Cinematic d20

[Lugh]

3) Finally, you want something which encourages various cinematic feels: you want stunts. You want mooks who go down quick (hit points = no no!). You want the ability for villains and heroes to give monologues during combat. You want some sort of metasystem (Hero Points). You want a system which might drag more narrative control back to the players. And, yet, you want all of these to be simple. (FATE, www.faterpg.com , is a really interesting narrative-based system (non-d20), which might give you a huge amount of ideas: the Aspects and Fate Points are particularly ingenious)

Just to plug my favorite game, Spycraft manages all of this. Stunts are encouraged and enabled, mostly through cool feats. Mooks, called minions here, are deliberately weakened, to go down fast. The meta-system in place is Action Dice, which not only enable stunts, and give narrative control to the players, but are a tool for the GC to reward the kind of activity he wants to see.

And, removing AoO helps speed up combat considerably.

And that's why Spycraft is a cinematic game.

 

[anonystu]

Just to plug my favorite game, Spycraft manages all of this. Stunts are encouraged and enabled, mostly through cool feats. Mooks, called minions here, are deliberately weakened, to go down fast. The meta-system in place is Action Dice, which not only enable stunts, and give narrative control to the players, but are a tool for the GC to reward the kind of activity he wants to see.

And, removing AoO helps speed up combat considerably.

And that's why Spycraft is a cinematic game.

Spycraft does a lot of things well. I like the game. Action Dice are pretty cool (although the mechanisms for Control Action Dice seem dubious to me, but that's another thread). Combat is a bit speedier, due to a simplified action system, and no AoO's. It's got a style to it.

It still misses a few points, and misses them wide:

1) Combat still ka-chunks: It's still a:

Decide Action:
Roll d20, add to-hit.
Ask GM if that hits.
GM gives yes or no.
Roll damage, add modifiers (if you're smart, you've prerolled this)
Indicate damage to GM.
GM records, tells you if he goes down.

That's a whole lot of rolling dice, and passing around numbers, for it to qualify as too cinematic: let's throw in that in a lot of cases, you get to do this twice a round rather than once, that once you hit third level, people will start getting 3 attacks, and mooks can always queue up for two attacks as well.

In addition, combat is still very detailed: quick! Name me the cover fire, suppressive fire, autofire, and burst rules off hand: there's a lot of very specific stuff that you need to know, and that players who invest in say, Speed Trigger (burst pistols), are going to know, but there are still a huge amount of modifiers to juggle around.

Obviously, really really well prepared players solve this, or you can just play really fast and loose, but if you play spycraft combat even reasonably straight up, you've got just as much churn.

Minions aren't very well done: unless you're a critical hit monster (by which I mean, going the sniper route), you're still going to have churn through all those VP's, and when you're playing mid-level or up spies, that's a lot of just smacking around for the heck of it.

Character creation isn't fast, or easy: gear stands out as a boondoggle and min/maxing exercise par excellence: you can solve this by helping people gear up, and so on, but there are lots of tricky nuances (personal budget) that can trip you up.

Spycraft seems to me to be a standard d20, rules-moderate (bordering on moderate-heavy in spycraft, especially if you start using the splatbooks) game, that has a lot of clever design, a lot of good writing, and which captures the feel of spies well.

But if you run spycraft, I don't think that at the crucial point (combat), you end up with anything any less number-crunchy or complex: in fact, the depth of tactics and action and feat combinations make it even more complex to me.

 

[anonystu]

Chases are the example I was just blanking on:

Innovative system. If you get familiar with it, neat. But it's slow. Maybe not as slow as tactical-warame-d20 modern style, but still: you look at the manuevers, cross reference with your current lead, choose manuevers, look up the table, add modifiers, add d20's, add skill, resolve. It's cool, but it's oh-so-chunky: if you try dropping a chase on someone who only glanced over the rules (like, let's say the soldier gets into a foot chase), it's going to drag, drag heavily.

 

[Lugh]

You've certainly got some good points. Spycraft combat is a cleaned-up version of D&D combat, modified for use with guns. As such, it is still very tactical, and crunchy. To a certain degree, I think it needs to be. The system needs to support both James Bond and Rainbow Six. To have the potential for both exceptional stunts and precision maneuvers, you have to get pretty crunchy.

With minions, you can slide the scale up and down. There are suggestions in the rulebook for doing so. My personal favorite is to remove wound points from minions. That generally means they take one or two less hits to go down, and crits are automatic death. I also try to use large squads of weak minions. I've heard other GC's have a lot of luck with restricting minions to a single die of vitality, regardless of level. If you REALLY want to go A-Team level of cinematic, give the minions a high Defense, no vitality, and only a single wound point.

Gear is probably the biggest sticking point in the system. Stargate has a significantly streamlined gear system, that is getting good comments. OTOH, I've never seen a cinematic gear system that I thought worked.