Spycraft 2.0 is awesome!

[Pbartender]

fromn everything i have seen from multipkle sources, automatic fire does not increase the likelihood of a complete miss.

No, it doesn't -- at least not for the first target you are aiming at -- but you do very quickly reach a point of diminishing returns. The repeated recoil of an automatic weapon quickly destroys the accuracy of even the best marksmen. This is why militaries train their soldiers to fire three round bursts, and most assault weapon have a three round burst setting. The primary reason for this is to reduce ammunition being wasted by spraying it uselessly about the battlefield.

Fully automatic fire is generally considered useful only when the target(s) are at very close range (~<50 ft... CQB range, in Spycraft terms), and the targets are very closely grouped. Anything farther away, or more loosely grouped than that, and you are wasted bullets in the empty spaces between the targets... You'd be better off firing carefully aimed bursts of 3-5 bullets or less at each individual target.

 

[swrushing]

[/QUOTE]

No, it doesn't -- at least not for the first target you are aiming at --

BINGO! We agree.

Unfortunately, as seen by glass' statement, some people believe otherwise.

of course, they might be reading the rules and drawing from that, where AF does increase the chance of a miss against your "first target" or even your only target.

but you do very quickly reach a point of diminishing returns. The repeated recoil of an automatic weapon quickly destroys the accuracy of even the best marksmen.

Well, sure. Absolutely. unless its a mounted weapon, by a few rounds into the fire, you are now just spraying unaimed lead. Now, in some circumstances, spraying unaimed lead isn't a bad idea, but its certainly not on a per bullet accuracy thing, a great move. (this may change slightly for mounted guns but thats a different animal.)

This is why militaries train their soldiers to fire three round bursts, and most assault weapon have a three round burst setting. The primary reason for this is to reduce ammunition being wasted by spraying it uselessly about the battlefield.

exactly. no arguemt there from me.

AF vs single targets at best gives you as goo or slighlt better better chance of scoring a hit at all and gives you a chance of getting 1-2 extra hits give or take.

Fully automatic fire is generally considered useful only when the target(s) are at very close range (~<50 ft... CQB range, in Spycraft terms), and the targets are very closely grouped.

again, we agree. thats why in my rules for AF from my spycraft game, AF doubles range penalties.

Anything farther away, or more loosely grouped than that, and you are wasted bullets in the empty spaces between the targets... You'd be better off firing carefully aimed bursts of 3-5 bullets or less at each individual target.

In general, i have no argument with this statement.

IRL there are plenty of bad things that make autofire not a good overall option such as wasting/burning ammo ridiculously fast for little net gain and the danger to other objects and people down range of the fire from the slew of missing bullets among others.

If these were reflected in the rules (make large volumes of ammo harder to carry by actually having it count as weight and make the stray fire a serious risk) and if the increasing difficulty of targetting scale for extra hits went Up for each hit (say one extra hit if you beat the needed to hit by 5, another extra hit if you beat it by 15, another if you beat it by 30) so that seeking the extra hits gets harder and harder, you could get a manageable autofire even considering game balance without needing the silly "increased chance of miss."

As an Aside...

BTW, and i have read several games recently so this might have been spycraft but it was I think feng shui, i also like the notion of adjusting the "level for extra hits" by the SIZE of the target. Say the base count is " a hit for roll exceeded by 5", if the target LARGE make that by 4, if its huge make it by 3, up to if its collossal make it by 1, and the flip side of rasing the bar based on smaller sizes. Again, i think thats feng sghui but am not sure.

As another aside...

Now, in the nature of fairness, i have revised my initial opinions. I saw so much good stuff written about the campaign qualities, variable npcs and dramatic conflicts that i decided to give it a buy in spite of the gun rules. "logically," i said to myself "since i have already house ruled those problems, it won't be hard to just do the same for 2e, so lets not allow the lack of improvement on guns to stop me from looting the other good stuff."

So, i gotta say, i am glad i bought it in spite of the gun rules.

The qualities are nice.

The variable npc design is something that i felt D20, especially the heavier d20 systems, has needed for a while. Adding tons of chargen complexity for PCs is tolerable to some degree and desirable but it slams the GM if he uses those same rules. This is similar to how i have been doing npcs.

and the dramatic conflict system is wonderful and IMO the best part of the book. As some background, i have been running a stargate game for almost two years and three of the four players went with a variation on doctor. So i retooled the game to be a medical emergency response team and dubbed it Stargate 911. What i have struggled with was making "medical challenges" into more than "just roll your medicine skill" or "roll your first aid skill" so that the players had to make "meaningful choices" in their character's main focus.

