Hi all! Bonus review, which will in turn become a two-part review. I love me some Indie games. Even more, I love me some clever Indie games. Do I have one of those for you? Twitter has allowed me to cross the paths of many Indie players over the past couple of months. One of those people is a gent that goes by the handle of Fighter Guy or @FightGuyStudio. His posts were interesting and amusing so I paid attention to them. When I saw them first, I had no idea he had a Role Playing Game studio. But then a post where he was throwing in the towel made me realise this fact and so I have gone to take a look at it. Here is a review of their game, Brains and Brawn.
Kith and Kin: Vampires
Initially, the post was about Kith and Kin: Vampires. I purchased it from Drive Thru RPG but reading the first little bit, I realised this was an addition to the basic game. I am going to do a follow-up to this initial review on Kith and Kin: Vampires because it has the rule of cool look about it. But I saw that it would be better if I looked at the rules of the base game, Brains and Brawn which turned out to be a free download. Neat!
Brains and Brawn
This game is a rules-lite game. The entire game fits on four pages, and part of the fourth page is the character sheet. The thing about this game is it is DAMN CLEVER! It is a generic game allowing you to apply it to any genre. The examples given in the basic game are for a spy (007) style game. If you know my site, you know I am always down for that style of game! It is the core mechanic that makes this so smart. One statistic that defines your character. It is simply called Number.
Number
The description around this is to choose a number between 3 and 8. Lower numbers mean you are more of a Brains-type character and the higher number means you are more of a Brawns-type character. That is it. Only statistic, simple and elegant. In the game the Tale Teller (TT) will ask you to roll tests to resolve issues and they will be a Brawns test or a Brains test. If it is a Brawns test, successes are a roll that equals or rolls under Number. Brains tests are successes on rolls equal to or higher than the Number. If you are wondering, you roll a D10 (or multiples of them) to determine successes.
Boons and Bane
Your character has skills, named Boons, and weaknesses, named Bane. These tie into the number of dice you roll. Simple as that. Combine that with how prepared you are and you will have the total number of dice for your character’s success test.
The long and the short of it?
Go get this game. There are bunches of supplements for it that focus on genre, and I will look at the vampire one soon. Honestly though, it is well written and the rules can be explained in under five minutes. It is clever and brilliant. Games like this always seem to fly under the radar, and they shouldn’t. Use the link I provided above and go get this FREE game and then support the studio by buying some of the very reasonably priced supplements. Fighter Guy Studios, please do not throw in the towel. This is a blindingly brilliant game and so simple. Well done!
Patreon Pitch
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Sounds cool mark, maybe it could prove a good basis for vtt?
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It certainly would be easy enough to implement there. One statistic character sheet with only a few noted boons and banes. It might actually be an excellent way to learn to program various VTT modules—food for thought.