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ShortQuests -- individual adventure modules! An all-new collection of digest-sized D&D adventures designed to plug in to your game.

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="anonystu" data-source="post: 1171912" data-attributes="member: 10897">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.</blockquote>

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