Fight!

I tend to be a cheapskate. I don't spend much money on anything other than bills and food. I'll pick up the occassional cheap pdf from RPGNow or Lulu every now and then, but not very often. It was a rare moment last night when I splurged and picked up the Fight! bundle. Fight! The Fighting Game RPG from Divine Madness Press picks up the torch that White Wolf's Street Fighter RPG dropped. Back in the day I dabbled a bit in SFRPG, but I found it too easy to powergame by selecting certain special moves. Soon, everyone figured out what those moves were and the game got very boring very fast. From the reviews, while there are still some moves that are more powerful than others it sounds like the author, Christopher Peters, has done a great job in keeping such instances to a minimum.

Fight! weighs in at a whopping 247 pages. I say whopping because most of the games I pick up nowadays are around 160 or so pages long. Plus, Fight! isn't a rules-light affair like many of the games that catch my eye these days. I haven't had a chance to actually play the game yet, but it appears to have a level of crunch somewhere around the Pathfinder to Exalted range. This is definitely hitting the upper strata of what I care to run/play in terms of rules.

You may be asking why I bought Fight! and Fight! Round Two (the other book in the bundle)? I'm a fighting game fanatic. Ever since I first played Street Fighter II at the long gone, but not forgotten Gunther's arcade in Columbia, Missouri, I've been hooked. I'll play just about any fighting game from Street Fighter (and the various splintered-off games like Darkstalkers, Marvel vs. Capcom) to Samurai Showdown to King of Fighters to Soul Calibur to Mortal Kombat and everything in between. The crazy thing is that I'm not all that great at the games either, but there's something about them that keeps me coming back time and time again. When I read that Fight! does a pretty good job of emulating many of the tropes found in fighting games like Super Special Moves and Fatalities I had to check it out.

I don't know that I'd ever run a genuine campaign with Fight!, in lieu of just creating interesting characters and having it out to see which concept comes out on top. Still, the idea of running a tournament that deal with the machinations of shadowy criminial organizations or otherworldly powers does have some appeal.

I plan on making some characters soon, once I've read through the rules more fully. Then I'll likely attempt a solo combat between the fighters to see how the system runs.