Friday, January 31, 2020

Playtesting Fallout 2d20 from Modiphius



Tonight, we took a break from our longstanding and excellent Vampire: the Masquerade 5th Edition game to make characters and begin playtesting Fallout 2d20.

Character creation took close to an hour for two characters out of four (the other two players made their characters ahead of time).

I've seen the 2d20 system described as "playing better than it reads" and I 100% agree with this statement and so do my players. The Modiphius 2d20 house system is crunchier than what we've been playing (DnD 5E, V:tM; TinyD6, Savage Worlds) but once you get started it hums along very well.

From what I understand Modiphius tunes each 2d20 engine to the game and this version has both Hit Points and Hit Location. From what I gather, the Hit Location essentially highlights wether you have armor on that location and if it becomes useless if you take 5 or more damage with one hit (I am going to clarify if that is one hit or in general). For our playtest so far, only the Head (1-2 on a d20 roll) seemed important because no one had a helmet.

We really like the momentum mechanic which in Fallout is known as Action Points. Everything was really pretty good and I'm hyped to continue this game. I won't lie that I was dubious after reading everything, but the system really comes through. In fact, there were numerous crunchy bits that seemed worrisome but in play worked just fine.

I intend to post a more thorough Actual Play in the next day or two, but the system not only has me digging into Fallout lore (I, as the GM, am the only person at the table that has never played a Fallout game) and working a bit on the sample campaign provided.

It was a great session and I intend to take a closer look at other 2d20 games.

1 comment:

Nathand Christenson said...

If you have time to listen while doing other things, some of the Oxhorn lore videos on YouTube can be enjoyable imho. I'm glad it works well, I have been wanting to play/run a Fallout game for awhile.

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