Spycraft 2.0 is awesome!

[swrushing]

[/QUOTE]

We did include the weight of the weapons, in some detail, but ammo? I like the "stupid rule", and if I were to tell my players they need to count up all their ammo - by type - and figure out how much it weighs (assuming no unusual rounds have been requition and we are going to actually hand wave the weight of the magazines since magazine size/weight varies from weapon to weapon making any sort of standardized entry an appproximation), I'd feel stupid because the next thing I'd be asking is "did everyone get their gadgets?"

Actually, wow, you make that sounbd complicated. I assumed it would be handled by something as straight forward as listing a typical "loaded mag weight" right beside the "ammo in mag" column. Level of detail doesn't require getting down to per bullet for a handful of slugs in you coat pocket. but, you might not realize, there is a lot of room to play with between "dont count ammo for encumbrance" and "count every bullet and special load" and many games have played well in that room since as early as 1977, when, iirc, traveller did it using "typical mag weight."

In all honesty, Bond Movies and FPSs actually agree on this point - it is below the threshold of concern. Get back to the shooting ! Difference in playstyle to be sure.

Now, of course this I can agree with. An encumbrance system which doesn't sweat the small stuff is great and not a bad design notion at all. The disconnect i had came in Stargate where the encumbrance system was actually very precise and did sweat the details and had weights for things like bottles of water tablets while AT THE SAME TIME doing the "below the radar" thing with the potential thousand rounds of ammo you toted.

low detail encumbrance system = cool!
High detail encumbrance system which then ignores a fairly important weight for a fairly important element = not cool!

Do i gather from you guys redesign in Spy-2 that your encumbrance system is less detailed about the other stuff too and not just handwaving the ammo weight? IF so, that would be a plus. So, whats the smallest item weight actually listed then for encumbrance? Probably what a couple pounds? Do you have weights of less than a lb? of an lb?

Summary: low detail on encumbrance, not bad at all. Low detail on encumbrance only one particular fairly heavy element of a primary story element (gunplay) and high detail on the rest... not so good?

With things like autofire, if you create a game option that is vastly superior to a normal attack and almost invariably fatal, you have to realize that not only will players gravitate to it, but NPCs should too - and by shear coincidence you are going to end up spending more time making characters than playing

I think it was the "almost invariably fatal" part you added in there that gets you these problems.

OTOH, movie physics tell us that namesless gunmen spraying lead never hit anything !

a feature that can be created by dint of their role, by the design of the NPC, and doesn't conflict with the autofire to-hit change at all.

Hypothetical example: Remove the autofire penalty and raise the bar for bonus hits to say " 10 over for the first, 20 over for the second, 30 over for the third, etc and allow a hero point to gain an extra hit for you) which suddenly means autofire in the hands of the faceless mooks (built with rather low BAB, no hero points) is pretty much the same as single shot in effectiveness as they rarely if ever get the second hit in, while our heroes can find utility out of it either thru hero pt or thru high enough bab. (Not the higher threshold for extra hits also keeps the number of extra hits low, somewhat like i see described for autofire... one-two extras hits at most, usually only one.)

IE, in the movies, the mooks miss because they are mooks and not because autofire sucks. If you are looking for cinematic feel, realize, its not about the gun.

As for autofire becoming just better than normal fire and people using it all the time, there are plenty of drawbackls to autofire. When these don't apply, it is better than single shot.

Obvious drawbacks include ammo usage (carrying tons of ammo is tough, especially on missions as opposed to sitting in your evil guy's complex), the hail of "unaimed" bullets is very dangerous to anything you don't want to hit in the area, like valuables (think the climax of rush hour, or was that rush hour two?) especially to civilians say down the street, not reliably silenced (iirc), and of course increased problem with mechanical errors. of these the ammo usage is probably the more common depending on the fight's setting... but of course if ammo doesn't weigh anything,..

In my games, for instance, ammo (by typical mag size) has weight and is counted by encumbrance like other things are. heck, its one of the serious "track it" kind of items. Autofire is better than normal fire (but not to the overwhelmingly over-lethal draw up new characters all the time level you seem to leap immediately to) and the downsides play a role because of that abd because of scenario setting and challenge demands as often as not.

Really, there are middle grounds between making autofire mechanics the cause of mooks spraying wildly misses and your alternative of having autofire result in death by the score scenarios.

As to more rolling producing more errors, errors by themselves don't do anything when you are shooting - somebody has to spend an action die to apply the suck. We tried to provide the GC with a LOT more cool things to do with his action dice that go after you every time you error, but if he does, tell him, from me, to knock it off .

Clearly, i should have said "chance of error" instead of relying on your game term "error" which does mean "chance of error".

Certainly, you are correct, the Gm is the judge on when an eror occurs when the chance comes up. But if you don't intend the Gm to use or consider the error chance rolling up in this decision, why have error rates at all?

But again, i dont really have an answer to this using your system.

In my games, most weapons don't have an error rate by default. They can gain one by abuse or by lack of proper care or by extended use without routine repair. things like autofire also give them a smjall chance of error. of course, for me, error means more than mechanical failure, and it can also mean things like an unfortunate ricochet or hitting something you did not want to, and pretty much each "point" (dice actually) of error chance added by the Gm has a "reason" for it.

Rambling on but, here is the key, by setting the bar at "0 error chance and add chance with cause" I don't have to futz with all those "rolled an error but hey, no error occurs" thingies. My people only have to check their rolls for chance of error when it will mean an error occurs.

