Never Tell Me the Odds Oneshot Review

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A couple weeks ago, I had the opportunity to run David Somerville's Never Tell Me The Odds as a one shot adventure. Never Tell Me the Odds is a game of space scoundrels risking it all in the same vein as Firefly or the adventures of Han Solo. Here are some of my thoughts:

The System

In Never Tell me the Odds, characters have six factors or values that represent things important to their character. These could be relationships with NPCs, items like blasters or spaceships, beliefs, or a wide variety of other things. Each factor is ranked High, Medium, or Low. 

When players want to accomplish things where there might be a chance of failure, they have to risk one of their factors and roll the dice. On an even roll, the player usually gets what they want. On an odd roll, they don't and they might endanger or even lose their factor. (These results might be a bit better or worse depending on the level of the value in comparison to the level of the risk.)

Some Initial Thoughts

• The fact that all actions tie back to things important to the character makes roleplay a lot more inherent than in systems where actions are tied to numbers
• I like that the tension increases as the game goes on and players factors become endangered/lost
• I feel like it was a strange decision to call the game Never Tell Me the Odds when the odds are literally always 50/50

Some Thoughts on the One shot

I planned an adventure around the characters that I was going to have in play. I had 6 players (which might be a bit more than is ideal for the system): a beast alien cat burglar, a hacker, a hyperviking barbarian, a politician, a pilot, and a sharpshooter.

The adventure involved trying to trick a dirty politician into bidding a lot in an art auction while stealing the item that he was using for collateral/credit in the event.

The one shot went really well! I enjoyed it a lot, and I think that other people did too. I feel like a lot of times when I run a one shot, I feel disappointed after it's over that it didn't go how I imagined or that things just didn't run smooth or something. I didn't feel that at all at the end of this one. So that was cool.

I learned that players will always try to use high factors. This wasn't necessarily something I anticipated, but it makes a lot of sense. In the game, if you are using a factor that is higher rated than the rating of the risk, you automatically succeed. You still risk endangering or losing the factor, but you successfully do what you were trying. So, this of course led to players trying to use their higher rated factors all the time. This also makes the players more likely to lose these factors and then not have them to rely on later in the game.

Players will also try to stretch their specialties. In the game, players have specialties that are like professions that make characters better at one thing-reducing the risk of rolls associated with that thing. Players will absolutely try to claim things fall into their specialties that might not. The "Hacker" specialty defines itself as "better at bypassing security." While I think the intention of this is electronic security systems, the player argued that, based on those words, it should include things like locks or security guards. And on a literal interpretation, they're right.

Probability is a cruel mistress. The players were doing awesome at the start of the game. I couldn't believe how we went roll after roll without any odd results...right up until the climax of the adventure. That's when all their bad rolls came out, making for some thrilling heroics and high tension at the end.

Campaign Play?

Never Tell Me the Odds is clearly designed around one shot play, but I tend to always think about campaigns regardless. There are rules in the book for playing a campaign, involving adding new factors to a character and advancing over the course of several adventures. I don't dislike these, but they didn't focus on what I saw as the larger difficulties of playing multiple sessions.

First, each session would have to be a complete adventure/heist. Or have an adventure spread multiple heists but have no recovery/advancement happen in between each. My thought would be to have it such that if the characters are unable to complete their job before the end of the session, that it's considered them failing for any future ramifications.

Each adventure, characters are going to lose some of their factors. It would be unfair/incredibly difficult for characters to start a new adventure without being full up on factors, so players need to get new ones to replace the ones they lost. HOWEVER, first, the factors that a character has all shift up to fill in any spaces from lost factors of higher values. It makes sense that the things characters were able to hold on to would be more important to them than whatever they are getting to replace those things. This also might make a player think more about if they want to risk their high-ranked blaster, knowing that if it goes away the best they'll be able to replace it with is a low-value one.

Horror/Suspense

My very first thought after wrapping my head around the rules is that this system would be AWESOME for a horror or suspense type game. A lot of times, in these types of games, the thing that helps to keep the feel suspenseful is having to make tough choices about risking things that are important. That's literally every action with Never Tell Me the Odds. Losing more and more factors as the game goes on would help to ratchet up the tension and possibly the fear as the game goes on. Players would litter ally see everything their character calls about fall away over the course of the adventure. With frequent enough and high enough risks, the system has a strong potential to be incredibly fatal to characters, but even without being fatal, losing things creates a certain panic in players.

Speaking of things in space...

In case you missed it, the first story of my Ruins & Robots series is now available and is completely free.

You can find it here: https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/949655

You'll want to check it out before book 1 comes out on 16 August!