First Impressions: POWER RANGERS ROLEPLAYING GAME Has a Lot of Potential Despite a Messy First Run

Last week, Renegade Game Studios released Power Rangers Roleplaying Game (PR RPG). If you pre-ordered the book, you got early access to the PDF version of the book and have probably been going through it and dissecting it. Renegade was kind enough to send me a copy of the book, GM screen, and starting adventure. I am going to focus my thoughts in this article on the Core Rulebook. I will say that I have not played a session yet. I have a group and we’re getting together soon to see how the game actually plays, but outside of creating characters, there is no hands-on experience with PR RPG or the Essence20 system. After I have played the beginning adventure from the Core Rulebook, I will share our thoughts and experiences in a full review.

PR RPG is a dream come true for many fans. The idea of being your own Power Ranger is just so incredible. You can choose any color, any theme, any weapon, any Zord, etc. You can insert yourself into various points of the franchise or create your own little universe as an addition. The possibilities are endless. As a concept, this is 100% a winner. In execution, it seems to be tougher than originally thought. In short, after reading the Core Rulebook, I’m still very interested but a bit more skeptical. There are things that I love and things that are not so great, and I will address items in both camps. I’ll start with some of the bigger negatives and close on a happier note.

The first problem that anyone who has read the book will tell you is that there are a lot of errors. There are many spelling errors, grammatical errors, rules errors, and quite a bit of confusion. Reading through, it feels rushed and unpolished like these are really playtest materials instead of a final product. It makes me wish that they had taken another month or two to do another few passes and catch these problems and really clarify things. It kills me to say that. I don’t know anyone personally who was more excited for PR RPG than myself and my friends and family can attest to that with how much I started obsessing over it at the end of the year. This is pretty big, but there is a silver lining to these problems. Renegade is a fantastic company that’s very active on the official Facebook page. The team has been very gracious about answering questions, clarifying things, and are working on fixing/updating all of this. Once again, it’s not great that this happened, but the company has taken it in stride. Sadly, physical books can’t be updated like PDFs and so this first batch is pretty pointless in all honesty unless you want to mark your copy up like mad.

Another big negative in my opinion is how they did the Roles. Roles are akin to Classes in other RPGs. You get it at first level and it gives you certain abilities and more or less tells you what you’re responsible for in the party. The thing I do not like about the approach in PR RPG is that each Role is a color of Power Ranger. Red Ranger is a Role; Pink Ranger, Blue Ranger, and Black Ranger are Roles; etc. This assigns specific traits to specific colors and the traits only hold true for Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. This Core Rulebook focuses on the Zordon Era of Power Rangers which is fine in my opinion (additional books can fill out additional eras), but after the transfer of power in season two of MMPR, the roles shifted a bit and the descriptions and traits in this book don’t reflect that. It breaks Blue down as smart and techy which doesn’t always hold up; Green as the lone wolf but once you hit Zeo, that definitely goes away with Green serving as Black; etc. Yes, it’s an RPG and therefore, very easy to say that while your role may be a Blue Ranger, the character actually has an orange costume in-game. I just wish that they had instead given the roles names like Lone Wolf, Tech Genius, Leader, etc. instead of using the colors.

Equipment is the third and final negative that I’ll talk about for now. This section has a fair number of errors like the omission of keywords like Versatile (used by Black and Red Rangers) and Light (used by Yellow Rangers), the table isn’t clearly organized in any way, and I think some weapons ended up in the wrong section of their table. There are some cool things I’ll mention in the positives, but another thing I don’t like is the section on Power Armor. For starters, there’s mention of upgrading your armor, but there’s no information on how that’s done or what kinds of upgrades you might be able to get. Then, in the table it has information on the different armor types. In PR RPG, there’s Non Armor (clothing), Light Armor, Medium Armor, and Heavy Armor. There’s a nifty chart that lists the bonus that each armor provides, a brief description, and any traits. I hate this chart. All of the armor excluding Non Armor has the same trait, Deflective. Also, there are three entries for Medium Armor where the only difference is the “Type” which is just some flavor. The “Types” are Zeo, Turbo, and In Space. It has no bearings on anything. It’s just flavor, but for some reason each one needed it’s own row. I want to explain right now that you do not have to be Zeo, Turbo, or In Space to use Medium Armor and if you do choose to play with those Rangers, they will not all use the stats from that row. I think it would’ve been better to just have the level of armor and at the end of the row have an examples cell. That would let you very easily get rid of two rows and cause less confusion.

