Don't Roll a One

I recently played Kevin J. Allen’s game Trouble For Hire at an online con. I’d never played anything quite like it, but I also felt exactly like its target audience.

A Lone Crusader in a Dangerous World

The stories your group tells with Trouble For Hire (T4H) will change, but they’ll always revolve around a single protagonist, Ruben Carlos Ruiz. He’s that archetypal post-western “lone dude with a car”, heart of gold optional. You’ve seen his ilk from Kowalski to Knight Rider all the way to Ryan Gosling’s Driver.

This is notable because typically, even if you make a character like Ruben in most TTRPGs, your dreams of being a wild loner will be tempered by playing as part of an ensemble of characters. Even the Driver in Apocalypse World intertwines with the other player characters like a premium cable series.

What It’s Not

T4H clearly isn’t a solo game (for an excellent single-player video game like T4H, check out Heading Out).

One player plays Ruben at a time, but it’s not like Girl Underground (a more usual GM/players structure where one player is the Girl and the others her companions), nor is it like Bluebeard’s Bride (many players with authority over aspects of the protagonist’s personality).

It’s GMless/ful, but unlike Fiasco the roles people play change at set intervals.

Roles and Playing Them

There are a number of asymmetrical Roles in Trouble For Hire like The Editor or The Road Through the World. Each has authority over certain aspects of the story you’re telling and can interject scene changes, introduce characters, or challenge Ruben by spending RPM, T4H’s metacurrency.

After the table spends a certain amount of RPM, that “turn” is over and everyone changes Roles. You’ll have a set number of turns determined by the adventure you’re playing (whether pulled from the book or the dusty recesses of your own minds), then Ruben’s adventure comes to an end… for now.

The Hollyhock 1500

Our group played through the Hollyhock 1500 scenario from the book, a Cannonball Run-inspired race from New Mexico to Kansas. There were six of us and seven Roles:

• Ruben Carlos Ruiz and his 1969 Corvette Stingray L88.
• Los Companero: In this case, a young man named Bobby who fell into acting as Ruben’s navigator, rally-style.
• The Road Through the World: Setting details, man vs. nature challenges, and themes.
• La Villanos: The bad guys, and given this was a wacky race full of psychos, there were a LOT of bad guys.
• Los Espectadores: The other NPCs and side characters, like bystanders, cops, cultists, and nameless KGB agents.
• The Editor: Recaps, smash cuts, fortune-telling, and messing with dice results after the fact.
• The Rider: Ruben’s foil, a wild woman meant to challenge Ruben’s worldview as much as his driving skill.

Nailed It

Trouble For Hire absolutely results in the kinds of stories it wants to tell. My group of players were all experienced GMs and even though we hadn’t played before, we were able to generally shortcut a ton of the usual “new players new game” issues. T4H supports good player behavior explicitly through the RPM economy – spotlight hogs will run out of RPM, plus other Roles are responsible for collaborating in every scene. For safety tools, T4H includes a line/veil-style red/yellow light token, but also adds in a Green Light that encourages moments everyone wants to see.

After the first turn where everyone exchanges Roles, everyone felt warmed up and held on loosely for the wild ride. When the dice came out for challenges, Ruben would roll and assign the results to several outcome charts, Otherkind-style. When I read the book, this felt simplistic, but in play there were enough RPM-powered abilities that skewed results that I didn’t want anything more complex.

Out of Control

I’m not sure Trouble For Hire was designed for six players. Because nearly every Role was available each turn, nobody really returned to a Role until the game was half over. I’m glad we all got a taste of each Role, but it was difficult to focus on my own Role at times because I was trying to watch everyone else’s little dashboards AND keep track of the Themes in play AND think about how I could contribute.

The other thing is perhaps when everyone shares a character, nobody really plays that character. Investment in any given character was fleeting because the game turns were coming at us…

Fast and Furious

The RPM economy was absolutely out of whack. We literally could not burn it all. I firmly believe this was a “big table” issue, but when you have that many players who are

• generally good at recognizing metacurrency economies in games
• cooperating, not competing
• sitting on their own stacks of RPM tokens

We melted the turn track. I felt like we didn’t have enough time to build towards anything in any given scene because one of us would start a challenge, maybe someone else would burn some RPM adjusting the results, perhaps Ruben would spend some to duck consequences, and then that’s the turn. Time to play a new Role!

2 Trouble 2 Hire

All that said, these observations didn’t stop us from describing an amazing and wild race / gunfight / arson / mission of retribution / romance. I would totally play T4H again, although I would try to cap the table at 4 players.

If faced with a large group, I might scale up the RPM required to complete a turn or try fewer turns, each requiring more RPM to complete. You’d still see all the Roles and people would have a little more time to settle into them.

Target Audience

Finally, I admit I’m a little jealous. Trouble For Hire encapsulates the style, setting, and themes I’ve been trying to design toward for a while now.

I’m also grateful, because in playing T4H I learned that no matter how many mood boards I pore over, my own game cannot do the lone crusader thing. The pressure’s off and I can stop trying to make Outlaw Country fit into a Vanishing Point-shaped hole. I’m making a GM-and-PCs game because that’s what my people will play, and I make games so I can play them.