When we were 13, waaaaay back in the 'eighties, I used to run a game for three of my friends which was basically them playing themselves, riding their BMX bikes, but some "event" had happened and the neighborhood had turned all Mad Max on them. Everybody got to equip with whatever was in their house IRL. They fought gangs at first - "Warriors" style, so we called the game "Gang Warfare." But after awhile, mutants and mad scientists and other crazy crap started creeping in, and everything became a sewer crawl, so we just called it "The Game." It was mostly AD&D with bicycles and shotguns, but I was just winging most of it. The best part of it was the rule where you chose a "Theme Song" and if it came on the boom box during combat, you gained sick bonuses to hit for the duration. Everybody had a Def Leppard song as their Theme - LOL.
A friend of mine tried running a similar game, but the players fell through a wormhole or some such and ended up in a DnD world. We were handed a character sheet each and told to stat ourselves. That turned into the cringiest cringe fest I've ever cringed at. Imagine a bunch of socially awkward nerds trying to convince each other that they actually know anything about sword-fighting and wilderness survival. The game ended after about 10 minutes because the GM threw some insanely convoluted riddle dungeon at us and no one had neither stats nor irl smarts to figure out what to do about it and the GM had done zero prep and couldn't adapt.
We did this once in the new World of Darkness (back before it was made into "Chronicles of Darkness" blech) anyway, it was meant to be a one shot in which we essentially discovered the supernatural world hidden behind the scenes in our home town. By the end of it my wife was a werewolf, out best friend was a vampire, and I had awakened as a mage. That had been so much fun, lol. The whole thing started with us discussing the realism or lack there in of the mortal character creation rules, lol.
Hahah, this is such an awesome memory to share, man. One that’s only born out of specific points in time, ya know? Like when me and my two friends would run around in the woods and play “Wizards and Warriors” and basically just make shit up as we’d go and got more high off the single joint we had been saving all week. Ahh, makes me miss being middle school age again. Those were fun times, to say the least 😁
Actually just played this! Was a ton of fun, but our group did it differently. We talked about what kind of game we wanted then the GM built the world around that. He also treated it like a more standard system instead of giving us all the control. We ended up coming up with a scenario where each of us witnessed some dark force at work in our home-town but none of the adults believed us. So we ran away from home in search of a famous exorcist we saw on T.V. in hopes of getting him to rid whatever it is out of our home. From then on the main obstacles of the game were ducking authorities, surviving in the wild when we were traveling through woods, and fighting off the dark minions sent to catch us by the monster.
This is why Session 0 is such an underrated aspect of gaming. Get all the pre-game work done ahead of time, so the GM has a chance to implement all the ideas the players want.
For a collaborative monster-hunt RPG in a contemporary setting, I'd recommend "Monster Of The Week". The PbtA system seems like a nice fit for the theme.
I GM this for my friends a lot and I always homebrew it a bit to fit the group. They help come up with a setting and town and their characters and I do a lot of prep work before hand to have a villain driven story that forces them to move through the plot. Powered Characters Ive never played with I where it was done really well so I swap the NPC aspect out for a magic or powered item that can be shared among the group and that's a lot easier to deal with and adds a fun learning aspect to the game in learning how to share and use (properly) the item. Overall I totally love the freedom our group has and it allows the narrative to feel more natural because we fit the narrative to their characters and setting.
Some people like to point to this kinda game as "easy starter rpgs" for new players! They do this based on there being very little rules in the game. But I find that in fact improvising, joint story telling, huge amounts of freestyling - is actually really hard and better suited for seasoned players who want to focus on the story and roleplay and leave the dice mostly behind. I often recommend Call of Cthulhu as your first game. Since everyone understands what scary movies and stories are like. Also Cthulhu takes place in the "real world" with skills that have regular understandable names. And everyone understands percentages. Whatever else they need to know they will pick up as they go along.
maybe, but i'm going to try to run this as a beginner and i don't think that's a bad idea. i've been writing and telling stories all my life and done theater for just as long. so, for me roleplay and storytelling is the easy part and i'm not excited at all baout having to learn rules (or god forbid do maths)
This system looks like it has the problem I had with the Fate system. It's not really a game per-say, but more of a toolset used for shared Storytelling. Not bad at all, just looking for more gaming elements in my RP.
That dice system, where improving stats are represented by increasingly large dice, is the same as the Tales of Equestria My Little Pony RPG. I actually really like it as a simple stats system, and progression is just getting bigger dice. Don't judge me, I play it with my kids.
When I ran my KoB campaign, the town creation was all on Session 0, and then I came up with story stuff from there, so things were better thought out by the time we actually started the story. We had a lot of fun with it.
I ran this bad boy completely off the cuff and had a blast! The world building questions alone helped a lot and from there we were off and running in Nowhere Hawaii, Home of the Nowhere Nobodies 😂 this is a really good "cool down" game as I call it. It's good for when you need time to write more on the next session or are getting close to burn out. It doesn't have to be taken seriously at all and you can just let yourself go. I give it an A-
You nailed exactly how I felt about the game. What I was hoping for were mechanics, tables and setting details to help run a game where you balance the adventure against the day-to-day of being a kid. But I was also not a fan of rotating control of the "powered character," and I also felt like there just wasn't a lot of meat in the game. Actually I've felt this way about all these kinds of games that I've read or played so far. Stranger Stuff was just a very basic set of RPG mechanics barely adapted to the setting, while ReMemorex is just a hot mess of style over substance. I've heard good things about Tales From the Loop but I can't personally say.
I use a single universal system and just map it over different settings. I use rpg books as conceptual source books. I also recommend this method to everyone lol
You'd really need a group comitted to the collaborative story concept to get the most out of this. Mutant: Year Zero does something similar with collaborative storytelling, but the gamemaster has a lot more agency. Also, it has a greater sense of progression (and decay!)
This is the first of your videos I've seen and a wonderful review method. I appreciate that you layout the system in a rather unbiased and fully explained way and save your final opinions for end, I also appreciate you explaining your rational for the opinions.
The best part of playing a "Kid" based game is the characters and social interaction, you can go to town, ham it up, or play a stereotype, the bigger the better, but remember you always need one "Common sense kid" in the group to ground it its a license to be dumb, dicks, and embarrassing, embrace it, We were all fumbling to make sense of the world,
I have also thought about it. Role playing has done a loooong loop from fairy tales thru wargaming to D&D - to narrative again. But I guess it was natural, since who else could ever imagine telling stories collaboratively, and with tomes of rules, but wargamers?
Others have already said this, but this game sounds a lot like a greatly simplified version of Savage Worlds. What I want to add is that the SWADE rule book art for kids on bikes style settings, as well as rules for playing as children. There's lots of short adventures out there for Savage Worlds, some going by the name "one sheet" which are a single doubled sided A4 with an adventure on it. Tracking these down will be a bit of work as many of the links are dead, but you can download them from pirate sites fairly easy. There's also a horror setting called East Texas University. I've not played that myself, but that might be the kind of thing you're looking for.
I had a similar reaction. I played 2 short campaigns in this game led by my friend. I ended up deciding that the element of "exploration and discovery" - characters exploring into the unknown - was actually important to me. In KoB, you are only going to places that you already established, and whether anything succeeds or fails feels very arbitrary, and you can't really escape being a child - being essentially owned by NPC parents feels pretty limiting. During the game my mind kept wandering and I would be writing down ideas for cool worlds that I could run for players to explore in other games.
I always find your content to be amazing, as you usually review games that are not "that famous fantasy game". Seeing you review these rules-light games is awesome, since I`m a big fan of PbtA and other indie games myself. I hope you like this one, and you try others, since your reviews are really great and fun to watch! I love Jack the NPC and all the scenes with the "players" since is a great bonus and enhance the quality of the videos and make them even more enjoyable... Thanks a lot!!!
