Where have you been all my life? (Spycraft)

[Morgenstern]

It's a very "balls to the wall" campaign. I intend to make the PC practially homeless for a while.

One thing to watch out for is that the classes that have the most Budget Points tend to be the ones who need the most gear to do their shtick (even soldiers get the medium progression so they'ge got the points for lots of weapons...). What you might do is have the folks with mostly high BP progressions (3 per level) start each session to two extra action dice, those with mostly medium progressions (2 per level) get one extra action die(multiclassing might muddle this a little, but this is a sort of fast and dirty 'fix' anyway so you're already into the relam of judgement calls ). That way the Martial artist who's standing there shrugging his shoulders and saying "WHat? I don't see the problem?" Doesn't totlly outshine the Snoop who's really wishing he had his gear. This is mostly a balance thing within the party - the sting of no support will still be keenly felt 8).

Hope this helps,

 

[Luddite]

One thing to watch out for is that the classes that have the most Budget Points tend to be the ones who need the most gear to do their shtick (even soldiers get the medium progression so they'ge got the points for lots of weapons...). What you might do is have the folks with mostly high BP progressions (3 per level) start each session to two extra action dice, those with mostly medium progressions (2 per level) get one extra action die(multiclassing might muddle this a little, but this is a sort of fast and dirty 'fix' anyway so you're already into the relam of judgement calls ). That way the Martial artist who's standing there shrugging his shoulders and saying "WHat? I don't see the problem?" Doesn't totlly outshine the Snoop who's really wishing he had his gear. This is mostly a balance thing within the party - the sting of no support will still be keenly felt 8).

Hope this helps,

Hmm...I find that the lack of percived budget points for particular classes to do their "Shtick" is more an issue of either poor planning, or poor team work. Poor planning could be based off of poor initial intellegnce, ie the mission objectives changed mid-mission. But players should still plan on the mission changing.

Poor team work comes from not pooling mission BPs so that the best tools that are needed for the mission are aquired.

-The Luddite

 

[AscentStudios]

Thanks all for the nice comments. It makes me warm and fuzzy to see folks gushing about a project the entire design team is so proud of. Look out in 2004 and 2005 though - it's just getting better

 

[woodelf]

I bought d20 Modern & Urban Arcana, and was a little disappointed. Can Spycraft be used for non-espionage games? When I see Spycraft on the shelf, I think "Alias", "The Bourne Identity" and "MI-5."

Perhaps a quick survey from our audience: Which genres could Spycraft handle, without too much fiddling, and which couldn't it handle?

Let's limit it to modern-ish genres. I say "-ish" to include things like World War Two - I was thinking about a WWII espionage game, OSS and the French Resistance against the Gestapo and SS.

What about modern, non-Shadowrunny, supernatural ("the X-Files", "Buffy" or "Ultraviolet")?

Short version: anything without PC supernatural abilities, no problem. Supertech is covered in the core book, but if you want the PCs to have psi or magic, you'll need to get one of the Shadowforce Archer books (don't know which ones, off hand).

Long version: check out these threads, where much discussion of Spycraft, specifically in the context of comparing to D20M, is had: http://enworld.cyberstreet.com/showthread.php?threadid=56386 http://enworld.cyberstreet.com/showthread.php?threadid=59706 . Also, some evaluation occurs in the thread on running a D20 GI Joe game: http://www.enworld.org/forums/showthread.php?threadid=65521