all of the great ongoing discussion about gaming, is a funny little role-playing game from A. Miles Davis called
Homicidal Transients. I use "funny" because it is applicable in a couple of uses of the word: humorous and peculiar. I mean both of these in a good way.
There is a lot of good stuff to be found in this little game (weighing in at a whopping 41 digest-sized pages). This is a game that works at the digest size, instead of inflating page counts for games that most likely should have been done at a traditional page size.
In this game you play homicidal transients, pretty much like it says on the tin. This isn't a game mocking the homeless or making homeless people into some sort of reprehensible figure. This is not Bumfight The RPG. And, having been homeless in the past, I can say "thank God for that." Playing a transient has absolutely nothing to do with being a homeless person, although it could if you wanted it to. I know, that's a bit of a weird double standard. I have nothing against
playing or
portraying a homeless person in a role-playing game, as long as it isn't done in an exploitative or insensitive manner. I don't think that
Homicidal Transients does either of those things.
There's not a lot to this game, so if you need a game that has a lot of rule, or that has a lot of rules to enforce a certain mode or style of play...this game is not for you. If you like a rules light framework that will allow you a lot of freedom within those rules to do cool and interesting stuff...this just might be the game for you.
Characters are defined by a handful of skills (five of them in all), two traits (homicidal and transient), and a level. Level works pretty much as a bonus to your attempts to have your character do something. Homicidal and Transient give your character special talents and abilities. The skills work much like the skills in any other RPG that you may have seen or played. There are no attributes.
The game uses a single for combat, skills, tests and everything else. The cool thing is that it uses a pool of whatever dice you have the most of sitting around. Everyone uses the
same dice, but the game isn't linked to the use of one particular die type. I think that is one of the qualities that would make
Homicidal Transients a good game for pick up play. Skills do not seem to have levels, as much as they have modifiers due to the talents that your character has (not to mention situational bonuses). This part of the rules is a little bit confusing, as you aren't really told
if there is a bonus from skills (or I somehow managed to miss it), or if you just use bonuses given from talents. That could stand to be better explained in the rules.
While I don't mind it (maybe because I am mostly a GM), someone out there will be upset by the rules for experience: "Go up a level whenever the GM says so." I wouldn't play in a group where there isn't trust between the players and the GM (and I cannot fathom why someone would play in a group like that), so I don't have a problem with a rule like this.
The rest of the game is rounded out by "magic" powers, monsters, equipment and vehicles, and all of those other things that are expected in a role-playing game. There is no setting, implied or otherwise, in the game, which allows you to tack on your own setting to the system. I can see using this for cyberpunk-styled games, or games in the style of something like
Battle Royale. Or pretty much any game that consists of beating things until they are dead. I'm sure that there is (or will be) a D&D hack of
Homicidal Transients out there someplace.
This is a good game. A very good game for someone's first time at professionally designing a role-playing game. As with any rules light game, there will be speed bumps as a play group realizes that much of what happens at the table will need to be figured out as you go, by on the spot rulings rather than explicit rules. I think that is a good thing for a game because it allows a GM flexibility for those unorthodox situations that players are so good at creating for their characters (and the GM's world). This is a game that you should have on your shelf (virtual or otherwise) if you want something light and flexible that you can use to get a game going fast, and that gets out of the way and allows the group to get to its fun. I'm glad that I have a copy of
Homicidal Transients and you should want one too. The link at the very top of this post points to where you can buy the game in print or PDF (it is an affiliate link but that also helps to track down games that I can talk about with you here at the blog).
