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Message: <blockquote data-quote="grufflehead" data-source="post: 3284792" data-attributes="member: 35977">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  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" /> 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  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":p" title="Stick out tongue    :p"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":p" />  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:<a href="http://www.osirs.net" target="_blank">www.osirs.net</a>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?'</blockquote>

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