Don’t Kill a Bird with a Baseball: A Randy Johnson TTRPG by JD Clement is a 3-page, 1-shot RPG in which every player plays a parallel version of 6’10” baseball pitcher Randy “the Big Unit” Johnson on March 24, 2001 in the 7 hours leading up to the fateful moment in which he will kill a bird with a baseball. This is a real event, and you can find the video on YouTube (content warning: a bird gets killed by a baseball). The game has simple rules and can be played GM-less, or with a GM.

This review is based on playing in a game of DKABWAB at the 2024 Go Play NW Spring Festival. We played with a GM, and I was one of the three Randy Johnsons in the game.

The Premise

The Randy Johnsons you play aren’t our universe’s Randy “the Big Unit” Johnson. Instead, each player is a parallel Randy Johnson, from another reality. Some other kind of unit. And you are all, for similar or different reasons, trying to avoid your fate. Our game included Randy “the Goon Unit” Johnson (with Juggernaut level strength), Randy “the Cursed Unit” Johnson (with the curse to always see the worst possible futures), and Randy “the Acclaimed Unit” Johnson (a sort of cross between an Ent and a Disney princess).

About half way through the session we made contact with each other via a cross-reality conference call, but mostly played out our struggles in parallel. Taking turns in the spotlight meant we got to be audience members watching the other Johnsons when the spotlight wasn’t on us. Shout out to my GM and fellow players for being wonderfully entertaining! Three Johnsons felt like a good number, and I think four would work as well. More than that might get a little unruly in terms of making sure everyone got their turn in the spotlight.

I felt the parallel stories worked particularly well with the theme of all being different versions of the same person. If you preferred, you could easily have your Johnsons find a way to travel through the multi-verse to join forces against fate all together.

The premise of the game is both absurd and specific in a way that made it easy for me to dive into roleplaying my particular Randy Johnson. The writing is evocative and funny and inspired me to delight in piloting the Cursed Unit directly into failure after failure. It was a perfect fit for playing an online game with a bunch of strangers.

The Mechanics

The basic resolution mechanic is that you have three stats, and to alter fate, you need to roll under the relevant stat on 2d6. This system is simple, works smoothly, and the fact that the three stats are Baseball, Pitching, and Big makes it even better. I’m a sucker for games with funny stats. You start with two Baseballs, which can be used to reroll a failed roll.

Each time you succeed (or spend a Baseball), you accumulate a resource called Friction, and when you eventually fail a roll, the more Friction you have, the more dire the consequences of your failure. The Friction mechanic was delightful and created a mounting sense of tension after each success.

I haven’t played a game with a mechanic like this before, and I’m excited to see if there are any other games out there exploring an idea like this. I also am definitely going to be thinking about how I can steal this for my own designs! I loved it.

The one piece that I wish the game offered a little more guidance about is how to handle the final moment where you must determine if each Randy Johnson kills a bird with a baseball. The game doesn’t give you any direct guidance about how to run the end of the game. We handled it with a simple roll, just like any other. This worked fine, and meant we didn’t have to stop the momentum and talk about it, but it felt slightly anti-climactic mechanically.

I think I want the “do you kill the bird” moment to either be entirely narrative, or have an extra-special mechanic.

The purely narrative approach would be to resolve it without rolling dice. The GM could of course decide whether or not you’ve succeeded in avoiding your fate, but I think it might be fun to give the decision as to if you kill the bird to the player themselves, and narrate it like an epilogue for your character. You could also give the decision to the other players on the table to pass judgment on each Johnson’s efforts to escape their fate.

If you’re going to resolve it with a roll, I think it would be cool to tie the final roll into the Friction mechanic. For example, instead of rolling under one of your skills, to have to roll under your current Friction score, or under twice your Friction score if you want a higher chance of escaping your fate.

I lean slightly towards the diceless resolution, but it’s hard to know for sure without trying it out. I don’t mind the fact that the game doesn’t tell you exactly how to run this moment, but I think I would have appreciated some suggestions or options.

Parting Thoughts

Overall, I had a blast playing the game, the premise is fantastic, the Friction mechanic is clever, and I’m excited to play it again to see more people come up with more Randy Johnsons and to watch them struggle against destiny.

Don’t Kill a Bird with a Baseball: A Randy Johnson TTRPG is written by JD Clement. You can purchase the game from Rat Bastard Games on itch.io for a donation of your choosing. I highly recommend it.

Updates after GMing

I ran Don’t Kill a Bird with a Baseball a few weeks after playing it for the first time, and I wanted to add on a few additional thoughts to the review!

First, running it was just as fun as playing. My three players all brought a ton of energy to their respective Randy Johnsons and we had a blast.

Second, I found the structure of moving through the 7 hours before the incident to be really useful both to manage the overall running time of the game, and to manage the players time in the spotlight. I would advance the hour once everyone had had a chance to do something, and once at least 15-20 minutes had passed. I think our total play time was around 2.5-3 hours (I forget exactly when we shifted from introductions and rules to actually playing). I have a habit of wrapping improv-heavy one-shots pretty quickly (often running 1.5-2 hours), and I’ve been wanting to extend them a little more into the 2-3 hour range, so this landed exactly where I was trying to put it. The structure of the 7 in-game hours really helped me manage the pace!

Third, I tried out my idea of having the other players adjudicate whether each Johnson had successfully altered their fate. When the fateful moment came, I had each player give a quick recap of their successes and failures in altering their fate, had the other two players decide if they had succeeded or failed, then handed narrative control to the Johnson in question to narrate how the final moments played out, epilogue-style. I felt like this worked quite well, and gave the final moment when some birds were killed, and some were not, the weight I felt it deserved.

Finally, the one thing I did somewhat wish I had as a GM is a mechanic for harm or conditions for the characters. If a character breaks a rib, or is high on mushrooms, it’s all narrative, it doesn’t affect the dice. This works fine, but I think I would have enjoyed having the ability to have the characters conditions affect the dice rolls.

I’ve had this same desire when running Lasers & Feelings, so a few weeks ago I made a (very) quick hack experimenting with adding some rules along those lines: Advanced Lasers & Feelings. I haven’t actually played my hack yet, so this may not actually be a good idea. Gotta play to find out!