Mince Pies & Murder: An RPG Review

It was about a year ago now when I first came across 6d6 online. I don’t remember how I came across the site, but I was immediately attracted to the range of RPG-centric miniatures that are available there, being both a fan of miniatures and RPGs.

However, that was a year ago and a lot of changed for me in that time, but one of the highlights was meeting Chris from 6d6 when he kindly visited our group to GM a fantasy game using his prototype RPG rules. I was rather taken with the innovate mechanics of the system which whilst still needed work at that time, obviously had a lot of promise!

That was last summer, and having recently been fortunate enough to see a preview copy of Mince Pies & Murder – the first 6d6 RPG product that Chris is offering for sale, I am very encouraged to see that the 6d6 RPG has not stagnated and has evolved to embrace a lot of the promise I saw last summer.

As well as being a murder-mystery scenario, Mince Pies & Murder includes a copy of the 6d6 Ultra-Light rules - the core rules of the game, together with the adventure itself.  The adventure itself is well written, with a nice light-hearted dig at the detective sleuth genre and appears to be flexible enough to be able to be played more than once with the same group of players.  There is also plenty of solid, but not restrictive, guidance given to the prospective GM of the game that I believe should give confidence to any new 6d6 GM.

Player Characters in a 6d6 game are created from a deck of cards that represent different aspect of a character’s personality, physical nature, history, experience or their equipment. Actions are carried out by the player suggesting which combination of cards will allow them to carry out whatever is being attempted, and the adjudication of any more peculiar situations rely on the player explaining why that particular combination of cards will allow them to carry out the action they are attempting.  This is actually much easier to play than to describe in text like this and given that this is the first 6d6 RPG product, the examples of play given in the rules are clear and easy to follow and this I think is very important feature, since few people picking up these rules will have played a 6d6 RPG game before.

However, the very nature of the way in which a player’s deck of cards that form his character sheet work in order to perform actions means that it is probably a game that is only going to work with a group of players that are able to agree and get on when playing a game.  Of course, if you’re not in such a group, why are you trying to play any RPG!?

Nothing is left out of the adventure and Mince Pies & Murder event includes all of the cards that are required to run the sample player characters and to play the game – all that is required is to print them out and find a group of players to play with!

A final point I should cover is the cost of this new product, which is quite an adventure in itself! Chris has decided to offer this new product for whatever you want to pay, with a minimum of £1 to cover charges.  However, if you want to pay less than this, just wait a month, when Mince Pies & Murder will then be available for free!  Certainly an interesting experiment and one that I am very interested to find out the results – I guess we’ll just have to wait to see if Chris chooses to share the result of the experiment for free, too!

If you like either RPGs in general or innovative rules sets for games, then I would strongly recommend you head over to 6d6 RPG and getting hold of a copy of Mince Pies & Murder!

Prince Azalea.