The Roleplaying Game of Modern Horror
Genre: Horror
GNS: Simulationist
Rules Weight: Medium to Heavy
Where To Buy: RPGNow
What drew my attention to Blood! was its emulation of the survival horror genre. Often I’ve played or ran zombie survival games only for them to fall apart due to rules that are too abstract and restrictive, games that weren’t designed around the concept of a monster that can only really be killed with a blow to the head. So I picked up Blood! along with its zombie adventure Blood Tales: The End.
Leafing through the rulebook, I find it hard to classify the rules weight. It’s a d100 system, which is a generally versatile die mechanic because it allows for easy adjustment and easy gauging of risk. The only things I don’t like about d100 are that it also allows players to do the same, reducing their chances taking certain risks, and that it doesn’t have a bell curve. Call me picky, but I also don’t like the fact that so many games use it either.
Adding to this confusion of weight is the fact that dice rolls are very simplified. There’s no counting degrees of success as in other d100 games. A roll is either a botch, fail, success or critical, and effects for each are consistent from one skill use to another. Opposed checks work the same way: your skill level represents your chances of getting each type of roll, and it’s your type, not your number, that is compared to the opponent. The system for comparing them is just as simple: either you drew, or someone did better than the other and they win the contest.
The reason I find it difficult to classify the rules weight is that although the rules look more complicated than average on paper, they play through pretty simply. Character creation requires a few sums, but nothing complicated; add 20 to one of your attributes, divide an attribute by this etc. But once you get this out the way, and it doesn’t take long, everything is set up for you and recorded on the character sheet.
Characters in Blood! are the average people who are the victims of so many horror movies. No one is special, and many skills are purposely designed to be useless, such as “Pub Games”. If you want to play yourself in a zombie survival setting, as I do, this is pretty perfect (although I personally am not very good at pub games).
Dying in Blood! is about as much fun as staying alive. In fact, being a horror game, dying and losing body parts is a key part of the game. It’s also nicely realistic. You have Hit Points, which measure your stamina, really. Losing all your Hit Points won’t kill you, but will make you much easier to harm. This is realistic. A person can take a real beating and be reduced to a winded, whimpering ball on the floor without ever being at risk of death, but once they’re in that position they become a lot more vulnerable.
It’s losing Blood Points that kills you. Blood Points are literally that — they are your body’s ability to cope with blood loss. Weapon damage is grouped into types, with sharper weapons dealing more blood loss, while blunt weapons tend to deal just HP damage at lower levels. A particularly severe blow from any weapon, though, will lead to a character bleeding out each round until they run completely out of Blood Points. First Aid is very important in this game.
There’s an optional Energy Points which measure exhaustion. I won’t be using these as I see Hit Points as fulfilling this role, so I won’t mention them any further.
As I said, the game is great for zombies, as well as other viruses. It provides rules for both fast (Fury Virus) and slow (Zombie Plague) types, as well as vampires, an insanity disease, the meteor-induced blindness from Day of the Triffids, and a few others.
Only after learning all the different ways characters can be maimed and killed do we learn about how combat — the art of not being maimed and killed — actually works. This order seems rather fitting. Combat is relatively simple. Aimed attacks are dealt with nicely with four basic areas and different effects applied to successful attacks directed at those areas. Combat works like any other skill checks: both combatants roll and compare their successes, the defender declaring which type of defensive action they’re taking. One abstraction that I like is the idea that although a knife can’t be used to parry another weapon, it can be used to ward an attacker off with a thrust and a wave.
The rules for burst and automatic weapon fire are versatile, but their realism is debatable. Effectively, the more bullets you expend, the less accurate your fire but the more damage you can do. Whether that’s realistic or not is a debate to be had on a forum, not a review, and to be honest I can’t say I know of a game that does any better. Like grappling, automatic fire is something roleplaying games are yet to iron out.
Ah, grappling. It’s not simple enough to be used without reference to the book, at least if this is your first time playing, but it at least uses the same core mechanics. Opposed checks are made and a draw results in a stalemate, a success results in the attacker being given one of three options (ground and pound, drag or pin) with each applying various effects. On the defender’s turn, they can choose to break free or reverse the grapple. How difficult this is to do depends on how well the attacker did last round. It’s certainly more fun-sounding and workable that other methods I’ve seen.
I forgot to mention, each action requires you to spend a point of Action, whether you’re initiating an action or opposing it. This means, if you want to go all out, you can, but you cannot defend against attacks. You can carry Action Points over into the next round if you don’t use them all, but there’s a maximum to how many you can hold. The game recommends the GM distribute beads or coins or something similar to track this. Action Points style combat has always been my favourite, so it would be biased for me to rate the game on this, but, yeah, I like it.
Many more methods of attacking characters are also described, including running them over and crashing into their vehicle, and there’s a chase mechanic. I notice that there’s no mention of how you roll to hit in this circumstance or how dodging works, only damage, but I assume it requires a success on the drive skill and there dodging as in combat. I also distinctly notice that the section on dealing damage to a vehicle lists tires, headlights and engine blocks but makes no mention of smashing windows. In zombie survival game, or indeed any game where the enemy is trying to smash their way to you, I’d consider this vital.
The game also has an integrated fear and insanity system, where the setting wears away at the characters slowly. When you lose your Mind Points, you lose your mind in various ways. Unlike, say, Cthulhu, getting to a safe place and resting up restores your Mind Points.
That’s half the book dealt with, and about a quarter of that was about how to kill people. Of the rest, about half is a list of creatures, then there’s a weapons table covering every conceivable improvised weapon (it’s about 200 items long), and then the book finishes up with critical hits tables for every conceivable form of damage.
Overall, I feel the game very accurately depicts the horror genre in a way no other game does. It’s a game about the victims who fought back, and I feel it puts more control in the hands of the players than Cthulhu-type games do. To counter this, the level of action is a lot more intense, providing for a much more combat-oriented experience.
As for playability, the game sets itself up in a unique way that, though very thorough, plays pretty consistently. All actions, whether opposed or unopposed, use the same mechanic. The only times you’ll need to flick through the book are in specific circumstances such as such as critical hits or insanity, and in these cases I think the suspense of the players watching you flick through the book to find out what happens to their character will work well. Grappling and automatic fire, I imagine, can be printed out for reference or memorised with enough play-through. I already have the automatic fire rules memorised, and I’ve only read them once
Integrity: **** There’s some table-referencing in specific circumstances and the process of deriving certain statistics is unique to each, but in these cases the system is laid out pretty clearly and the simple dice mechanism is always the same no matter what.
Combat: **** Combat is simulationist and requires some bookkeeping as it’s much less abstract than more gamey RPGs, but it’s also short and deadly. This leaves combat open to a number of clever tactical choices.
Speed: **** Despite its apparent complexity, the game plays fairly quickly. However, it gets slowed down in certain circumstances, such as rolling criticals, aimed shots and grappling.
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