Troubleshooters: The Makers of Kult doing a Tintin-like RPG!

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I saw this advertised before - looks quite promising actually.
 
Voros said:
So Helmgast, the company behind the excellent reboot of Kult and going to be releasing a game called The Troubleshooters based on Tintin-like adventure Eurocomics. Certainly a change of pace from the horrors of Kult!


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This looks very cool! I dig it. Two quibbles. One I wish the art was drawn in ligne claire style. Only because I'm a sucker for it. That being said the art looks fantastic and true to the source material. Reading about the mechanics, the words "story point economy" come up. I'm hoping thats a savage worlds type benny system. Not fatetish. Which theres nothing wrong with. Its just not my jam.
 
Interesting. Any indication that the game will have nuanced rules for non-violent challenges? Most games major in combat with relatively little mechanical support for resolving other kinds of challenge like stealth, chases, investigation, persuasion and so on. It can make the ‘game’ bit of such RPGs a bit thin, in my experience.
 
dbm said:
Interesting. Any indication that the game will have nuanced rules for non-violent challenges? Most games major in combat with relatively little mechanical support for resolving other kinds of challenge like stealth, chases, investigation, persuasion and so on. It can make the ‘game’ bit of such RPGs a bit thin, in my experience.
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Good question! Heres a blurb from the designers, "The system is based on d% task checks against a skill value. With skills, abilities, complications and a Story Point economy, the system is designed from the ground up to fit the genre. Skills, abilities and complications are recorded in the character’s passport." So maybe CoC like with bennies? Complete guess on my part.
 
Thanks, I had a little dig and found similar info which doesn’t give us much to go with at the moment.

Looks like they are planning a Kickstarter so hopefully there should be more details or perhaps even free QuickStart rules so people can make an informed backing decision.
 
Hello! I'm Krister Sundelin, and I'm the lead designer/writer of The Troubleshooters. I hope I can answer some of your questions.

So where to start? The Troubleshooters is written in English, and we have a Canadian editor to improve on the text. The French edition will be translated by Arkhane Asylum, our French partner which released the French edition of Kult.

The Troubleshooters starts in 1965, but it's not exactly the 1965 as we know it. The Concorde is already flying and a Japanese-French expedition has landed on the Moon using an atomic rocket. There are "extra countries" like Arenwald and Sylveria in Central Europe, San Angelo in the Caribbean, Sitomeyang in Indochina, and so on. And of course, there is the threat of the Octopus, an evil organisation striving for world control.

Stylistically, we're a mix of école Marcinelle, the more action-filled style of Spirou et Fantasio and Gil Jourdan, and ligne claire, the style of Tintin, Blake&Mortimer and Yoko Tsuno. Vehicles and locations are definitely more ligne claire, though; while characters and action are more école Marcinelle. We're also inspired by TV shows like The Saint and Lupin III.

Player characters are ordinary but competent and colourful. The characters are friends who have adventures happening to them, and which have them go all over the world to experience them. There is a plot hook system to get the adventure started: there are 11 plot hooks and every character has one or two of them. Everyone should have different plot hooks. Then, every adventure has 4-6 startup handouts based on corresponding plot hooks. This all but guarantees that if you have a moderately sized group – 4 players, each with 2 plot hooks – at least one character is guaranteed a plot hook to kick off the adventure.

There are about a dozen templates that allows you to get going quickly (and six pregenerated characters that we will use in quickplay scenarios and as examples throughout the core book), but you can tweak the templates a lot, and make characters without using templates at all.

The system is indeed inspired by Basic Roleplaing, so "CoC with bennies" is quite close. There are no attributes, though, but only skills. The core mechanic is "roll d% lower than or equal to the skill value". Skills can be combined to skill challenges, which are used for chases, investigations, social interactions (unless roleplayed), stealth, group activities, creating mad inventions, and so on. Opposed rolls are also common, pretty much as they are in King Arthur Pendragon (roll below your skill value, but higher than the opponent's roll).

The story point economy is tied to abilities and complications. Players get story points for entertaining the table, getting Karma (ones and tens of the d% roll are equal), activating complications, and getting captured. Players spend story points for flipping task checks (making a failed roll of 73 into a successful roll of 37), activating abilities, and influencing the story flow. It is pretty easy to be captured, but also easy to escape thanks to the story points.

Death is not really a part of The Troubleshooters, and when it is, it almost always mean something. In fact, losing Vitality doesn't even mean that you're wounded, but rather unbalanced or out of breath. You're only wounded when you take the Wounded condition (your choice), and you're only dead if you take the Mortal Peril condition (again, your choice) and Vitality runs out. Otherwise, you're just Out Cold and typically find yourself hogtied and locked into a room in the villain's secret base.

