How To Play Outgunned

Hi everyone, this is a special how to play episode of Firebreathing Kittens podcast. I’m the game master for an upcoming session using the rules for Outgunned. This episode is a summary of what I learned after reading the rule book. Hopefully this will be a handy guide for how to play for my players, will help me organize myself, and will be useful for you listeners, too, who are looking to play your own Outgunned game at home.

I’ll organize this how to play guide into sections.

1. 
   

   Game category

   
   


2. 
   

   Skills

   
   


3. 
   

   Distances

   
   


4. 
   

   Gear

   
   


5. 
   

   How to attack

   
   


6. 
   

   Grit

   
   


7. 
   

   Conditions

   
   


8. 
   

   Time Out

   
   


9. 
   

   Reloading

   
   


10. 
    

    Death roulette

    
    


11. 
    

    Gambling

    
    


12. 
    

    Cover

    
    


13. 
    

    Adrenaline

    
    


14. 
    

    Spotlight

    
    


15. 
    

    Rides

    
    


16. 
    

    Chases

    
    


17. 
    

    Helping allies

    
    


18. 
    

    Double difficulty

    
    


19. 
    

    Weak spots

    
    


20. 
    

    Re-rolling

    
    


21. 
    

    Extra actions

    
    


22. 
    

    Heat

    
    


23. 
    

    Building a character

    
    

Game category. Outgunned is a cinematic action role playing game. We’ve all seen movies where heroes crawl through air ducts, keep a runaway bus above a minimum speed, face off alone against a dozen goons, look to the camera with a dashing cut on their cheek, a hero who walks in slow motion towards the camera while everything behind them explodes. That’s the type of game Outgunned is, and that’s the sort of hero you will be roleplaying as. A hero is someone on a mission who lives dangerously and is one of the good guys. Central to the theme of Outgunned is the idea that the hero is racing against time, making split second decisions with great consequence, never stopping to look back. There’s no rest for heroes. Your goal is to carry out your mission, whether that means avenging your dog, finding your kidnapped loved one, clearing out a bank vault, or something else. Mechanically, you will accomplish this by rolling multiple six sided dice, also called d6, hoping to get not high or low numbers, but matching results of two of a kind, three of a kind, or even four of the same number across multiple dice. Gear such as your weapon give you more dice to roll. Feats during character creation let you reroll failed rolls when attempting certain types of actions. If the going gets tough, you can spend the limited adrenaline and spotlight resources to pull off something really cool in an an epic scene.

Skills. When you want your character to do an action that has the risk of something going wrong, you will pick the relevant skill on your character sheet. You will roll as many six sided dice, also called d6, as you have as a number in that skill and attribute. There are five attributes: brawn, nerves, smooth, focus, and crime. Each attribute lists four skills under it.

You can and usually will pair the skill with the attribute it’s listed under, but you don’t have to. You’re not required to combine the attribute that’s directly above a skill on the character sheet. For example, the know skill is under the focus attribute on the character sheet. If you are at a fancy cocktail party before an opera and are trying to make a good impression on the mayor with your sophisticated knowledge of opera, you can roll the smooth attribute with the know skill. The know skill is listed under the focus attribute, but you can use the smooth attribute because it better fits what you’re trying to do.

Success on a skill roll. In Outgunned, success is determined by whether or not you got multiple dice of the same number. It doesn’t matter how high or low the number is. A one isn’t bad and a six isn’t good. Getting two ones or two sixes is what you’re looking for.

There are four difficulty levels: basic, critical, extreme, and impossible. A basic difficulty needs two dice to have matching numbers for you to succeed. For example, two twos. If you get a basic success after rolling the dice, you are eligible to reroll your dice that weren’t part of the combination once. A critical difficulty is cleared with three of a kind. For example, three twos. An extreme difficulty needs four dice to have the same number to pass. The impossible difficulty requires five dice to show the same number to succeed. What happens if you get six dice of a kind? If that ever happens, which it probably won’t, six dice of a kind is called a Jackpot. If you roll a jackpot, you become the Game Master, who is called the Director in Outgunned, for one turn. Players can roll nine dice at most. The probability table for how likely a player is to succeed at each of the four difficulty levels for rolling two through nine dice is on page 67.

Here is an example of a roll at basic difficulty, where two dice need to be the same number for you to succeed. Let’s say you are sneaking through an air duct quietly, infiltrating the compound stealthily, when suddenly a spider crawls on you. You try to stay as still as possible, because if you react loudly, your enemy could hear you. Roll as many dice as you have in nerves and cool. The Director says this is pretty basic. With two dice in nerves and one in cool, your odds of getting two dice to be the same number when rolling three dice is 45%. So there’s about a fifty fifty chance the spider crawls on you and you scream loudly, revealing your location, and a fifty fifty chance that you stay quiet.

Here’s an example of a roll at critical difficulty, where you need three dice to show the same number to succeed. It’s a time out and your friend’s arm is hurt. You offer to bandage them up. This requires the focus attribute and heal skill. You have a three in both focus and heal, and roll six dice. If three dice show the same number, you successfully healed your friend. On 6 dice, you have a 37% chance to succeed at a critical difficulty roll. With a reroll you would have a 75% success rate.

If you’re not certain what attribute and skill to roll, ask yourself how what you’re trying to do could fail. What is at stake here and what are the consequences of failure? Here is an example. You are driving at top speed towards a bridge when you see that the bridge is rising and a gap is opening over the water. What could go wrong? If you chicken out and stomp on the brakes at the last minute, your car might not have enough speed to clea