No D&D No Cry ‘Madness of March’ Blogstafarian – Day 8

Other blogs can be found HERE.

The questions can be found HERE.

8 What spy RPG have you enjoyed most? Give details.

The more of these questions I answer, the more I see how narrow my roleplaying experience is. I think once my degree dies off and I have free time again I owe to it to myself to go Constantcon crazy and play some of these older (and even some newer) games and genres I know of but have not experienced directly.

OK, so for spy games I have only played two. The first was a disastrous run through the old Top Secret RPG. We were kids and had little clue of what we were doing, so ‘play’ is a relative term. The second time was in uni, and our traipsing around the town of Sprechenstale was a mess of gunfights and intimidations that was far removed from ‘spying.’ I figure the Admin ‘pixel bitched’ too much, expecting us to magically find the right NPC contact and get the clue, so we responded by shooting the place up. It was fun, but I think the game could have been more a classic spy game with clearer objectives, a consideration borne out by the rules themselves, which have clear roles (investigation, confiscation and assassination if I recall) for each character.

That leaves the other spy game I’ve played – Palladium’s Ninjas & Superspies. Like Top Secret I have had two runs at the game. The first was an abortive mercenary style game where the unkillable characters and plethora of attacks and martial art moves made combat a turgid mess.

I am lucky that I gave the game a second chance, for when I GMed I made lots of observations about Palladium and changes that made the game really hum. First, I realized from prior experience that the game need some lethality, so I composed the house rules that would later form the nucleus of my Palladium Patch, which floated around the internet a few years back. Here are a few of the changes:

Armor Rating – AR is changed to reflect how much damage a character or object can take. For living creatures, any damage up to AR is subtracted from SDC, while any in excess of AR is taken directly from Hit Points. Armor takes SDC damage up to AR then passes it on to the wearer. Watch players get wary of hand to hand and start running from guns…

(Also, use the optional critical damage tables! The risk of a broken arm or leg will force the characters to be creative)

Combat Momentum – Since most characters have multiple attacks/actions, a different style of adjudicating combat is necessary. Roll initiative as normal, but whichever character gets it keeps on attacking until one of the following occurs: 1) they run out of attacks, 2) they fumble (roll a natural 1) 3) they decide to stop attacking and use their remaining actions later. Implementing Combat Momentum made the game much more cinematic and sped up combat immensely.

(NB: Also, find the older unrevised edition if you can, but the newer edition works just as well. Just don't mix the two as power levels vary greatly.)

In addition to the above houserules, what made the game shine was the story we chose to copy – not James Bond, but Remo Williams. Bond may be good on paper or in the movies with scads of conversation, seduction, politics and scuttling about, but games need simpler and faster action. Remo Williams the Destroyer delivers that in spades, and with a game like Ninjas & Superspies all characters have varying degrees of Shinanju-like mystic combat prowress.

In fact, if you’re thinking of running a spy game, I’d suggest Remo Williams or Mack Bolan as inspiration. Let’s face it, for starters cheap pulp is a better fit for a game of action than stirred martinis, which needs a certain frame of mind and GM-player understanding of genre.

Makes me want to play Victory Games’ 007 now….

Non-D&D ‘March Madness’ Blogarrhea Day 5

Other blogs can be found HERE.

The questions can be found HERE.

Question 5 - What other old school game should have become as big as D&D but didn’t? Why do you think so?

I’m gonna come out of left field here and nominate another TSR game – Top Secret from 1980. Not that it was the greatest game, but that it had two pop cultural factors working for it that should have but failed to make it The Next Big Thing.

Consider the evidence:

1 – There was a movie about the game. No, I am not talking the 1984 Val Kilmer slapstick spy comedy that shared the game’s title, although that popular movie could also be considered a factor in the game’s favour. I am instead referencing another film from the same year, Cloak and Dagger. The film starred Henry Thomas – you know, the kid who was HUGE at the time for playing the main frickin role in ET – as Davey, a boy obsessed with the Cloak and Dagger video and roleplaying games. Davey stumbles upon classified information hidden in a game cartridge and goes about finding out who put it there and why while taking advice from Jack Flack, his imaginary friend based on his character in the roleplaying game. There is even a scene where Davey and friends play a suspiciously Top Secret-like RPG and Davey’s figurine of Jack Flack is crushed by a giant d20.

Talk about product placement!

2 – It caused an FBI visit to TSR headquarters because of a presidential assassination reference in its material. Just as D&D’s ‘Satanic Panic’ would conversely steer kids toward the game in droves by giving it an unwarranted veneer of danger, FBI attention should have created some controversial buzz for TSR and Top Secret. Fortunately or not, TSR downplayed the investigation and nothing came of it. Ditto the brouhaha about the original cover, which featured US money but had to be scrapped after it was discovered that printing photos of American currency is illegal.

Conversely, when Steve Jackson Games was also investigated by the US Secret Service due to hacking references in their GURPS Cyberpunk sourcebook, they rode the free publicity for all it was worth, putting a sticker proclaiming the book ‘confiscated by the US Secret Service!’ GURPS Cyberpunk was one of SJ Games best selling sourcebooks of the 90s.

What a lost opportunity for TSR!

Then again, Top Secret also had a few points against it. First and foremost, its main competitor was Victory Games’ James Bond 007 RPG. The Bond franchise is the grande dame of spy fiction, and its name recognition factor would have been hard to beat. Even TSR couldn’t help mimicking Bond iconography – the tuxedo clad spy on the cover of the Admin’s Screen could only be 007.

Second, the 2nd edition of the game, entitled Top Secret SPI, is generally perceived as  having better setting information but inferior mechanics.

Finally, maybe Top Secret in particular and spy games in general were just too real to be popular. People play games, and RPGs especially, to escape their reality. Top Secrets’ scenarios were all more plausible than James Bond stories, with hijacking terrorists and cold war spies instead of monocled megalomaniacs. Maybe the ‘lightening in a bottle’ that was D&D could only have been a fantasy game, as far removed from our reality as imagination would possibly allow.