The Closest Thing Action Movie World Has to a Problem

I don’t have any Sunday games for at least the next two weeks, so now I’m just going to bloviate about random Action Movie World stuff. I had a conversation with my Pugilist player the week after our Razorfist AD 1995 game, wherein his supporting Pugilist wiped the floor with any and all adversaries. It occurred to me that the Pugilist + the Fighting Tournament playbook can create something of a no-lose scenario with experienced characters. And a no-lose scenario is not necessarily bad, but it is potentially a bit dull. 

To run some numbers:

Say you pick the Pugilist playbook. You give him an ability set that grants him Agility +2, and take the “Sting Like a Bee” move, which lets you roll +Agility instead of +Muscles in melee. You also take “Go for the Gut,” adding an extra +1 to Agility. If the Pugilist then takes the "Hands of Stone" move from the Fighting Tournament movie script, that’s an additional +1 to close combat and stunt rolls, making for a total of +5 to melee and close combat rolls. If they add a "Training Montage" move beforehand, the total goes even higher.

The upshot of this: the Pugilist, under these circumstances, will never fail, and only succeed with a cost if he rolls a 2, 3 or 4 on 2d12. His average roll will be more like a 12.

How big a problem is that? It depends. Having a Lead who always mows down the bad guys without breaking a sweat is perfectly within genre, if a little Steven Seagal-ish in dimension. But it does tend to flatten the action a bit. Since the Director never rolls the dice in Action Movie World, the only chance to execute a Director move is when a hero either fails or succeeds with a cost. If that failure state never occurs for a character, then the chances anything interesting will happen to that character drop dramatically. The “sweet spot” for Action Movie World lies in that 7-9 roll where you get the push-and-pull of success and failure together.

To be fair to my player, it’s not like he set out to break the game. He’s just a natural and highly skilled min-maxer. (You should see his Shadowrun characters -- better than the entire rest of the party combined.) He likes to succeed at everything, and taking joy in failure does not generally come naturally to him. So if he sees a chance for a bonus that helps him succeed, he’ll take it. But unfortunately, succeeding all the time in AMW is even more boring than it is in other games. If you never roll below a 9, the bad guys literally can’t touch you -- unless someone else makes a move that says you get hurt.

So What’s the Solution?

To be honest, I’m not sure this represents a serious problem. In our session, the Pugilist was just one of a whole troupe of characters, and there was plenty of interesting, juicy failure to go around. Also, the supreme bonus-stacking only applies to combat rolls -- which, while likely to be copious in any AMW game, are hardly the only roll in the game. Such a focused Pugilist isn’t going to be very good at one-liners, drama, or anything except killing and beating people. A whole squad of min-maxing Pugilists could present a problem, in that all your combats would be extremely boring because the PCs would ace every single roll and never take a hit. They’d be like late-career Bruce Willis: their contract says they can no longer take a savage beating, and they might become a bit of a snore to watch. 

The Pugilist player is talking about retiring this particular actor, as it looks like he’s painted himself into a corner game-wise. Even if he doesn’t, having that one guy who shows up to effortlessly beat the living daylights out of everyone isn’t a bad thing. My only real gripe as a Director is that this allows the character to rack up massive Star Power without providing a lot of nail-biting excitement at the table. But with movies changing Leads every game, that only amounts to a bonus XP.

So again, not a huge problem, but it does present an interesting dilemma in the long term: the more capable the characters become in AMW, the less exciting the action might become. The real juice lies in their failure. 

What’s So Great About Action Movie World?

Now that I’ve posted a few play reports from Action Movie World, I thought it might be time to discuss the game in more detail. (I like doing things backward.) If you’ve read through the previous posts and wondered what some of the game terms and conventions are about, this post will explain a few of them. If you’re not already a fan of AMW, this post will make you a fan. Or cause you to grimace in distaste. Or walk away unmoved. Look, I’m not the boss of your emotions.

Anyway, here’s what I think makes Action Movie World special.  I will say up front: this is not a review, nor a balanced critique. It’s pretty much a fan letter and a list of things I like. A list of things I dislike might be forthcoming -- if I ever come up with any.