Dont forgett "earth to echo" - A very E.T like movie from 2014 that sadly suffered from the "fillem on a handheld "shakycam" style. (though the fact that it takes place in a post 2010 era when veryone has a cellphone might go against the setting of this game a little bit - it still shows that the "kids on bikes" style can be done in a modern setting.)
Notes from a formerly Nerdy Kid; Greetings from Canyon Diablo Arizona(home of the Diablo Demons, meanest team in Little League)! As much as i think your right 'bout the system(it's honestly a little TOO group co-operative for my taste, but that's a complaint i got for most modern made rpgs), it could be ran rather effectively if you adjusted the rules a bit. Let the players have the choice of, let's say four of the eight world building questions and let the players only use the Powered Character one time each per game session. All this gives the Narrator majority control, but allows the players to be invested in the game world. I haven't even played/DMed this game yet, but i've already come up with a story to run my group through, just by using the above adjustments. Keep being Nerdy Gang! "Still a Nerd" Sizemore
It's a fun game and my only real complaints were in the trigger warnings at the beginning of each setting and the lack of a full starter adventure. They could have saved some space by putting a single list of the warnings at the beginning of the book (like Rifts) and probably trimmed a few of the settings to include at least one starter adventure for new groups and GMs to run. Other than, I had a lot of fun running it. I would put it a bit below Loop though. Good to see your review of it.
Comment sections, The English language or anybwords for that matter fail to provide the means of expressing how wonderful a blessing Seth's content is. Best tabletop RPG content on youtube and no, it is not close.
Ha. I grew up 5 miles away from Weiner, Ar. Worked there in my college years to pay for school. Really surprised me it was mentioned in the video. It’s a good setting as well, town had about 400 people and about 4 main roads, and is rural farms.
I agree with your assessment. The game is based around nostalgia, so it appeals to people who grew up in the 80s and 90s, but we loved those movies when we were kids, so I'm not that interested in being a preteen hanging out with his friends, talking about bullies and first kisses, etc. The older I get the more I want adventures with deadly risks and rewards, and a game about being a kid has none of what I'm looking for. Still, I think they've done a great job with the design and have a unique system. It's a beautiful looking game, and I'm glad to hear they have some hardcore fans that support it.
I noticed that playing this game can be awesome, or a chaotic mess. It really does come down to the players. Thankfully you can tweak the rules and pull away some of the power the players have. But this system is not for everyone that is for sure.
I was about to meet her at Weiner's Diner, about our Intercourse in Gayville. Man, you don't want to know who I met there. PS. Waiting for you to do Kult: Divinity Lost review.
I love stuff like this, it helps my players and I remember that the focus of an RPG is characters not numbers. When we all get rules lawyer-y. I like to break out a one shot of amber diceless or paranoia or something like that so we come back to the chronicle and see the story we're trying to tell.
My experience with this game was that the group played for slightly below 2 hours... and then we spend the rest of the evening playing Underwater Cities, the board game. If I had to compare "Kids on Bikes with something, I think "The Quiet Year" is the best thing. You know, the "creativity exercise" that's hard to be even called a game, but is a huge pile of ideas for how to co-create stories as a group and can be fun as such. I would be hard-pressed to call KoB an actual game, despite it has on surface level bunch of stuff bolted to it. What it really appears to be is a nostalgia jump, the "remember how cool the 80s were?". And nobody in my group back then had any sort of nostalgia for the 80s, as most of us did remember them and it was nothing like the Hollywood movies for kids.
This game reminds me of a booze fueled night where some friends had an "awesome" idea, then gave up halfway through when they realized how much work has to actually go into it. Brad: We still need to come up with a ton of rules and explain a lot of stuff. Tom: Nah, just say its up to the players and it's "contemporary"
I bought this book, haven’t actually gotten a chance to play it yet, as I found a lot of the character backstory generation to be unnecessarily complicated and ultimately pointless as I prefer players to decide these things on their own, I liked the general idea enough to run a Halloween one shot with this concept, out I used the Pulp Cthulhu system where the players were kids, so I gave them the standard one tenth hit points from CoC 7th rather than the standard pulp one fifth. You helped me figure out the narrative focus, Mr. Skarkowsky, and I was very happy with the way my players responded. I’m planning to do a one shot of this game for Halloween this year just to say I did, but, I’m gonna do the town, time, industry, all that stuff ahead of time so I can decide the narrative weeks in advance. As always, awesome video, love your insights, Mr. Skarkowsky.
@Nick Manzo, backstory generators and story seed tables are not so important in hack'n'slash games. Much more in games like this one, with a more detailed and nuanced narrative. Thus I believe it is there for a purpose. Especially valuable if players are not veterans.
It's always funny to watch people play story games and not know what the hell is going on and then find out it's not their taste. This really illustrates the difference between story games and RPGs. Did a solid review and very thorough thank you!
That is your typical indie collaborative shared narration story games. They are good for what they do, but I wouldn't call them roleplaying games. I discovered that any protean game that gives players the narrative power to make it rain when their character feels sad is difficult to enjoy longer than a one-shot.
Hey I'm from Wiener and it's far from small. It's actually pretty big. It has huge arteries. Only problem is inhabitants they don't know when to get in or get out
Couldn't agree more with Seth on this one. Well, He was a lot more diplomatic than i have been but i think he alluded to how he really felt with the robot chicken sketch.
Hey shout out from a New Mexican fan Love your stuff seth When I played kids on bikes I came to a normal game night a bit late and it turn out my friends where playing this Everyone was a kid except me I wrote up a greaser teen who was the champion wrestler of the town and had a beat up truck as one of his possessions. We all woke up from a dream like state some of the players knowing each other. Someone finally addressed me and I froze I had no idea how I was going to play the character so I panicked and just said "who the fuck are you" in my best Italian accent. Due to the group storytelling aspect of the game it ended with the party finding out that my dad ran the local Italian mafia and was dabbling in the supernatural and was what was causing the horrors around town. It was pretty fun and I loved how much storytelling came out of a shitty accent.
One suggestion I would have if you want to play something like this but either want to go darker in theme OR the same sort of lighter style. Little Fears 1st edition is a VERY dark game and definitely recommend clearing it with your group first (The Dad in my group really found it uncomfortable because it does get into themes of parental abuse and the like but through a semi-fantasy setting). However Little Fears 2nd Edition is a lot lighter in tone (yes the 1st and 2nd edition vary massively in tone, the original designers thought the first edition went a little too far and wanted to bring it back) and might be something to help run a game like this...maybe...
Yeah I don’t like “rules lite” systems that involve the players. Asking players to describe stuff is a bit like asking a group of friends what they want to eat. You will only get “I dunno. You pick. Anything is fine.”. Player choice is fine but I draw the line at “there is no wrong answers”. A dm’s job is to say: “we are ordering food- pizza, Chinese or Indian?” The players should have choices but it’s up to the dm to guide these choices. Without that guide most players will end up bored and confused.
This, exactly. Diffusion of Responsibility is a force in RPGs, as it is in everyday life. Unless a player has a strong idea about what they should be doing, the group will end up spinning its wheels because no one wants to make the decision. It's why the GM is so important: they have the authority (via the social contract) to curate the experience in such a way as to guide the group towards the most exciting options. Although even with a GM, the group can flounder without a firm hand sometimes. The number of times I've had to ask my players "okay, but what are you doing?" is annoying, and I haven't run that many games.
A good example of this is a RUclips where the guy who invented the Apocalypse system was running an adventure and while it started off OK and actually did work a bit to ask the players what the setting was, it wasn't long before his improvisation lost all relation go the setting. For example, he suddenly said in the middle of a fight, "Player X needs you or they will die." The player looked at him like, "huh?" And he said, "They just do, they need you or they will die." So the player says, "OK, I go up to the player and ask them what is happening." GM then expects the other player to explain why they will die if the other player doesn't do something. In short, it was awful.
Oh gosh I'm suddenly remembering all those times as a young adult, hanging around a video library with friends, trying to decide which movies to hire for our get-together...
