Modern Conspiracy system

[grufflehead]

Hey all

Fuelled by watching the first 3 seasons of Alias while on holiday, I'm inspired to run a conspiracy type game. I've just acquired ConX edition first Ed which I like bits of but found somewhat confusingly written in places, and I've got D20 modern as well, but I want a break from D20, plus I don't think the ruleset/mechanics really give me the feel I want this time.

So, let me jack into the collective brain of ENWorld and see what other suggestions you guys have. Some of my choices/limitations are:

- like I said, just want away from D20 for now. I've got True20 but even that isn't quite removed enough (although the combat system looks nice and lethal, heh, heh ). I do want to have 'specialists' among the characters, but for them all to be competent at a range of basics (eg computer use, acting, driving, firearms etc) - and in the past I've found D20 to encourage characters which are just superhumanly good at one or two things once they get up a few levels. One of the things I liked about ConX was the simple difficulty scale, so if a task was 2 levels above the PC's skill they couldn't do it (short of working together, more time, gear etc) but then easier tasks didn't even need to be rolled for.

- the plot will likely be something similar to the Alias arc with Rimbaldi, plus I like the idea of intragroup paranoia. The hook will be that they are an inter-agency force (probably NATO based) so there will be lots of opportunities for organisational mistrust and factionalism.

- I don't want aliens or monsters (thought about Delta Green as well), although cinematically unrealistic devices will exist where appropriate

- I really like the ConX ESP system so if I don't use the rest of the ruleset I'd consider transplanting just that part of it.

If I do get it up and running, to further aid confusion and misdirection, I'm only going to ask the players to give me backgrounds including agency, stats and any traits/advantages that they see their characters with. Once I decide how many points they will be allowed to buy the rest, I'm going to start the game, and once they are required to perform a task I'll just ask who is going to do it, and how good their PC is at it - then assign them an appropriate rank, and check off the points. Once they have run out, then that's their finalised character. I'm hoping this will also help fuel paranoia as they will only know some of what the others are capable of, so when things start to go wrong, they might jump to the wrong conclusions as to who might have done it. Has anyone tried this sort of generation on-the-fly before?

 

[Andor]

I was going to suggest Unknown Armies, but it sounds like you've got a system?

In anyevent it sounds like a cool idea. Very conspiracy meets James Bond to haul mysterious skill out of.. err.. nowhere.

 

[masshysteria]

Alternity

1. The System

If you want to get away from d20, my suggestion is Alternity.

Alternity has a unified game mechanic, like d20, so everything is resolved in a similar manner. This makes it easier to learn, GM, and pick-up and play. The game mechanic is to roll a control die (a d20) and then add or subtract a modifier die (d4-d20). That will then give you a failure, ordinary success, good success, or amazing success.

Alternity was designed to support sci-fi and near-future games, but is expandable to all sorts of levels. I'd consider Alternity to be closer to cinematic realism that d20's heroic fantasy.

To run an Alias type game, get the Dark Matter setting and just leave out the supernatural stuff. There are enough agent and conspiracy power groups to give you a good setting. On
the character sheets just take a black marker and censor out the skills you'll never use or don't want the players to see (yet). It can help establish that a feeling of paranoia.

Of course, the books are no longer published, but are easily found on eBay and often in used book stores.

If you go this route, great support can be found at http://www.alternity.net/

--OR--

Check out Spycraft 2.0. Sure it is d20, but with some of the campaign options you could create an Alias type game quite easily.

There are others here who are much more knowledgeable that me about Spycraft.


2. The Atmosphere

I'm not in favor of taking away the character sheets especially if your players will be learning a new system. But you know your players better than I do, so maybe it will work fine. Perhaps you could cross everything out and just leave them the titles of the skills they have ranks in, so they have a general idea of what they can do without getting killed.

Do you want you players to trust one another, or do you want to build mistrust?

I've found with a conspiracy game, there are a few things that a GM can do from time to time that can help increase the tension:

Give the occasional red herring - As a GM, enjoy the time the PC's spend researching and going in the wrong directions.

