“…that which does not kill you better run away.”
Trigger Happy is a game about the sort of people who don’t like you or anyone else for that matter, because they’re misanthropic b****rds with guns and they’re going to beat seven shades of something out o’ you before they even start brainstorming potential opening questions.
The game aims for a low prep, high action game that entertains and engages, probably for all the right ‘wrong’ reasons. Peaceful resolution is not an option… it’s isn’t even a consideration. If you like Jason Statham, Tarantino or Vin Diesel movies (by way of a small sample), Trigger Happy will appeal to your sense of fun.
Form
Trigger Happy is a trade sized PDF running 196-pages, written by Caias Ward – and also available as a physical book. The game features a bunch of art, by a plethora of artists, featuring appropriate thematic scenes of action and mayhem.
While all the artists show talent, some of the composition just seem to work better than others – with a few images of individuals looking a little awkward or ill-judged in rendition. Nothing too serious or off-putting – just some variety in illustration that didn’t always quite hit the mark for me. Other readers experiences/viewpoints may vary!
Features
Trigger Happy broadly splits content focus down the middle, with mechanics filling the front and setting/adventures filling the back end. In practice, the players and Showrunner (the Trigger Happy term for the lucky one running the game – abbreviated SR) can read the whole first half of the book, but the backend really aims at SR only. Players reading through the setting and adventures might find their enjoyment and surprise marred by too much knowledge of the setting’s grimy underbelly.
Each chapter kicks off with a page or two of fiction, suitably accomplished in getting the right kind of atmosphere across. Trigger Happy is all about the sort of people you’d like to have on your side in a tight spot, but probably wouldn’t like to spend much of your spare time with. You certainly wouldn’t take them home to meet your parents. Gun-toting, scum-slamming action junkies with a penchant for resolving problems with bullets, Trigger Happy fully embraces the action and serves up a lean and entertaining system.
You define a character primarily through a concept and background, because knowing how a character grew up, what drives them, and what annoys them matters a great deal more than a few numbers on a page. When you do hit the numbers though, you define your character with six Attributes – Might, Will, Wit, Pride, Hope, and Clarity. Each services as a basic value for determining success in taking actions. On top of that, characters have Skills and when they’re really good at a skill, they have Specialisations.
The basic mechanic involves rolling a ten-sided die, adding your Attribute plus any relevant modifiers and comparing to a target number.
If you’re up against a static objective, like breaking down a door or cracking a safe, the SR will set a static target number. If you’re fighting a mook or intimidating a bouncer, the SR will generate an opposing target based on the characteristics of the target. For extended affairs, like hacking computer records, driving a drag race, or working a protracted hustle, the system has a neat way of setting down a cumulative target to achieve, with difficulty, time frame and deadlines all rolled into one easy line.
When you exceed the target number, you accumulate Points of Limit, which might be relevant in determining the measure of your success or to win an extended conflict.
Take It To The Limit
“Let this be a learning experience, gentleman. If you resist we will kill you and the man next to you. Now move out of here in an orderly fashion… NOW!”
Now, having got the basic mechanic across, you might be thinking what makes Trigger Happy any different to dozens, if not hundreds, of games that use a similar beat the target with die and skill mechanic. Well, that would be where Limit comes in.
Limit boils down a very complex idea intrinsic in all great (and violent) action movies into a single number. It simultaneously represents your well-being, your drive to succeed, and your talent for hamstringing the opposition.
In the first form, Limit shows the amount of Danger you can absorb before things go terribly wrong. Wrong might mean dead, but it could equally mean something far worse – and specifically more embarrassing. Danger accumulates from damage, humiliation, loss of hope, remorseless interrogation – anything that might ultimately put the character out of the picture in the end. The muscle, the hacker and the Face Man in the group might all deal with quite different situations and opponents, but if they zero their Limit on Danger, then they’ll all go down.
In the second form, a character can ramp up the effort and push through the pain barrier to Take It To The Limit. Before a roll, a player can spend Limit to add a positive modifying, or after a roll bridge the gap to achieve a minimal success. Both options have a ceiling – and both obviously eat into your Limit reserves. If you fail by a long way, you can Push The Envelope and spend enough to succeed, whatever the cost – but that spend not only depletes your Limit, but also adds to a pool the SR can draw in to make it harder to handle the enemy, increasing the difficulty of tasks.
The final form of Limit takes the form of Circumstances, which allows you (or the enemy) to spend Limit to create short term disadvantages. Whether you throw dirt in their eye, dump a Trojan on their laptop, or point the IRS in the direction of their bank account, a Circumstance distracts and penalises associated skill rolls – unless they give up on their current action and resolve it, or spend some of their own dwindling resources to set it straight.