@@PeterKoperdan Depends on the system, but in a case like Apocalypse World Engine, which is very similar in this respect, it is entirely designed to _respond_ to player actions, rather than do any "leading" as GM.
Seth, you gotta play or see Blood and Honor (a samurai tragedy game) or its independent sequel World of Dew. Both are very narrative without being just “do whatever”, and good part of the story making is collaborative with all players
I had fun running it as a one off. I like to play a variety of games, and as I get older, I tire of complex settings and heavy rules. I am also far more interested in short campaigns of one or two adventures than causing the white whale of the super long campaign that no one ever seems to actually run. I also enjoyed the collaborative nature of the world building, as it lets the players really get into the game. I'm increasingly hearing that GMs need to be more receptive to player ideas, as using their ideas helps the players feel smart and interested (vs the traditional, one-directional approach). I won't say that I love and adore this game, but I am more and more drawn to "game night" games like this that can be enjoyed for a short time than a 1-20 D&D type game that revolves more around power escalation and GM fulfillment than fun.
This came up on my page (or whatever it's called on YueToub) and it says 3 years ago. What? Didn't I watch that video just a couple weeks ago?! Wait...I've been watching this channel since just before the lockdown...yeah, three years. At least. It doesn't seem that long, and that's a good indicator of a good job. Thanks, Seth!
Thanks for another great review Seth. I almost pledged this KS myself, but lost the feeling before the campaign was over. Just last week I was thinking of buying it and giving it a chance. However I like your idea about the free test drive rules. Especially after hearing it is pretty thin on rules and content. Thanks again for another great video.
I bought this for my nephew as his first RPG. I think it really is a good "learner" game, but it helps if the players are into the source material as mentioned.
Having players contribute to the world is great. A group can create a much more rich world than any individual. But as a DM I need to retain control of the major story elements to make a coherent plot.
I happened across this while searching for a Smosh video of the same name. I'm glad to have come across this video. I'm interested to hear more about different RPGs and thought this was a very helpful review.
I've home brewed an entire progression system for kids on brooms because I had an issue with the lack of long term playability. Everyone wants to improve their characters overtime. I also added combat mechanics which really kept my players invested.
Seth, Even though you were criminally wrong in your analysis of Picard vs. Kirk, I still love your channel! Please, more Jack in costumes. Every time he shows up in one I have to wonder how a grown-ass middle age man has props and costumes just chilling in his house waiting for an excuse to be used! I love it!!
My friends and I do a lot of themed parties. For example, last night (Feb 29th) my buddy had his 52nd birthday. But because it was the 13th time his birthday fell on his actual birthday, we did it as a PG-13 John Hughes theme, where everyone came as a character from a John Hughes movie. We've also done Pirates vs Ninjas, Lame Superheroes (Mystery Men), Moulin Rouge, Toga, Russian Mob, and many more. Between that and 20+ years of doing Renaissance Faires, my wife and I have a closet full of costumes. Some pieces I've borrowed from friends who also have closets of costuming. I've bought a few for videos, but not many. Oh, and I did last night's birthday party as RDJ from Weird Science, complete with the ceremonial bra on my head.
The game looks fun and I think you nailed it. Great for one-offs, or connected but spaced out episodes. I have been working to set up a game for a bit (having been one of the titular kids on bikes back in the day) and I keep running into a bit of a logic wall of "why would you have a single place have all these things happen to it".
@@gossamera4665 while those are certainly in keeping with 90s TV tropes they do not play into 80s movie or TV tropes. It can be done but in doing so you push the limits of what this genre is all about - wonder, discovery, some danger.
@@elfbait3774 My 80s and 90s pretty much blended together, sneakers, popped collars, the music got a little different. Weren't the 80s more pulpy, like the principal did it, because old people/authorithy figures=evil and untrustworthy or the parents of the town banded together to protect their values/hide a devastating secret, or they're all pod people. Pretty sure all of those things would work in the 80s though but hey that's just me. I mean if you want realism, have the events be tied to a person/faction pursuing goals that make more sense in hindsight.
@@gossamera4665Like any RPG you can certainly work things in however you wanr but with this game being so reliant on genre and theme doing so risks making it something it isn't supposed to be and wrecking the charm of it. Stranger Things blurs the lines a bit because it is a love letter to all things 80s but most movies with kids on bikes really weren't about conspiracies or dark secrets beyond the occasional government agency trying to grab E.T.. The Goonies had the Fratellis and the only secret involved was an old legend turned real. You could certainly handwave some greater overarching reason such as you mentioned or you could just concede that the whole canpaign was like Goosebumps in which a lot of scary stuff happens to kids for no greater reason than the plot of the week. I think one of the best ways to run a campaign in the same place is to switch out characters and locations a lot. Any town is going to have hundreds of kids to provide potential characters. This is alsp the 80s, age of divorce and moving around. Kids might spend alternating time at different parents' homes, move following jobs or life changes. A sort of troop style play where each player had a selection of kids, teens, abd adults to use depending on story could stretch things out too.
Wait what does "bird in hand" mean other than referring to the saying about it's better to have a bird in the hand than two in the bush, or that it's better to have a smaller amount of something than a larger amount be just out of reach?
I actually use the questions and rumor system during chargen for tales from the loop. It adds a wonderful hook for me as the game master to add quirky NPC's or more strange locations that I might not have thought of.
Love the game. I am also a member of the Box Tear Club. I recommend the Free RPG Day Adventure that they produced: The House On Polar Court. I've run it twice with positive results each time.
It is much different than what I usually play, BUT, we tried it out to shake things up. We only played for one session, but it was super fun. Story evolved from our ideas and was super cool. I would definitely play this again.
this games honestly I think could work in a modern setting.besides my group and I are all currently teenagers and dont know a thing about life before the 2000s
I could totally see there being implementations for cell phones in a game like this. Calling for help on something that sounds incredibly unnatural would be challenging and sound like a prank. You could also jam cell phones at some point. You could even do something real sinister and send them actual texts and calls in the real world and make it part of the roleplay. This could easily be implemented in downtime.
OK, glad I'm not the only one who was thinking the same thing as you about the character advancement. Mechanics wise it would be better to file off the serial numbers and use Savage Worlds.
I like Little Fears. I don't own a copy yet, but I've played it at conventions and it's a lot of fun. Side note: My brother came up with the game concept for Little Fears when we were in high school, including the name, "Little Fears." We of course didn't do anything with it... But great minds think alike!?
I haven't mathed it out so I could be wrong, but if all the dice are exploding, is it possible that the lower dice could be better then ones slightly higher than them due to increased chances of adding a reroll? I could see a d4, which would have a 25% chance of exploding, giving a better average than a d6.
bauldur The answer is "yes, but actually no". The difference is consistency. You still really do want a bigger die unless you just happen to hit the one exception that shows up below: Say you have target number of 2 (don't know if the game would have this as a target, bear with me), and d4/d6/d8 would be 3/4, 5/6, 7/8 chance of success. Bigger die better, because the "extra" from exploding doesn't matter. Target 3: 1/2, 2/3, 3/4. Target 4: 1/4, 1/2, 5/8 So far, so simple. But wait! Target 5: 1/4(!), 1/3, 1/2 Target 6: 3/16(!!), 1/6, 3/8 Target 7: 1/8, 1/6, 1/4 Target 8: 1/16, 1/9, 1/8. Target 9: 1/16, 1/12, 1/8 If you are studying this closely, each time a die exceeds by one a multiple of itself in the target, its relative standing vs. the next die up goes up. It converges somewhat with the number above it in the range between its max and the next max. There is *one* point at which the small die hits the target with a higher chance, and that's target 4 with a d4. 3/16 is a tiny bit higher chance than 1/6. Anywhere else the convergence doesn't quite catch up, but it gets close. 1/8 chance vs. 1/9 chance, etc. In summary, big dice are better, but exploding dice make it weird.