Leave things unanswered - At the end of an adventure or episode, don't leave everything tied up nicely with all the questions answered.

End on a cliff hanger - If you game frequently enough, cliff hangers can be great. If you don't, it can be painful if your player start the game forgetting why they are in their current situation.

Force the PC to make morally difficult decisions - Do they torture the enemy in the interrogation because they need the information now and risk the loss of help/respect from "friends" within the agency? Do they shoot into a crowd hoping to stop the bad guy? Basically, do they resort to evil to stop evil and what are the consequences if they do?

Have events happen around the PCs regardless of their actions - Bombs don't wait for the PCs to stop them, they go off at predetermined times. Enemies and allies put plans into action, sometimes without all the information. Create a time line of events and perhaps the PCs will prevent somethings, but not others. The PCs need to feel success and failure.

 

[Umbran]

1. The System

If you want to get away from d20, my suggestion is Alternity.
...
To run an Alias type game, get the Dark Matter setting and just leave out the supernatural stuff.

I'm going ot second this - Alternity is a fine system, and Dark Matter one of the best stting books created in the history of gaming. I'd suggest Dark Matter even if you weren't using Alternity rules.

GURPS, using light combat rules, might also serve your purpose well. And there are a number of Gurps suppements that dela with conspiracy and spy stuff, ranging from silly to dark...

 

[Desdichado]

Including GURPS ConX IIRC.

I actually quite like d20 Modern for non-supernatural but over the top modern thrillers, but since you've specifically requested not to do that...

Have you thought about Unisystem? It's the system that the Buffy RPG uses.

As a plus, I hear that if you run a Buffy game at GenCon, all the hot RPG babes will sign up for it.

 

[grufflehead]

Doh! Spycraft - of course! I KNEW there was an espionage type game out there, but couldn't bring it to mind. This senility thing is taking hold earlier than expected...

Thanks for replies so far. I haven't had any experience with Alternity, and a quick trawl of games stores (should have said I'm in the UK) hasn't thrown up a lot of leads. There's always e-bay, although now I've been thinking about it, I think I'm going back to ConX, and just tweak the rules a bit. Even J-Dawg's HIGHLY persuasive reason for using the Buffy RPG hasn't swayed me

My reasoning for opting out of D20 is just that it's a little too, not sure if grainy is the right term, for my liking. I'm struggling to explain it - while I expect/hope some characters will take on specialist roles, I've found in the past that 'stacking' can be an issue in D20 games. By that I mean I've seen plenty of 5th level characters with about +15 in 1 skill and precious little else. Perhaps it's because I want the characters to all be 'field capable', rather than 1 trick ponies?

To explain my chargen-on-the-fly idea, it's not that I'm keeping the character sheets away from the players, rather I'm seeing it as an opportunity to start building the paranoia nice and early Let's say each has 20 pts to buy 'advantages' which are unknown to the others. They all start with a basic knowledge of several things (so a free rank in computers, driving, firearms etc), and that's where we start. They know how many points I am giving them for skills, they also know how much each skill costs - what I'm suggesting is in the first mission, as soon as they encounter something that requires a skill, I'll say 'OK who wants to drive/hack/climb/shoot, and how good do you want to be at it?'. Player A says 'I'll pick this lock, and I see my character as being pretty good at it so I want to have lockpick rank 3'. They write it down, and I deduct X pts from their total - when their points are used, their PC is 'complete'. The others now know they can do that skill, and how well. Or do they... Let's say I ask who wants to do it and get them to pass me a note to say how good they want to be. Let's say they pass me a note saying they don't actually want to put any pts into it at all! Or let's say I've already allowed them all to spend a proportion of their skill pts BEFORE the game so they may have the skill already. Now nobody's quite sure who does what, so of course when the laptop goes missing from the locked briefing room, who's going to get the blame.... That's the sort of game I want to run!

