Blade Runner

Posted 07 Mar 2023 to Sci-Fi

Cops in a rich but morally dystopian world.

XP Card

Sessions GM'd: 0
Sessions as Player: 8

I Used

Roll20 and Discord. We used only the core book, and our GM ran a mini-campaign of their own creation.

Overview

I joined an online group, jumping at the chance to try this new game out. Our Blade Runners investigated the suicide of a few replicants, peeling back a conspiracy of replicants seeking to mod themselves and their memories, and a billionaire sympathetic to the replicant predicament. My character inevitably failed one too many Baseline tests and had to go on the run.

The Good

Beautiful art. Very moody. Not just screenshots from the movies, but original art that very much captures the noir style and grainy feeling. Some detailed technical pictures of equipment such as the Esper machine. They know that many of their customers will never play the game, and only buy the book as a collector's item.

Cool world, with all the info you need to run it. There is a timeline of the world history, and the LA megacity is detailed well. Several of the districts of the megacity are described. Equipment is listed, with retro line art diagrams of the firearms and tech. The default setting is sometime between the two movies, but details are provided for you to play in either time period. Only Los Angeles is detailed. No info is given for a game in another location or off-world.

Simple skill system. There are 12 skills, each linked to a stat. They are rated the same way as stats, from A to D, which means a different size dice is rolled. I found it simple and elegant. Honestly, that is all I am looking for from a skill system. It is practically a classless game. There are archetypes that you choose (e.g. Analyst, Enforcer, Doxie, etc.) but these have only minimal impact on the skills you choose at character creation, and then are never used again.

Replicants are cool. Mechanically they are different to humans, usually with superior physical stats and inferior empathy stats. Rules are provided for both the Voight-Kampff test (2019 setting) and the Baseline test (2049 setting). My replicant was a naive newborn, trying to do things by the book and learned quickly that things don't work that way.

Push system. Like other Free League games, when you fail a skill check you can choose to Push and reroll. You risk damage to yourself if you roll any 1's. It is always a fun little decision for players to make, and for my replicant the risk was real because my Empathy was horribly low and I risked an outburst that could force me to take another Baseline test at the end of the shift.

Shifts, phases of the day. You are encouraged to track what your characters do during 4 phases of the day. The time tracker is a sheet the players can use to record what clues they found during the phases of the day, and you have to spend 1 shift of the day doing downtime activity. This is wonderful. It provides a structured way to see what the characters do in their private time. A chance to break away from the case and explore being a person in the dystopian world looks like. Our campaign didn't do this much, and we were focused on solving the case. There is a weakness to the downtime phase, if you read below.

Case Files. Free League publishes Case Files as adventures or modules to run. Our GM ran an original homebrew case for us, so we didn't use any of the official cases. They sound pretty cool, because they include detailed handouts with clues on them. They also include Countdown Events which are predetermined situations that develop during the investigation and may escalate the problems faced by the players. I like this idea.

An Improvement on the Year Zero engine. I have played a lot of Forbidden Lands, and have noticed that the probabilities of dice rolls often result in zero successes. It seems like it happens more frequently than feels good - a punishing difficulty. In Blade Runner, they have tweaked how the system works. Instead of rolling a pool of d6s (trying to get a 6), you roll just 2 dice - one dice for your stat (d6, d8, d10, or d12) and one dice for your skill (also d6, d8, d10, or d12). You need to roll 6 or higher for it to count as a success. The probabilities feel much better. My luck with dice rolls was still not great, however!

Advantage and Disadvantage. This mechanic makes dice rolling much faster. Forbidden Lands uses modifiers to your dice pool, to add or subtract dice for favourable or difficult circumstances. But simply rolling 1 extra or 1 fewer dice is elegant and quick. In a gunfight, fictional modifiers like shooting at a target who is behind cover are easy, or using full auto, because such things just give Disadvantage or Advantage.

The Connections Skill. One of the skills on your character sheet is used to represent how many contacts you know in the megacity. We used this skill quite a bit in our game, and it was a great shortcut for getting ourselves into scenes in the underbelly and calling in favours to work the case. I'm glad they included this skill.

The Not-So-Good

No investigation system is provided. The whole game is about police investigations, but no subsystem is provided for this. They provide rules for chase scenes and rules for combat scenes. There are rules for drowning or being burned in a fire. They capitalise the word Clue in the rule book, which at first made me think there was going to be a mechanic for gathering Clues and doing investigation scenes. But no. So investigation scenes tend to follow the awkward pattern that most other games face: where the players try to guess where the clues are hiding, and try every skill on their character sheet to see which ones make the GM pop out a clue. "Is there a computer? I go use Tech on it. How long is the corpse dead? I examine it with my Medicine skill. Is the neighbour nearby? I ask if she saw anything." I don't enjoy these because they tend to cause the pace of the game to come to a halt. The players do not know how many clues can be found in a scene and do not know where they could be. They do not know if a clue was not found because they failed their skill check, or because there was none to be found. I thought this was a solved problem, thanks to GUMSHOE? The rule book does give sidebar advice for GMs to be liberal with clues, and to make sure that every scene leads to another Location or actionable clue. But no actual mechanics for an investigation is given - a missed opportunity. I guess it could be that the designers expect the focus to be on the PC's relationships and the moral dilemmas of replicants, and less on police procedural stories. Maybe. That's just not how players approach investigations, in my experience. They're not ready to let a crime go unsolved, so they can rather play a scene focusing on their character's angst.

Not enough Downtime events. An interesting idea. When a PC has downtime (which is every day), the GM can roll on a table to see if there is an interesting event or scene that happens. If you have 4 players and a case takes 4 days to conclude, that means you could roll on this table 16 times. How many entries do they have? 8. The table is too short. There is repetition.

Little replayability. Everyone is a cop, and there is a limit to how many cop concepts you can play. The grizzled detective, the rookie, the aged replicant, the naive replicant, the CSI guy, the SWAT guy. There are no special feats or talents or special abilities to experiment with. Every PC is only 4 stats and 12 skills. After one campaign, many of these cop tropes will have seen use at your table. I am not sure if there is enough variety of material to play for too long, and the ruleset could not really be transferred to another setting. Being police officers is baked into some of the mechanics (e.g. Promotion Points, equipment requisitions) but it should be possible to play a different story where the PCs are replicants on the run, for example. As written, this game is designed to emulate a very specific thing. It is most suitable for a short campaign, I feel.

Verdict

A solid rpg that allows you to play a cop in a rich morally grey world. The system is easy to use, and the setting is familiar because of the movies. It would make a memorable short campaign, and I enjoyed it.