You can use any stat for a skill roll if you can explain why... DM: You want to build a rocket...using just your strength? Player: Yeah. I mean, when all you have is a hammer, everything's a nail, right? DM: I think I get what you wre going for, so I'll allow it. PC grabs a hammer and runs off screen, followed by *clang clang clang, thock thock thock, wubba wubba wubba, drill noises* Other PCs are seen watching the shadow of something getting larger and larger until the noises cease, camera pans to reveal an actual rocket ship. This long dumb skit was brought to you by my wife and me.
Hi Seth, love the videos! What tips would you have for a starting GM on scenarios/modules to play as well as any tips in creating your own adventure and what kind of notes about the module or adventure you take to the table with you?
Thank you very much. I have one on How to Run a Module, where I go over making cheat-sheets and the like. Also the Learning a New System might be helpful for new GMs. The big thing with choosing a scenario or writing one, is just to imagine your group, what they like, their strengths (both in and out of character). There are a lot of great adventures out there that I rule-out on running simply because they aren't the best fit for my players and I. Then get yourself comfortable enough with the adventure so you only need it as reference materiel once the game begins. Also, never be afraid to improvise the hell out of it once the players are unleashed.
Can't agree more with this. The simplicity of this game is really neat and I like the "choose your dice" style, but I think its a bit of a double edge sword in that it putting the average at a ten makes it near impossible to succeed at something you're not great at. That's like half your skills you will probably fail at. In most other RPGs, even if you're not great, you can still succeed with some regularity. This makes you ask "why even try?" And the modules are absolutely a disappointment. They had talked about them in the Kickstarter and I was interested to try, but when the book came, there was really nothing to work with. The Dads on Lawnmowers one was literally just about sitting around grilling and having a beer, like no real purpose in any other area. I was hoping to turn around and give it a go immediately with my players, but there was really nothing to go on. I'm also a little critical of its desire to force safe space roleplaying. And I'm not trying to be dismissive of wanting people to be comfortable, but when there is a lengthy write up in every section about not roleplaying outside your lane, that gets tedious. The rules basically don't trust that the players and DM know each other and will play in a way they all enjoy. I feel like the game is great to use as a tool to make your own setting and game, but doesn't offer anything actually useful to start any play something. Learning a system using only homebrew always seems difficult to me. That said, they did release The House on Polar Court which is an actual adventure for free RPG day, so maybe they are seeing this kind of feedback and trying to course correct. Also my box of character cards did the exact same thing.
When I ordered the CoC starter set, they sent me the Aquelarre RPG by mistake. If a company mails you something by mistake, its legally your property. So i ended up with very interesting Spanish RPG as well as the CoC starter set.
Great... now if you ever do try Savage Worlds (which this obviously draws from), you'll be reminded of this game you don't like. I also don't mean to imply that the passive/responsive style is necessarily bad. I think it is a very interesting idea that has promise (for example how Dungeon World does it with more crunch helps), but I do think it is hard to run this way and can derail more easily than normal systems.
My friends and I are playing it about once every two months between college classes and it's a lot of fun! Now we're playing City of Mist which I'm running. I hope you review that game in the future!
I wonder how far you could stretch for inspiration here. The basic framework of Weird Science or Voyage of the Rock Aliens could probably be hacked into a Kids adventure without too much effort, but what about, say, Sixteen Candles? Ferris Bueller? One Crazy Summer? Better Off Dead? Might be an interesting design challenge, anyway.
This game reminds me of the rpg Panty Explosion (the title is a joke and meant to be the author's poor attempt at a japanese man trying to think up an exciting title in english. They later made an addition they called "Tokyo Brain Pop"). The game had a resolution mechanic where each player had a "best friend" and a "rival" amongst the players. Whenever the player rolled to do something, the best friend would describe the outcome if the roll succeeded, and the rival would describe the outcome if the roll failed. I recall there was some sort of growth mechanic, but I forget what it was because I haven't looked at it for a while.
14:25 fantastic review and summary statement. Nostalgia drives it. But stranger things, and other weird shows like wednesday l. And covid especially being stuck with us inside for months. I do think our young ones have interest in the setting. Mine are 10 and 7
I know you said in her you prefer more crunch and progression, but if you want something similar to this in scope, but horror themed maybe give Ten Candles a try. It's similarly structured as a 1-shot style rpg with extremely light rules, but very dark themes and a focus on group storytelling
I felt the same way, then I found “Don’t Tell Mom & Dad” by Ted Gilbert & Ben Mazz similar, premise better execution. Would love to see you review that!
Orion Foresee only if you can bring him in as a 12 year old. He’s a bit of a train wreck at this point in his life. I love the guy but his ego is HUGE.
Dunno what got me initially interested. I think it hit right when I was in a mood for something and the guest authors with all the adventure modules really sold me.
![Kids on Bikes TTRPG "The Siren, clothed in barbs" | KOllOK 1991 [1x01]](/img/1.gif)
When we were 13, waaaaay back in the 'eighties, I used to run a game for three of my friends which was basically them playing themselves, riding their BMX bikes, but some "event" had happened and the neighborhood had turned all Mad Max on them. Everybody got to equip with whatever was in their house IRL. They fought gangs at first - "Warriors" style, so we called the game "Gang Warfare." But after awhile, mutants and mad scientists and other crazy crap started creeping in, and everything became a sewer crawl, so we just called it "The Game." It was mostly AD&D with bicycles and shotguns, but I was just winging most of it. The best part of it was the rule where you chose a "Theme Song" and if it came on the boom box during combat, you gained sick bonuses to hit for the duration. Everybody had a Def Leppard song as their Theme - LOL.
I'd play that game.
A friend of mine tried running a similar game, but the players fell through a wormhole or some such and ended up in a DnD world. We were handed a character sheet each and told to stat ourselves. That turned into the cringiest cringe fest I've ever cringed at. Imagine a bunch of socially awkward nerds trying to convince each other that they actually know anything about sword-fighting and wilderness survival. The game ended after about 10 minutes because the GM threw some insanely convoluted riddle dungeon at us and no one had neither stats nor irl smarts to figure out what to do about it and the GM had done zero prep and couldn't adapt.
I did the same thing with my friends except we used the Call of Cthulhu ruleset. It's so fun to see them express who they are!
We did this once in the new World of Darkness (back before it was made into "Chronicles of Darkness" blech) anyway, it was meant to be a one shot in which we essentially discovered the supernatural world hidden behind the scenes in our home town. By the end of it my wife was a werewolf, out best friend was a vampire, and I had awakened as a mage. That had been so much fun, lol. The whole thing started with us discussing the realism or lack there in of the mortal character creation rules, lol.
Hahah, this is such an awesome memory to share, man.
One that’s only born out of specific points in time, ya know?
Like when me and my two friends would run around in the woods and play “Wizards and Warriors” and basically just make shit up as we’d go and got more high off the single joint we had been saving all week.
Ahh, makes me miss being middle school age again.
Those were fun times, to say the least 😁
Actually just played this! Was a ton of fun, but our group did it differently. We talked about what kind of game we wanted then the GM built the world around that. He also treated it like a more standard system instead of giving us all the control.
We ended up coming up with a scenario where each of us witnessed some dark force at work in our home-town but none of the adults believed us. So we ran away from home in search of a famous exorcist we saw on T.V. in hopes of getting him to rid whatever it is out of our home. From then on the main obstacles of the game were ducking authorities, surviving in the wild when we were traveling through woods, and fighting off the dark minions sent to catch us by the monster.
I loved the "TV exorcist" thing, if I were the GM the party would find out in the end that the dude is just a charlatan lol
@@injetavel279 not to far off from the truth. In the end we had to stop it ourselves which turned out to be the Boogie Man himself.
Not exactly my cup of tea but it looks like a good “take a break” rpg from a regular rpg campaign. A nice break from more serious games.