Ok, that’s enough negativity, let’s talk about some things I genuinely like. Since we’re already talking about Equipment, we’ll start there. Outside of some of the aforementioned problems, there’s a lot of information about different types of equipment you can use including vehicles. Plus, there’s information and rules for upgrading equipment which is always cool. This is great as you play the game or even if you need to create a custom weapon for a custom Ranger.

Another thing I like is the use of Origins and Influences. Origins are akin to Race from other RPGs, but since you’re all at least pretending to be human typically, the approach is a little different. The idea is that your Origin is a one-word description of your character’s personality from their time pre-Ranger. Are you an athlete, class clown, popular, jaded, or something else? This is your Origin. This informs your starting health, some skills you can get, your movement, languages, and each one has a special benefit. I found that this really worked well when my players already had a concept of who their character was and then as we went through, they would say, “Yeah, that’s what I am.” Influences are more like your Background. Each Influence comes with a related Perk such as getting Edge (roll 2d20 and take the higher) on Skill Tests where your Artisan background applies. You’re allowed to take up to three Influences, but for each Influence after the first one, the character gets a Hang Up. This shouldn’t be a deterrent though. Hang Ups are small flaws your character has that can add another dimension to them. For example, our Artisan may get too absorbed in their work and suffer a Snag (roll 2d20 and take the lower) to Social and Smarts checks while working on their art. None of the Hang Ups or Perks seem game breaking, but appear to be very well balanced as ways to add flavor to roleplay moments.

Now, the heart and soul of the PR RPG, the Essence20 system. At the core of the Essence20 system are the Essence Scores. These are four core abilities that inform what your character is good at and not so good at. I like the simplicity of only four Scores. One important thing to note is that you do not roll for your Scores, but rather just assign 12 points as you see fit although you will need at least one point in each. Unlike other systems where the number of points would determine a bonus added to rolls for related skill checks, instead you then allocate your Essence Scores to their related skills. For instance, if you put four points in Strength, you then have four points to distribute across Athletics, Brawn, Conditioning, Intimidation, and Might as you like. For each point in a skill, the Skill Die you get to roll increases or you can add a specialization (a cool mechanic I won’t get into here). Instead of a set bonus to your skills, you instead increase the Skill Die which you will roll alongside the normal 1d20 when making skill checks. It’s a very different approach from what I’ve seen in other systems and I like that. There are a lot of things that I like about what I see regarding the Essence20 system and that’s just a small taste.

I know I already said I didn’t like the way they named Roles, but I really like pretty much everything else about Roles. The game is very team focused, as something based on Power Rangers should be, and the Roles reflect that. Each character has a niche to fill and excel at. Also, every time you level up, you get an Essence Score increase which is not something you see in most games. Every level sees your character’s numbers go up which is really cool.

Based on reading through the Core Rulebook for PR RPG, it has a lot of problems, but also looks like a lot of love went into it. It does look like a lot of fun and I’m excited to play. I know some people are upset that there are not very monsters, but I find that’s typical for similar books in other games and I would be shocked if a bestiary wasn’t announced in February. If you want to start playing, you can order your copy now from Renegade and it’s also available on Roll20! I would definitely go digital for now so that you can always have access to the most updated version because it will need at least one big corrected version. The art in the book is awesome and for those who don’t mind big download sizes, the team recently made available a high-resolution version of the PDF so that it’s easier to enjoy the fun artwork. Be sure to read my full review after I get the chance to actually run a game.