Mechanics Specific To Espionage TTRPGs

[00:00:00] Speaker A: In this episode of Go Bag, procedural. [00:00:03] Speaker B: Which is a game that's about sort of police procedurals, and is. Is, I think, in frame for our discussions here. [00:00:09] Speaker A: We created a Blue sky account. So if you're on Blue Sky, I've. [00:00:15] Speaker B: Had a couple of interactions with people that I would consider kind of an indirect grenade that we could maybe talk about. [00:00:20] Speaker A: Number stations is this. And it's a solo spy rpg. [00:00:25] Speaker B: One thing we wanted to unpack early in the podcast was, like, what elements belong in a good espionage rpg. Strap in, operatives. This is Go Bag, and here are your mission leaders, Sean and Harrigan. [00:00:41] Speaker A: Welcome to Go Bag. I'm Sean. [00:00:43] Speaker B: And I'm Harrigan. [00:00:45] Speaker A: How's it going, Harringan? [00:00:47] Speaker B: I am all right. I just finished a couple days at a local con, a small local con, so I'm all juiced up on gaming adrenaline and ready to go. [00:00:55] Speaker A: Did you play any espionage games? [00:00:58] Speaker B: I did not, but I had some good espionage conversations with a couple of people, and we'll. We'll talk about that maybe during one of our segments here. [00:01:06] Speaker A: Fair enough. [00:01:07] Speaker B: I did play Call of Cthulhu, but it was. It was. So it was investigative, but it was also World War I and wasn't. Wasn't exactly espionage. It's more like sad British soldiers who were encircled by the Ottoman Empire and were all dying, so. [00:01:21] Speaker A: Sounds quite sad. Yep. [00:01:23] Speaker B: Was. It was. What about you? How are you? [00:01:27] Speaker A: Good, good. Playing Delta Green. Having fun? Great. It was a. It was a lull situation. Last episode, last session last night. So as of this recording. [00:01:40] Speaker B: Oh, kind of a little downtime, a. [00:01:42] Speaker A: Little running around by the agents, if you will not. [00:01:49] Speaker B: Or were they going to get groceries and take kids to soccer practice? [00:01:52] Speaker A: No, they're investigating. They're doing. Doing the things. But they, you know, I. And part of me is, are they doing the things that move things forward in the game and. Oh, yeah, it's. We could get. It'll come up as a topic, I'm sure, at some point, so I'm sure it will. [00:02:10] Speaker B: Are they creating their own red herrings and that kind of thing? [00:02:12] Speaker A: Kind of a little bit. Like, it's a. We've had this discussion before, not to go into that kind of, you know, diverged conversation, but, you know, if they don't go in a particular direction in some of these scenarios, it can lead to a lot of. A lot about nothing, maybe. And as the handler in Delta Green, which is the game master, sometimes you have to be conscious of those things and make adjustments as necessary. And sometimes I try to figure that out and how that looks and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. But anyways, that's me. [00:02:50] Speaker B: I would even say more often than not you might have to do that. [00:02:53] Speaker A: Right, right. [00:02:54] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:02:55] Speaker A: A whole episode onto itself. Unto itself, indeed. Let's get into sit rep quick. [00:03:03] Speaker B: Let's do it. [00:03:06] Speaker A: Give me the sit rep. Sit rep. Things that are going on in the hobby, links, events, crowdfunding campaigns, things of interest that we would want to bring to your attention in the situation report. Harrigan, do you have any this week by chance? [00:03:22] Speaker B: Just the fact that I think procedural, which is a game that's about sort of police procedurals and is, is I think in frame for our discussions here. I think you and I looked earlier and I think it's funded. So I think the Kickstarter is proceeding and I think, you know, just keeping an eye on that one. But no, otherwise I'll over to you to see what you have for the week. [00:03:42] Speaker A: I'll put links in the notes for all the things we mentioned in sitrep. That should be go without saying. I had one. We created a Bluesky account so if you're on Bluesky, you could find [email protected] on Bluesky. Go ahead and give us a follow. And through that I made a couple updates like hey, what's your favorite tabletop role playing game or espionage game? And a few people chimed in and also said, you know, who should we follow that would be of interest to our show in the espionage RPG space? So a couple people chimed in and one, one of the individuals. Oh, you know what I think? Yes, Craig. So wodu Wodu bluesky Social W H O D O Again link to his profile but he has, he's partial because he's created a game himself in the SBA espionage space. I thought I'd give him a shout out. He has done number and that's number with the e as A3 stations. Number stations is this and it's a solo spy rpg. That's what it is. [00:05:00] Speaker B: Oh cool. [00:05:01] Speaker A: Yeah. And he's got it up on itch. So show him a little love by putting that out there. I do not own it yet at this point in time. I'm, you know, I've played solo RPGs but I'm not hugely involved with those. Have you ever played a solo rpg, Harrigan? [00:05:18] Speaker B: I have