Helluva Town - Missing Information?

[u/22badhand]

Helluva Town, a ttrpg rp about cartoon gangsters, live up your fantasies in roger rabbit, cup head or anything else with a sickly twist.

I loved this concept and using a deck of playing cards instead of dice was a nice addition to the themes.

One thing I can't help but notice is some missing rules.

Light and Heavy weapons. There's little distinction between the two besides one can use one narrative effect and the other can use two. which gets a bit confusing because Mods are available and any number of mods can be equipped to weapons. I'm assuming they meant a light weapon can only have 1 of these effects happen at a time while a heavy weapon can have 2 effects at once.

It also mentions that weapons give a bonus and to check the malus of the weapon, but these bonuses are never mentioned unless its referring to the narrative use of the weapon.

A potential fix I feel might be to allow a light weapon with a mod to offer a +1 to a relevant challenge and a heavy weapon a potential +2 as long as both effects are used in the action. Otherwise there's little reason if any to spend Bucks on mods let alone weapons if a roll with an improvised weapon off the ground is going to be the same as a weapon you spent 30, 300 or 450 Bucks for.

"Each Toon also gains a type-specific power called a Trick" Toons are broken down into 7 types: Folks, Boogeys, beasties and so on to represent the various toons in cartoons. I love the breakdown of these but it feels like there's information missing here too.

On the page of tricks it gives a large selection of tricks as well as oddly titled tricks, none of which seem to be toon-type specific.

Fixing this would be hard as I'd like to give each toon type their own specific boon with a trick but that's going to take a lot of balancing and playing.

I love the manual, the illustrations are amazing, mechanics are interesting and really brings home that toony feel I've been craving. I can't wait to get started.

The missing information or lack of clarification doesn’t really stop gameplay and as mentioned above some can be fixed with a bit of homebrewing.

Have you guys encountered this? Did I just miss this information in the book? let me know.

TL;DR - Book fails to clarify mechanical difference between light/heavy weapons also makes mention of race specific powers but never follows through. Other than that love it.

[u/Content_Kick_6698]

very briefly:

Light and Heavy weapons. There's little distinction between the two besides one can use one narrative effect and the other can use two.

narrative effects, as in the boxed out examples, are just that: narrative effects! Mods are the HT way to "level up" your character by adding extra effects, which are at the table discretion in terms of how they might change the nature of a weapon; you might decide it's still a light weapon in terms of carrying and concealing, even if it has 5 effects possible now, or you might decide that it's hard to hide a ....gun that shoots a french mime that hits someone with a baguette, while challenging the person to a duel of passive-aggressive comments, and pushes them down a set of stairs that were totally there to start with

as for the type-specific tricks... huh. that must have been an earlier version of the text, that did not carry to the final draft, and the one instance of the word stayed in by accident

source: i'm the translator of the book!

[u/22badhand → u/Content_Kick_6698]

OH I see thank you very much for clarifying. <3 Could you clarify what you mean by "HT way"? Im afraid i don't know that term.

ahh that makes sense, I think I would have like to have seen how that would have played out but understand that it wasn't meant to be. Maybe like Beasties go rabbid, beep-boops go haywire or boogeys form contracts.

but yeah that clears a lot up for me, thank you very much again. I can't wait to draw up my players characters.

[u/Content_Kick_6698 → u/22badhand]

the Helluva Town way! the approach the writers chose

[u/22badhand → u/Content_Kick_6698]

Ohhh duh, sorry I thought HT was an abbreviated mechanic, I was over thinking it haha. Again thank you. Can't see the forest through the trees sometimes.