We have several quickplay scenarios planned. One of them, The Minoan Expedition, will be released as soon as we have the time to edit it and add pregens and short rules to it.

I hope this answers at least some of your questions. If you have any other questions, please ask!
 
Welcome and thanks for taking time to reply here!

Could you perhaps share an example encounter / scene that a group might play out? To help us get a view of where the mechanics fit into the evolving fiction?

Something other than a fight, since most games have lots for that but games with good support for non-combat action are quite rare?

Thanks again!
 
Sure! Here's an example of sneaking into a secret Octopus base. The Octopus is the main villain of the game, a secret organisation striving for world control and led by the notorious count von Zadrith.

Sneaking into that base is an example of a skill challenge, which went something like this:

We had found the emergency exit of the base. One character, Paul (thief and smuggler), decided to pick the lock but was disappointed when there wasn't one. It was an emergency exit, not an emergency entrance. So instead we decided to look for an air intake or something. We found one, but it was high up, there was a sturdy padlock on the steel grille, and it was a very narrow opening.

Elektra (our rally driver) had the idea of parking the car next to the opening, and then have Paul pick the lock. And if it was too high up, then Frida (Swedish intelligence officer and the strongest among us) would have to lift him. Frida complained "I'm an air force officer, not a ladder!" And finally, they would send Éloïse (my character, a French schoolgirl and mad inventor) down the air vent to open the door from the inside. So that became the skill challenge: a Strength check from Frida to lift Paul, a Prestidigitation check from Paul to pick the padlock, an Agility check from Éloïse to crawl down the dark vent, and a Search check from Éloïse because it was dark.

Prestidigitation worked fine, but The Strength check failed. Agility failed with a roll of 40, but I could argue that since it was because of the narrow space, Éloïse's could activate her ability Young to flip the roll of 40 to a successful roll of 04. And then the Search check failed and I could not flip it to a success.

With two successes of four, that was a Limited success. A limited success means that we have a temporary success, or a success but something unintended happens, or that we get a tough choice on top of the success. In this case, the Director started off by having Frida's failed Strength check mean that she and Paul fell through the vinyl roof of Paul's Citroën 2CV, and that Éloïse fell through an opening down into a corridor hurting her head and arms because of the failed Search check – and also that an alarm was set off, but the Director didn't tell us that at first.

We weren't really prepared for taking on a bunch of Octopus henchmen. We were just there to sneak in and find information, possibly whacking a guard in the head from behind, or something. So when a bunch of them waited around the corner with submachine guns ready, we were surprised and decided to surrender.

Being captured gives you a big bunch of story points (at the time of the playtest, you got a full pool of 12 points; it was eventually changed so being captured gives you 9 points up to a maximum total of 12), and were marched off into the main control room, where count von Zadrith held his mandatory gloating speech on how we had failed to stop his plans for world domination, with evil laughter, of course.

For six story points, you influence the story a lot, and I suddenly got an idea, spent six points and said "Ugh! Dad! Stop it! You're just embarrassing me with you B movie villain act!"

And everyone at the table almost fell off their chairs laughing. The Director quickly got his act together and stammered "Pumpkin?! What… what are you doing here? My little darling, how have you been?"

"I am being captured by my megalomaniac dad! How do you think I would be? You better release us this minute, or Mom will never speak to you again."

That was my idea: to spend a lot of story points to have us set free. But the Director had so much fun planned breaking out of the Octopus base, so he suggested that it would be a minor influence instead which is worth two story points. "Keep quiet, rebellious girl! I have more important things to do than concern myself with your mother's feelings!"

"You never had time for your family! You only cared about yourself! You never could face the responsibility, and that’s why you ran off to play a parody of a Bond villain!”

“That’s it! Go to your room! Without dinner!” And then we were marched off to her room (which of course was in the base) and locked in, but it was a lot easier to escape from it than from a concrete cell.

I hope that this gives you an idea of how skill challenges and story points work.
 
This sounds like something I've been looking for, for running something Tintin-inspired. Looks easy enough to adapt to something more closely resembling the Tintin-verse, stealing straight from the Tintin comics. Color me interested!
 
Looking forward to picking this up now, the quickstart looks good.
 
