It's that time of year again! The very first game I ran for my home group was Fight Before Christmas, a simple system adapted from Lasers and Feelings where character creation all comes down to one number and a whole lot of improvisation. In 2020 as we were just getting into playing TTRPGs online, I found this fun little game and decided to give it a run. I wrote a scenario full of pop culture references and set my players loose to play around in a ridiculous world. Immediately after that, I became a go-to DM for the group and in between running two full length campaigns, we played numerous other one shots and always, always came back for Fight Before Christmas
Wanna check it out? It's free on Drive Thru RPG
Need some musical accompaniment? I score my games exclusively with tracks from the OverClocked Christmas collection
The gameplay is dead easy, borrowed from Lasers and Feelings. The only number on your character sheet is your Naughtiness rating, from 2-5. When the player wants to do something in game, you decide if it's Naughty or Nice, and roll a D6. Two of them if you're skilled at the task, and another if you're prepared for it. You want to roll lower than your number for Naughty, and higher for Nice. It's an incredibly simple system. Everything else is ad-libbed in character fun as the players act as a crack team of holiday heist mercs out for Santa's goods.
Each year we've done this, I pulled more weird and ridiculous Christmas pop culture and lore in. The 2020 game gave us an infiltration mission into the Home Alone house, where a grownup Kevin McCallister had plans to entrap Santa and inherit his power. One player character intervened and took the beard for herself instead. In 2021 a series of clues led the party around New York City to uncover a revenge plot weaved by the protege of Frosty's evil magician. 2022 reframed Home Alone in a Saw pastiche with an escape room puzzle orchestrated by the Grinch. Then in 2023 I took the group on a time travel mission to Victorian London to save Christmas cheer from a ghost busting Scrooge.
This year I have another fun mission lined up. Not to give it all away, but it's set in 1996, involves a skyscraper, an enigmatic villain with an accent, and an intruder crawling in the ductwork.
I spend a lot of time preparing materials for my games, and find that Fight Before Christmas works best when all we have at the table is some scenery and music, letting the players run with the story and seeing where it goes. All that's needed from me is some narrative push. It's not the biggest blockbuster game, but I'll always have a place in my heart for it and love that we started a holiday tradition with our group.