The DCon system gives me that sort of a procedure to make "things other than combat" a detailed ongoing process with meaningful choices. I don't recall there being a medical one per se, but one could certainly be devised.

of course, this is made bittersweet by the lack of support they have said the DCon system is going to get, with their decision to not have more DCons being something they plan to include regularly or almost any at all in future products. I think the comment was something like one more in products this year anbd none outlined/planned in products for 2006 at all.

sigh.

 

[Skrit]

Excuse me if this was asked already, if so just point me in the direction please, and Yes I checked the Spycraft 2 website and didn't see an answer...

I'm going to buy Spycraft 2.0 soon what I wanted to know will my Old Spycraft Equipment book work with it?? How about the D20 Firearm book??

 

[Pbartender]

I'm going to buy Spycraft 2.0 soon what I wanted to know will my Old Spycraft Equipment book work with it?? How about the D20 Firearm book??

They won't necesarily need to work with it... The vast majority of equipment and alternate rules in those two books has already been included in the SC2 rulebook.

 

[Henry]

After listening to my wife's sinister whisperings, I am now the proud owner of a copy of Spycraft 2.0.

I'm only about 4 hours into reading it, now. I like a lot of what I see, but my biggest problem is twofold:

1) Character creation is as confusing as heck, because of the DOZENS of extra options now available. I would like to play this, but it will be sometime next year, as I ingest the options slowly, and try to come up with a way that this will be digestible by my players.

2) I dislike its underlying core philosophy, which is different from every single d20 game I've ever seen until now (including 1.0). The core philosopy I'm speaking of is the "character level vs. in-game status" section of the book (it's a sidebar). SC2 is laid out such that everyone from level 1 to 20 could conceivably be the best at what they do, and be described as such. Level 1 Faceman? Best infiltrator in the U.S. Level 20 Faceman? best infiltrator in the U.S. Level becomes FAR less relevant to challenges, thanks to result caps, to the NPC rules, and the minion rules.

I can see why Denaes would be dissatisfied with Modern after looking at SC2. Many people (myself included) giving him advice were telling him he was aiming the play level at too low a level (3rd or so) to make a high-action wire-fu game. Spycraft implies you can do it at any level. In most over d20 games, you DO gauge power level by character level - even Mutants and masterminds, which recognizes its starting heroes at effectively 10th level. SC2's removal of DC's and instituting result caps means that the power level is gauged compeltely relative to what the heroes are like now, and the NPCs are on a sliding scale whose numbers are totally different based on the level of the PCs'. It's an interesting experiment, and I'm curious to see how it would play, because I'm not sure I like the connotations yet. If level is relatively irrelevant, then a levelless game would suit this better than a game still using levels.

Again, I'll have to see through further reading how this works. One thing's for sure -- I'll be haunting the AEG forums more, because I'm DEFINITELY going to need serious help understanding character creation and running the game. I "got" Spycraft 1.0 inside of a couple of hours of perusing it, tops, and I love the game. As it is, there's just TOO much for a first-timer to absorb - enough to turn them off from it, if hit all at once.

 

[Psion]

2) I dislike its underlying core philosophy, which is different from every single d20 game I've ever seen until now (including 1.0). The core philosopy I'm speaking of is the "character level vs. in-game status" section of the book (it's a sidebar). SC2 is laid out such that everyone from level 1 to 20 could conceivably be the best at what they do, and be described as such. Level 1 Faceman? Best infiltrator in the U.S. Level 20 Faceman? best infiltrator in the U.S.

That's actually a philosophy that started in 1.0, and never struck me right.

S'okay, it's easily enough ignored. If you are first level in my games, you may be good, but you ain't the "best there is at what I do."

Edit: I did like that they made (and continue to make) threats level-flexible. But bits like the threat agendas in 1.0 made it pretty clear that higher levels are bigger threats. Just like you think they would be.

 

[AscentStudios]

I've been waiting to see comments like Henry's come to the fore. One thing we assumed in the process of developing this massive book is that Spycraft 2.0 would not be Baby's First RPG Toolkit books are not really appealing to the new player who wants to be a Jedi or a Ring-bearer or anything from a licensed property - they're generally purchased by GMs who konw what they're doing or looking for something different to do their home campaigns with. Hence, we don't have the obligatory "what is roleplaying" section, and spend very little time ramping up concepts that our core audience will understand. I think our intuition was right - the people who crow about this book tend to be players familiar with Spycraft, d20 games in general, or old-saw GMs who really wanted a new twist on the d20 system.