tinkered with them but I have not sat down like at any, I don't know, I've never spent like many sessions like I looked at iron sworn for a while. I'VE tinkered here and there with a couple things and I like a lot of the. A lot of the generators and a lot of the oracles that come with those games, even if you're running a regular RPG with, with other players. But no solo. Solo games is not something that I spend my lonely time doing. I think, you know, that my. All my lonely time goes toward, like play by post and that kind of. [00:05:46] Speaker A: Thing for RPGs, a different kind of. [00:05:48] Speaker B: Lonely time it is together. [00:05:52] Speaker A: Lonely Number Stations is a solo role playing game inspired by the Cold War. Spies, secret messages, and the subtleties of communication. So during play, you'll take on the role of a spy sent to infiltrate enemy territory in order to undertake an important mission. Using real life number stations, you will complete each stage of your mission and relay information to your unseen handler through a series of messages that outline your progress and inform them of what you have learned. But beware, success comes at a price. Counterintelligence agents seek to discover your identity, and completing your mission risks exposing the operation. That's the write up. There you go. That's the cell. [00:06:34] Speaker B: Nice. I like it. [00:06:35] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:06:36] Speaker B: Along those same lines, I won't talk about it in detail today, but in the future after I have another conversation with somebody. I did run across somebody at this con. They're running space 1999, which is a 2D20 game, and that person is currently translating a Bond game that they run at every. Every Colorado convention. So Genghis Khan and. And Tacticon, they're converting it to 2D20 and they're writing up those rules. So there will be a little. Might be an independent thing, might just be, you know, not published, I don't know. But as that takes shape and I learn more about it, I'll certainly report back. [00:07:12] Speaker A: Very good. I think that wraps up sitrep. Let's get into encrypted comms. [00:07:18] Speaker B: Let's do it. [00:07:20] Speaker A: Sir, we have an incoming encrypted transmission. This is where we receive the grenade from a listener that throws us our way, either voicemail or email. I don't have anything for. It's still early yet. I don't have anything. I don't think we've roused it up. Anything for cryptic comms? But you said you mentioned you might have something. [00:07:42] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, as of this recording with you and I sitting here, we haven't released the first podcast yet, so there hasn't been a whole lot of traffic. Hasn't been a whole lot of. [00:07:51] Speaker A: That's weird. [00:07:51] Speaker B: But yeah, imagine that. But I've had a couple of interactions with people that I would consider kind of an indirect grenade that we could maybe talk about. So one of those being, I think Sean, we've got the stack of games that we're going to talk about, right. And we, on our, in our last episode we talked about how we wanted to kind of explore them, do a little actual play, maybe like a vignette sort of scenario sometimes, sometimes a deep cut, sometimes a quick overview. But what I have is a bunch of games I haven't played yet. So I'm trying to get as many games to the table as I can and I have pitched some games to the, a lot of the folks that I play by post with and I got some interesting feedback from some about espionage games and that. So like that's what I mean by it's indirect. Like one of them was like, why would I want to play that kind of game? I don't want to work for the government. The government's not a good, not a good thing right now. And it kind of became a little, not quite political, but it was heading down that direction. So there was definitely like, I don't want to work for the man. Why would I worked for the CIA who did all this hor. All these horrible things in Central America. Like and which is true, but I think part of it is maybe a little generational. Like you and I grew up on Bond and grew up on the more fanciful, you know, less politically problematic perhaps espionage, you know, fiction and movies and all that kind of stuff. So I thought that was pretty interesting. We got the person around the bend. Another, another guy chimed in and said, you know, it's a lot like cyberpunk, but in cyberpunk you're fighting against the machinations of the government and corporations etc. So I think where it's going to land is we're going to play a spy game, play by post and we're going to do it where they are an independent agency who, you know, works, works for the greater good. Or they may be some sort of, you know, pan national United nations style spy agency to escape sort of the, you know, the, the grisly and kind of icky politics that can go along with it all. Where a government's using their espionage armed to get up to no good, no matter who they are. Right. So I thought that was kind of interesting that not everyone is of the same like, you know, hell yeah, I want to play a spy game. There are some interesting reasons why people might not. I will contrast that with A