Cowpunchers

Cowpunchers
Crunch-light Roleplaying in the 1870s Southwest
by Jonathan Torres "The Basic Expert"

Available in pdf from Drivethru RPG:   https://www.drivethrurpg.com/
Or in print from Lulu:  https://www.lulu.com/

 

The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Cowpunchers is a short, 22 page, game.  It is set in the desert southwest of the USA, following the American Civil War (or 2nd Revolutionary War, the 2nd War for Independence, or a few other options, depending on where you call home).

The book is illustrated by the author, giving it a nice, consistent look.  

Cowpunchers is a d6-only dice pool system.  If you don't like die pool games, you probably won't like this one.  There is no limit for the amount of dice rolled from what I read, which can conceivably cause problems as characters grow in power.  Yes, this is also a level-based game; fortunately, it is classless, so the author did not need to shoehorn in "cowboy", "train engineer", or "Apache" into classes.

Right off the bat, we learn that the Referee in this game is called the Range Boss.  I like that.

Characters have three ability scores (vigor, finesse, and smarts), which should be self-explanatory.  Ability scores are rolled with 3d6.  The first brush with the dice pool system happens here.  Characters with low scores (3 to 6) get 0 "bonus dice", average characters get 1, and high scores give 2 dice.  These dice are added to a single d6 that everyone gets to roll to succeed at tasks.  Each ability score also has a modifier, which is used in rare circumstances.  The modifier matches the number of bonus dice.

Characters will roll from one to three 6-siders to ability score tests and saving throws, which are ability score tests.  This is one "core die" and 0, 1, or 2 bonus dice, based on ability score.

There is an average-sized list of skills and all of them could potentially be important in a campaign.  Most of them make perfect sense, a couple are for social encounters, and one is escamatoge.... gezundheit!  My favorite description of a skill is for "Cookin'".  When the posse sits down around the camp fire and ol' Cookie hands out the beans and bacon, a cookin' roll is made; if successful, the posse each gains 1d3 hp.  I know that I usually feel better about life after a good meal!

Characters begin with 3 to 18 skill dice, depending on how smart they are and how well they roll.  This is a place where one character can be significantly outclassed by another.  Doing some of that there cowboy math, I reckon that the average dummy (smarts 1-6) will have 4 skill dice, the average cowpoke will have 8, and that educated feller from back east will have 12.  I don't mind this spread but since there is no limit, from my reading of the book, of points to be assigned to a skill, our high IQ snake oil salesman from some yankee hellhole city might be able to drop 18 points into one skill!  This means 19 dice on a roll!  This is pure on crazy, I reckon!

This is where my first house rule would come into effect.  I would have some sort of limit to skill dice.  Maybe at 1st level, players can put 0-3 dice in a skill, allow a 4th die at 6th level and a 5th at 10th level.   Or, not allow skill dice more than half the character's level, rounded up.  Or, something. 

So, when the player grabs that handful of dice and rolls it, he is looking for 5s and 6s, which are successes.  Moderately difficult tasks require 1 success, hard tasks require 2, and extremely difficult tasks require 3, or whatever the Range Boss determines is needed.  A 1 or 6 on the core die is a fumble or critical.

Hit points are rolled with a d6, with a minimum of 6 hp for a character with no bonuses.  these hit points won't last long - see below.

The game has a paragraph for movement and one for advancement.

Next comes weapons, and here is where another eye-opener occurred to me.  Most weapons are reasonable as far as damage goes, basically 2d6 for most firearms, but perhaps with a +1 or +2 bonus, and a 12-gauge shotgun does 3d6 damage.  Just from this, the reader will realize that combat can be very deadly, very quickly.... and then we get to the rifles.... a regular old John Wayne-style Winchester can make 3 or 5 shots per round, depending on model!  A cowpuncher letting loose with his Model 1866 will do an average of 35 points of damage if he targets one foe!

The weapons section finishes with some rules on adapting other real world guns to the system.

The section on combat specifies that a character can do a move and attack, two moves, or two attacks per turn, and nowhere that I've seen limits the shots from a gun.  If a character stands still and uses both attacks with his $45 Winchester, does this mean he averages 70 points of damage?  If this is the case, I would absolutely remove the "shots per turn" from every weapon for house rule #2.

There is a decent equipment list, and I really like that there is a listing for housing costs.  The characters can pool their money and start their own homestead, right from character creation.  Equipment is recorded based on the number of "slots" it needs. 

I've already gone over the basics of combat and the combat section of the rules just has a handful of modifiers for shootin' tests, such as range, firing from horseback, etc.  Losing dice from the pool is a really fun way to do it and saves all them new-fangled mathing that real cowpokes don't know nuthin' bout, anyhow, other than maybe countin' heads of cattle.  There are a few paragraphs on duels, for those posses who want to do the old Main Street showdowns.

Next we get a couple of pages on cover, reactions, damage (you really, really do not want to get hit!), travel, and how much a feller ought to eat.  

A short section follows with some standard critters and townfolk.  The rules end with reaction rolls and random encounters.

The rulebook ends with a sample town, some buildings in said town, and a gang of the villainous sort, who enjoys raiding this town.  I think any genre game really needs to have a section like this.  I would have loved the author to have included about twice the number of adventure seeds (there are six) but I dig that one of them can lead to a supernatural campaign.

The book ends with a character sheet and the standard OGL that most games seem to have.

My overall impressions are that the game is really good.  There are a handful of sentences that needed another couple of read-throughs to fix some grammatical issues.  Of course, this Range Boss durn sure can't find the one that really stuck out to me, but trust me, it was there, two words were reversed.

⇒Grit:  ★★★★☆ The rules seem like they would really work, with the caveats I mentioned above in regards skill dice.  The book is very short but touches on all of the standard cowboy movie tropes.  A campaign based on any of the small handful of cowboy movies I've seen could be played through with this one book.

⇒Vigor:  ★★☆☆☆ My big issue with the skill dice is slinkin' in like a rattler into a bedroll.  If a character starts out with a god-tier skill check, what is the point of advancement?  Other than that pretty big (to me) problem, and the one sample town/adventure, I would really like to see 6 to 10 pages on some historical details, railroads, conflicts between the settlers and Indians, and between the various settlers themselves.  If the War to End Yankee Oppression just ended, I would like to see at least something on why this war led to hordes of people moving to the West.

⇒Grace:  ★★★☆☆ This game is good-looking, in its functional way.  It isn't beautiful, and some blank space between paragraphs would be appreciated, but there is nothing wrong with the book.  I think that if it was reformatted for a 6x9 printing, it would be much better.  The copy I got from Lulu is very floppy due to thinness, and I think that a smaller form would suit it quite well.  The art is really good, I think.  I would like to have some more pieces in it, especially in the equipment chapter so those of us who did not grow up on westerns have some clue what these items looked like.  I know exactly what a Winchester looks like and how it feels in the hands, but I wouldn't know a Mauser 1871 if it jumped up and bit me.