Bulletproof Blues 3e EN:Introduction
Welcome to Bulletproof Blues: a "rules light" superhero roleplaying game set in the universe of Kalos Comics. If you've seen any of the Avengers, Batman, or Watchmen movies, you know what a superhero is: an individual with great determination who chooses to use their abilities to make the world a better place. And, of course, everyone is familiar with Kalos Comics.
The Kalos Universe
Bulletproof Blues takes place in the world-famous universe of Kalos Comics, creators of Paragon (who first appeared in Amazing Adventure Magazine in 1938), Rook (who first appeared in Tales Of Mystery in 1939), Antiope, Doctor Arcane, and the rest of the Justifiers, as well as sinister organizations like Aegis and GORGON, and mysterious entities like The Bride. From the ancient ruins of Lemuria to the far reaches of the Hausdorff Dimension, the Kalos Universe is now yours to explore. If you are unfamiliar with the Kalos Universe, you will find more information in the GM Resources chapter.
On the surface, the Kalos Universe closely resembles our own. The place names and television shows are the same, and the victories and defeats of ordinary people are just like the ones you experience. Much as in our own world, extremes of good and evil exist, but the gulf between them is a murky area where those of good will can and do disagree.
However, the Kalos Universe can be a strange place. There are ancient civilizations deep below the surface of the earth and extraterrestrials in the sky above it. Strange forces are at work, and hidden powers manipulate world events and the news reports of those events. Still, few people encounter this strangeness in their day-to-day lives or recognize it when they do. For the vast majority of humanity, the world of the Kalos Universe is virtually the same as the world you live in.
While many events are intentionally hidden from the public, the sanitized actions of select posthumans are crafted into pre-packaged "human interest" stories. Entire cable networks are dedicated to the exploits and personal lives of posthumans. In addition, in a relatively recent two week span, Paragon killed millions of people in Atlanta and Southeast Asia, and held the world hostage -- a rampage that will drive government policy, mass media, and public opinion worldwide for decades.
The Fall Of Paragon
Bulletproof Blues is set shortly after the "Fall Of Paragon" crossover event, during which the Justifiers were killed by their former teammate, Paragon. The city of Atlanta, Georgia is in ruins, Mount Rushmore has been smashed, the island of Timor rests beneath the sea, and both the Keystone Pipeline System and the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System have been destroyed. It is a difficult time for posthumans. Posthumans have never been completely trusted by humanity, and Paragon confirmed everyone's worst fears. Although Paragon was ultimately defeated and killed by a small team of posthumans at the Justifiers' headquarters in Antarctica, his actions have changed forever the relationship between humanity and posthumans.
In the Kalos Universe, much like in our own world, sometimes things don't work out the way we'd like them to. Life is neither fair nor unfair, and the universe is indifferent to human suffering.
The struggle, then, is to make the best possible world with the tools at our command. Your character has great power. How will they use it?
SIDEBAR: Buying The Comics
If you would like to find and read some of the comics we refer to in Bulletproof Blues, we have some bad news for you: the comics this book refers to do not actually exist. It's a framing device. It's supposed to have the feel of a fully developed comicbook universe with a history, but without the baggage and overhead of an established comicbook setting, so that you can feel free to tell your own stories without fear of contradicting some obscure bit of in-universe history and without running afoul of the "big name" characters that overshadow a game set in an established comicbook setting. In a Bulletproof Blues game, your PCs are the "big name" characters.
What Is A Roleplaying Game?
Every roleplaying game has a section at the beginning that attempts to explain what a roleplaying game is, and Bulletproof Blues is no exception. So let's get started! As trivial as it sounds, two distinct elements set "roleplaying games" apart from other things which are not roleplaying games: roleplaying and game play.
First, a roleplaying game involves roleplaying. Generally speaking, roleplaying involves taking on a persona or character and making decisions based on what that character would do in a given situation. Does having a character in a game, by itself, make that a roleplaying game? No. The little dog token in a Monopoly game and a Blood Elf in World Of Warcraft are both characters, but Monopoly and World Of Warcraft are not roleplaying games. Can you roleplay as a dog while playing Monopoly? Yes, and you can roleplay as an elf while playing World Of Warcraft. What keeps these from being roleplaying games is that the roleplaying is not part of the game -- you can't get your Monopoly dog out of jail through unscripted conversation with the jailer, nor can you use roleplaying to convince a cultist in World Of Warcraft to let you pass by without a fight. If the rules of the game do not allow for the possibility that a conflict could be resolved through unscripted conversation (however unlikely that might be), then it isn't a roleplaying game.
Second, a roleplaying game is a game. Roleplaying games are sometimes compared to improvisational theatre, and there are similarities, but improv theatre isn't a game. How can you tell if something is a game? Games have rules that govern things like conflicts between players and whether something a player attempts is successful. Improv theatre is fun, but there aren't any rules like this. As Drew Carey described "Whose Line Is It Anyway?", it's "the show where everything's made up and the points don't matter." It's fun, but it's not a game, and therefore it's not a roleplaying game.
