Cowboy Western Roleplaying Games

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>Posts The Proposition

Aces and Eights is one of the most beautiful books I've ever seen. It's totally packed with loving period detail, a true testament to the creators love of the time period and genre.
It is, however, NOT for the faint of heart. A&8 is a CRUNCHY game. It tracks combat in tenths of a second, for example, and has a huge skill list. It's also grim and gritty, this is a game where you can survive a gun fight and die of an infection two weeks later.
I'm a more casual kinda guy, so I hacked out some of the parts I disliked and improvised around the rest. Still, our A&8 campaigns were some of the best my group has ever had.
Something to understand is that this game is perfect for running "Deadwood", but needs a little work if you want to run "Django Unchained" if you catch my drift. It's totally possible to wind up with a legendary gunslinger who can beat twelve men by himself, but you're much more likely to be running characters like an earnest prospector, a brothel madame and a Native convert than the Magnificent Seven. Combat is involved, and deadly. A gunfight is a big deal, not D&D style "several encounters per session" sort of thing.
Still, this game is a total treat. I thoroughly recommend getting your hands on a copy if purely for inspiration alone.

I like the idea where combat is the LAST thing you want to do in a game. It ups the stakes and puts more of an emphasis on roleplaying rather than being a murderhobo. I don't think I'd mind the crunch so much, but as long as it stayed deadly I wouldn't mind streamlining the system in certain aspects. can you give some example so how you did that?

Well, it's a bit hard to do without the book in front of me, but basically I dropped a LOT of the modifiers. The game officially has a bonus for each shot fired at the same target... and a penalty for firing too rapidly in succession. I pretty much ditched that. I also usually ignored the rule that says you have to have put 300 rounds through a particular gun to not take a penalty to using it. Mostly it was things like that, situational modifiers. I played pretty fast and loose with things like "flinching", that is, getting struck will delay your actions by a certain number of counts.
Basically, the game is crunchy but runs pretty smooth if you stick to the rules in the introductory chapter, but there's a BOAT LOAD of extra stuff later in the book. Some of it is great, some of it not so much.
I also fudged around with the count a bit, basing things on spur of the moment calculations as opposed to ticking out every single action.
Top of my head, let's say it takes about a twenty count to stand up from the table and draw your pistol, my player wants to stand up, draw and kick over the table simultaneously. Rather than calculate all that out as far as how long the rules say it takes to kick a table over, I have him make a strength and a dex test, and round the whole thing out at about a 25 count. If he blows both, I'll say it takes a 30 count instead, blows one but not the other then by 25 he's got his gun out but hasn't kicked the table.

Anyway, if you've got like-minded players who are down with a low action, high rp game I say go for it! You can have some great fun just herding cattle, panning for gold, making deals with traders and Native bands etc etc.

So, can someone provide a link?

Damn, it certainly sounds like there's a lot of crunch. But combat sounds really fast too, so if it happens rarely I guess it's not as big of a deal.
As for dying of infection 2 weeks after a gun fight, I'm sure that can be mitigated a bit for PC-consideration.
I am also interested in a pdf or something

Do you have any good stories? I'm getting interested

Okay, I'm not gonna let a good western thread go to waste. Let's play theoretical game. Setting is the American west, inspired by your favorite classic westerns. A little Morricone. A little Peckinpah. Maybe a little Tarantino because this is 2016 and we can afford to be post postmodern.

The destination is Nevada, where the Comstock Lode in 1858 has created a boom time for silver. Whether or not the ore is your ticket, you think you can change your life out west and find yourself - in one fashion or another - on a coach heading into the territories.

What's your character?

Forgot my pic.

Posting this link from the PDF share thread
mediafire.com/download/5by390gva9csz9g/Aces & Eights.pdf

Jack Carver, son of a drunk Wyoming railroad worker come down south to make something of himself. 19, an okay shot, and literate.

>literate.

Well la di DAH ain't we fancy.

He hid from his abusive dad in the church and the preacher was kind enough to learn him some words

Does Doomtown reloaded qualifies for this thread?

Sure. I mean, it's a setting, ain't it? Even if it's for an LCG.

I have wanted to play it, though.

Doomtown is really good. the one thing it does have is its initial learning curve but after that I've never felt such a tense matches against someone else.I lkie how the game revolves around movement and zone control rather than fighting. shame that the game is ignored by everyone else.

It would have been great if it was more multiplayer focused.

I'm not sure what are you talking about.
the game can be easily played up to 4 players at time (now rounds become eternal that's another thing)

It reminded me, looking at it, of Netrunner, and how the mechanics serve the setting.

Ephram Chapelhouse, former cotton grower who sold his failing fields in Georgia to rebuild his family fortunes through mine ownership and ore processing.

okay hold on can we just get together and run a game or what

One of the classics!

I see David Hayter has a hairy chest

This film had too many people pointing their guns at the camera.
And no cowboys. Hell, it was barely a western, more of a revange flick or drama with gore.

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Just started a ratkin wild west. Bumping!

Well, I mean... the old west didn't have that many cowboys, and none too many of 'em were gunslingers. The gun-pointin thing is pretty dead on, though.

Hyuk.