Gunpointing (Ashcan)

The handgun. Compact and easy to use.

Terribly, awfully easy to use.

Much of a handgun’s power is the promise of violence. Put a gun in someone’s face and suddenly they are cooperative. Shoot a few bullets over someone’s head in a firefight and they might flee. Make sure someone can see your piece in its holster and they might take you seriously. 

This is the ashcan version of Gunpointing, which is sortof the Steam Early Access version of a TTRPG. Prototypes of games that need some playtesting and tweaking and don't have stuff like elegant prefaces and pretty layout yet and assume you have some experience with roleplaying games, but are otherwise fully playable games.

Highlights:

• Players resolve actions by playing from a hand of standard playing cards against the GM and each other. The only way to get more cards is to run out, so plan for success and failure.
• Stat-less system. Characters are made by selecting feats from a list, each with pros and cons. When leveling up, players choose to add a new feat or erase the con from a feat. Characters level up when they check enough boxes on a video-game-style achievement list.
• Card plays are buffed or nerfed by a spectrum/hierarchy of advantages and disadvantages (play two cards and add/subtract them, see other player/GM’s cards before playing your own, etc.)
• Generally, being shot is lethal. Characters can survive one “winging” from gun combat in their entire life.
• Characters can also Gunpoint. If they succeed on a gunpointing play, they have the option to lethally shoot the character they are pointing a gun at with 100% success rate and top action priority at any time until the Gunpoint ends, whether by Gunpointer choice or by outside influence (view obscured, Gunpointed calls the Gunpointer’s bluff and leaves line-of-sight, etc.). But shooting someone is a big, loud deal that never goes without consequences...
• Also rules for hand-to-hand combat, chases, clocks, investigations, and more.
• Do mysteries, heists, underworld wars, etc.