How Much Do You Care About Novelty?

[Thomas Shey]

The only thing I hard-oppose is "weird dice", because literally there's nothing mathematically you can do with those that you couldn't just do with normal dice (or, if there is, I have yet to see it, I am open to seeing it if people have examples), and frankly every game I've played with them, they were just an excuse to get more money out of the group and maybe try and lock new gamers into their "ecosystem".

I can accept, in theory, that this might in some cases be a case of quality-of-life intention where its perceived that the special characters on the dice are more reliably read and interpreted than just using a particular number would be. I'm not sure I believe it'd actually be true, but it could at least be sincere in intention.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Totally fine. What you are saying is that it doesn't work for you and your group, not that it doesn't work period.

I am saying it doesn't work for cinematic spy action or realistic spy action, period.

But... and this is significant I admit!

Some people don't care about either!

They just want a loosely spy-themed game with rules that support that spy theme (even if they don't produce results that resemble spy media), and which don't require their group to learn an entire new rules-set, and they don't care if it's basically D&D in a balaclava and clutching a Walther PPK! That's fine for them!

This has been true throughout RPG history - it's probably least true now because so many easy-to-learn and genre-suited rules sets are out there (and PtbA and FitD are fundamentally good at genre-matching, especially if you're not a fundamentalist about what PtbA/FitD "has to" be) but we still regularly see 3PP games (usually not particularly huge-profile ones but still) which use 5E's rules to do a genre they're fundamentally not good at, because to the people buying and backing them, that doesn't really matter, what matters is not learning new rules! Just getting to play something new and different with familiar rules/approaches!

That's actually kind of partly how we got into that position. There were no "recent" and well-designed and in-print spy RPGs in like, 2002 (if there were, we didn't know about them), and I wasn't thoughtful/clever enough to adapt Feng Shui or something, but there was Spycraft, and it had this additional, significant benefit, that the two people in the group who really weren't good at learning new rules (and to be fair, my brother and I had overloaded them by swapping systems repeatedly in that era!) already knew the general 3E/d20 approach.

(The reason I think Spycraft came out first is that we tried it first btw. But I could be wrong.)

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Broken Compass/Outgunned uses a dice pool system where players are looking to get X of a kind rolls. Special symbols on the dice aren't required by any means, but are helpful to spot duplicates at a glance. But Two Little Mice makes it very clear that their dice are a nice-to-have, not a must-have.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Broken Compass/Outgunned uses a dice pool system where players are looking to get X of a kind rolls. Special symbols on the dice aren't required, by any means, but are helpful to spot duplicates at a glance. But Two Little Mice makes it very clear that their dice are a nice-to-have, not a must-have.

It helps that they aren't trying to offload too many things on one die. When you have three or four special results you should read from a single die it gets a lot trickier.

 

[prabe]

Broken Compass/Outgunned uses a dice pool system where players are looking to get X of a kind rolls. Special symbols on the dice aren't required by any means, but are helpful to spot duplicates at a glance. But Two Little Mice makes it very clear that their dice are a nice-to-have, not a must-have.

Is that as similar to One-Roll Engine as it seems to me? (Looking for a reference point is all.)

 

[John Dallman]

Instead you just get D&D wearing a dinner jacket, but still behaving like D&D!

A big point is that hit point attrition, which is pretty fundamental to D&D-style systems, has little place in spy and super-spy stories. Their meaningful states of health for characters are something like:

• Unhurt.
• Cosmetic damage/ripped clothes.
• Seriously wounded, only trying to do anything if desperate.
• Unconscious, possibly in danger of death.

You can go from unhurt straight to unconscious: a well-placed rifle shot is likely to do that. Being knocked out is separate from these, and is possible in any state of health where you could be conscious.

That kind of thing doesn't work well when characters have widely variable numbers of hit points. That leads to that rifle shot flattening some characters and doing very little to others. If characters have small numbers of hit points, and those don't change much as characters develop, this works quite naturally. BRP/Coc, GURPS and even Hero system with the right restrictions behave in that way, but D&D doesn't.

 

[Thomas Shey]

That kind of thing doesn't work well when characters have widely variable numbers of hit points. That leads to that rifle shot flattening some characters and doing very little to others. If characters have small numbers of hit points, and those don't change much as characters develop, this works quite naturally. BRP/Coc, GURPS and even Hero system with the right restrictions behave in that way, but D&D doesn't.

Honestly, most fixed-hit point model systems do, to some degree.

 

[Reynard]

A big point is that hit point attrition, which is pretty fundamental to D&D-style systems, has little place in spy and super-spy stories. Their meaningful states of health for characters are something like:

• Unhurt.
• Cosmetic damage/ripped clothes.
• Seriously wounded, only trying to do anything if desperate.
• Unconscious, possibly in danger of death.

You can go from unhurt straight to unconscious: a well-placed rifle shot is likely to do that. Being knocked out is separate from these, and is possible in any state of health where you could be conscious.

That kind of thing doesn't work well when characters have widely variable numbers of hit points. That leads to that rifle shot flattening some characters and doing very little to others. If characters have small numbers of hit points, and those don't change much as characters develop, this works quite naturally. BRP/Coc, GURPS and even Hero system with the right restrictions behave in that way, but D&D doesn't.

I'm not sure I understand the complaint. Action adventure spies are not meaningfully different than sword and sorcery heroes in this regard. In fiction, characters succumb to their Wounds only when dramatically appropriate. In games, they lose HP. What's the problem?

 

[Thomas Shey]

I'm not sure I understand the complaint. Action adventure spies are not meaningfully different than sword and sorcery heroes in this regard. In fiction, characters succumb to their Wounds only when dramatically appropriate. In games, they lose HP. What's the problem?

Not sure they're typically similar in that regard; fantasy heroes are far more prone, on the whole, to take a beating and keep going that spy characters, in particular anything beyond a fist fight. (This avoids the question of whether level elevating hit points are a good model even for the former, but that's a separate discussion).

 

[Reynard]

Not sure they're typically similar in that regard; fantasy heroes are far more prone, on the whole, to take a beating and keep going that spy characters, in particular anything beyond a fist fight. (This avoids the question of whether level elevating hit points are a good model even for the former, but that's a separate discussion).

Ethan Hunt and Jason Bourne would like a word.