Review: Fallout RPG

Tabletop fun in the Wasteland!

Recently, I've been given an exceedingly rare reprieve from running the game(s) when one of the players wanted to kick the tires on Fallout, the 2d20-driven RPG by Modiphius. He had done either the pre-order or Kickstarter on the game and got the GECK box set, with includes all of the GM bundle, some cool Nuka-Cola bottle caps to use for AP (more on that in a minute), maps, etc., etc... I’ve already outlined the early experiences the game group had with John Carter playtesting and the aversion it had created toward 2d20. This is the game that got me to give 2d20 another try.

I will admit to having been less than enthusiastic about trying the game. I haven't played any of the video games, although they look quite interesting. The rest of the players all have experience with them. I did watch the TV show after our first couple of sessions playing the game and found it quite well done, with excellent acting and solid writing…getting to be a rarity on TV, that. It also gave me a bit more of an idea of what we were doing in the setting.

We ran through the basic adventure presented in the box set, and said player-now-GM put together a few more episodes. That group of characters didn’t seem to grab us, so a new set was put together and we started a new campaign after coming home from GenCon. (I think we’re playing a campaign he got while he was there.) On the first run, I played a Vault Girl — and was glad to see, from the show, my take on their culture was pretty spot on. My new character is a Nukatron…essentially a protection robot turned coke machine (and old school juke box bolted to his back.) Originally property of the Quincy Skate-a-thon, it is roaming the wilderness dispensing fun and cola refreshment. (The high note was its negotiation, over a Nuka-Cola and perfectly preserve key lime pie, of a peace treaty between some gunners and a local mutant town. He taught the world to sing…)

So, I'm reviewing after a good month or two of playing the game.

The basic mechanics are simple: roll 2d20 and try to get under the combination of attribute (here called S.P.E.C.I.A.Ls -- a call back to the video game) and skill ratings. So shooting a gun would be Small Gun+Agility to give you the number to roll under. If you get under the skill, as well, and it is a tagged skill, it's two successes. For many tests, your difficulty is measured from a zero on up. Zeros are an automatic success, but rolling to get extra successes is a good idea. If a difficulty is two, you need two successes to pull it off, and so on. In opposed tests, whoever gets the highest number of successes wins. Any extra successes generate Action Points -- represented in the GECK edition by the Nuka-Cola bottlecaps. (It's fun flicking these things back and forth with the GM.) If you role a 20, some complication occurs.

Action Points allow you extra d20s to roll on a test, allow you to reduce the time of an action, take additional actions, or add extra damage. These are communal and meant to be spent. You make them back pretty quickly, so hoarding them is actually pretty useless. The GM also gets AP equal to the number of players involved in the game and can use them for similar effects. Still pretty simple.

But...there is also an attribute called Luck, and this generates Luck Points that are used for re-rolling damage or a d20, changing your position in the turn order, or adding an aspect to the scene. You regain these by looking at some trinket of importance to you, finishing a mission/quest, or a milestone (if using milestones instead of experience points for advancement.) The use of a second game currency is — in my opinion — confusing and redundant. It would have been better to keep one or the other.

Combat feels very old school. There's a die for hit location. There's armor for physical, energy, and radiation for each body section. (I'm assuming this parallels combat in the video games...) Radiation exposure can rob you of Hit Points until you get access to the right treatment (Radaway, rightaway!) Actions are broken into major and minor actions and you get one each unless spending AP. When you hit, you roll d6s challenge dice that have blank faces (zero damage), a bullet hole (1 or 2 damage depending on the number of holes, and the smiling Vault Boy character, which gives you damage and activates any special feature of the weapon used. It felt a bit mechanical to me, but probably parallels the video games well. Also, the guy running hasn't GM'd in a long time, so that might be an artifact of him learning the rules and sticking to them.

A lot of the book is dedicated to the environment and how to move around, scavenge, map, and otherwise survive in the Wasteland near Boston, as well as setting up shelter or a town. Again, I'm assuming this parallels a lot of the elements of the latter Fallout games -- and the other players have confirmed this. There's a lot of resource management here — something a lot of newer games have moved away from, but again, I suspect mirrors the video games. You take effects from hunger, thirst, and other conditions, so finding safe food and water is important. (Except for my character… he’s a robot.)

The book is packed with material from Fallout 4'a Boston setting, and the artwork is gorgeous. The print books included are well done -- handsome, good paper, and well bound (the core book), or stapled in magazine form. The dice are well crafted, as are the bottle caps (at least in this edition) and the PDFs that came with the bundle have all the materials in file sizes that won't blow up your printer.

So is it worth it? If you are a fan of the Fallout series and a gamer -- yes. If you have someone to run it that knows the universe and the tone the game is looking for -- yes. My preference for post-apocalyptic worlds runs to the cars-in-the-desert variety, but I’m enjoying Fallout.