NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Henry" data-source="post: 2549190" data-attributes="member: 158">After listening to my wife's sinister whisperings, I am now the proud  owner of a copy of Spycraft 2.0. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />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.</blockquote>

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