I also came across this site:

www.osirs.net

It's a GM resource which allows you to set up a fictitious organisation from which you can mail missions and info to your players. Of course, not all of them are going to have access to the same briefings, and just occasionally their 'home' agency just might have a request for them that it would be better if the others didn't know about...

Lastly, whiel searching for Spycraft I came across the Living Spycraft site. Plenty of old adventures and info there, which should make fleshing out my plot a bit easier.

So now my only problem is 'do my players REALLY want to play a game like this?'

 

[Deekin]

Just a Quick note. OSIRS is the name of the Operation System run by the Hoffman Institute in Dark*Matter. That's where that site got it's name.

 

[VirgilCaine]

GURPS, using light combat rules, might also serve your purpose well. And there are a number of Gurps suppements that dela with conspiracy and spy stuff, ranging from silly to dark...

That's what I was going to say.

 

[Glyfair]

Although I have no personal experience with it, EsoTerrorists might fit the bill. I recommend it based on the fact that it's designed by Robin Laws, and publlished by Pelgrane Press (who did the Dying Earth RPG).

It uses the GUMSHOE system, which is what really makes me think it might fit your needs. It's also the system that's going to be the basis of Kenneth Hite's new take on Call of Cthulhu.

Simon Rogers (principle in Pelgrane Press & ProFantasy software) posted a slight preview of the system on his blog.

I'm very interested in the GUMSHOE system, and am just waiting on a game that uses it that I'm interested in (neither Esoterrorists or Trail of Cthulhu seems to fit the bill, although I may try the second). The key idea I agree with:

Investigative scenarios are not about finding clues, they're about interpreting the clues you do find.

the basis according to Simon in this blog post:

Concept: Elite investigators combat the plots of occult terrorists intent on hattering the population’s sense of collective reality.

Mechanics: We replace the old Call of Cthulhu “one failed roll and the mystery grinds to a halt” syndrome with a resource management system.
During character creation players choose their skills from a finely-delineated menu of investigative techniques. (Also a few broader adventuring skills like combat and so forth, but the emphasis is on different flavors of investigation.)

Examples: Forensic Pathology, Ballistics, Academic Research, Textual Analysis, Graphology, Interrogation, Charm, Intimidation.

Like Dying Earth, your ratings in each ability correspond to a number of points you have to spend on it.
However, rather than a reroll mechanism, the points you spend give you additional degrees of success on a skill attempt.

Having a skill in the first place assumes a certain base level of accomplishment. If you get to the right scene and try to use the skill, you always get at least a base success, which is enough to propel you further into the story, moving the group into the next scene.

So where in CoC you’d have a chance to find the Eldritch Tome containing the map to the basement, and roll Library to see if you do find it, in Esoterrorists a character with Academic Research automatically finds it. The scenario may also give you the option to spend points to enhance your success: 1 point might prevent the map from crumbling, so you don’t have to rely on your memory of it. 2 points might allow you to spot the marginalia written in the volume by the secondary villain, which gives you an edge in interrogating him when you catch him later in the scenario.

When facing active resistance (generally in the broader adventuring abilities, like Fighting or Acrobatics) you auction points to see who wins, with a coin toss adding a degree of unpredictability to the outcome.

Certain other successes in climactic situations may require that you have X number of points currently in your pool without requiring you to spend anything.Concept: Elite investigators combat the plots of occult terrorists intent on shattering the population’s sense of collective reality.

 

[Drawmack]

www.osirs.net

I working on a PbP Call of Cthulu game. One of the things I want to do is have public and private things going on. Then when an adventure culminates we'll all get together and game through a live on-line session or two to resolve the chases and battles quickly.

I think this site is going to be a major part of the private aspect of the game.

On the note or paranoia, one great way to build this is to have the same rolls work sometimes and fail sometimes for challenges that are apparently the same. This works especially well if rolls are made publicly but determinations of success and failure are handed out by secret notes.

Remember though that there has to be something about the challenges the players do not know that makes them different, it is not fair.