The PCs play actors playing characters. 

In the introduction, Action Movie World admits to taking copious inspiration from Hong Kong Action Theater, an RPG from 1996. I loved HKAT at the time, though I had some gripes with the combat mechanics. I especially loved the mechanic of PCs playing actors who in turn would take on a variety of roles, which HKAT pioneered (as far as I know) and Action Movie World perfects.

Playing the same “actor” across a variety of movies frees up a player to put a new concept into play each time. They can play a renegade maverick on the edge, the quiet loner, or the by-the-book disciplinarian. If they want to typecast themselves and play the same character every time, that’s an option too. This level of player freedom adds a breeziness and flexibility to Action Movie World that has made my play group eager for the next session.

One PC plays the Lead. Everyone else plays a supporting character. 

Many games and play styles tend toward an ensemble mode of storytelling, where everyone is equally valuable and no one character stays at the forefront. Action Movie World gleefully defies this formula as part of the genre emulation element of the game. Movies have Leads, so the game has Leads. One PC stays in the spotlight, and the other players surround the Lead to act as motivation, foils, or hapless buddies only two days from retirement.

Of course, there are many reasons why (especially in a long-term campaign) an ensemble approach might be best for a play group. But for the pace and intensity of something like Action Movie World, having a single lead character around whom the majority of the action revolves really works -- and the game understands this.

The Lead cannot die. Supporting characters get XP for dying. 

In some games -- well, let me rephrase that, in some groups, character death can be a problem. A lot players (for good reason) don’t enjoy putting a lot of time and care into a PC, only to have them die (either gloriously or ignominiously). Action Movie World solves this problem. If your character dies, your actor lives on. They’ll play another role in another movie. Better yet, they get tasty XP for dying, possibly more XP than they might have gotten for surviving the movie. I cannot overstate the sheer genius of this. This is the mechanic that led to one of my most damage-phobic players yelling “I’m trying to die here!” in the middle of a session and enthusiastically throwing himself on a literal sword.

Dying also opens up the possibility of the Vengeance move, a single PC move (usually against the Villain) that garners automatic success when used to avenge a dead supporting character. So killing off a supporting PC isn’t just motivational from a storytelling standpoint, it has real mechanical benefit. Again, this helps guide the games into the shape of your typical action movie.

Better still, supporting players can basically decide to die at any time. The Director can decree that your character dies when you take five harm or take damage from a weapon with the -deadly attribute on it, but a player can also just decide to throw themselves into the fire and have a heroic death in order to trigger that sweet Vengeance move. This might seem counterintuitive at first, but not when you realize that trying to survive as a supporting character in Action Movie World is not only missing the point a bit, but mechanically uncoupled from your character advancement.

When PCs die, their players become “assistant directors.”

When PCs lose their supporting characters, they don’t have to just sit around bored for the rest of the game. They take on the role of assistant directors: fight choreographers, pyrotechnics coordinators, acting coaches, etc. Their job is to “punch up” the flow of the game, suggesting bigger, badder, more exciting elements for the fight scenes and action sequences.

I’ll be honest, I wasn’t sold on this at first. Players with dead characters sitting on the sidelines making commentary and changing the action as we go? I had my doubts about it working -- but it did. A player at the table whose entire job is to make your fight sequences amazing is a great way to ensure your fight sequences will be amazing. This is a wonderful little innovation.

Action Movie World understands action movies.

I wanted to play Action Movie World from the moment I finished reading the book, but it was an entertaining read on its own. The introduction by Dr. Will Dodson is like a miniature lecture in the ecology of the action film. Throughout the book, the authors demonstrate that they understand how action movies work: from the beginning, you understand the story, and you know how it’s going to end -- the hero kills the bad guy. The whole point is generating excitement (and body count) on the way there.

Action Movie World doesn’t debase its source material, but it doesn’t try to make it out to be more than it is, either -- it encourages “loud, dumb fun” and straight-up tells you not to think too hard about certain elements of the game. After all, many action movies fall apart under close logical scrutiny. Your AMW games will too, if you’re playing them “right.”

So that’s what’s what makes Action Movie World special in my book.