I would swing opposite from you in that, for me, making my guys check their rolls for "error chances" when i wont give them an error regardless makes me feel stupid.

and, as i stated before your clever mockery on account of it, absolutely not a system i would buy again. you guys pro'ly did a bunch of really neat things in the "other parts of the game" but, to my surprise, didn't seemingly address any of the issues i had originally.

enjoy.

 

[swrushing]

[/QUOTE]

So, why are you playing d20? Why is vitality SO unpalettable but HP are perfectly acceptable?

isn't spycraft 2 OGL, not d20?
you are aware that in the OGL arena there are several games that eschew the hit point (VP/Wp) model, right?

Well, i don't mind hit points (whether they be called hit points or the modern rpg slang VP/Wp) for genres like magical fantasy at all. With fireballs, and dragons and spells, you don't start from any sense of "faux-reality" or "cinematics" at all and the DND "dramtic clock" hit points create feels comfortable there. heck, it may just be a case of being so used to it combined with the "no pretense of realistic" but it works fine.

However, i have tried and rejected, and so have those i game with, all of the hit point models for gunplay. they just dont work (for us only, perhaps) well at all.

Models we have found successful for representing gunplays include:
a damage save system (ala MnM or true 20) i used for two years in my own stargate game (it was fairly easy to tag it on top of AEGs rather good class system and basic d20 mechanics)
a similar system for traveller.
heck, even old standy traveller did pretty fair to middlin' with its "damage applies to physical atts and first blood rule."
We haven't tried them but the grim and gritty and bab 5 and starship troopers seems like interesting takes too (though the latter two iirc dealt with it by removing most of the hit points escalation.).

there are plenty of OGL systems out there which have abandonded the hit points model for what they consider better ground. and this is the OGL forum, right?

Because 1 line of different description in no way changes that VP/WP is HP but with the ability to kill in one shot rather than the terribly realistic system of grinding down a character hundreds of hit points to get to the juicy center.

where in the world did you get the notion that the grind down was realistic? certainly not from me. its just that neither i nor my players have as high a need for "realism" in our dragon-slaying fantasy as we do in our seemingly detailed modern firearms gunplays.

If you have that much of problem with the "official" description of VP/WP, you could always go with the *other* description I had of 'shots that hurt' (wounds) and 'shots that don't' (vitality).

i could do lots of things, but the lots of things i might do if running some other system (or a house ruled version of a system) doesn't make the actual "system x" seem better, right? For sure, being "fixable" is a merit of sorts tho.

 

[Psion]

To each their own, I guess. I see no compelling reason to eschew HP systems. They work, and work well.

 

[philreed]

To each their own, I guess. I see no compelling reason to eschew HP systems. They work, and work well.

Agreed. Besides, if I wanted to get really deadly I'd just lose hps/vps/wps and have all damage be Constitution damage. That'll kill plenty of characters quickly enough for just about anyone.

 

[Kevin Brennan]

Well, the real benefit of WP/VP as a matter of game design is that they allow for a character to continue to take damage in a scene, or over several scenes, but be unlikely to die except toward the end of the adventure, when their VP pool is badly depleted and they become vulnerable to wounds.

If you want a game where every fight is equally dangerous, you might be better off looking at alternative mechanisms like the True20 damage save.

 

[PJ-Mason]

Agreed. Besides, if I wanted to get really deadly I'd just lose hps/vps/wps and have all damage be Constitution damage. That'll kill plenty of characters quickly enough for just about anyone.

You heard it here first folks! Soon to be released at RPGnow, Ronin Arts newest pdf - "Empty clips, Full graves" Show your players you mean business!!

I'm a Cyberpunk myself, so deadly games have never been a problem with me. I've toyed with just having Constitution = Hit Points, as a matter of fact. But then my version of "D20" is becoming a whole lot different than everybody elses.

 

[AscentStudios]

If you want a game where every fight is equally dangerous, you might be better off looking at alternative mechanisms like the True20 damage save.

While not explicitly laid out as a campaign quality in 2.0, damage saves are SOP for the standard NPC. This could easily be switched over to PCs as well - just assign a roman numeral to each class to represent its progression and you should get a usable total based on level, with no calculation . I might also add the Tough quality (which allows the character to fail a save without dropping unconcious) at every 5 or 10 character levels, just to keep 20th level characters going down on one bad roll - but maybe that's what you want. It'd certainly make combat less heroic and initiative FAR more important...

 

[trancejeremy]

I finally got it today (I love FRPGames but I hate their long delivery times because they are on the coast) and at first glance, it pretty much fixes everything I didn't like about the original Spycraft (which wasn't all that much). Except the art.

 

[Dragonblade]

I got Spycraft 2.0 and this game is brilliant! Well done AEG!! It fixes EVERYTHING I didn't like about the original. As I read through it, I couldn't really find anything I didn't like. In fact, I like the hybrid damage save/HP system so much, I'm going to be integrating something similar in my M&M campaign once 2nd Edition comes out.

 

[Breakdaddy]

I went ahead and got Spycraft 2 based on the comments of Phil and Psion (and the fact I did want it anyhow, but these guys cemented it for me). I have only had 2 hours to get into the meat of the book but I really like what I am seeing so far. I like the fluid initiative, I like the error/threat system and how it integrates certain feats that can only be used when scoring a threat or when an opponent has commited an error. I like the Table of Ouch, it is entertaining and will be useful. Top notch stuff! I also like the differentiation between stealth that is so ingrained into the PC through training and practice that it is second nature and doesnt require active thought and hiding, which requires an active attempt to remain unseen.