Design Diary: Streamlining Fear and Panic

I like to think Fear and Panic is a pretty streamlined game: it has shorter, simpler rules than almost every other game in the d100 horror space, not counting some one-pagers (and of course Cthulhu Dark, which I count despite it using d6s). However, I’ve been running it a lot at conventions and local game nights recently, and I think I can make it even simpler. For now let’s call these alternate rules, but I’m thinking of combining them with Time of Monsters at some point for a standalone game. First of all, it’s not really important to calculate Menace and Escape. That was always the clunkiest part of character creation. Most adventures I find myself actually running in Fear and Panic are about ordinary people, and for any game about ordinary people, it’s fine to just start both at 4 and let Scars change them if necessary. Then there’s the skills list. I included Operate because Operate Heavy Machinery is a bit of an in-joke for Call of Cthulhu players, but it really could be covered…