Bulletproof Blues has more rules than some games, but less than others, and an essential part of conflict resolution involves making decisions that your character would make under the circumstances. Maybe those decisions aren't the most tactically advantageous, but if they are true to what your character would do, and if you are having fun playing, then you are playing correctly, because that's what Bulletproof Blues is all about.
If you would like to read more about who plays roleplaying games, and why and where they play them, check out The Escapist -- The Five Ws of RPGs.
The Players
In a roleplaying game, each player adopts a persona called a player character, or "PC". The player characters are imaginary people who inhabit the fictional world of Bulletproof Blues.
In many ways, the player is like an actor who chooses their own part and writes their own lines as the play progresses. The game moderator sets the stage and introduces the characters to their world, but the story is driven by the player characters.
The Game Moderator
The game moderator, or "GM", creates the story and portrays everyone that the player characters encounter during their adventures. These are called non-player characters, or "NPCs". The players help create the adventure by responding to the challenges the GM presents and by pursuing the PCs' own goals. This dynamic creative process creates a story which neither the game moderator nor the players could have created alone.
Why A Third Edition?
A great deal of effort went into making Bulletproof Blues Second Edition a fun game that we wanted to play, and we succeeded. So why is there a third edition?
A fundamental tenet of game design is that rules that don't make the game better should be discarded. As people played Bulletproof Blues, we found several parts of the game that simply weren't needed. For example, making ranged targeting (Accuracy) separate from a character's flexibility and coordination (Agility) seemed like a great idea. However, when we examined the characters that people actually played, we found that there was a very strong correlation between characters' Agility and Accuracy: in nearly all cases, the attributes differed only by one, at most. We found a similar correlation between hand-to-hand combat (Prowess) and either physical strength (Brawn) or coordination (Agility). So we've eliminated Prowess and Accuracy, and we've made it simple for characters to base their combat abilities on either Brawn or Agility.
Another major change regards power levels. In second edition, a Bulletproof Blues character's powers must all have their power levels set individually. However, when we examined the characters people created, we found that each character's powers were usually all within one or two ranks of each other. So why make players buy them all separately? We could drastically reduce the complexity of the game by giving each character a single power level, and have all of their powers follow suit. So we did.
Finally, we have simplified task resolution (including combat), making rolling dice and applying bonuses and penalties much faster and easier.
Other than these changes, the revisions between the second edition and this one are mostly minor: changes in phrasing, clarification of existing rules, and so on. We hope that all of these changes make this version of Bulletproof Blues even more fun than the second edition.
As with the second edition, this edition of Bulletproof Blues is not a carefully balanced simulation of a reality where people can fly, dress up like bats, and shoot energy beams from their jewelry. The rules are here to help you play a fun game and keep things fair, but there's really nothing special about the rules. They are there to serve you, not the other way around. Your first thought when someone tries something new in a Bulletproof Blues game should not be, "Do the rules allow it?", but "Would that be fun?". Of course, what's "fun" varies from group to group. If a tightly plotted political thriller is your bag, that's great. If you prefer nonstop action with giant robots and exploding ninjas, that's great, too. You could use Bulletproof Blues to run either type of game, or anywhere in between. However you want to play, whatever you consider "cool", takes precedence over the written rules. If the rules don't make sense in a given context, or if they seem to be getting in the way of the kind of game you want to play, then either change the rules or ignore them.
Ground Rules
A roleplaying game is fundamentally a cooperative activity. The players (one of whom is the Game Moderator) are not in competition. The goal is not to be the most powerful hero, or to win every fight. The goal of a role-playing game is to create interesting stories and to entertain everyone at the table. We hope that you are the kind of player that creates interesting characters and enjoys creating stories with your friends.
Use Common Sense
The single most important piece of advice we can give you is that you should use your common sense. If something in the rules violates the way you think your game should work, then override it. If the rules permit something ridiculous, or would prevent something completely ordinary, then override them. Do not be one of those players who adheres to the letter of the rules in defiance of common sense.
In fact, if you can make a character work without resorting to the rules, you should. Saying "it works like this" is often a better solution than trying to find rules to force it to work that way.
Avoid Rule Arguments
It is in the nature of any human activity that differences of opinion will arise. We've tried to make the rules for Bulletproof Blues as simple and clear as possible, but there's only so much we can do. Sooner or later, there will be a difference of opinion among the players regarding what a rule means, or how a rule should be implemented. There is nothing wrong with this: discussion and consensus are healthy. However, the time for rule discussions is between games, not during games. If a rule discussion takes longer than 60 seconds, the game moderator should make an executive decision and table additional discussion for later. If players balk, the GM should be civil but firm, and move on.
Respect Genre Conventions
Bulletproof Blues is a superhero game, and being a superhero game, it has certain genre conventions. Robert McKee defines genre conventions as the "specific settings, roles, events, and values that define individual genres and their subgenres." Superhero games, relying as they do on a relatively commonplace modern-day setting, but one which incorporates extremely non-commonplace characters, have even more genre conventions than most other games.
