Episode Details

A GM’s thoughts on how to play Desperado Quickdraw.

Hi everyone, this is a special episode of Firebreathing Kittens. I’m the game master for an upcoming session using the rules for Desperado Quickdraw. In this episode, I’ll share my thoughts after reading the rule book. Hopefully this episode will be a handy guide for how to play for my players, will help me organize myself, and will be useful for you listeners, too, who are looking to play Desperado Quickdraw yourselves.

The sections I’ll talk about are character creation, how to move, how to attack, alternatives to character death,how to use skills, how to help your allies, and spellcasting.

Character creation: Desperado Quickdraw provides some handy dandy character creation randomizers using a deck of cards. Don’t know what character you’re going to play? Draw from a standard playing card deck to generate your character’s name, background, combat stats, feats, starting items, and ammo. For example if you draw a diamond your background is the gambler, who has 2 grit, 4 wit, a firearm aim of 2d12, and a melee aim of 2d12. Here in Firebreathing Kittens, for my players, because we are the same character all season, please feel free to pick from these random lists to build your character. You can also change the flavor; a ranged weapon can be called a bullet, arrow, fireball, etc.

How to move: You can move as many yards as your grit score at the start of your turn. If you move while attacking it makes you less accurate, decreasing your aim DC.

How to attack: Here’s an example melee weapon, the dagger. You can either pierce or cut with a dagger. If you’re piercing, it takes one action to draw the dagger from its sheath, and one action to attack. A dagger gets plus two steps to its accuracy and has a wound DC of 3. Here’s an example attack: You are standing within a yard of an enemy. Your dagger is drawn. You try to stab the enemy with the dagger, so, being a gambler, you roll your melee aim of two d12 dice. The dice result is 12 overall. You add plus two for the dagger’s accuracy, so that’s 14. The person’s right next to you, so your aim DC was zero, so you hit them. The wound DC is plus 14. The 3 wound DC of the dagger is increased to 17. That’s not twenty over, so you didn’t insta-kill your target. They are wounded and must make a fortitude check. They roll grit and compare it versus their total wounds received overall, which so far is just this one stab. Your GM announces they failed their roll, so they take one grit damage. Remember your gambler statted player characters has 2 grit, so taking one grit damage means this NPC probably is pretty badly injured.

Next, let’s talk about ranged attacks. Desperado Quickdraw requires you to draw your weapon, load it, chamber a new round, cock the weapon, fire, and eject the round. That’s about five rounds of preparation for one round of dealing damage, which is different than other tabletop roleplaying game systems you might be used to. Here’s an example weapon, the Baron Lawman single action revolving pistol. This is a short barrel weapon that can hold six shots. Its ammo is 0.44 magnum. It has a wound DC of 6. To fire this weapon, you’d need to first spend one action to draw it from the holster, three actions per cartridge being loaded (one to draw ammo, one to load, and one to rotate the cyl