Brian Bloodaxe
I played in a couple sessions of Mutant City Blues. I liked the premise of the game, cops with mutant superpowers hunting down criminals with mutant superpowers, but it uses the Gumshoe system, which I've always been dubious about. I signed up for these games to give it a proper play and I tried to go in with an open mind.
If you don't know Gumshoe was designed to run investigations. It's big thing was that you don't roll to find clues, you just find them, the game is about what you do with those clues. Which is fine, but you can just do that in any system, you don't need to build a whole set of rules around it. And the rules they did build around it are weird.
There are three sections to your sheet in Mutant City Blue. Investigative Abilities, General Abilities and Powers.
Investigative Abilities are binary, you have them or you don't. They cover all the different areas of investigation you might know. There are 41 of them. The idea is that if you investigate something and you have the right skill you simply get the information. I get it, it differentiates the investigators so that they are all distinct and you get to have some fun with asking "Who should go do the morgue while the rest of us go interrogate the suspect?" But you could do that anyway and if you do it wrong in Gumshoe then it could get a little messy when you find the criminal's accounts but the guy with the Forensic Accounting Ability is in the morgue because he also had Pharmacy.
One of the three subsets of Investigative Abilities is "Interpersonal". I had Reassurance so I could basically always reassure people to get them to open up, which felt too good and I felt like I was stealing the spotlight after the third time I used it. Another player had Bullshit Detector which was similarly useful but I was left wondering if that means that my detective just can't detect lies. All of this though can be overruled by NPCs who will not respond to certain approaches. Which is actually fine IMO but kind of shows that the system doesn't quite work as intended.
Most of the game was just RP and those abilities, and it really could have been just RP.
General Abilities are all the usual skills and numbers. Athletics, Driving, Filch, Shooting and erm, Health which is really your HP. They get between 1 and 10 points each which you can spend for a +1 to your d6 dice rolls. Usually you need to roll between 3+ and 5+, so a few points will guarantee success and since you spend most of your time investigating you should have plenty of points when you need them.
Again, this felt like, why did they bother? I don't see any benefit in turning your ability to drive or sneak or punch into a limited resource. It's not realistic, it's not emulating any genre conventions, it's not simpler, it's not more fun. I don't get it.
Finally, the super powers. I liked this! They are a good mix and they add variety into the investigations and the showdown at the end was messy and fun. Also knowing the the criminals we were tracking down had powers meant that all the little details we learned were put to use prioritising targets in the final confrontation.
So yeah. Gumshoe. WTF?
Two of the players said at the start that it was their favourite system.