 

[MoogleEmpMog]

I have to disagree with Henry on this one. To me, "level has little/nothing to do with your relative competence or character role" is just one more step forward on the same shining road as "character class has little/nothing to do with your character role."

Levels are a great tool for making a playable game, but they restrict character concepts immensely.

Spycraft moves further in the direction of most, say, console RPGs (ala Suikoden, Final Fantasy, Wild ARMs), where a character's game mechanic power level and his role in the story often conflict.

For instance, in Xenogears, Hyuga Ricdeau is pretty much the world's greatest spy and top five as an inventor and martial artist, but he joins as a "level 8 character." He's the best combat character in the game on a per-level basis (in d20 terms, he'd have a munchkin build stacking his +8 Int bonus multiple times to every action ), but he still joins at a lower level than Maria Balthasar (begins as a "level 30 character"), who in storyline terms is much less capable.

The Spycraft system lets me play a retired warlord, an active superspy and a brash young monarch, all in the same party, all at the same level, and have the game mechanics in the background working perfectly. That's a very good thing from my perspective.

 

[Byrons_Ghost]

1) Character creation is as confusing as heck, because of the DOZENS of extra options now available. I would like to play this, but it will be sometime next year, as I ingest the options slowly, and try to come up with a way that this will be digestible by my players.

This is pretty much what I was thinking with my previous posts in this thread. I'm playing around making starting characters on my own, and it's been a pretty long process to wade through all the options. And I haven't even got to the gear section yet.

The complexity involved means that a) my players will have to acquire a book (somehow) and ready pretty much 80% of it on their own, or b) I'll have to commit an evening to each one of them, and take them through the chargen process step-by-step, as if I were taking an end user through a server configuration. And I get enough of that at work.

I've seen the toolkit statement, and that's pretty much the feel that I got from the book, too. But my players are by no means newbies. We've all been playing and running D20 since it first came out, and other games for years before it. We've even played GURPS and Hero in the past, and like those games, there's a steep learning curve to this one. It's going to make it more difficult for people to get into.

My assumption and hope is that, once everything is up and running, things will run a lot smoother. But I won't know this until I've done a lot of groundwork to make things digestible to my players. Even on the AEG forums, they're talking about taking some of the more complex rules and holding off on them until people have a feel for the system. In short, I still prefer the toolkit approach, but (liked anything else) it is possible to go too far.

As to Henry's point #2, the lower-level characters etc, I can see it either way. One of my main complaints about D&D has always been low-level games. I just don't get many thrills from killing orcs or giant snakes. I usually compensate for this by starting my games at higher levels, but that leaves me less room for the game to expand (especially in D&D, which I find becomes increasingly unplayable as it approaches level 20).

This same thing is really even more of a turn-off for D20 Modern. Without getting into the whole generic vs. archetypical class debate, D20 Mod has always struck me as pretty bland. Characters still can't do much at lower levels, and they're in the normal world as well, so there's no much cool stuff they can draw from the environment either. That's pretty much like two strikes against the game right there.

So, having the ability to play the "world's greatest X" at an early level in Spycraft is definately a feature for me. Mechanically, the characters still have a lot of room to advance, and I see it more as honing one's skills or branching out into areas rather than spending several levels becoming competent. I could even see it working like M&M 2e, with a power level cap and the PCs building their characters around it.

After all, the advancing mechanics really don't do much other than expand character options and inflate the numbers involved. Their main purpose is to give the PCs a sense of accomplishment. If this can be done in other ways- not just story ways, but also with things like training levels, organization membership, etc- then I could see low level Spycraft being sufficient for a pretty long time.

At any rate, all this is really going to be up to the individual GM. I didn't read that sidebar so much as "your game SHOULD work like this". I read it more like "we've seen this issue with other games, and have decided to try something different, and here's how you can do it". YMMV.

 

[Henry]

I've been waiting to see comments like Henry's come to the fore. One thing we assumed in the process of developing this massive book is that Spycraft 2.0 would not be Baby's First RPG Toolkit books are not really appealing to the new player who wants to be a Jedi or a Ring-bearer or anything from a licensed property - they're generally purchased by GMs who konw what they're doing or looking for something different to do their home campaigns with. Hence, we don't have the obligatory "what is roleplaying" section, and spend very little time ramping up concepts that our core audience will understand. I think our intuition was right - the people who crow about this book tend to be players familiar with Spycraft, d20 games in general, or old-saw GMs who really wanted a new twist on the d20 system.

Alex, please clarify for me -- was that supposed to be an insult to my ability to comprehend RPG's? Because it really read like my struggling with the body of SC2 rules was due to my "inexperience with d20," or the fact that "I'm a GM who doesn't know what he's doing."