First Time Playing: FIST

I buy a lot of the charity bundles on itch.io. They're generally around $5-$10 a time, and while I'm largely indifferent to most of the content, there's usually a few gems making it well worth the price. FIST has appeared in bundles for abortion funds and for trans rights in Florida and I definitely got my money's worth buying those two.

I hadn't actually looked at FIST properly though until a friend offered a game at a time I was free and I dived in. The pitch was pretty compelling. It's inspired by Metal Gear Solid and The A-Team, so you play as soldiers of fortune in the late 20th century, with a twist in the shape of everyone having supernatural abilities.

We began with character creation, which is very simple. Roll two traits and a role on random tables (or choose, if you prefer) and that defines your stats and abilities. The first trait I rolled would have left me unable to speak, which I decided would not actually be fun, so rolled twice more and got  hybrid and ninja. The hybrid could be any animal, but one of the suggestions was shark, so I went with that - King Shark but also a ninja. My role was Mercenary, so I was absolutely in it for the money.

This part was a ton of fun, as we figured out what our random traits meant and what we could do with them. We came up with our own codenames. I was Mako, and was joined by Shadow, Mr Pink, Toes and Blood, the latter being a telekinetic vampire. Then we just had to choose between extra hitpoints, a piece of equipment, and war dice (single use bonus dice you could add to a roll). Most people went for war dice but I picked the extra hitpoints, having seen how our current points compared to the weapons we already had.

And so into the game, where we were dropped in the middle of a jungle and charged with intercepting trucks, preventing their contents getting to their destination, and figuring out what was going on at the nearby hydroelectric plant. We formed a basic plan and went at it, guns blazing. And it was a wild ride, as we figured out how to make use of our special abilities and threw ourselves into the action. It's fast paced and easy to play.

FIST is mechanically pretty much a PBTA game, with the usual 2d6 and three levels of success. It's also very OSR-like in that combat is brutal and characters are disposable, easily created and easily killed. This is in my opinion, its biggest weakness.

The whole setup is for a narrative game, with supernatural protagonists with extraordinary abilities. Then there's the PBTA mechanics, where every roll drives the story forward. You're all set up for some nice genre emulation, fitting with the PBTA 'be a fan of the characters' philosophy.

Except that doesn't mesh well with the concept of disposable characters. The A-Team aren't disposable. They don't get constantly killed and replaced. Metal Gear Solid...well, the way I play video games, the protagonist dies a lot, but they don't stay dead, and Solid Snake is still the person you're playing at the end of the game. When I play Mork Borg I know my scvm is going to be dead soon enough and that all feels right and proper. In this game it doesn't.

Mako did make it to the end of the mission, entirely thanks to those extra hitpoints I bought at the start.

If you bought one of those bundles, I would definitely recommend giving FIST a try, but with the caveat that the two clashing game philosophies aren't going to work for everyone. It succeeds at fast paced action and fun characters, but ignore the trappings of PBTA because that's not the experience you're going to get. I honestly think this would be better using the Mork Borg mechanics as that would fit a lot better with how the game works generally. And with four stats and similar numeric values, it should be an easy conversion.

So that's my verdict: a game that's well worth checking out but which accidentally used the wrong system. Try it with Mork Borg, or if you want the PBTA experience rather than the OSR one, replace hit points with the harm system from Apocalypse World, which coincidentally also includes the possibility that your character will be entirely obliterated, and then suddenly come back very much like they were before. Just like in a video game. Now that's genre emulation.