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!

Ruins and Robots 0: Tutorial (Available now for FREE!)

Check out the first story of the Ruins & Robots series available now from Smashwords for FREE:

https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/949655

It is available in all popular ebook and digital formats, so it will be easy to read on your phone, tablet, computer, or other digital device.


Humanity is no more. In its ruins, robotkind has risen up. 

MAI195-H, or May, a Humanizer model robot, sets out on her first journey, following a Tutorial program. Her Tutorial will take her through the streets of an abandoned human city searching for relics that might be useful to the development of robotkind. Her success will mean getting placed with an excavation team and earning Perplexity Game points that she can spend on upgrades to her chassis. Her failure will mean being decommissioned.

Can she survive the streets of Vlake City alone?

Ruins & Robots is a post-apocalyptic space exploration story with cyberpunk themes and gamelit elements.

Caerwent Closes

A couple of weeks ago, I concluded my most recent RPG campaign, Caerwent Ascending. Of course, Caerwent Ascending was a sequal campaign to my group's previous campaign, Caerwent Down.

So, closing this campaign marks the end of about two years of adventure.

Caerwent Down

The origional campaign was played in the Numenera setting using the Cypher System basic rules and character types. It followed a group of adventurers searching for a legendary flying city that had fallen from the skies. 

Caerwent, the origional flying city, was inspired largely by Aurthian legends, and the group got to encounter the aged versions of several figures from these stories as they sought out the fallen city.

In the end, they found the city and rose it back, becoming the new leaders of this soaring city-state.

Caerwent Ascending

The more recent campaign utilized the Discovery & Destiny (Numenera 2) types and picked up a year after the previous campaign ended. The players took on the role of new leaders of caerwent (after the heroes from the past campaign had vanished) trying to make their city whole and leave an impact on the world.

They faced off against numerous threats, and learned a great deal about powerful datagods in the Ninth World that had created Caerwent and that would use the Iron Wind for their own ends.

In the end, they convinced the pawn of these datagods to join with them as they were joined by positive datagods in battle against the masters of the Iron Wind. The end of the day found them victorious.

Reflections-These were good campaigns

I enjoyed these campaigns a lot. It might not seem like it, with some of the things I'm going to follow this statement with, but I did. I want to highlight that right now. I am very happy to have gotten to run them, and I see them both as successes. It's just...harder for me to reflect on things that went well. I can't think of much to say about things that did go well, because they just...are... I think it's human not to be able to see the good as easily. I know I experienced the good, but it's harder to put my finger on it.

My Vision-Build a Better Ninth World

When I first started planning Caerwent, it was going to be one campaign. I wanted to have the players raise up the city and then become its champions, touring the world with the city in tow and making the Ninth World a better place. 

Then Monte Cook games announced Numenera 2, with a focus on building up cities and making the Ninth World better, and this seemed to be exactly exactly in line with my plan for the Caerwent game. But it wouldn't be out in time for when I wanted to start the game. So, I decided to split it into two games instead.

The first campaign, Caerwent Down, was fairly straightforward and went, more or less, according to plan. (I feel like I didn't think so at the time, but I cannot put my finger on what seemed out of place. Possibly just wanting to get to actually building up the Ninth World.)

I had...very high aspirations for Caerwent Ascending. I wanted to really get into the city rules. I wanted to really get into the crafting stuff. I wanted to really focus on Caerwent's connection to other cities and places in the Ninth World and for the players to work on building up these places. I had a plan that involved giving the players city-based issues in between sessions and having them vote on how they wanted to resolve them. Most of this didn't really end up happening.

Unmet Expectations

Notably, I don't really blame my players for things not going according to plan. The stuff that I thought was important and wanted to focus on? The city and crafting stuff and having players make decisions about how to rule the city? It all felt to me like stuff that was more technical than roleplay, and therefore stuff that I wanted to resolve outside of session. This really meant that even if that stuff was done, it wouldn't have been the focus of gameplay anyway, so I had set myself up for failure to begin with. 

But then, I found that players didn't really want to engage with these things outside of session. They didn't want to read long walls of text giving their advisors opinions on matters and then vote on them. They didn't want to spend time outside of session working on long technical crafting things. I don't blame them. 

So, most of these things, that had been my driving push to begin with sort of fell by the wayside. It also meant that we really didn't get to experience the full benefits of running Numenera 2 and might have been better off with the origional types/rules.

I'm not saying Numenera 2 doesn't work or that it wouldn't be fantastic for this sort of thing. It just wasn't as compatiable with the combination of how I was trying to run things and how my players were trying to play things. I probably could have taken time in session to work out the city-focused things, but for whatever reason I didn't want to and I ended up dropping these issues instead.

NPC Players

One thing that I did that I enjoyed a lot was that I ran NPC players. I may write a longer post about this in the future, but the basic idea is that I had people who weren't at the table that made characters/groups that were active in the world. Every couple weeks, I'd message the NPC Players about what was happening in the world as it affected their character/group, and we'd discuss what they wanted to do moving forward.

I think this made the world seem more real/dynamic for the players, and it allowed them to experience things that worked on other lines of thinking than the common patterns that I use.

One of the NPCs played a datagod who had an automaton infiltrate Caerwent under the guise of being one of its advisors. Another controlled the Jagged Dream, an organization trying to spark war in the Ninth World. Another played Caerwent's military advisor. Another played a replicating automaton, infecting any tech it found and turning it into instances of itself. Another played a mad noble whose wife had been transformed by the Iron Wind and who was set upon the path to revenge against the soaring city.

Overall

As I said earlier, I really enjoyed these campaigns, and that's the note I want to end on. I loved the characters that my players (both at the table and beyond) came up with, and I had a lot of fun interacting with them. The players explored a lot of interesting places across the Ninth World, and met a lot of interesting people. They overcame great villians and they did help cities and nations of the Ninth World. I had a lot of fun running these games, and I'm really looking forward to what we have to play next.

But that's a post for another day.

If you play RPGs, what are some campaigns that you look back on (either playing or running)? What do you remember fondly about them? Are there expectations you had that weren't quite met?