Wow this game bring back memories. I grew up with this style of comics.
My parents own somewhere in the 20 numbers, of both Spirou et Fantasio and Yoko Tsuno. I have all the Tintin comics.
I also have another comic series called Natacha, that would fit right into this game I think.
Natacha is this beautiful lady, by the way.
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I also followed the link to the Helmgast website. Wow they have a couple of cool looking games, and since I'm danish I don't need translations. Definitely going to by some of them, in the new year.
It also brought back memories of how I got into roleplaying games. Because my first roleplaying game was the swedish Dragons & Demons game, a Runequest like game.
I first saw those books in the library, translated into danish by the way. I then went to a bookstore with my grandfather to get them for my allowance money, they didn't have them but could order them for me.
When my grandfather went to the shop and picked them up, and paid for them, when they arrived.
He then out of curiosity read them before giving them to me, (without asking for the money they cost).
We often played boardgames together, so he asked if he should run a game for me and my brother. He ran several games for me and my brother. Eventually I wanted to try running a game, so I did. I later roped my friends in school into playing.
My grandfather passed away 20 years ago, at the age of 82. Even though we very rarely played rpgs together anymore he often asked if I still played.

Wow what a chrismas gift this thread was.
 
The Mad Hatter said:
Wow this game bring back memories. I grew up with this style of comics.
My parents own somewhere in the 20 numbers, of both Spirou et Fantasio and Yoko Tsuno. I have all the Tintin comics.
I also have another comic series called Natacha, that would fit right into this game I think.
Natacha is this beautiful lady, by the way.
View attachment 14333

I also followed the link to the Helmgast website. Wow they have a couple of cool looking games, and since I'm danish I don't need translations. Definitely going to by some of them, in the new year.
It also brought back memories of how I got into roleplaying games. Because my first roleplaying game was the swedish Dragons & Demons game, a Runequest like game.
I first saw those books in the library, translated into danish by the way. I then went to a bookstore with my grandfather to get them for my allowance money, they didn't have them but could order them for me.
When my grandfather went to the shop and picked them up, and paid for them, when they arrived.
He then out of curiosity read them before giving them to me, (without asking for the money they cost).
We often played boardgames together, so he asked if he should run a game for me and my brother. He ran several games for me and my brother. Eventually I wanted to try running a game, so I did. I later roped my friends in school into playing.
My grandfather passed away 20 years ago, at the age of 82. Even though we very rarely played rpgs together anymore he often asked if I still played.

Wow what a chrismas gift this thread was.
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Welcome to the Pub, Mad Hatter!
 
The Mad Hatter said:
I also followed the link to the Helmgast website. Wow they have a couple of cool looking games, and since I'm danish I don't need translations. Definitely going to by some of them, in the new year.
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Could you tell us a little more about them? Kult I am familiar with, but the others all look intriguing.
 
3rik said:
Could you tell us a little more about them? Kult I am familiar with, but the others all look intriguing.
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Sure. I'll be out for the rest of the day though.

But sometime during the weekend I'll do an actual readthrough of the quikstarts I downloaded. Have just skimmed through them for now.

Then I'll tell a bit more about them.

Stay tuned!
 
Hmmm I don't need this, but I like it's vibe!
I've flagged it as a 'Remind Me' to consider backing it at Business Class... :thumbsup:
 
Backed, though I'm not entirely sold on the Story Points thing.
 
I really wanted to get into this but the ruleset seems to be a poor fit IMO from what I saw with the Quickstart. I also think I would likely only run this with prewritten adventures and just there isn't enough here for me to invest given what else is out there.
 
Trippy said:
Why?
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My first reaction is that it was more complex than I would like. However, on further review,it was less about complexity and more that its convoluted. At its heart, it begins to look like a traditionally designed old school system like BRP (though the success system of pips is just odd). However, when you get to action and combat (including damage) its starts to feel like D&D3e. Then, you get a narrative system which looks simple in principle but becomes burdened by a lot of specific costs and mechanics.

It feels like they threw together a lot of ideas they liked from a range of RPGs without much of a filter. They may have hoped that people would find parts that appealed to them, but IME it tends to mean that people are more likely to find an issue with it.
 
Skywalker said:
it was less about complexity and more that its convoluted. At its heart, it begins to look like a traditionally designed old school system like BRP (though the success system of pips is just odd). However, when you get to action and combat (including damage) its starts to feel like D&D3e
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I would tend to agree, and won’t be backing the Kickstarter, either.

I comes back to what I asked the developers back near the top of this thread: how does your game make non-combat more than just a simple yes / no dice roll and from my reading of the QuickStart rules it didn‘t bring anything new to the party.

Lovely aesthetics, but nothing special in the rules department. And the rules is the bit you actually use at the table, IMO, not the evocative art.

Speaking personally, I bough the three art books by Simon Stålenhag rather than buying the RPG for the same reason.
 
To me, it looks like the pip system will solve quite a few problems that other ways to modify the chance of success in BRP-like systems have. I don't know if it will fit this game yet or not. After all, I might end up using another system for The Troubleshooters, and this system when running some other game.

