The Final Girl

Characters in The Final Girl work a bit differently from ordinary RPG characters.  Instead of having just one character, each player creates at least two (and potentially three or four, if their group is small) characters.

Shared Character Pool

Furthermore no one owns the characters they create.  Instead, all created characters go into a shared pool, and in each scene players can pick which character they want to play.

Players are encouraged to not get too attached to any one character, both because of their communal nature, and because this is a horror game, and most of the characters in the pool will wind up dead.

Simple Characters

The characters themselves are very simple, and require only a single index card.  To create a character, a player simply writes down a title in the form "name the adjective noun" (although it doesn't have to be exactly four words).  For instance, "Wallace the gruff janitor" or “Rex, the guy who can’t stop talking about his muscles."

Relationships

Relationships to other characters help characters in The Final Girl to survive, and they can have three different types: friendship, rivalry, and screwing.  These are not determined at creation, but instead are decided on (mutually) by players during the game's three introductory scenes.

For instance, in an introductory scene where a group of goth characters are hanging out at a graveyard, the players playing two of those goths might decide that it would make sense for their two characters to be friends, so they would add the "friendship" relationship (with each others' names) to their cards.

Relationships can also change during play.  For instance, two enemy characters who find themselves as the last survivors facing the killer might decide to team up in the interest of survival, changing their "rivalry" relationship to "friendship".

Scenes

The Final Girl is organized into "scenes", similar to encounters in a traditional RPG (or scenes in a horror movie).  In each new scene the roles of each player changes: a new player becomes the "killer", while the rest of the group chooses new characters from the pool to use for that scene.

The Killer

Unlike most RPGs, The Final Girl does not have a traditional "game master".  Instead, players take on part of the GM role, narrating things related to their characters actions.  For instance, if a player wants their character to walk into a kitchen and find a large freezer, they don't ask the GM "what's in the kitchen" ... they just say that their character finds a large freezer.

However, someone needs to run all of the characters encountered who aren't in the character pool (ie. the more minor NPCs), as well as the story's killer, and that person is the "killer".  The killer rotates with each scene, so no one is stuck with the role the whole time.

Since this is a horror game, there is no traditional combat.  Instead, in every scene after the introductory ones, the killer targets one or more characters for death, and then the two players play a mini-game involving a standard deck of playing cards to determine who survives.

Killing With Cards

When the killer begins his murdering spree every player  in that scene gets to draw a single card, plus one extra card for each relationship the character has.  Then, the killer draws and plays a card; every character they targeted must play a card that beats that card, or else the killer gets to describe exactly how the character dies.

If no one died the killer then gets to pick new target(s), with the limit that they can't target the same single person twice in a row, and then the process repeats.  This goes on until one or more characters die, and the killer gets to keep those characters' cards.

Relationships and Killing

In addition to providing extra cards, relationships allow players to play cards to help or hurt characters they have relationships with.  Friends can play cards to help each other, rivals can play cards to help the killer, and characters who are screwing each other can do either.

Survivors

Whenever a character survives a scene they get a permanent "survivor point" added to their index card.  In future killing sessions the player playing that character can discard and redraw as many cards as they have survivor points.

The Endgame

This series of killing scenes repeats until only one character is left surviving.  At that point the player playing them and the player playing the killer compare the number of cards they have (from characters they killed while playing the killer), and whoever has the most gets to decide how the story ends, and whether the "final girl" and/or the killer survive.

Other players are also encouraged to provide their own "alternate endings" to the story as well.