For example, there are no rules for running out of bullets, or for recharging the cosmic widget from the cosmic widget recharging device. It's not that guns do not run out of bullets, or that cosmic widgets never need recharging. Of course they do, and if a character intentionally empties their gun, then the gun runs out of bullets just as you'd expect. It's just assumed that they don't normally run out of bullets unless there is a dramatic reason for it. The rest of the time, the character is reloading the gun or recharging the widget when it's convenient to do so.
Another genre convention of Bulletproof Blues is that the extraordinary technological advances made possible by the superhuman intelligence of super-scientists (not to mention alien technology) rarely make it into the marketplace. Some technology eventually does -- cell phones and 3D televisions, for example -- but these advances are delayed until they can be successfully commercialized. Any advanced technology with potential military applications remains out of the reach of ordinary people, or even of ordinary soldiers. Shadowy government agencies, amoral corporations, and subversive organizations bent on world domination all conspire to keep these advances to themselves, or at least to as small a group as possible.
Core Mechanics
Attributes
Each character has six attributes which describe their basic physical and mental abilities.
- Brawn: physical might, close combat fighting ability, and general hardiness
- Agility: coordination, flexibility, accuracy with ranged attacks
- Reason: ability to analyze data, draw conclusions from the facts at hand, and solve problems
- Perception: awareness of one's surroundings, intuition, and understanding of the motivations of others
- Will: determination, focus, and the strength of personality
- Power: technological might, alien potency, psychic potential, and so on
- Endurance: determination and ability to shrug off physical and mental abuse
See the Attributes chapter for more information.
Skills
Skills allow a character to apply their attributes to solve a specific problem or accomplish a specific task. Rough Magic divides skills between general skills and areas of expertise. General skills are quite broad, such as Culture and Survival, while a character's areas of expertise are rather specific, such as Gymnastics and Physics.
See the Skills chapter for more information.
Rolling Dice
We assign numbers to characters' abilities so that we can tell what they can do. When a character attempts a task, and the outcome is either contested or there is some random element involved, the player rolls 2d6, counts the dots, and adds the result to the character's action value (AV). This roll is compared to 2d6 plus a difficulty value (DV).
If the player's total (2d6 + action value) equals or exceeds the target number (2d6 + difficulty value), the character's attempt succeeds. There is no need to roll for routine tasks: characters automatically succeed at routine tasks. Similarly, there is usually no need to roll if there is no penalty for failure and/or no time limit: it might take months, but the character will succeed eventually.
Rounding Fractions
When in doubt, round fractions down.
Plot Points
Each player begins each game session with one plot point. A player gains a plot point when they do something particularly entertaining or interesting, when one of their character's complications causes a serious problem for them during the game, or when the GM overrides a roll of the dice to make things more difficult for the characters. Plot points are spent to alter the game world, gain a bonus die, or gain an advantage in combat. See the Actions chapter for more information.
Glossary
- Agility (AGL)
- coordination, flexibility, accuracy with ranged attacks
- action value (AV)
- XXX
- all-out move
- base move x 6; incurs penalties on attacks and task rolls
- attack bonus
- a number added to a combat task roll (another name for "task roll bonus")
- attack value (AV)
- XXX (another name for "action value")
- attribute
- the seven basic character traits: Brawn, Agility, Reason, Perception, Will, Power, and Endurance
- base move
- normal ground movement based on an attribute or power
- Brawn (BRN)
- physical might, close combat fighting ability, and general hardiness
- character point
- spent to buy attributes, skills, gifts, and powers for a character
- defense value (DV)
- XXX (another name for "difficulty value")
- difficulty value (DV)
- XXX
- double move
- base move x 2; incurs penalties on attacks and task rolls
- Endurance (END)
- determination and ability to shrug off physical and mental abuse
- expertise
- a character's field of extraordinary competence
- game moderator (GM)
- the player who sets the story in motion, plays everyone and everything in the game other than the PCs, and arbitrates any disputes
- gift
- an exceptional ability that a normal human can have, but that most humans do not have
- non-player character (NPC)
- a fictional character belonging to and controlled by the game moderator
- Perception (PER)
- awareness of one's surroundings, intuition, and understanding of the motivations of others
- player
- a living, breathing person playing the game
- player character (PC)
- a fictional character belonging to and controlled by a player
- plot point
- spent to alter the game world, gain a skill bonus, or gain an advantage in combat
- Power (POW)
- the strength of a character's posthuman abilities: their technological might, alien potency, psychic potential, and so on
- power defect
- a drawback to the power that makes it less useful than it normally is
- power enhancement
- an extra capability that makes a power more useful than it normally is
- rank
- a number from 1 to 10 describing each of a character's attributes
- Reason (REA)
- ability to analyze data, draw conclusions from the facts at hand, and solve problems
- roll bonus
- a number added to the character's action value when making a roll
- run
- base move x 2 (another name for "double move"); incurs penalties on attacks and task rolls
- sprint
- base move x 6 (another name for "all-out move"); incurs penalties on attacks and task rolls
- success
- a task roll that equals or exceeds the task difficulty
- target number
- the number the player must match or exceed on a task roll (2d6 + difficulty value)
- walk
- normal ground movement based on an attribute (another name for "base move")
- Will (WIL)
- determination, focus, and strength of personality