Yeah, the idea of role-playing a kid is too awkward for me.
@Name Name Used to. It's just not my style of role-play. To each their own.
Yup. It looks like a fun night of improv gaming to pull out every once in a while when the GM needs a break.
@@sezrekahneldar4058 you're not required to play a kid lmao, i'm planning on using the rule system as a baseline but adapt as necessary otherwise
You could always have the players create the town and the rumors ahead of time, that way you have some time to prep.
This is why Session 0 is such an underrated aspect of gaming. Get all the pre-game work done ahead of time, so the GM has a chance to implement all the ideas the players want.
Yeah a Session Zero for Kids on Bikes is vital. I am wrapping up three campaigns of the game and it was incredible
Gives you some rp time to establish the status quo you're gonna break, too. Or a lower key foreshadowing adventure that doesn't ratchet up quite yet.
Amazingly, Intercourse, PA is less than 10 miles from Blue Ball, PA. (And Bird in Hand is even closer!) We're weird up here.
> "summer"
Okay where are we?
>> "New Mexico!"
He just had to do the group like that didn't he
Its 105 degrees here
For a collaborative monster-hunt RPG in a contemporary setting, I'd recommend "Monster Of The Week".
The PbtA system seems like a nice fit for the theme.
PbtA games are awesome. I enjoy them as a player and GM... (Well...MC i should Say)
I GM this for my friends a lot and I always homebrew it a bit to fit the group. They help come up with a setting and town and their characters and I do a lot of prep work before hand to have a villain driven story that forces them to move through the plot.
Powered Characters Ive never played with I where it was done really well so I swap the NPC aspect out for a magic or powered item that can be shared among the group and that's a lot easier to deal with and adds a fun learning aspect to the game in learning how to share and use (properly) the item.
Overall I totally love the freedom our group has and it allows the narrative to feel more natural because we fit the narrative to their characters and setting.
Some people like to point to this kinda game as "easy starter rpgs" for new players!
They do this based on there being very little rules in the game.
But I find that in fact improvising, joint story telling, huge amounts of freestyling - is actually really hard and better suited for seasoned players who want to focus on the story and roleplay and leave the dice mostly behind.
I often recommend Call of Cthulhu as your first game. Since everyone understands what scary movies and stories are like. Also Cthulhu takes place in the "real world" with skills that have regular understandable names. And everyone understands percentages.
Whatever else they need to know they will pick up as they go along.
maybe, but i'm going to try to run this as a beginner and i don't think that's a bad idea. i've been writing and telling stories all my life and done theater for just as long. so, for me roleplay and storytelling is the easy part and i'm not excited at all baout having to learn rules (or god forbid do maths)
This system looks like it has the problem I had with the Fate system. It's not really a game per-say, but more of a toolset used for shared Storytelling. Not bad at all, just looking for more gaming elements in my RP.
Ha! I have been saying since The Mandalorian came out that 'baby Yoda' shouldn't be fed after midnight.
That dice system, where improving stats are represented by increasingly large dice, is the same as the Tales of Equestria My Little Pony RPG. I actually really like it as a simple stats system, and progression is just getting bigger dice.
Don't judge me, I play it with my kids.
There's nothing wrong with playing kids games, even when kids aren't around. Fun is fun.
Hey, not judging, I have a copy, and I don’t have kids,
I’m a collector,
Saying that tho, I would consider playing it...
Its a pretty cool mechanic. Unfortunately it's about all KoB has and as you pointed out that's plagerised.
Savage Worlds and Agon do something similar
This style of dice mechanic goes back a lot farther than most gamers know, IronClaw/JadeClaw has the same thing.
When I ran my KoB campaign, the town creation was all on Session 0, and then I came up with story stuff from there, so things were better thought out by the time we actually started the story.
We had a lot of fun with it.
idk why he acts like you HAVE to do it all there and improvise
I ran this bad boy completely off the cuff and had a blast! The world building questions alone helped a lot and from there we were off and running in Nowhere Hawaii, Home of the Nowhere Nobodies 😂 this is a really good "cool down" game as I call it. It's good for when you need time to write more on the next session or are getting close to burn out. It doesn't have to be taken seriously at all and you can just let yourself go. I give it an A-
Pitching another kids on bikes story:
lord of the flies.
Would play
Last time I was this early, you still had to calculate THAC0…
Wait, That's an Ex Thing? (Been playing mostly Cthulhu/Traveller/RuneQuest/L5R for the last 30 years!)
@@jon-paulfilkins7820 THAC0 was dropped starting 3rd edition (released 2000)
You nailed exactly how I felt about the game. What I was hoping for were mechanics, tables and setting details to help run a game where you balance the adventure against the day-to-day of being a kid. But I was also not a fan of rotating control of the "powered character," and I also felt like there just wasn't a lot of meat in the game.
Actually I've felt this way about all these kinds of games that I've read or played so far. Stranger Stuff was just a very basic set of RPG mechanics barely adapted to the setting, while ReMemorex is just a hot mess of style over substance. I've heard good things about Tales From the Loop but I can't personally say.
I use a single universal system and just map it over different settings. I use rpg books as conceptual source books. I also recommend this method to everyone lol
Takes From the Loop is very good and I also recommend Dark Places & Demogorgons.
This seems like it'd be really fitting for people who play Fiasco a lot, honestly.
Hahaha! Latvian publisher of Fiasco here.
You'd really need a group comitted to the collaborative story concept to get the most out of this. Mutant: Year Zero does something similar with collaborative storytelling, but the gamemaster has a lot more agency. Also, it has a greater sense of progression (and decay!)
This is the first of your videos I've seen and a wonderful review method. I appreciate that you layout the system in a rather unbiased and fully explained way and save your final opinions for end, I also appreciate you explaining your rational for the opinions.
The best part of playing a "Kid" based game is the characters and social interaction,
you can go to town, ham it up, or play a stereotype, the bigger the better, but remember you always need one "Common sense kid" in the group to ground it
its a license to be dumb, dicks, and embarrassing, embrace it,
We were all fumbling to make sense of the world,
Maybe, but where is the game in the "license to be dumb, dicks, and embarrassing"? That's social media, not an RPG.
@@MoragTong_
Not social media, social interaction,
@@MoragTong_
He means in rp. Kinda the point of the tabletop rpg my man
If we're going to be loose with the definition, then perhaps "Honey I Shrunk the Kids" is also within this genre.
I love collaborative world building, I've been using it a lot these days.
It's interesting how far along roleplaying has come since miniature gaming.
I have also thought about it. Role playing has done a loooong loop from fairy tales thru wargaming to D&D - to narrative again. But I guess it was natural, since who else could ever imagine telling stories collaboratively, and with tomes of rules, but wargamers?
Others have already said this, but this game sounds a lot like a greatly simplified version of Savage Worlds. What I want to add is that the SWADE rule book art for kids on bikes style settings, as well as rules for playing as children.
There's lots of short adventures out there for Savage Worlds, some going by the name "one sheet" which are a single doubled sided A4 with an adventure on it. Tracking these down will be a bit of work as many of the links are dead, but you can download them from pirate sites fairly easy.
There's also a horror setting called East Texas University. I've not played that myself, but that might be the kind of thing you're looking for.
You know, being born and raised in East Texas, that sound EXACTLY like something I'm looking for. Thanks!
I had a similar reaction. I played 2 short campaigns in this game led by my friend. I ended up deciding that the element of "exploration and discovery" - characters exploring into the unknown - was actually important to me. In KoB, you are only going to places that you already established, and whether anything succeeds or fails feels very arbitrary, and you can't really escape being a child - being essentially owned by NPC parents feels pretty limiting. During the game my mind kept wandering and I would be writing down ideas for cool worlds that I could run for players to explore in other games.
