Daredevils

by Robert N. Charrette, Paul R. Hume

Role playing action and adventure in the two-fisted thirties.

Play the role of an action-adventure hero. Smash spies, fight crime, defeat criminal masterminds and more. Enter the world of hard-boiled detectives, cloaked vigilantes and globe-spanning adventure. Become a DAREDEVIL.

DAREDEVILS is a role playing game for 2 or more players. In this game you become a hero. You think for him or her and use your character’s skills to solve the problem or overcome the obstacle at hand. These problems and obstacles are developed by a referee (called the Gamesmaster). He or she arbitrates all situations using both the rules and personal judgement. DAREDEVILS is a game of action, adventure and imagination.

Your character is a hero. A cloaked avenger, a technological wizard, a hard-boiled detective, a reckless soldier-of-fortune… each is a possibility. You can draw upon the great pulp magazines, the old movie serials, classic radio programs and even modern films set in the period. DAREDEVILS provides full rules for creating your hero… his or her attributes, skills and gear. Optional rules allow for the special powers and high-technology gimmicks used by many of the prototype heroes. Provision is even made for the uncanny luck of these redoubtable protagonists.

The rules for DAREDEVILS are your gateway to action and adventure.

64 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1982

About the author

Credited on some German editions as "Robert N. Charette".

Reviews

[Jerry · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are far too many possibilities for us to confine your imagination with a set of tables.

I’ve already forgotten how I ran across this game a month or two ago. But I had my eye out for a game that would both be a great fit with the Kolchak: The Night Stalker television series and a great fit for the North Texas RPG Con, which tends to focus on old-school-style games. From what little I could see online, Daredevils sounded awfully close to what I wanted. So I gambled $12 for the game and another $6 for a book of supernatural adventures, both still available in print from Fantasy Games Unlimited.

Daredevils is simple, while still providing exciting outcomes on some die rolls; it carefully balances the freedom to change the character’s mind after announcing what they’re going to do with the tension that comes when plans go awry in the fog of war; and (if I’m reading it correctly) it is one of a handful of games (along with Traveller, under some interpretations) from the early era that used real simultaneous combat.

Like the BRP rules sets—RuneQuest, Call of Cthulhu—experience is gained during play on successful skill rolls. Daredevils puts a very pulpish twist on this, however. While the basic game uses pretty much the same mechanism—roll against a number that diminishes the higher a character’s skill gets—the expected mechanism uses talents. Each character has a talent score in six areas, such as Scientific and Charismatic, ranging from a negative number up to a maximum of twenty. On a successful roll that advances the game, the player can roll less than or equal to their score in the Governing Talent of that skill. Success increases their skill score by 1.

Characters that are untalented in a skill—their score in the skill’s Governing Talent is zero or less—cannot “advance by doing” as the game calls it. They can only learn or improve a skill through time-consuming study.

This is a great mechanism that allows characters to both improve and gain skills at varying rates depending on where their talents lie. And in true pulpish fashion, if a character doesn’t have a particular skill, they can use their talent score instead. And if successful, have a chance of gaining that skill.

The character generation system is a reasonably streamlined combination between random rolls and points, in some cases, randomly rolling points. Characters get 75 points to allocate among their attributes (strength, speed, health, etc.) and a random number of talent points. In fact, talents are double-random: first, a score from -2 to +3 is rolled in each talent, and then 20+2d6 points are allocated among the talents.

Then, the player allocates another set of points equal to their character’s age, which is randomly rolled as 4d10+12. Each point means d3 attribute increases, a new skill, or a 2d6 increase to an existing skill. New skills begin with a score that is a combination of the character’s initial attributes and their allocated talents.

During game play, success rolls are made on d20. Attributes each have an Attribute Saving Throw and a harder-to-make Critical Saving Throw; players must roll less than or equal to that Saving Throw to succeed. Skills have a Base Chance of Success, which, again, players must roll less than or equal to for success. Rolls of 1 are critical successes, and rolls of 20 critical failures.

