Riccardo ​“Rico” Sirignano & Simone Formicola’s 20231 Outgunned is a cinematic action tabletop roleplaying game. The art is by Daniela Giubellini2. The translation from the original Italian is by Caterina Arzani.

Outgunned is published by Italian company Two Little Mice and distributed by Swedish company Fria Ligan.

Although Outgunned has production values that would have been the stuff of fantasy for early RPG game companies, one element of the game does recall the old days. This is the cheerful shamelessness with which the authors and the artist reference their source material.

Outgunned​’s focus is action movies, from the 1980s to the recent past (recent enough for cell phones, not recent enough for smart phones). If you cannot figure out what that might mean, the authors provide a convenient, lengthy list of movies as reference points. If you’ve seen an off-duty cop crawling through an air vent, a suave British spy inexplicably introducing himself by name, or an Indian officer somehow producing not one but two extremely large pistols despite having been searched for guns, twice, you probably have a good sense of what the game covers.

This is the second Italian TTRPG that caught my eye in the last year (the previous being Fabula Ultima). Now I must admit to some impediments to exploring Italian games, starting with not living in Italy nor speaking Italian. So I cannot be entirely sure that Italy’s TTRPG community is having a golden age… but from what I’ve seen, they are3.

Although the differences outweigh the similarities, Fabula Ultima and Outgunned have some common points. Both have small-format core rulebooks, although that for Outgunned is slightly larger4 and hard-cover, rather than soft-cover. Both games have eye-catching artwork, albeit in different genres. Both are clearly written by people who are extremely enthusiastic about the genre their games emulate.

One important difference between the two games is that Outgunned eschews an index. Yes, there’s a decent table of contents, but indexes are invaluable. This may work out in Two Little Mice’s favour, because you will want to hustle over to a local game store to buy a physical copy of the rulebook to festoon with sticky index tabs.

Outgunned is skill-based, but with hints of a class system (more on that below). The medium-crunchy game mechanics do their best to provide player characters both with incentives to try wild stunts (stunts that in a realistic world would only result in horrific injury or death) and also with the ability to survive such wild stunts.

An aspect of the game that may surprise players and game masters is its experience system. Most RPGs provide characters with ample opportunities for improvement. Outgunned offers more limited scope for improvement, at least in terms of skills and attributes. What it offers instead is accumulated life experiences. This is because the model is action films, whose characters are often static. Accordingly, some groups might not find Outgunned ideal for long campaigns.

I admit I do not yet find the game mechanics intuitive (more on that below) but after playing around with them in test runs, I found that they consistently produce genre-appropriate results5.

This is a pretty nifty little game on its own. However, as I soon discovered, the game is phenomenally well-supported (in both Italian and in English) for a game that’s only a year or two old6.

Good news for players, bad news for their wallets (although Two Little Mice does offer a lot of free stuff). Would-be *Outgunned *GMs will want to take particular note of supplements Action Flicks, which provides new options to better cover ten action movie genres, and Action Flicks 2, which covers ten more action movie genres.

Now let’s get down into the weeds with the rulebook.

Outgunned

An introduction to Outgunned and its essential themes.

Making of a Hero

The eight-step process of transforming a blank character sheet into a character. Arguably, the two choices with the most impact are role and trope.

Remember I said this was a semi-class-based system? In a sense, it’s an intersection of two class-based systems. Each character has a role, their designated function on the team (the commando, the ace driver, the face, the brain, and so on). The base game provides ten roles, each of which confers on characters automatic access to an attribute, ten skills, two from a set of feats, and starting gear. Then players select tropes, which are essentially how they approach their job. There are eighteen tropes (cute but distracted, genius bruiser, leader, so on). The tropes also confer access to an attribute bump (which does not stack with the earlier bump), eight skills (which can), and one feat from a trope-specific list.

The result will be a character with five attributes (brawn, nerves smooth, focus, and crime), of which two will be valued at three, and three will be valued at two. That may not seem like much of a range but due to the way the mechanics work, two vs three has a significant impact.

Each attribute has four associated skills. Values range between the minimum of one to a maximum of three. Each character will have gained eighteen predetermined skill increases from their role and trope, plus two of their own choice.

On top of all that, each character has three feats, each of which confers some advantage.

I am amused that ​“crime” is an attribute.

Time for Action!

Having created a character, it’s useful to know what exactly those numbers mean. Tests are straightforward: players roll one six-sided die (d6) for each point in an attribute, and one d6 for each point in a skill. Therefore, someone with two points in smooth and one point in flirt would roll 3d6, whereas someone with three points in smooth and three points in flirt would roll 6d6. However, unlike most dice-pool systems, where one looks for total sums or number of dice above a threshold, Outgunned players look for combinations, sets of dice with the same rolled value.

GMs do not appear to ever need to roll dice, unless I misread the rules.

There are five levels of success/difficulty targets in the game: basic (a pair), critical (three of a kind), extreme (four of a kind), impossible (five of a kind), and jackpot (six of a kind).

I am amused that critical is the second lowest success level.

