# Street Fighter: The Storytelling Game tags: #game/rpg/street-fighter ![[Street Fighter - The Storytelling Game (cover).jpg]] Ah, **Street Fighter: The Storytelling Game**. Take a wildly popular, brightly-colored fighting game known for fireballs and questionable physics, then filter it through the moody, angst-ridden lens of mid-90s White Wolf Publishing. The result is a tabletop roleplaying game where you're not just a martial artist, you're a _storytelling_ martial artist, probably with a tragic backstory and a personal philosophy on why you punch people. In this game, players create their own globe-trotting pugilists or take on the roles of the established World Warriors to fight evil, seek enlightenment, or just make a buck in underground tournaments. It’s a world where a seven-foot-tall Russian bear-wrestler is a national hero and the primary antagonist is a megalomaniacal dictator with psychic powers and a penchant for dramatic capes. Essentially, it's an excuse to describe your spinning pile-driver in painstaking, narrative detail, possibly while quoting a made-up sensei. The core mechanic of the game is White Wolf's classic **Storyteller System**. If you've ever played **[[Vampire - the Masquerade|Vampire: the Masquerade]]**, you'll feel right at home, though perhaps with less brooding and more hadoukens. Every action whose outcome is in doubt is resolved by rolling a handful of ten-sided dice. Your character's capabilities are defined by numerical ratings in Traits—Attributes (like Strength or Wits) and Abilities (like Kung Fu or Stealth). To perform an action, you combine a relevant Attribute and Ability. The sum of their ratings tells you how many dice you get to roll. This is your "dice pool." The Storyteller sets a "difficulty" number for the task, typically 6 for standard actions, but ranging from 3 (easy) to 9 (nearly impossible). You roll your dice pool, and every die that comes up equal to or higher than the difficulty is a "success." You usually only need one success to accomplish the task, but the more successes you roll, the better you do. A single success might mean you barely clear a chasm, while five successes mean you do it with a graceful backflip that impresses onlookers. There's a catch, of course. Any die that rolls a "1" cancels out one of your successes. If you roll no successes and at least one "1," you've "botched" the roll, leading to a spectacularly disastrous failure. It’s a system that ensures that even the simplest action carries a slight, nagging chance of catastrophic, face-planting humiliation. There was only one official edition of **Street Fighter: The Storytelling Game** published in 1994. While it was supported by a line of sourcebooks like _Secrets of Shadoloo_ and _The Perfect Warrior_, it never received a revised or second edition, leaving it as a perfect, glorious time capsule of 90s RPG design. ## References - [Overview of the Game - Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_Fighter:_The_Storytelling_Game) - [Street Fighter: the Storytelling Game fansite.](https://sfrpg.com)