Honey Heist (Roleplaying Game)
Nov. 13th, 2020 10:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroIt’s Honeycon 2017. You’re about to pull off the greatest heist in the history of man. Except you’re not a man, you’re a GODDAMN BEAR.
This is another one-pager (with an optional second page of rules for wearing human clothes to disguise yourself) with two stats: Bear (doing things bears do) and Criminal (everything else). The stats swap against each other, with failures driving you towards Bear and successes driving you towards Criminal, but if you hit 6 in either your character exits the game. This is an amusing idea but perhaps one of the game’s weakest points, because it’s unclear with what granularity the shifts are supposed to kick in, and if you end up with a 5 in Criminal you can be paralyzed of trying things for fear you’ll succeed.
It's also a little unclear home much or how often things are supposed to be “planned”—it’s clearly trying to be Ocean’s 11 with bears, but ttrpg players are well-known for their inability to stick to a plan and ridiculous failures are going to happen roughly half the time. If you screw up the plan but improvise enough that you come out reasonably well-off, is that success or failure?
The random generation tables are pretty excellent. I rolled a “truck convoy” as the location of Honeycon and decided to make it a truck stop that they used vendor trailers to barricade off, because we’d recently played a game about crab truckers and it felt repetitive to have them do the highway chase scenes again. But nonetheless, two honey badgers and a grizzly successfully stole the central double-wide with the “vault” in it (and accidentally kidnap the organizer and his assistants), and then cracked it open, rescuing the Queen of All Bees and negotiating to be her bodyguards in exchange for honey.
Overall: This is another of those “entertaining for a couple of hours of one-shot, not necessarily worth a repeat, definitely not campaign material” games.
This is another one-pager (with an optional second page of rules for wearing human clothes to disguise yourself) with two stats: Bear (doing things bears do) and Criminal (everything else). The stats swap against each other, with failures driving you towards Bear and successes driving you towards Criminal, but if you hit 6 in either your character exits the game. This is an amusing idea but perhaps one of the game’s weakest points, because it’s unclear with what granularity the shifts are supposed to kick in, and if you end up with a 5 in Criminal you can be paralyzed of trying things for fear you’ll succeed.
It's also a little unclear home much or how often things are supposed to be “planned”—it’s clearly trying to be Ocean’s 11 with bears, but ttrpg players are well-known for their inability to stick to a plan and ridiculous failures are going to happen roughly half the time. If you screw up the plan but improvise enough that you come out reasonably well-off, is that success or failure?
The random generation tables are pretty excellent. I rolled a “truck convoy” as the location of Honeycon and decided to make it a truck stop that they used vendor trailers to barricade off, because we’d recently played a game about crab truckers and it felt repetitive to have them do the highway chase scenes again. But nonetheless, two honey badgers and a grizzly successfully stole the central double-wide with the “vault” in it (and accidentally kidnap the organizer and his assistants), and then cracked it open, rescuing the Queen of All Bees and negotiating to be her bodyguards in exchange for honey.
Overall: This is another of those “entertaining for a couple of hours of one-shot, not necessarily worth a repeat, definitely not campaign material” games.
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Date: 2020-11-15 02:50 am (UTC)