The “detailed action scale” of the game, that is, turn-by-turn action such as combat, consists of a six-second turn of four phases: declaration, action, action, bookkeeping. What makes declaration unique in Daredevils is that the player declares what kind of action they’re going to take, and then, on each action phase, may choose from a list of specific actions in that group. A player who says their character is going to operate a vehicle can then choose to throw something, do a short function such as opening a door or catching an object, fire from the hip, defend, speak, observe, strike with a hand-to-hand weapon, and drive. But they may not ready or carefully shoot a firearm, start walking around, or engage in a complicated task (other than driving).

Damage is nicely divided into subdual damage, lethal damage, and critical damage. Subdual damage comes back very quickly, on the order of several every ten minutes of rest. Lethal comes back much more slowly. When the combination of lethal and subdual damage exceeds a character’s Damage Resistance Total, they’re unconscious, but only if lethal exceeds it are they actually dead. Critical damage, which tends to come from critical hits, is completely separate, and is applied to locations on the body; any body part with critical damage is unusable. Critical damage to the head or body “will render the character comatose”.

Like most games of its era, and especially its sister publications at FGU such as Villains & Vigilantes, organization is a bit alien to modern readers. Hidden stats were the bane of the era: stats that are not mentioned in the character creation but are mentioned in the rules for particular features, such as Healing Rate under the healing section.

In a sense, Daredevils solves this with a universal mechanic, the “attribute group” for each attribute. A character’s Healing Rate, for example, is their attribute Group Number for Health. Each attribute group also has an Effect Die. A character’s hand-to-hand damage (which is their base for any melee weapon) is their attribute group Effect Die for Strength.

But while clearly (to modern eyes, at least) meant to be a sort of universal mechanic, it is far from universal. The Effect Die, for example, is almost exclusively used by Strength. The example of picking locks uses the Deftness Effect Die and this can presumably be used as an example of how other attributes can use the Effect Die to handle tasks, but within the rules text there’s little else.

The rulebook is filled with “Optional” and “Advanced” rules that, judging from back-references to them elsewhere are mostly assumed to be in use. The introduction recommends easing into these rules. “These are intended, in some cases, to provide greater detail or enhanced realism in the game.”

There are some aspects of the rules I remain confused about. Talents, for example. The character sheet includes a spot for a character’s “Psychological Profile” which seem to explicitly be the character’s original, rolled Talent scores: from -2 to +3. Why these are needed on the character sheet or why they have the cool name of “Psychological Profile” goes unmentioned; every example of using Talents explicitly uses the score after allocation of the 20+2d6 extra points.

Similarly, the note that “All Actions are considered simultaneous on each Action phase” nowhere defines what it means by “simultaneous”. While I chose to assume it means that everything happens at once, some other rules hint that this is not quite right. For example, there is a penalty to firearms use if the shooter was “damaged in that combat turn”. Now, because each turn includes two Action phases, this could mean (and I chose to assume it means) that the penalty only really applies on the second action phase.

Otherwise, if actions truly are simultaneous on each action phase, you could end up in a paradox loop where each character’s shot in a two-person gunfight is unsuccessful if the other character’s shot is successful.

The description of sample character Jonah E. Kaful says that “The formulas in section 1.1.1 and 1.3 are followed to yield the values on the sample Character Record Sheet.” There was no sample character sheet for Jonah. An Internet search on “Jonah E. Kaful” indicates there probably never was one. This may refer to the blank character sheet included with the book but of course this means there is no example of calculated results to use to help interpret the formulas.

The primary sources appendix at the back recommends Doc Savage, The Avenger, The Spider, and The Shadow, as well as “any of the old serials”. And for movies, the Thin Man series “and of course, Bogart’s ’Maltese Falcon’”.

…and ‘Raiders Of The Lost Ark’ (surprise!).

Batman, Spy Smasher, and the later Dominic Fortune rounded out the recommendations on the comic book end.

Kolchak fit right in. I had a great time running a Kolchak adventure using these rules, and plan to do it again next year. It was easy enough to apply the various attributes, talents, and skills to actions in the game. We did tend to forget about learning-by-doing; on the other hand, the seemingly complicated firearms rules turned out to make handling firearms simpler rather than harder, by combining multiple shots into one.

The Crash Factor is the percentage chance that the fuel will ignite. If the fuel ignites the vehicle will burn for a number of Detailed Turns equal to 1D3 plus remaining Durability. On the next turn, the vehicle will explode as if it were a hand grenade.