I also backed the game to have it if I will introduce new players to role-playing. Comics like Tintin and Spirou is, or at least was, pretty big so a lot of people are familiar with them.
 
dbm said:
Lovely aesthetics, but nothing special in the rules department. And the rules is the bit you actually use at the table, IMO, not the evocative art.
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I am not the same. I don’t need the rules to be special. By that metric, almost every new RPG is not worth getting. If the rules are designed with a clear focus, fun in play and ultimately provide the experience that the RPG is selling, then that’s just fine with me. FWIW that’s why I was more than happy with Tales from the Loop RPG as it did exactly that.

With Troubleshooters, I am not convinced that’s the case. From what I have seen they are confused. Not traditional enough for that crowd, not narrative enough for that crowd, and not clear enough for introducing new Or young RPGers.
 
Skywalker said:
I am not the same. I don’t need the rules to be special. By that metric, almost every new RPG is not worth getting. If the rules are designed with a clear focus, fun in play and ultimately provide the experience that the RPG is selling, then that’s just fine with me. FWIW that’s why I was more than happy with Tales from the Loop RPG as it did exactly that.

With Troubleshooters, I am not convinced that’s the case. From what I have seen they are confused. Not traditional enough for that crowd, not narrative enough for that crowd, and not clear enough for introducing new Or young RPGers.
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I have the complete opposite reaction to this game's system, than you. In fact, I really like it. It looks a lot like how my homebrew systems end being like. Probably because I often do exactly like you said in your first post. Take some ideas and systems from games I like, and mix them together.
Many modern RPG systems end up feeling far too streamlined to me. This often makes them boring in the long run, to run and play, again to me.

I might have to break my, don't back Kickstarters principle, for this game.
 
Good for you. The individual components look fine so if the amalgam works for you, it’s should be sweet.

Troubleshooters does paint a pretty consistent picture of how Helmgast goes about its rules design. Kult was something similar with Helmgast grabbing stuff Almost at random from World of Darkness and Powered by the Apocalypse with little understanding of the underlying design behind the components. By all accounts, it shouldn’t have worked (and many people still hold that view). But IME it actually did, though it feels like it did more by lucky happenstance than by design. I hope that lightning like this can strike twice with Troubleshooters. However, I would have to see a few actual plays like I did for Kult before I was convinced it has.
 
Skywalker said:
My first reaction is that it was more complex than I would like. However, on further review,it was less about complexity and more that its convoluted. At its heart, it begins to look like a traditionally designed old school system like BRP (though the success system of pips is just odd). However, when you get to action and combat (including damage) its starts to feel like D&D3e. Then, you get a narrative system which looks simple in principle but becomes burdened by a lot of specific costs and mechanics.

It feels like they threw together a lot of ideas they liked from a range of RPGs without much of a filter. They may have hoped that people would find parts that appealed to them, but IME it tends to mean that people are more likely to find an issue with it.
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I may have to reconsider. I'll take a more thorough look at the Quickstart rules.

Skywalker said:
If the rules are designed with a clear focus, fun in play and ultimately provide the experience that the RPG is selling, then that’s just fine with me.
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I could easily run this kind of setting using a rules set designed for pulpy adventure, so I agree. If the rules are too convoluted or fiddly there's nothing in the book that I'd specifically need to run "Tintin" style euro-pulp. Intuitively, I'm thinking this might actually work pretty well using the Vortex rules (Doctor Who, Primeval, Pulp Fantastic).
 
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Skywalker said:
Good for you. The individual components look fine so if the amalgam works for you, it’s should be sweet.

Troubleshooters does paint a pretty consistent picture of how Helmgast goes about its rules design. Kult was something similar with Helmgast grabbing stuff Almost at random from World of Darkness and Powered by the Apocalypse with little understanding of the underlying design behind the components. By all accounts, it shouldn’t have worked (and many people still hold that view). But IME it actually did, though it feels like it did more by lucky happenstance than by design. I hope that lightning like this can strike twice with Troubleshooters. However, I would have to see a few actual plays like I did for Kult before I was convinced it has.
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Well, I disagree with that. Nothing was chosen from World of Darkness games in the design of Kult: Divinity Lost - at all - and everything was based on a Powered by the Apocalypse system. I’m not sure what "little understanding of the underlying design behind the components” means, but having played it/ran it, personally, on a number of occasions, I think the system fits like a glove and the game is one of the best designed horror games around, without even mentioning the excellence of presentation and setting that goes with it. I wouldn’t say that of every Apocalypse engine game.

I'm not sure about how Troubleshooters works directly, and was interested in your take.
 
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