Remember I said there was more difference between stats of two or three than was apparent? Take two characters, both with one point in flirt, one of whom has two smooth and the other three smooth. The odds of the fellow with two smooth getting a basic success is 45%. The odds of the fellow with three smooth getting a basic success is 74%.

Additionally, there is a success currency system. Successes can be converted: three lesser successes equal one success of the grade immediately above, and vice versa. A player who needed a critical but got three basic successes could trade those in for a critical. Successes can also be used to reduce damage; an option players will absolutely want to remember.

Levels of success are outlined on page 62. What that means mechanically is on page 66. An index would have been helpful.

Complicating the statistics: as long as players have at least one success, they have the option of rerolling dice that were not part of combinations, in the hope of a better result. This has a risk: if the new result is not better than the old result, the player loses a success. Which is bad. Especially if they only had one success to begin with.

At least this is a fail-forward system, in which failure represents an undesirable outcome that nevertheless moves the plot forward.

Many feats provide Free Re-rolls, which have two advantages over the regular kind: the player does not need at least one success to re-roll, and failure to improve the result does not cost a success.

I am still wrapping my mind around the statistical implications of the system, but in test sessions, the mechanics were fast and easy to use… ignoring page flipping as I searched for the rule I knew I had just read. Indexes, guys. Embrace indexes.

Impending Danger!

This section applies the game mechanics to combat and other situations whose worst possible outcomes are dire. Remember that each level of success is three times the value of the level below? That applies to damage as well. A basic success reduces grit by one. An extreme reduces grit by nine.

The good news is that while player characters only have twelve grit, grit isn’t just physical health but also determination. Losing all grit is bad but it’s not necessarily fatal. In fact, even death isn’t necessarily fatal: a character could lose all grit, fail their Death Roulette roll and be left for dead… and turn up later with an implausible story of how limousine sprinklers and airbags protected them when the car went over a cliff and exploded.

*Gear Up! *

The rules pertaining to guns, gear, and vehicles.

Bullitt has a lot to answer for.

Face the Enemy

The rules pertaining to hostile non-player characters (NPCs).

Some games use the same rules for player characters and NPCs. Outgunned does not. Instead, the NPCs have grit, plus the attack and defense thresholds players need to match or exceed to either hit the NPC or avoid being hit by them, and whatever feats the GM deemed appropriate. Foes come in three grades (goon, bad guy, and boss), each of which has five grades. A grade one goon is more of a speed bump than a threat, while a grade five boss is to be feared.

Circling back to game mechanics: attack and defense thresholds are framed in terms of the kind of success needed: basic, critical, and extreme. According to the very interesting table on page 67, a player character who has the best possible applicable attribute and combat skill has the following chances of connecting:

Basic: 99%

Critical: 37% (75% with a re-roll)

Extreme: 5% (26% with a re-roll)

Even with re-rolls, a player character will miss 74% of their shots at a boss with extreme attack/defense, while the boss will connect 74% of the time. This is not a great combination, particularly when you remember the boss is doling out nine grit per hit.

An interesting suggestion is using a single stat block to represent a group of antagonists, rather than a single person. That scene in John Wick where he massacres a team of assassins could be simulated using the stat block for a low-grade goon, each point of grit representing a single mook.

As someone who creates vast charts documenting antagonists, being able to document them on just one or two lines is very appealing. More words, deeper hole and all that.

Mission Start

This chapter provides pointers on how to game-master action-movie-style plots, with heists singled out as a special case.

Race Against Time

A sample adventure.

Outgunned is available here (Two Little Mice), here (Free League), and here (DriveThru).

1: I thought this was a 2024 game but the copyright says 2023.

2: Full credits:

Authors: Riccardo ​“Rico” Sirignano, Simone Formicola

Art: Daniela Giubellini

Graphic Design: Luca Carbone

Original Layout By: Sabrina Ceccon, Luca Carbone

Translation: Caterina Arzani

Revision: John Marron

Editorial Director: Simone Formicola

Creative Director: Rico Sirignano

Game Design Consultant: Claudio Pustorino

3: Handy for me, as US TTRPGs are out of my shopping cart until at least January 20, 2029. USA delenda est.

4: 23.5 x 15.24 x 1.91 cm vs FU’s ‎ 21.11 x 15.01 x 1.8 cm

This affects which TTRPG shelf the rules land on. If I mix different sizes, the smaller ones get lost.

5: For example, if sample character Fighter/Jerk with a Heart of Gold Savar Kahn spars with of goons (the weakest category of opponent), Savar makes mincemeat of them without mussing his hair, whereas a boss (the strongest) consistently ragdolls Savar. Sucks to be Savar but at least now I understand the Death Roulette rules.

However, playing with the combat system really underlined how much I miss an index. Just assume every other paragraph is me moaning about the lack of an index.

6: I should clarify that at least two of the ancillary products are themselves complete roleplaying games: Outgunned Adventure is a pulp adventure game, whereas their upcoming Outgunned Superheroes is, surprise surprise, a superhero roleplaying game.