Player Perspective

The Terminator RPG

Publisher: Nightfall Games

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Authors: Andrew E.C. Gaska, Benn Graybeaton, Richard August, Mark Rapson, Bart Wynants, John Hodgson, Jude Reid

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Artists: Dave Allsop, Matteo Spirito, Mirco Paganessi, Alyssa Menold, Erin Rea, Scott Purdy, Gregor Kari, Ori Kegan, Arron J Reilly, Paul Bourne

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Published: June 1, 2022

A Player’s Review of Their Experience with The Terminator RPG

Hello, my name is David and I’ve been playing D&D or similar tabletop RPGs for about 11 years now. Most of my experience is with the Pathfinder system, but my favorite system so far is W.O.I.N. I’ve also tried a few others like Fantasy Age or Exodus. I know not what you’re here for but I wanted to share that I’ve had experience with RPGs. The Terminator RPG is an excellent adaptation of the series, and they know their source material. To do Terminator right you have to. I will break things down and talk about how I felt playing the game and the different parts of its mechanics. I feel it’s also important to know that the campaign I played started in the future and had the party traveling back to the 80s, so I’ve had some gameplay in a setting where we had adequate equipment to efficiently fight the Terminators and a setting where we did not. My Game Master was this site’s creator, Danny Millard. We had a party of 8 players, and my character was a Hacker with minimal combat abilities and I made sure to max out my hacking abilities ASAP. 

 Making a character was a fairly easy process and allowed for good variety even if multiple players chose the same classes. That being said the individual classes still matter. each of the character classes really only differ in the singular ability they grant and the way you can spend attributes to build the character, a hacker will always be better at hacking than the soldier but it doesn’t mean the soldier can’t have those skills. It is also key to pay attention to how you distribute skills and to keep in mind at best, you only get one skill and attribute at max. I also suggest making sure you have a session 0 where everyone attends and can talk about how they want to build their characters, some classes are useful but more than one can short the group on other much-needed skills. I know that sounds like any D&D game but Terminator goes for the real feel of fighting an army of killer time-traveling robots with pea shooters in the 80s, or at least it can. 

Out-of-combat gameplay was also well done, mostly role-playing and die rolls like any RPG but I thought the D10 system that relies on the number of successes to determine how well you do is a lot of fun. The more successes in a roll the better completed the task is but this also means you can succeed at a task and still run into some trouble, I think systems that do this are a lot of fun and can make things more entertaining than just pass/fail. I played a hacker so my experiences were slightly different from the rest of the party. The hacking “minigame” for lack of a better term, made it feel like I was trying to fight Skynet on their turf. As long as I did not alert the system security I could more or less do as I pleased but the moment the security is tripped the system is aggressively trying to block you and push you out, and it’s not even a matter of the GM making the decision. The rules for hacking are set up so the security aspect is fairly automatic in terms of what it’s supposed to do next.  

In combat, the gameplay was interesting. Now to be fair I was in a party of 8 which is massive for any tabletop RPG, and Sarah Connor at most had like 4 friends helping her at any one time, and almost always one of them was a repurposed Terminator, so keep that in mind it matters. There were moments in the future setting where the group could line up and hose down a terminator or two and have a pretty minimal risk to ourselves, that being said that was in the few instances where the group was given such an opportunity. This is where I feel the GM should defiantly be good at tactics and strategy, even in those moments where we could just be a firing squad for a terminator it usually came at great risk or took great effort largely in part to the Game Master not only being very well versed on the Terminator universe but that also has good knowledge of battlefield tactics and strategies. This made the game a lot more fun in terms of feeling like it was in the Terminator universe but sometimes made it very stressful to play the game. if anybody turned out to be a Matt Smith-like Terminator it would be Dan. Case in point the one time off the top of my head that I’m thinking of where the group got a chance to just do a firing squad on a Terminator was because it detonated its power core, you know, like in T3.