Tales from the Loop - Review and Thoughts on the End Game

 

My late teen years was in the 80s, so there's a lot of nostalgia for me. I didn't have an angst ridden high school, so Monsterhearts RPG never appealed to me. Goonies, Labyrinth, Ghost Busters, Gremlins, Stranger Things, Lost Boys, Aliens, and Stephen King was my 80s.

Tales from the Loop (TftL) RPG was published in 2017 and was based on Simon Stålenhag's art work. It's an alternate reality where The Loop exists, a high tech, top secret facility where particle physics experiments are being conducted. The result? Maglev vehicles, advanced robots, and dinosaurs. And throw all of this back into the 80s.

Kids ride bikes, have a club house whether in a tree house, a barn, or in someone's basement, but they don't have cell phones. The kids' ages range from 10 to 15. Their Luck Points is 15 - age; each Luck Point allows a reroll of failed die rolls. As the kids age, they gain more skill points, but their luck decreases. Kids follow specific templates: Bookworm, Computer Geek, Hick, Jock, Popular Kid, Rocker, Troublemaker, and Weirdo. Attribute + Skill level + bonuses such as an Iconic Item = dice pool of d6s (max 10d6). Each 6 rolled is a success, count total number of successes. Most tasks require only one success. Extra successes makes your success better by allowing you to ask the GM more questions about a situation or allows you to lend your extra success (a helping hand) to your buddies who failed. Kids don't have hit points, but Conditions such as Upset, Scared, Exhausted, Injured, and Broken (final Condition; if checked, you're unable succeed in any tests). Each Condition subtracts a die from the dice pool. If at anytime you fail, you gain a Condition. You can also voluntarily Push a roll, take a Condition and reroll non-6s. Basically for each die roll, you can spend a Luck AND Push a roll; if you still fail (no 6s), you gain a Condition and something bad happens. PCs also have a Pride which can be used once per scenario which is one auto-success.

TftL borrows from indie RPGs where the Players are asked questions to build out the PCs family life and relationships. What is your PC's family life like? Can you sneak out of school? Miss dinner? Do you have to take care of your kid sister? Do you belong to a single parent family? Latch key kid? This all comes into play as the kids try to solve a mystery. "Hey, guys. I gotta go home, it's dinner time. If I don't, my mom's gonna kill me."

Each kid has an Iconic Item (a skateboard, baseball bat, boombox, etc.) which adds 2d6 to their dice pool if they can think of a way to use it to help with a task. Normal items add 1d6, but doesn't stack.

I found the procedural system works fine. Declare what you want to do, roll dice, count number of successes, look up what bennies you have if you got extra ones. But what's odd is the end game (The Showdown, p. 87 / Extended Trouble p.70), it's sort of a mini-game in itself. The GM decides how many total successes are needed for a complete success, between 2 to 4 per PC, so for a group of 5 PCs, you might need a total of 20 successes. If you fall short, you'll either fail or have a partial success. So, each PC declares what they're doing, roll dice, total up the successes.

What I find odd is this. The PCs declare what they're doing in the planning stage. Then roll dice (allowing a Luck spend, a Push, and a Pride spend) based on their action. Then the GM narrates the outcome, again repeating what the PCs were doing and whether it was successful. You're basically telling the same story three times. WTF. I know Jackie Chan movies sometimes show the same action again and again from different camera angles (and sometimes the same angle), but this ain't a Jackie Chan movie, but Goonies. I found the shift from procedural to this mini-game jarring and a bit odd.

I've played in a few games by Daniel N of Bandit's Keep, where he just kept the end game procedural. We embraced the Swedish setting.

I've played in a short campaign set in Salinas run by Saul M and Bay C. Salinas is Saul's hometown.

I've run 3 of the scenarios from the core book, set in Palo Alto (I wanted Berkeley, but the Players wanted Stanford. Both have linear accelerators.), and planned on running Our Friends the Machines and Out of Time before segueing into Things from the Flood. But the end game just didn't work for me. Even when I kept it procedural, success seem too easy and there isn't enough risk in the end game.

I also played in 3 games a few weeks ago at A Weekend With Few Good Friends set in Boulder, CO. In one game, we ran short on time, so the mini-game worked fine, but if we had more time, it would have felt strange. I spoke with Nate after the games and he said after running 5 games in a week and a half that "I am feeling you on the end game mechanic needing some additional love. It really seems to halt the entire game and put the grand finale end scene into a mini-game mechanic."

I think I have a new way to run the end game.

1. Have the kids plan their Rube Goldberg plan.

2. Determine Player order, who goes first, etc.

3. GM determines the Threat Level (p.70), how many successes are needed per PC, depending on difficulty and failure stakes. e.g. if it's dangerous or not. It'll depend on the PCs skills. With the pre-gens, each PC got 10d6 to roll and got a total of 20 successes which was 4 per PC.

4. Each PC (hopefully picked their strongest skill) rolls their skill, applying it to their task. They're allowed, if available, one Luck spend, one Push (which adds a Condition), and their Pride. Not getting enough successes for the amount determined in #3 above, will result in one condition per shortfall, unless the next PC can pick up the slack. The next PC rolls their skill and can lend extra successes to the previous PC to prevent their injury. This continues until the last PC rolls. After each die roll, the Player (with GM input) describes how their leg of the plan worked or went sideways. The following Player (with GM input) describes how they rescued the previous PC and how they continued with their leg of the plan.

Page 71 does state the Kids can Push multiple times in the end game, something to think about. Maybe optionally, they can continue Pushing until they're Broken, trying to get their required number of successes. Even though they're gaining another Condition, the Push is just rerolling the non-6s and not reducing the dice pool for this task, but for future tasks.

Lead skill (p.74) can either lend extra dice to other Kids (2, 4, or 6) or be successes in the dice pool. You can't double dip. So, if a PC wants to Lead as their skill (help plan and give a rousing speech), they can mix and match, lending dice to other Kids and succeeding in their own right. e.g. Maria decides to Lead, explaining the plan in detail and making a rhyme explaining all the steps like right out of The Dirty Dozen, and rolls 4 successes. The target is 3, so she decides to spend the left over success as  extra dice for kids that won't roll 10d6. The extra success is converted into 2d6. She decides to give 2d6 to Linda, by giving her words of encouragement ("You can do this!") who's going to try to Tinker with the electronic door and shut it behind the rushing Raptors who's chasing Fred into the trap they've set.

5. If the last PC succeeds by the amount determined in #3 above, their plan worked. Otherwise, it fails.

Not is all lost because there's a few conceits in the game:

• Kids are bored and like adventure, they risk getting into trouble just to have fun.
• Kids can get hurt, but can't die.
• Adults are basically useless, so the Kids must solve the mystery themselves. They can get help from adults, but most of them will ignore the kids (I've got more important things to do), think it's a prank, or get into worse trouble.
• Most mysteries return the world to a status quo. Like most episodic TV shows, the town always returns to normal for the next episode.

Overall, I really enjoy the feel of the game. It's nostalgic and captures the sense of wonder kids have with robots, magnets, and dinosaurs.

I'll report back after trying this new way of doing the end game.