If you've heard of Filled With Online before now, it was probably through the news that someone dropped a 600+ page fan translation of a Japanese indie game that no one had ever heard of. I took a look at it, and while it had some weird bits and its origin as a GURPS supplement resulted in a game that looked a little old fashioned in some ways, there was a lot to like in it. The setting is a dead MMO that's still running after the apocalypse, and players can be self aware AI NPCs who just think their game is the real world, NPCs who've found out the secret of their artificial reality, or humans who fled to space but have found back end ways to log back into the still running servers on Earth. Everyone gets to pick "skills" that mostly looked to me like D&D 4e powers, and the classes seemed really interesting. You can be a catgirl whose martial arts powers combo into each other, a small flying robot with a big gun, a sheep with sleep themed powers, an ape person whose powers are themed around both Son Wukong and Saiyans, or a fucking battle pastry chef. So me and a couple friends ended up really wanting to try this weird game, and we managed to get into a group with someone running fan translations of the official adventures. And unfortunately, we found that the game has some issues.

I probably should have started questioning how well this was playtested when I read about rolling and difficulty. This is a 3d6 roll under system where your stat is the base target number, and if you roll that or less, you succeed, and bonuses or penalties adjust that target number. Like if your stat is a 13, and you have a -2 penalty, you'll succeed as long as you roll 11 or less. Human characters can have stats ranging from 10-15, though other races have bonuses and penalties that can let them go beyond that. Here's what the book says about difficulty:

"•-0 is Easy. Even an amateur should be able to
manage this, but specialists will almost
always succeed.
• -3 is Standard. An amateur might struggle.
Appropriate Skill bonuses will come in
handy.
-6 is Hard. Generally impossible for an
amateur. You should be alright if you train
the appropriate Skills.
• -9 is Difficult. This is generally impossible if
you’re not a specialist.
• -12 is Near-Impossible. This sort of thing might
only be possible with the aid of another
specialist."

You might expect for that to mean there's a D&D style skill system where you get to add something to your stat, since otherwise, a human who maxed out a stat would fail at hard checks based on it 62.5% of the time, and anything harder would be ludicrously unlikely. That would just suck. Unfortunately, there isn't. It is possible to get bonuses to specific checks or to boost your base stats by one point at a time, but you need to select a Skill that specifically does that, and Skills are also the powers your character uses. Like if you want to do more than some basic attacking, you'll need to take a Skill from a class. At level 1, you get 1 Skill, and you get 1 Skill each level up. And while a level up happens after every session, you're probably not going to want to take boring +1s to a stat or +3s to a check for specific action when you could take one of the cool powers you started playing this game for.

I feel like most checks in the official adventures were hard ones, and we were constantly getting strings of failures. One player was explicitly "good" at lock picking, and even she was constantly failing to open anything. You can certainly make a fun game about bumbling around, but that's probably not why you were looking into this game.

As for combat, it became clear that it needed work pretty quickly. As far as I can tell, the main difference between being a close range melee character and a ranged character is that the former will struggle to make it to enemies before the latter kills them. We had one character built to be a tank, and I don't think he was able to even try hitting a single enemy until at least the fourth session. He kept having to use his action to move further to actually get next to things. I tried a melee character myself for a couple sessions, and while I made a point to build up movement, I still felt like it was a challenge to get to enemies on my turn.

Difficulty just seems fucked. Either enemies went down really fast, or they'd be long slogs that hit really hard. And you know how designers of tactical games have realized that solo encounters need to work differently than fights against multiple enemies, and they've implemented things like giving them off turn actions, dividing one enemy into sections, etc? The designers of this game didn't. They just use a character at a much, much higher level than the players with huge defenses, accuracy, and damage and one big attack a round. Like in our last session, we had two solo fights, and I saw someone land a fairly normal hit with OK damage be told that the target took none of that because their defenses were that high.

And the book actively gives bad advice. I decided to play a Shephy, a race of sheep people, and there's a bunch of Skills based around putting people to sleep (because counting sheep lol) then doing things like hurt them through dreams or puppet their sleeping body to attack other foes. Each race/class has a suggested build at the end of the section, and the one they provided had a decent amount of Sleep related things, so obviously this is something the designers thought was a good option. But when we got into combat, things were dying so quickly that putting an enemy to sleep didn't seem like a good option. Why spend a resource to put an enemy temporarily out of commission when I could use no resources to do that permanently with my weapon? I tried it once just to use it, but it didn't work, and I ended up feeling like I should have just attacked. And then in the last session with the solos, I finally got a chance to use it against the last boss of the adventure. It would probably mostly just result in someone getting a free, undodgable hit in and the boss taking a penalty until she was able to stand up on her turn, but that's still a useful thing. So I gave it a shot, but she made the roll to resist it. And the thing about how this was set up in Foundry was that I could see the target number she needed to hit to succeed. Her stats were so high that Sleep would only have worked if she had critically failed, which in this game is a 17 or 18 on a 3d6, meaning the thing I focuses my character on had only a 1.85% chance of happening. According to the GM, that was intentionally a stupidly overpowered fight¹ that we were just supposed to try surviving and that most solo enemies would have had a decent chance of being effected by Sleep, but that still means two things:

1. This official adventure sucks ass, and I don't trust these designers to know how to design a fun fight. This means they probably don't know how to balance a game for one.

2. Sleep is at best extremely situational, and it was a bad idea to recommend building a character around it to new players. It's highly unlikely that anyone playtested the recommended Shephy build, at least not at the levels we were playing in.

Some of these issues might be fixable with house ruling, and if this had a following over here, it's the kind of game you probably would see plenty of guides on how to fix things and which trap options to avoid. But since this doesn't have that following, if you want to play this, you'll either have to put in the work yourself or deal with the jank. There are still things to like here, and if you want to check it out, you can get the English translation for free here.

1. Also, this opened with the villain almost one shotting three of us with an AoE. The only reason that didn't happen was that the tank took the hits for us and was the only one knocked unconscious. At least he finally got a chance to use the tanking powers he built his character around, I guess?