I always find your content to be amazing, as you usually review games that are not "that famous fantasy game". Seeing you review these rules-light games is awesome, since I`m a big fan of PbtA and other indie games myself. I hope you like this one, and you try others, since your reviews are really great and fun to watch! I love Jack the NPC and all the scenes with the "players" since is a great bonus and enhance the quality of the videos and make them even more enjoyable... Thanks a lot!!!
Dont forgett "earth to echo" - A very E.T like movie from 2014 that sadly suffered from the "fillem on a handheld "shakycam" style. (though the fact that it takes place in a post 2010 era when veryone has a cellphone might go against the setting of this game a little bit - it still shows that the "kids on bikes" style can be done in a modern setting.)
Kollok 1991 is my favorite Kids on Bikes(modified) Kids on Bikes game stream.
Pogs would be great tokens! haha!
That was one of the first things to spring to my mind
Notes from a formerly Nerdy Kid;
Greetings from Canyon Diablo Arizona(home of the Diablo Demons, meanest team in Little League)!
As much as i think your right 'bout the system(it's honestly a little TOO group co-operative for my taste, but that's a complaint i got for most modern made rpgs), it could be ran rather effectively if you adjusted the rules a bit. Let the players have the choice of, let's say four of the eight world building questions and let the players only use the Powered Character one time each per game session. All this gives the Narrator majority control, but allows the players to be invested in the game world. I haven't even played/DMed this game yet, but i've already come up with a story to run my group through, just by using the above adjustments.
Keep being Nerdy Gang!
"Still a Nerd" Sizemore
It's a fun game and my only real complaints were in the trigger warnings at the beginning of each setting and the lack of a full starter adventure. They could have saved some space by putting a single list of the warnings at the beginning of the book (like Rifts) and probably trimmed a few of the settings to include at least one starter adventure for new groups and GMs to run. Other than, I had a lot of fun running it. I would put it a bit below Loop though. Good to see your review of it.
Comment sections, The English language or anybwords for that matter fail to provide the means of expressing how wonderful a blessing Seth's content is. Best tabletop RPG content on youtube and no, it is not close.
Ha. I grew up 5 miles away from Weiner, Ar. Worked there in my college years to pay for school. Really surprised me it was mentioned in the video. It’s a good setting as well, town had about 400 people and about 4 main roads, and is rural farms.
I agree with your assessment. The game is based around nostalgia, so it appeals to people who grew up in the 80s and 90s, but we loved those movies when we were kids, so I'm not that interested in being a preteen hanging out with his friends, talking about bullies and first kisses, etc. The older I get the more I want adventures with deadly risks and rewards, and a game about being a kid has none of what I'm looking for. Still, I think they've done a great job with the design and have a unique system. It's a beautiful looking game, and I'm glad to hear they have some hardcore fans that support it.
I noticed that playing this game can be awesome, or a chaotic mess. It really does come down to the players. Thankfully you can tweak the rules and pull away some of the power the players have. But this system is not for everyone that is for sure.
I was about to meet her at Weiner's Diner, about our Intercourse in Gayville. Man, you don't want to know who I met there.
PS. Waiting for you to do Kult: Divinity Lost review.
I love stuff like this, it helps my players and I remember that the focus of an RPG is characters not numbers. When we all get rules lawyer-y. I like to break out a one shot of amber diceless or paranoia or something like that so we come back to the chronicle and see the story we're trying to tell.
My experience with this game was that the group played for slightly below 2 hours... and then we spend the rest of the evening playing Underwater Cities, the board game.
If I had to compare "Kids on Bikes with something, I think "The Quiet Year" is the best thing. You know, the "creativity exercise" that's hard to be even called a game, but is a huge pile of ideas for how to co-create stories as a group and can be fun as such. I would be hard-pressed to call KoB an actual game, despite it has on surface level bunch of stuff bolted to it. What it really appears to be is a nostalgia jump, the "remember how cool the 80s were?".
And nobody in my group back then had any sort of nostalgia for the 80s, as most of us did remember them and it was nothing like the Hollywood movies for kids.
this sounds like my kind of game, I love Stranger Things and can't wait for Season 4
This game reminds me of a booze fueled night where some friends had an "awesome" idea, then gave up halfway through when they realized how much work has to actually go into it.
Brad: We still need to come up with a ton of rules and explain a lot of stuff.
Tom: Nah, just say its up to the players and it's "contemporary"
I feel this, I own a couple ttrpgs that give me that vibe and it's been equally disappointing each time.
@William Tuttle the thing is it can work that way. It is another option.
Loved the bit about the real town names.
You forgot Athol, Idaho.
Also there’s Dildo in Canada.
I bought this book, haven’t actually gotten a chance to play it yet, as I found a lot of the character backstory generation to be unnecessarily complicated and ultimately pointless as I prefer players to decide these things on their own, I liked the general idea enough to run a Halloween one shot with this concept, out I used the Pulp Cthulhu system where the players were kids, so I gave them the standard one tenth hit points from CoC 7th rather than the standard pulp one fifth. You helped me figure out the narrative focus, Mr. Skarkowsky, and I was very happy with the way my players responded. I’m planning to do a one shot of this game for Halloween this year just to say I did, but, I’m gonna do the town, time, industry, all that stuff ahead of time so I can decide the narrative weeks in advance. As always, awesome video, love your insights, Mr. Skarkowsky.
Yeah, all the narrative building sounds like session zero material to me. "Create our characters and the setting... game begins next week."
@Nick Manzo, backstory generators and story seed tables are not so important in hack'n'slash games. Much more in games like this one, with a more detailed and nuanced narrative. Thus I believe it is there for a purpose. Especially valuable if players are not veterans.
Shout-out from my hometown of Penisbreath, Ontario.
This can't be. Rofl
It's always funny to watch people play story games and not know what the hell is going on and then find out it's not their taste.
This really illustrates the difference between story games and RPGs. Did a solid review and very thorough thank you!
I wouldn't mind running a game set in a Dublin residential area in the early 2000s. This might be just the ticket.
I wonder if i could run a Big Bad Beetleborgs campaign with this.
That is your typical indie collaborative shared narration story games. They are good for what they do, but I wouldn't call them roleplaying games. I discovered that any protean game that gives players the narrative power to make it rain when their character feels sad is difficult to enjoy longer than a one-shot.
Hey I'm from Wiener and it's far from small. It's actually pretty big. It has huge arteries. Only problem is inhabitants they don't know when to get in or get out
Couldn't agree more with Seth on this one. Well, He was a lot more diplomatic than i have been but i think he alluded to how he really felt with the robot chicken sketch.
Hey shout out from a New Mexican fan
Love your stuff seth
When I played kids on bikes I came to a normal game night a bit late and it turn out my friends where playing this
Everyone was a kid except me I wrote up a greaser teen who was the champion wrestler of the town and had a beat up truck as one of his possessions.
We all woke up from a dream like state some of the players knowing each other. Someone finally addressed me and I froze I had no idea how I was going to play the character so I panicked and just said "who the fuck are you" in my best Italian accent. Due to the group storytelling aspect of the game it ended with the party finding out that my dad ran the local Italian mafia and was dabbling in the supernatural and was what was causing the horrors around town.
It was pretty fun and I loved how much storytelling came out of a shitty accent.
One suggestion I would have if you want to play something like this but either want to go darker in theme OR the same sort of lighter style. Little Fears 1st edition is a VERY dark game and definitely recommend clearing it with your group first (The Dad in my group really found it uncomfortable because it does get into themes of parental abuse and the like but through a semi-fantasy setting). However Little Fears 2nd Edition is a lot lighter in tone (yes the 1st and 2nd edition vary massively in tone, the original designers thought the first edition went a little too far and wanted to bring it back) and might be something to help run a game like this...maybe...
Yeah I don’t like “rules lite” systems that involve the players. Asking players to describe stuff is a bit like asking a group of friends what they want to eat. You will only get “I dunno. You pick. Anything is fine.”. Player choice is fine but I draw the line at “there is no wrong answers”. A dm’s job is to say: “we are ordering food- pizza, Chinese or Indian?” The players should have choices but it’s up to the dm to guide these choices. Without that guide most players will end up bored and confused.