second, much shorter grenade. The two people that were at the table that I played at yesterday for this space 1999 game that I already mentioned, including the guy who's working on the two D20 rules. When I told them that this podcast was coming, they were both very interested. They were both older guys, but one of them has a history of working in like post production in I think, I think in television for a while. So he had all kinds of really cool insights about the making of space 1999 and that sort of thing. And as we opened the doors on talking about espionage games, he had tons of stuff he wanted to kind of add to the equation, including that he thinks, he thinks that like Pre World War I is one of the best espionage time periods of all. So he recommended some books and some series. So I'm going to dig into that a little bit. So we've already had some interaction with the public. Sean, it's was good. [00:10:57] Speaker A: Well, I hope that you share some of those publicly, even through your, your own substack, because I'm interested in that. Those takes like very much. [00:11:06] Speaker B: Yeah, I will. And this was, this was yesterday, so I haven't really processed it all yet and written it up. So you've been home for like a. [00:11:12] Speaker A: Little over eight hours by now, I'm sure. [00:11:15] Speaker B: Indeed, that's about it. Yep, yep. [00:11:18] Speaker A: So Corporation, the role playing game, not a huge hit right now probably, I'm guessing some, some crowds of the RPG hobby. [00:11:26] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Well, and, well and interestingly about. Remember how I recommended operators to you like a month ago or something like that? Right. That game comes to me from a guy named Alfred who quite frankly, through my sort of role playing, you know, all things role playing, he has been somebody who's turned me on to new games. Years ago, like the first person who said, look at this PBTA stuff, look at this, look at that kind of thing. He sent operators my way like, like must be four years ago now, like quite a while ago. We tried to get that off the ground recently and this is like you know, about two months ago also play by post. And in that game, the players wanted to have the benefactor of a spy organization be like a crowdfunded thing by a bunch of benevolent, like multi trillionaires, that sort of thing. So again, kind of, kind of different, right? People are steering clear of governments and they want it to be like people who are these like dilettantes and philanthropists who, who want to fund fighting against, you know, the, the various nations and all of the, all the ugly Stuff that goes with that. So there's definitely a theme around that. So, you know, you. You and I maybe are a little more traditional. We're getting into the. [00:12:43] Speaker A: Are we getting into this at the wrong time? Like, maybe you guys, like, missed it by about 15, 20 years. Oh, okay. Great. [00:12:52] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean. I mean, part of it is. Part of it that I don't understand. I'm like, yeah, man, work. Work for the CIA and question their motives and. And your handler and, like, you can turn that into a whole thing, right? Yeah. [00:13:04] Speaker A: You are an individual. You can think for yourself. You don't have to be an automaton of the institution. [00:13:11] Speaker B: Exactly. I mean, Delta Green is that lever thrown to 110%, right. Where you're like, ooh, should I be doing this? There's. There's all kinds of that, but you can inject that into regular espionage as well and turn it into a whole, like, maybe I should be working for someone else. Maybe. The information I've learned, I'm not going to pass along to my superiors because I'm worried about what they're going to do with it. Right. So you can still have a conscience. [00:13:32] Speaker A: I agree. I think there is a. A. You gotta broaden your horizons when you talk about espionage. If it's just like, well, I'm gonna go work for the government and further the government's agenda. You know, there's part of that, but it doesn't have to be that, Right? [00:13:49] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, it's rich territory, man. There could be different sections within the. Whoever you're working for, MI6 or whatever, that are fighting with each other because they don't like who's come to power. Like, just all that cool stuff that you can do. Yeah. [00:14:02] Speaker A: Slow horses. [00:14:04] Speaker B: Great example. [00:14:05] Speaker A: Perfect example. Yes. [00:14:07] Speaker B: Great example. [00:14:08] Speaker A: Like, at gunpoint with your colleagues, and then the next episode, you're like, okay, fine. You just don't like each other. Like, they're about spoilers, right? Like, yeah, yeah, it's a good. [00:14:19] Speaker B: Yeah. For the. For those who don't know, that is MI5. So British national, you know, spy spying. And there's a. A back office where they send all the rejects. Gary Oldman, Gary Oldman's character runs that office and he is amazing in that show. But. And what often happens is that there's some good agents who get sent there for various reasons. So sometimes MI5 has to turn to them for help kind of thing. So it's. It's pretty damn good. [00:14:47] Speaker A: