Tuesday 15 December 2009

It's a deal, it's a steal, it's brilliant: Dog Town by Cold Blooded Games

Dog Town by Cold Blooded Games is a modern Roleplaying game set in the gangster world of 1970s New York. It's gritty, dark, sexy, violent and adult in nature. It's GTA, Scarface, Carlito's Way, Goodfellas and Superfly. Its beautiful, professional and evocative. It's unbelievable that Dog Town is free.

Villain crafting

You begin with the welcome first step of deciding style of play. The three styles are Punk (gritty, realistic), Gangster (cinematic) or Anti-Hero (one man army, comic book). No-one is putting a gun to your head to choose one of these styles but by pointing out the dead elephant head in the room up front will help many tie down the sort of gangsters they will make.

The next steps are familiar: You point assign attributes (Bulk, Power, Toughness, Reflexes, Sense, Brains, Control, Style, Experience and Luck). Calculate derived attributes (there are 12). Select criminal type (like a class but less constricting). Talents and flaws further tune your character and add Vices - a randomly rolled flaw every character gets.

Background is a delicious feast. Dog Town includes lots of help such as name lists (organised by background, Irish, Italian etc). This kind of detail does not add a mechanic to the game but piles on depth. You'll be up to your eyes. You finish with adding Skills to the character, for which there is an admirable but not oppressive list.

There are other mechanic measures for a character, such as influence: which changes given your actions in game. Police Status tells you how much the police are after you - augmented by Warning Signs, which are markers that the police use to warn other cops about you (such as Violent or Drug user). You start with only $40, a watch and your clothes and a criminal mind. Character Creation reads like a 1970s gangster film. It feels right.

Putting in the boot

Dog Town's mechanics appear simple but have layers on top of it. You roll a d20 against a target number, adding any appropriate skills and talents. That is wrapped in a layer of timing. Some actions take longer than others and that is modeled too. The level of success of any action affects the discipline of the characters.

Combat rounds are broken up into slots and depending on your fighting style, these slots are filled with a myriad of blows and actions. Gun fights have their own rules, as do explosives. Injuries are gained using a chart describing all manner of ailments. There's one for close combat, fire fighting and explosives. And for falling. And for drowning. And car crashes. And for furry fedora fashion failures.

You're not a gangster? Really?

Don't know about torture? Don't know how to run a racket? What about creating concrete overcoats? Dog Town can help you with that. It lists rackets, how much they pay, how much time and effort they require to keep going and so on. There are more mechanics to help you build a criminal empire. There's even a table for Flunkies. These mechanics allow you to scale your game from a small band of punks beating up grannies to mob bosses running the whole show. Police tactics are included too, giving the GM some help in hunting you down like the scum you are. Or that you will certainly feel by this point.

Two hundred and ninety five pages

Dog Town leaves nothing to chance, including lists of vehicles and weapons from the 1970s. The setting information is great, the players given a sketched requirement to amass $100,000 in 90 days. The GM section is superb, with a massive list of plot hooks and example play. Whats more:
Its beautiful!

It's beautiful in the most evocative sense. The imagery is of a professional standard and layout is clean throughout. If the main rulebook is too much for you, then gorge your ravenous eyes over the lite delight on Dog Town Stripped, which takes the core mechanics and shaves them for the lighter appetite. Beyond that, there is a plethora of source books (I counted 8) and I am pleased to say that Jonathan Ridd (I believe to be the main brains behind Cold Blooded Games) is still active and over at 1km1kt.

Spill the beans

Like all gamers, I want more. And so this is the paragraph in which I shine a torch in Dog Town's face. The maps are not as high quality as the majority of the art and I am not sure that a key works as well as labelling. The font choices for the main and sub headings are very similar, making it difficult to determine whether you are in a new section. I think the whole book could do with some more partitioning and order, following some ideas from my guide to organisation. There is some text on dark backgrounds - fine on screen but too little contrast on a print. The explanation of mechanics is a little cumbersome - a problem mostly mitigated by excellent examples.

Conclusions

Dog Town is a professionally produced, crunchy gangster game that feels like a gangster game. By the end of my stop and search, I felt like a criminal. Dog Town feels like a crime training manual, which is testament to its superb writing. Downloading Dog Town for free is a crime. The production values of this game set it in the commercial bracket and I am still confused why it is not. Go and download it now before the brothers Ridd realise their terrible error in making it free and put it back on the market. I'm going off to hand myself into the nearest police station.

More opinions
Blog Review by misterecho
RPG.Net review by Carl Morris

4 comments:

Adam Dickstein said...

Very cool. This game reminds me of the Japanese RPG SATASUPE, described as the Asian Punk RPG.

Think Kill Bill, John Woo, Chow Yun Fat and such. This game is the Eastern Yin to Dog Town's Western Yang.

misterecho said...

Thanks for the link!

I agree on all points. Dogtown extrudes awesomness. In the true sense of the word!

Many thanks Mr Ridd. I wonder though what were your motivations for making it free?

Rob Lang said...

Thanks for the comments, guys!

@misterecho - We'll see if Mr Ridd can JUSTIFY HIMSELF! How dare he make it free?!?! Making the rest of us hobbyists look bad with his professional filth. CALLING IT FREE. The devil! :-)

(I'll prod him to leave a comment here or explain himself on 1km1kt and link it up)

Endy said...

This is a great game, one of the best I've seen in a while. When I asked about the system on RPG.Net, to see if anyone else was playing it, one person made the most interesting comment about it I've read.

"Dog Town is the only game that makes you feel like a criminal."

I can't help but agree. It's available free at DTRPG or RPGNow, which is where I got it.