This, exactly. Diffusion of Responsibility is a force in RPGs, as it is in everyday life. Unless a player has a strong idea about what they should be doing, the group will end up spinning its wheels because no one wants to make the decision. It's why the GM is so important: they have the authority (via the social contract) to curate the experience in such a way as to guide the group towards the most exciting options.
Although even with a GM, the group can flounder without a firm hand sometimes. The number of times I've had to ask my players "okay, but what are you doing?" is annoying, and I haven't run that many games.
A good example of this is a RUclips where the guy who invented the Apocalypse system was running an adventure and while it started off OK and actually did work a bit to ask the players what the setting was, it wasn't long before his improvisation lost all relation go the setting. For example, he suddenly said in the middle of a fight, "Player X needs you or they will die." The player looked at him like, "huh?" And he said, "They just do, they need you or they will die." So the player says, "OK, I go up to the player and ask them what is happening." GM then expects the other player to explain why they will die if the other player doesn't do something. In short, it was awful.
Oh gosh I'm suddenly remembering all those times as a young adult, hanging around a video library with friends, trying to decide which movies to hire for our get-together...
But can't GM just fall back on the usual way of running things when needed?
What's beyond the portal?
I don't know..
OK, you hear an unnatural..
@@PeterKoperdan Depends on the system, but in a case like Apocalypse World Engine, which is very similar in this respect, it is entirely designed to _respond_ to player actions, rather than do any "leading" as GM.
Friendly Neighborhood Cop Jack is my favourite of Jack's various personas.
I lost my shit at, "Those are all real places."
Thanks so much for your content. It's amazing.
Seth, you gotta play or see Blood and Honor (a samurai tragedy game) or its independent sequel World of Dew. Both are very narrative without being just “do whatever”, and good part of the story making is collaborative with all players
I had fun running it as a one off. I like to play a variety of games, and as I get older, I tire of complex settings and heavy rules. I am also far more interested in short campaigns of one or two adventures than causing the white whale of the super long campaign that no one ever seems to actually run. I also enjoyed the collaborative nature of the world building, as it lets the players really get into the game. I'm increasingly hearing that GMs need to be more receptive to player ideas, as using their ideas helps the players feel smart and interested (vs the traditional, one-directional approach).
I won't say that I love and adore this game, but I am more and more drawn to "game night" games like this that can be enjoyed for a short time than a 1-20 D&D type game that revolves more around power escalation and GM fulfillment than fun.
This came up on my page (or whatever it's called on YueToub) and it says 3 years ago.
What? Didn't I watch that video just a couple weeks ago?! Wait...I've been watching this channel since just before the lockdown...yeah, three years. At least.
It doesn't seem that long, and that's a good indicator of a good job. Thanks, Seth!
Thanks for another great review Seth. I almost pledged this KS myself, but lost the feeling before the campaign was over. Just last week I was thinking of buying it and giving it a chance. However I like your idea about the free test drive rules. Especially after hearing it is pretty thin on rules and content. Thanks again for another great video.
I bought this for my nephew as his first RPG. I think it really is a good "learner" game, but it helps if the players are into the source material as mentioned.
It's like TFTL and Savage Worlds had a baby...it sounds interesting. I'd be interested in running or playing it...I'll have to think on it more.
Having players contribute to the world is great. A group can create a much more rich world than any individual. But as a DM I need to retain control of the major story elements to make a coherent plot.
I happened across this while searching for a Smosh video of the same name. I'm glad to have come across this video. I'm interested to hear more about different RPGs and thought this was a very helpful review.
I've home brewed an entire progression system for kids on brooms because I had an issue with the lack of long term playability. Everyone wants to improve their characters overtime. I also added combat mechanics which really kept my players invested.
Seth,
Even though you were criminally wrong in your analysis of Picard vs. Kirk, I still love your channel! Please, more Jack in costumes. Every time he shows up in one I have to wonder how a grown-ass middle age man has props and costumes just chilling in his house waiting for an excuse to be used! I love it!!
My friends and I do a lot of themed parties. For example, last night (Feb 29th) my buddy had his 52nd birthday. But because it was the 13th time his birthday fell on his actual birthday, we did it as a PG-13 John Hughes theme, where everyone came as a character from a John Hughes movie. We've also done Pirates vs Ninjas, Lame Superheroes (Mystery Men), Moulin Rouge, Toga, Russian Mob, and many more. Between that and 20+ years of doing Renaissance Faires, my wife and I have a closet full of costumes. Some pieces I've borrowed from friends who also have closets of costuming. I've bought a few for videos, but not many.
Oh, and I did last night's birthday party as RDJ from Weird Science, complete with the ceremonial bra on my head.
The game looks fun and I think you nailed it. Great for one-offs, or connected but spaced out episodes. I have been working to set up a game for a bit (having been one of the titular kids on bikes back in the day) and I keep running into a bit of a logic wall of "why would you have a single place have all these things happen to it".
Conspiracies. Hell mouth. Aliens. Leylines.
@@gossamera4665 while those are certainly in keeping with 90s TV tropes they do not play into 80s movie or TV tropes. It can be done but in doing so you push the limits of what this genre is all about - wonder, discovery, some danger.
@@elfbait3774 My 80s and 90s pretty much blended together, sneakers, popped collars, the music got a little different. Weren't the 80s more pulpy, like the principal did it, because old people/authorithy figures=evil and untrustworthy or the parents of the town banded together to protect their values/hide a devastating secret, or they're all pod people. Pretty sure all of those things would work in the 80s though but hey that's just me. I mean if you want realism, have the events be tied to a person/faction pursuing goals that make more sense in hindsight.
@@gossamera4665Like any RPG you can certainly work things in however you wanr but with this game being so reliant on genre and theme doing so risks making it something it isn't supposed to be and wrecking the charm of it.
Stranger Things blurs the lines a bit because it is a love letter to all things 80s but most movies with kids on bikes really weren't about conspiracies or dark secrets beyond the occasional government agency trying to grab E.T.. The Goonies had the Fratellis and the only secret involved was an old legend turned real.
You could certainly handwave some greater overarching reason such as you mentioned or you could just concede that the whole canpaign was like Goosebumps in which a lot of scary stuff happens to kids for no greater reason than the plot of the week.
I think one of the best ways to run a campaign in the same place is to switch out characters and locations a lot. Any town is going to have hundreds of kids to provide potential characters. This is alsp the 80s, age of divorce and moving around. Kids might spend alternating time at different parents' homes, move following jobs or life changes. A sort of troop style play where each player had a selection of kids, teens, abd adults to use depending on story could stretch things out too.
In addition to Intercourse we also have Blueball and Bird in Hand, PA.
Words...used to mean different things...
Wait what does "bird in hand" mean other than referring to the saying about it's better to have a bird in the hand than two in the bush, or that it's better to have a smaller amount of something than a larger amount be just out of reach?
I actually use the questions and rumor system during chargen for tales from the loop. It adds a wonderful hook for me as the game master to add quirky NPC's or more strange locations that I might not have thought of.
Love the game. I am also a member of the Box Tear Club. I recommend the Free RPG Day Adventure that they produced: The House On Polar Court. I've run it twice with positive results each time.
Played this a few times at conventions. Had a lot of fun but I wouldn't want to purchase it or run a game myself.
Sounds like a great one shot game
It is, but I have also run three short campaigns of it and it worked shockingly well. 5 to 7 sessions each.
It is much different than what I usually play, BUT, we tried it out to shake things up. We only played for one session, but it was super fun. Story evolved from our ideas and was super cool. I would definitely play this again.
this games honestly I think could work in a modern setting.besides my group and I are all currently teenagers and dont know a thing about life before the 2000s
Seth got to be a player?!?! Did Hell freeze over too?!?!
