Bram Stoker's Dracula (the film): The RPG
After gaining some notoriety for Phoenix Command (1986), a simulationist tactical RPG notorious for some of the most detailed (and least playable) combat rules ever put to print, Leading Edge Games managed to secure the rights to publish official RPG rules for several popular films of the late '80s to early '90s. Among these were Aliens, Lawnmower Man, and Terminator 2 (which I believe only saw release as a miniatures game). Think a game design company best known for ultra-crunchy realism is a good fit for big-budget action franchises? I'll give you one guess.
Not too much going on here, against what I was expecting. Clean, if fairly boring. First step: roll a d% to determine background. Sounds good, and reminds me of the career determination in Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. Turns out Jimmy the Vampire Hunter is a professional occultist. We'll find out what that entails later.
Step two: either build your Primary Characteristics via point-buy or roll 3d6 twice and take the highest result for each Characteristic in sequence. Obviously I choose the latter, which I think is a nice, simple way to create a set of above-average stats. Secondary Characteristics only get one 3d6 roll in order, then a final d6 to add to any of those numbers. Which will always be Motivation, as we'll see.
Step three: Roll for Age (which takes roughly seven seconds) and Skills (which takes roughly forever). Jimmy's 51. His skills? Gotta first figure out his Learning Value (LV, and I'm trying really hard to make that the only acronym I use in this whole post), and that's simply Intelligence+Motivation, 25 altogether. And here's the first sign of a broken system: this single value is overwhelmingly more important than anything else on the character sheet. For every skill you choose, you make a d% roll against the LV: anything equal to or under that number is a success. You can also make multiple rolls on the same skill if you really just need to be a Grandmaster Boilermaker.
If you fail, you're a novice and get a -4 penalty to those rolls. If you succeed, you get neither a bonus nor a penalty. If you simply don't choose a skill, however, you're considered "untrained" and take a -8 penalty. Yes, you can be untrained in things like Balance. Bearing in mind that skill check rolls only have a result range of 3-18, and the skill system "covers the full range of human activity" (p17), there's a whole lot of incentive to take the maximum number of skills possible and make a single LV roll against all of them.
And that involves a lot of flipping between p7 and an unnumbered page near the back of the book sandwiched around 40 pages of unrelated, unindexed tables. (As an aside, the binding of this book is along the lines of the cheapest paperbacks you had to buy for your college courses, with stiff pages and a spine that always feels one step away from breaking. For a book with so much cross-reference, it's extremely unwieldy.) I chose the most ridiculous skills I could find, including Balance (if you don't choose this, there's a more-than-50% chance you'd fall off a standard footbridge trying to cross a street), Arctic Exploration, Horsemanship, Photography, Connoisseur, Etiquette, Oceanography, Philosophy, the aforementioned Boilermaker, Hot Air Balloons, and Taxidermy. Why Taxidermy would ever be relevant in any RPG, I have no idea, but it's listed (with no description, mind you), so I took it. All told I rolled against my LV for 24 skills, exceeding the space given on the character sheet.
Although Characteristics do influence skill checks on a vague, GM-determined basis, they're almost always limited to a -1 to +2 range (and aren't listed on the character sheet or anywhere besides p19); the first three skill levels, on which you're most likely to land with your initial LV roll, range from -8 to 0. Thus, someone with a high LV will have a much better chance to succeed on about 20% of their skill checks. This advantage will continue throughout the course of the campaign, as well. Worse, if you use the point-buy method, you can give yourself up to 21 Intelligence, leading to a potential 45 LV with lucky Secondary rolls.
Okay, we've made it through this section, chosen our useless skills, made another couple rolls for special skills Faith and Social Status, and finally make even more LV rolls for background-specific skills (Jimmy ends up being a Metaphysics expert vampire hunter), and now we can... create Supporting Characters. Yes, Bram Stoker's Dracula: The RPG necessitates the use of player-generated hirelings. Luckily, Leading Edge recognizes what a slog that'd be and provides a table of faceless Supporting Character statistics in the back of the book for players to graft personalities onto.
Afterward comes the Equipment and Combat Abilities portion. For a company with a simulationist reputation, character load capacity is determined in a fairly bizarre way: you cross-index your Strength with the type of clothing or armor you choose, and the result is how much weigh you can carry on top of that. Seems way more intuitive to just show capacity based on Strength then include different clothing types by weight in the equipment list, but hey. Following this, I give Jimmy a set of standard equipment that an occultist might carry (p12), including Cameras, Notebooks, and access to libraries and the like (capitalization theirs). (Note that according to p38 the setting is assumed to be 19th century, yet my occultist rules-as-written keeps camera on his person when out in the wild.) There's no weight given for these things so I hand-wave a one for all of it.
We then determine Combat Actions, cross-indexed from our skill level in one of the two combat skills (Gun or Hand-to-Hand; I took Archery as a skill but it's not an option) and since I'm totally untrained in either of those I only get three. I don't know what that means but the max is only eight. Next is the Knockout Value, a "simple and highly realistic system of shock and Physical Damage" (p14), also referenced as a combat skill versus a characteristic; Jimmy's is only 4 versus a maximum of 147! Fortunately, it seems he's not long for this world.
Step 5 is the Learning Roll, which the book states it's already talked about and so I'm baffled as to why it's even listed here again.
And finally, the optional-yet-recommended Weapon Data step, in which we choose our weapons without any systematic regard for price or setting - it lists arms from the medieval era to today with no cost attached. I choose an M60 because it's the most powerful thing I'm strong enough to carry in addition to my clothes and camera. (Turns out that, while I have enough Combat Actions to draw the gun, I don't have enough to reload it.)
Although we're done with the character according to the book, there's still a blank field for Money. It's filled in with $300 on the example character sheet but I can't find any rules for what goes there so I just wrote in the result of my Social Status roll. Reputation Points, Superior Support, Psychotic State, and Control Number (exciting!) weren't mentioned in the character creation chapter so I ignored those.
Without going into too much detail on the combat system, I'll say that, yes, it's not the total math-hell I expected, but it's still a ruleset for to a blockbuster movie that includes tables for Glancing Blows and details degrees of damage by hit location. Give. Me. A. Break.
On the positive side, there's a fair number of large color images from the movie present in the otherwise black & white book, and the Vampires section seems well-researched and could be an excellent resource for another game. There's also an option for creating a vampire character/party that maybe I'll return to one day in a fit of self-flagellation. There's little original art to speak of besides traced illustrations of weaponry; the book instead opts for vaguely contextual quotes from the movie.
(p13)
(p20)
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