@4TALES FROM THE FLOATING VAGABOND REVIEW
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@1
"You dive behind the bush, but in the process disturb a flock of ducks, who 
fly in to the sky. The security droid turns in your direction, and then 
starts rolling towards your hiding place," the games master tells me. "What 
are you going to do?"

Thinking fast I reply: "OK, I stand up and walk towards the droid going 
`Quack! Quack!'"

It may sound stupid, but when your playing Tales from the Floating Vagabond 
(TFFV) that's the sort of weird thing you do. The system is humorous, 
obviously, but humorous in a slapstick Laurel and Hardy kind of way. It 
begins as all the best adventures do in a bar (the Floating Vagabond of the 
title), which is suspended at the centre of a very strange universe. In this 
bar the drinks don't just make you see double, they turn your head into a 
mushroom cloud, and then give you the worst hangover you've ever had.

The basic statistics for getting a living character in TFFV are: strength, 
nimbleness, aim, smarts, cool, common sense and luck. In to these a player 
has to divide 20 attribute points, where 2 is an average rank. When this is 
done you can then work out your Oops! points. Oops! points are TFFVs name for 
hit points, called so because the players go oops when they've been hit by 
something. After the stats have been worked out the fun really begins with 
the players choosing a shtick for their character. The shticks are there to 
add humour to roleplaying, and there is no doubt that they do, by giving the 
character a strange ability to cause something to happen to them or their 
surroundings. A character can have the Rambo effect which means ranged 
attacks always miss when launched close to the character, or the trenchcoat 
effect that allows a character to hide an unlimited amount of items in their 
trenchcoat.

To pay for both a shtick and some skills the players are given 1500 points. 
Buying the shtick of your choice will cost 500 points or there is the option 
of rolling 1d20 (one 20 sided dice) for a random result, which will only rob 
you of 200 points. Once a shtick has been decided upon the characters then 
get skills. As one would expect the list of skills is appropriately funny 
including such things as "headbutt" and "target vomiting" under the combat 
skills, and "belching for effect" and "look good at all times" from the 
social skills list. Each of the skills is related to a statistic and has a 
set cost, but they can also be bought multiple times which will increase the 
value of the skill. Being a - kind of - multi-genre system there is also a 
skill called "cast spells", which means that a character can be a magic user 
(if only to a limited extent).

It would have been very easy with a comedy RPG, for the rules to have been 
simple but inefficient, this I am glad to say is not the case with TFFV. 
Yes the rules are simple, but the majority of situations are covered. All 
skill rolls are made using one of the following: 1d4, 1d6, 1d10, 1d20, 1d30 
or 1d100. The choice of dice depends on how easy or hard the action is, 
where a normal skill test is done with 1d10, the player having to roll under 
Štheir skill value. Combat is also worked out using 1d10 with various 
modifiers taken in to account by the games master (GM).

The layout of TFFV has also had a lot of thought put in to it, with each 
chapter being introduced by one of the major characters from the bar. These 
characters talk the reader through their particular chapter accompanied by 
a multitude of pictures which add humour to the text. All the tables a GM 
needs are highlighted by big blue boxes, and are also listed at the back of 
Šthe book. My main gripes with the system are the lack of a GMs screen with 
all the useful things printed on it, the fact that you have to buy additional 
adventures to get rules for superheros and spaceship combat, and the use of 
a d30 within the rules. This dice, having such small sides, rolls in all the 
wrong directions, including on to plates, in to pizzas and generally off the 
table and on to the carpet where it vanishes.

TFFV, although no where near as in depth as some systems, is ideal for when 
everyone's bored of characters that are more complex than they are. The GM 
can relax a bit, and the players can make jokes to their hearts content 
without disrupting an intense moment.

Leigh Barlow