I could totally see there being implementations for cell phones in a game like this. Calling for help on something that sounds incredibly unnatural would be challenging and sound like a prank. You could also jam cell phones at some point. You could even do something real sinister and send them actual texts and calls in the real world and make it part of the roleplay. This could easily be implemented in downtime.
This reminds me of the TTRPG “Tales From the Loop” it has that kind of small town mystery feeing with more fleshed our system.
Tales from the Loop, there is trailer of the serie now.
Cast looks great, the cgi sucks
OK, glad I'm not the only one who was thinking the same thing as you about the character advancement. Mechanics wise it would be better to file off the serial numbers and use Savage Worlds.
This looks like a lot of fun. Might run it as a one shot every little bit. I do Call every October so maybe July...
I like Little Fears. I don't own a copy yet, but I've played it at conventions and it's a lot of fun.
Side note: My brother came up with the game concept for Little Fears when we were in high school, including the name, "Little Fears." We of course didn't do anything with it... But great minds think alike!?
That’s why I like it. It’s good for kids. I run it the way I need for social groups.
I haven't mathed it out so I could be wrong, but if all the dice are exploding, is it possible that the lower dice could be better then ones slightly higher than them due to increased chances of adding a reroll? I could see a d4, which would have a 25% chance of exploding, giving a better average than a d6.
bauldur The answer is "yes, but actually no". The difference is consistency. You still really do want a bigger die unless you just happen to hit the one exception that shows up below:
Say you have target number of 2 (don't know if the game would have this as a target, bear with me), and d4/d6/d8 would be 3/4, 5/6, 7/8 chance of success. Bigger die better, because the "extra" from exploding doesn't matter. Target 3: 1/2, 2/3, 3/4. Target 4: 1/4, 1/2, 5/8
So far, so simple. But wait!
Target 5: 1/4(!), 1/3, 1/2
Target 6: 3/16(!!), 1/6, 3/8
Target 7: 1/8, 1/6, 1/4
Target 8: 1/16, 1/9, 1/8.
Target 9: 1/16, 1/12, 1/8
If you are studying this closely, each time a die exceeds by one a multiple of itself in the target, its relative standing vs. the next die up goes up. It converges somewhat with the number above it in the range between its max and the next max. There is *one* point at which the small die hits the target with a higher chance, and that's target 4 with a d4. 3/16 is a tiny bit higher chance than 1/6. Anywhere else the convergence doesn't quite catch up, but it gets close. 1/8 chance vs. 1/9 chance, etc.
In summary, big dice are better, but exploding dice make it weird.
You can use any stat for a skill roll if you can explain why...
DM: You want to build a rocket...using just your strength?
Player: Yeah. I mean, when all you have is a hammer, everything's a nail, right?
DM: I think I get what you wre going for, so I'll allow it.
PC grabs a hammer and runs off screen, followed by *clang clang clang, thock thock thock, wubba wubba wubba, drill noises*
Other PCs are seen watching the shadow of something getting larger and larger until the noises cease, camera pans to reveal an actual rocket ship.
This long dumb skit was brought to you by my wife and me.
Hi Seth, love the videos! What tips would you have for a starting GM on scenarios/modules to play as well as any tips in creating your own adventure and what kind of notes about the module or adventure you take to the table with you?
Thank you very much. I have one on How to Run a Module, where I go over making cheat-sheets and the like. Also the Learning a New System might be helpful for new GMs. The big thing with choosing a scenario or writing one, is just to imagine your group, what they like, their strengths (both in and out of character). There are a lot of great adventures out there that I rule-out on running simply because they aren't the best fit for my players and I. Then get yourself comfortable enough with the adventure so you only need it as reference materiel once the game begins. Also, never be afraid to improvise the hell out of it once the players are unleashed.
Can't agree more with this. The simplicity of this game is really neat and I like the "choose your dice" style, but I think its a bit of a double edge sword in that it putting the average at a ten makes it near impossible to succeed at something you're not great at. That's like half your skills you will probably fail at. In most other RPGs, even if you're not great, you can still succeed with some regularity. This makes you ask "why even try?"
And the modules are absolutely a disappointment. They had talked about them in the Kickstarter and I was interested to try, but when the book came, there was really nothing to work with. The Dads on Lawnmowers one was literally just about sitting around grilling and having a beer, like no real purpose in any other area. I was hoping to turn around and give it a go immediately with my players, but there was really nothing to go on.
I'm also a little critical of its desire to force safe space roleplaying. And I'm not trying to be dismissive of wanting people to be comfortable, but when there is a lengthy write up in every section about not roleplaying outside your lane, that gets tedious. The rules basically don't trust that the players and DM know each other and will play in a way they all enjoy.
I feel like the game is great to use as a tool to make your own setting and game, but doesn't offer anything actually useful to start any play something. Learning a system using only homebrew always seems difficult to me. That said, they did release The House on Polar Court which is an actual adventure for free RPG day, so maybe they are seeing this kind of feedback and trying to course correct.
Also my box of character cards did the exact same thing.
When I ordered the CoC starter set, they sent me the Aquelarre RPG by mistake. If a company mails you something by mistake, its legally your property. So i ended up with very interesting Spanish RPG as well as the CoC starter set.
Great... now if you ever do try Savage Worlds (which this obviously draws from), you'll be reminded of this game you don't like. I also don't mean to imply that the passive/responsive style is necessarily bad. I think it is a very interesting idea that has promise (for example how Dungeon World does it with more crunch helps), but I do think it is hard to run this way and can derail more easily than normal systems.
My friends and I are playing it about once every two months between college classes and it's a lot of fun! Now we're playing City of Mist which I'm running. I hope you review that game in the future!
I played a oneshot in this system before. It was fun! I loved being a kid!
I wonder how far you could stretch for inspiration here. The basic framework of Weird Science or Voyage of the Rock Aliens could probably be hacked into a Kids adventure without too much effort, but what about, say, Sixteen Candles? Ferris Bueller? One Crazy Summer? Better Off Dead? Might be an interesting design challenge, anyway.
This game reminds me of the rpg Panty Explosion (the title is a joke and meant to be the author's poor attempt at a japanese man trying to think up an exciting title in english. They later made an addition they called "Tokyo Brain Pop"). The game had a resolution mechanic where each player had a "best friend" and a "rival" amongst the players. Whenever the player rolled to do something, the best friend would describe the outcome if the roll succeeded, and the rival would describe the outcome if the roll failed.
I recall there was some sort of growth mechanic, but I forget what it was because I haven't looked at it for a while.
For some reason some of the things you describe remind me of the game Death Road to Canada
14:25 fantastic review and summary statement. Nostalgia drives it. But stranger things, and other weird shows like wednesday l. And covid especially being stuck with us inside for months. I do think our young ones have interest in the setting. Mine are 10 and 7
I know you said in her you prefer more crunch and progression, but if you want something similar to this in scope, but horror themed maybe give Ten Candles a try. It's similarly structured as a 1-shot style rpg with extremely light rules, but very dark themes and a focus on group storytelling
I felt the same way, then I found “Don’t Tell Mom & Dad” by Ted Gilbert & Ben Mazz similar, premise better execution. Would love to see you review that!
I think Corey was sadly busy with other things as well, if you catch my drift...
Nice, fair review. Thanks.
That's pretty cool! Thank you again Seth for another great video :)
Corey Feldman needs to be in Stranger Things. Let's start a petition.
Orion Foresee only if you can bring him in as a 12 year old. He’s a bit of a train wreck at this point in his life. I love the guy but his ego is HUGE.
What we should do is have Emilio Estevez playing Corey Feldman in it.
Reunite the Coreys! Let's start a petition.
(What? Too soon?)😆
I'm curious as to what led you to support the initial Kickstarter campaign?
Dunno what got me initially interested. I think it hit right when I was in a mood for something and the guest authors with all the adventure modules really sold me.