Yeah. Agreed. Well, that sounds like. That sounds fantastic. I. I'm Interested to hear about the. The person who seems to. To be a resident expert in Pre World War I stuff, or aficionado, if you will, or an admiral admirer of that era. I'm interested to know more about it because that's. That's a blind spot on me. Totally. [00:15:08] Speaker B: Yeah. It's funny, I meant like, I, I think I mentioned even in the last episode, like my, my understanding of some of this stuff is pretty lightweight. It comes from watching lots of Bond movies as a kid and just, you know, loving the themes and the, I don't know, the intrigue and the action and. But less about like. I've dug deeply into the history. But I do remember, remember this, Sean. Remember when. In the. Must have been the 90s when Indiana Jones was a whole thing and they were trying to spin off like young Indiana Jones and all that. If you recall that. I think that was River Phoenix. [00:15:40] Speaker A: Maybe he was. [00:15:42] Speaker B: Yep. So I remember there being some sort of espionage stuff in like the streets of Vienna in like 1914 kind of thing in that show. And the, you know, long trench coats and, and hats and broom handle, mouser pistols and all that kind of stuff, which fits in with what. What this guy Dan was telling me about in terms of like how rich of an environment then, you know, around 1900 through the First World War was for this kind of thing. So you and I will dig into that and we'll see what we see. [00:16:11] Speaker A: Well, it's such a unique time period because now when you run espionage games or, you know, modern contemporary set in the modern contemporary era, like, what tech levels are you dealing with? And if you get back that far, I mean, there's no. The map better be accurate or not, you know, you. There's no telephoning and leaving a voicemail. It just changes the whole dynamic altogether. [00:16:36] Speaker B: I have found that in general, some people don't love historical role playing for various reasons. I adore it, whether it's 20s, Call of Cthulhu or Victorian, but for the reasons you're citing, like you have to get somewhere, that's much harder. Now, do you take a ship, A train? Do you go by horseback? Is it a zeppelin? You're taking all that, including down to the. And we'll get into this in a minute here because, because of our topic today. But I'm pretty much as a long time gun wonk, right. Like gun. Whatever you want to call it from. From when I was a kid. And I love these transitional time periods, like 1900, where you're going from like okay, cartridges have been produced about 25 years prior, but it's mostly revolvers. Ah. Now we're some automatics and whatnot. So you have this mix of like tech on the gun side of things, but some of them aren't very reliable. I just love that whole period where you can kind of mix like a couple of different worlds are coming together kind of thing. Like, if you're on the frontier, someone may still have like a cap lock rifle. No. But if you go into the city, they've got a slim little Browning automatic that actually has like six or seven shots. Right. So it's, it's good stuff. I like it. [00:17:44] Speaker A: Yeah, all great. All right, let's. Should we get to the mission briefing? Huh? [00:17:47] Speaker B: I think we should have a seat. Let's get on with the mission brief. [00:17:53] Speaker A: You're running point on this one, my friend. [00:17:57] Speaker B: Yeah. So a week ago, we talked about how one thing we wanted to unpack early in the podcast was like, what elements belong in a good espionage rpg? What, what basis does it have to cover? What ground does it have to cover? So I think our mission for today is to kind of dive into the depths of that without getting into any specific system too deeply. I think we're going to look across systems and our own experiences. And this is maybe one of the first places where, as people listen to this episode, hopefully they'll engage with us and tell us like, you missed these three things or that thing you think is important isn't important at all. And here's why. So I've got a pretty beefy sort of breakdown of some of the things that are important to me. If I pick up a role playing game and it's, it's meant to be an espionage, spy, covert action style game, what do I want to see it cover? Right. And I think right off the bat, if you, if you allow me to just dive in. Anything you want to add to that before I do dive in? [00:18:58] Speaker A: No, I think that I'm on the same page. [00:19:01] Speaker B: Okay. Yeah. So that'll be the meat of what we talk about here today. There are various ways to approach this, but generally speaking, I want to see competent spies. So the game better set up the success rates, the attribute values, the percentages, whatever. You know, some of them do a decent job of saying you're a rookie, so you're coming in at a lower level, or you're, you know, the James Bond game does that, right? You're like a rookie, a veteran, or like a double O agent kind of thing. So it has these tiers and some games like White Lies have levels. So you can go like 1 to 5 in terms of the levels. And if you come in at level one, you're, you're a fresh recruit kind of thing. But even then, I don't think anybody wants to see that sort of