Having an all in one resource like this makes for an exhilarating, seat-of-your-pants experience where you have to balance a bit of resource management against just how fast you can lay your opponent out. If you dump your Limit early into a few heavy hits, can you finish the conflict without a scratch – or will you leave yourself wide open when your Limit strikes single figures? You can recover Limit through first aid or taking a breather, but most of the time that means finding a moment of downtime that the enemy just won’t be prepared to offer.
In a game about fast, violent action, where split second decisions should be de rigueur, you don’t want to be juggling complex mechanics and multiple abilities. Trigger Happy means that the brains and the brawn of the team can all get involved in the same situations and handle them with the same mechanical currency in Limit – while still having an appropriately different experience.
Just One (Or Two) More Things
“I do what I do best. I am who I am. Now, if you’re going to use that gun then use it. Otherwise, get this gun out of my face!”
Beyond the simplicity of Limit, a few other crunchy bits continue the business of tying the system cleanly to the theme. Each adds depth and colour to the system without adding a pile of overhead or complexity.
If the dice go in your favour, any 10s roll over – so you keep the result and roll again. If you roll a double one – something possible if you add extra factors like skill or Assistance – you Tank and need to accept you’re in for a whole world of hurt. If you’re fighting and losing, you can Yield – which might mitigate a death blow into something humiliating or just damned painful. Unless you can find a way Out…
Ins and Outs represent aspects of your character concept. Ins represent drives and motivations, those triggers that get you worked up and push you to get involved. If you give in to an In, you have to turn it up to 11 and get involved. If corruption or child cruelty seriously get you worked up, witnessing them will only get you angry. If you give in, you get a bonus throughout the scene, but you have to really play it up. Otherwise, you’re resisting – which means you play with a penalty, but you control your actions and have the option to back down and get out of there.
Outs represent preparation, connections, loopholes and other things that benefit you and might just get you out of a tight spot. All characters start with five of them, and throwing yourself into danger or doing stuff with style will earn you a few more. You can spend them to assist others with an extra die, Drop the Hammer to get an extra dice yourself, or get out of trouble – like cancelling a Tank, softening a Yield, or even influencing the plotline.
Like I say, the crunch is quite subtle in many ways, because one size fits all. How you interpret it and handle your Limit really determines where you end up and whether you’re heading toward success or a blazing deathslide into eternity.
Tales of Vanguard Heights
“…a place in flux, power players thinking they were untouchable and actual weather beside ‘rain’ and ‘suffocating humidity.’”
Vanguard Heights provides the sort of slightly stereotypical, larger-than-life environment vital to a game poised on the brink of action and bloodshed at the start of every scene. Part of a greater city, Vanguard Heights seems to sit on a knife edge, with competing powers consistently at odds with each other.
While you have a smattering of good and bad sorts, most personalities occupy the broad expanse of the grey inbetween. Corrupt cops who nevertheless follow a code, a businesswoman who seeks to right the wrongs of her father’s past, hard-bitten security consultants trying to sell safety through fear…
The first section provides a map and picks out key locations and dangerous borders, then ten pages of Movers and Shakers picks out a swathe of personalities from across the Heights, with backgrounds peppered with hook and seed potential for adventures.
To provide for a more immediate need – and as a hands-on sample of approach and style – three adventures fill the next three-dozen pages.
The final section gathers together an interesting resource for would-be Storyrunner’s – on top of a very thorough and entertaining example of play, which outlines all the conflicts and mechanical resolution along side the blow-by-blow dialogue – a pile of example conflicts, both standard and extended, sample Circumstances, characters stats for all the Movers and Shakers, and Archetypes for ultra-fast character generation.
This section won me over big time because getting the balance of a new game right can be a real brain beater. While you might only need to refer to this section for your first couple of adventures when setting difficulty levels for tasks, including them helps ease you through. I thoroughly loved the Extended Conflicts examples, because it kicks off with Building an Armored Car:
“Your crack commando unit turned soldiers of fortune managed to armor plate a utility vehicle in time for dealing with the criminals.”
I love it when a plan comes together!
Final Thoughts
In the end, it’s you against the world. Trigger Happy offers up a focussed system designed for fast and frenetic action, where cunning, nerve and a dose of good fortune might see you survive another day – but equally might land you in hospital, the slammer or worse. If you want to do action, it serves that up in spades, with mooks to mow down, henchmen to outwit, and bosses to foil in a final lead-filled, high octane showdown.
Trigger Happy isn’t about realism, libraries, gentlemanly swordplay, or polite diplomacy – and never pretends it is. It’s about shooting, bleeding, cursing, weaving, squealing, smashing, and showing people the error of their ways through a knuckle-based delivery system.
If you want low prep, big ego, high explosive action, Trigger Happy might very well prove the game for you.
My copy was provided for review. Trigger Happy, Caias Ward, Talespinner Holdings, $9.99 in PDF, also available as softcover POD. Quotes from the rulebook, Under Siege and The Transporter, courtesy of IMDb.
