Playing the Role

This is nothing more than a slightly more organized version of the Let’s Pretend games you played as children. You are pretending to be someone else - in this case a character in a Saturday morning cartoon. The major difference is that when you make a “pyew-pyew!” noise, we have more than the honor system to rely upon in determining whether your energy bolts hit anything.

You don’t have to use those rules, but we postulate that they are better than stopping the game to argue about it.

Go Action Fun Time, more than most RPG’s, is a make-it-up-as-you-go affair. It is a storytelling game with dice mechanics available if needed. You should never let the dice get in the way of the story, or even tell the story. They are simply provided as a neutral third party to resolve any disputes among the storytellers.

GAFT can work like most RPG’s, where the XP has the scenario all worked out in advance, and moves the other players from decision point to decision point behind his cardboard Screen of Omnipotence. Here’s a secret: the less the XP has to make up in advance, the better GAFT goes. In order to do that, though, the players have to be willing to fill in more blank spaces than they would be called upon to do in similar games.

Getting a high roll does not dictate the result; it means the player gets to describe the result. Character stats are generated to provide continuity. We are not trying to simulate a bad cartoon, where the character’s abilities depend entirely upon which underpaid hack they got to write that particular episode. Recording a Strength stat means your character can lift this much every episode unless something happens within the game to change that. We know that because we wrote that down, and it is the same number regardless of who is telling the story.

You do not actually need a Screen of Omnipotence (though you will still want to designate an XP to at least be in charge of looking up the appropriate rule.) If you've decided the time, place and basic plot, a group of good storytellers can go around the table making every detail up as they go. A word of caution about that approach: everyone has to confident with storytelling. It only takes one player who only knows how to wait for the GM to dictate which dice to throw to grind that process to a halt.

The more imagination and input everyone brings to the table, the better the game will go, regardless of how the dice are used.