The A-Team RPG

So there's going to be a A-Team movie. Don't know if it will be any good, but a wise man would bet against it. The trailer however made me laugh.

Used to watch that show back in the day, it was fun and predictable. Odd how those two concepts go together in TV (and likely in RPGs as well). It was also silly with likely thousands of rounds fired and I can't remember them ever hitting a single person. They were hell on vehicles and the landscape however.

One night our gaming group decided to play a one-shot A-Team game instead of our normal campaign.

So I turned to my workhorse game- HERO System. Ran it straight with the following house rules:

1. Kill Attacks (and deadly normal attacks) would not harm a living creature. Instead their effect was replaced with a Presence Attacks. Weapons were given dice bonuses to these depending upon how impressive they were. These Presence Attacks only applied against valid targets of the original physical attack.
2. Any A-Team kit-bashed weapons got more Presence Attack bonus dice than any normal weapon. Only one allowed per adventure.
3. Anyone who loses a full phase from a Presence Attack counts as 'defeated', i.e. they either give up or flee from such a display of impressive firepower.
4. Any character could make a free dive for cover from any vehicle, exploding building, etc. This was always successful- but if invoked 'defeated' the character as in item 3.
   

With those four simple changes, we went on to have a perfect A-Team adventure. It could have been scripted from the actual show. Was a ton of fun. But it wasn't the stuff of a full length campaign for us and we only did it once.

Now days people at the Forge and elsewhere would attempt to create an completely new game system to do something like that. And it would almost certainly suck in comparison.