Death Dealers - [Playtest]

Death Dealers is what would happen if you converted Dead By Daylight's killer role gameplay into a cooperative tabletop rpg by mixing it with Among Us. It's a really neat concept, and I haven't seen too many other ttrpgs tackle the slasher genre from the slasher side.

The PDF is 51 pages, with great custom art and an extremely professional layout. It's polished and smooth and readable, and matches the subject material exactly. It also does a great job of visually tutorializing mechanics by using charts and symbols and breaking up the flow of information into manageable visual chunks.

One element that I think slasher games tend to struggle with is connecting the player with the character. A lot of movie slashers are kind of elementally malicious in a way that really limits who can enjoy playing them. Death Dealers sort of sidesteps this by posing the idea that Final Girls are a kind of cosmic injustice, and that slashers are simply rectifying this. It's a neat angle, and it gives a little more range to the types of stories you can tell with the system.

The core mechanics here are relatively simple, but have some tangible meat. Rolls are pbta style, 2d6+stat with 7--9 being success at a cost. Combat is expected, and players have Vitality (hp) to absorb damage with. Players also have the ability to get back up after dying, a desire track that fills when they fail rolls and causes them to go berserk, and an interesting disguise mechanic where they don't obviously read as slashers until they've been discredited by the mortals they're pursuing.

In combat, the game works sort of the way you'd expect. Players take turns and roll attacks---but interestingly, only hostile actions end your turn. You can open doors, throw levers, etc, and as long as it's not an attempt to damage somebody you can do as much as you want. This keeps combat moving fast at the cost of hyper-centralizing it around attacks.

For progression, the game uses an interesting mechanic called Legend. Specifically, your character accumulates exp in regions of the world---if your Legend is in Connecticut but you go after a target in Antarctica, you're back at square one for that hunt. There's also a second progression mechanic called Legacy that scales off of the group's Legends and provides the whole team with benefits. And there's regular experience points, which are used for specific character upgrades and awarded at the end of missions.

For GMs, the book is laid out cleanly, there's a lot of advice seeded throughout, there's a very thorough GMing section, and there's a sample scenario and bestiary. It's a pretty easy game to run, and if you've GM'd PbtA or 5e or OSR you'll pick it up extremely fast. The game is also quite player friendly, and this takes some of the pressure off of having to teach it.

Overall, if the premise sounds interesting, pick this up! It's an extremely solidly put together book, and the design is fun.

Minor Issues:

-Resting feels like it's out of step with the tone of the game. I can't think of too many slashers that aren't positioned as relentless pursuers, and having them need to take a breather fits conventional rpg play but creates some cognitive dissonance. Maybe they could instead heal up off of spending a scene slaughtering some unrelated people?

-Resurrection is very easy, which works with the genre and keeps players in the game, but feels very consequence-free. Maybe PCs lose a point of max Vitality for the rest of the scenario each time they resurrect? This would make it so that the only way for the Gifted to win isn't just focus-firing all of the PCs at once, and it would check a potential player strategy where one person always hangs back and resurrects while everyone else rushes in.

-Page 13, Weaknesses, "a Characters Weakness" Character's

-Having the Gifted be other killers, not just final girls, might be an interesting angle. You'd get a more Freddy Vs Jason direction, and it might make the Gifted more threatening/unlikeable.

-Page 14/15, The text is clear that combat actions are only things that inflicts harm on people, but then it spells out reloading a firearm as a combat action.

-Page 27, "but ow they can gather" how