Thoughts on Reading Kids on Bikes

​With the 3rd season of Stranger Things released, I pulled Kids on Bikes off my shelf to give it a read.  This is the first game book in this genre that I have read--Tales from the Loop is so damn big (but beautiful, of course)!  The art in Kids on Bikes has its own beauty (Heather Vaughn has a cool, moody aesthetic going on), and the book is strikingly lean, a mere 55 pages of rules and procedures.  I was impressed with (and appreciative of) how concise the rules are; nothing is sacrificed in that concision.
 
The game helps you tell stories of small-town mysteries of the Stranger Things variety, though there’s no reason the rules couldn’t be used for more mundane stories, like Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys stories.  Actually, there’s no reason the rules couldn’t be used to tell any type of story in a small town because the rules of play don’t consist of anything more than a resolution mechanic.
 
Characters consist of 6 stats, and each stat is given a die size—d4, d6, d8, d10, d12, d20.  When your character attempts to do “something that runs the risk of failure” (27), you work out which stat your character is relying on to accomplish the thing, and then the GM assigns a target number for you to roll against.  If you roll at or above the target number you succeed in your attempt.  If you roll below the target number you fail in your attempt.  The more you miss or exceed the target number, the worse your failure or greater your success.  There is a chart to guide GMs in creating target numbers, and a chart to guide the players in interpreting the degrees of success and failure.  That latter chart also dictates who has narrative control over the success and failure.
 
That’s really the heart of the game once characters are created and the scenario is underway.  There are no special mechanics for investigating a mystery, spying, meddling, questioning others, or anything else.  I’m not a fan of creating target numbers as a GM, and simple success/failure mechanics leave me uninspired.  The authors give advice to GMs not to let failures just mean the end of a line of inquiry, but there’s no mechanical way to make failure mean anything other than “you don’t get what you want.”
 
That said, the game has a nice character creation system that builds your small town and places your characters into a web of relationships with the other PCs and the various NPCs that get created in the process.  You choose strengths (which have mechanical weight) and weaknesses (which are purely fictional) and answer both relationship questions and personal questions in what looks like a fun session zero.
 
The most innovative element in the game’s design is the creation of the “powered characters.” After the game begins, the GM can introduce a new character with powers (yep, just like Eleven).  The powered character doesn’t belong to any specific player.  Instead, the GM writes aspects or traits on index cards and distributes them to the players.  Each player has control over those aspects on the cards they get.  Through play the GM can reveal more about the character simply by handing out a new trait or aspect.  So the players might only know that the character is shy, quick to anger, likes kittens, and hates confined spaces when they meet him.  Those trait cards give the players what they need to play the character however they want within those bounds.  Then as powers or other aspects are revealed, players gain control of those new aspects as well.  The appendix in the book provides a list of aspects and powers to help the GM create powered characters without stress.
 
The GM section devotes a good deal of time to safety and healthy, open conversation among the group.  It also walks the GM through the process of mining the information revealed in town and character creation for hooks and story ideas.  It’s a solid suggestion, and happens to follow my usual process—I thought it was well explained with the authors’ typical concision.  What the game doesn’t give the GM is any tools for making story creation or running the game any easier.  With a resolution system and some advice about story creation and working with players and controlling pacing, the game leaves the rest up to the players.
 
In short, the game has a great setup, a workable resolution system, and some fine advice.  That’s probably all any experienced gamer needs to have a good time, but it’s certainly not all I want a game to offer.  

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