bumbling, stumbling. Level 1 D20 style, can't get out of your own way. Like and, and there are games like that where if you're starting off as an early agent, you're going to fail more often than you than you would like to. I'll just put it that way. So I think it needs that. Comments on competency? [00:20:01] Speaker A: No, I don't think so. I think that's good. Although I think the, the game system would definitely determine that. For better or worse. For sure. One example is Delta Green uses percentile. And I think a lot of people might write in and say, well, oh, you know, you're Delta Green and you have percentile. Percentile is hard. It's. You might have a few small skills that you do really well in. But I think also a lot of people overlook the fact that you don't need to call for a skill check in that game if you're at a certain level, a certain score in your skill. [00:20:35] Speaker B: Yeah. It equates to like, you know, you, you have X number of years of training or an under undergraduate degree or a graduate degree and you're a pro. That's one of the, you know, the chef's kiss parts of Delta Green where you don't have to make them roll. Right. [00:20:48] Speaker A: You have an 80 in Latin. If you come across Latin text, you don't roll. Yeah, got it. You read it like no problem. [00:20:57] Speaker B: Well, but you know as well as I do how many games actually say those things in the, like how to run them. They. Virtually none. Right, right. [00:21:04] Speaker A: Wow. People love to roll dice, Harrigan. [00:21:07] Speaker B: They do. They do so better. It's better now in terms of like they're being like a GM section or how to run this game kind of thing is you see that advice more and more. And it also gets down to the whole, you know, thing as well coming from the story game side of things, which is like don't roll unless it's interesting. Right, Right. So if there's, if they ask about information and then there's some OSR in this as well, which is if they ask, tell them. Right. If they ask smart questions about situation they're in or they take a smart approach, just, they just do it. You just get it. So all that's kind of Blended in, maybe even some of the, some of the Trail of Cthulhu gumshoe stuff rears its head a little bit, which is like give them the damn clue they need to proceed. But now it's up to them to either ask smart questions, spend their little metacurrency, or make a roll to find out more kind of thing. But in the end, what I'm really talking about here is making the spies feel like they are highly trained operatives who stand out. I do think. You know what, let me, let me back up one step. What I'm talking about right now, I think applies broadly to espionage games. Right. I do think that there are different types of ways you can run the action and the. Not to lean too much on the James Bond game, but it breaks down really nicely sort of the tone that you can strike for and that it breaks down kind of like the reality distortion levels in GURPS used to do as well, which is like. Is this like as realistic as it gets? So when you walk out your front door and you have the world in front of you, that's what you're dealing with, that level of physics and simulation? Or is this Kingsman where the action is outlandish and ridiculous and then there's. There's gradations in between. Bond breaks it down into like gritty or realistic play, adventurous play, cinematic play and heroic play from the, you know, the sort of the grittiest all the way up to the most outlandish sort of thing. And I do think that the mechanics we're talking about right now apply, should apply to everything in all those categories. But when you dial into something like a gritty game, it'll be different than the heroic game for like how competent these spies are. So I'll kind of get to that in a moment, but just kind of for a little bit more framing, I do think these games should have some sort of skill profession or tradecraft set of rules. So some way for people to really kind of sink their teeth into what the game is about. And this is where the game design, by naming skills a certain way or having them present, it's telling the table what it's about, how it wants you to engage with the world, that kind of thing. What do you think about skills, professions, trade craft, et cetera? [00:23:44] Speaker A: Yeah, I think there has to be something. And much. Many of the role playing games have that breakdown. How you set that up has to relate to what an agent would do or encounter, I suppose, because the last thing you want to have is a mechanic or A skill or something the agent wants to do but it's not covered. I mean, there, or have a fallback. Like, okay, it's, this covers everything under X. Like, you know, search or perception cover, search alert, whatever, insert umbrella, investigate. Right. But you don't want to be playing an espionage game and trying to do something and then it's like, well, it's kind of common and there's nothing really that covers that. [00:24:37] Speaker B: Yeah, it's actually more, it happens more than it should. [00:24:42] Speaker A: Hard to determine what like. [00:24:44] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, you're, you're playing a game and there's something that's like, like explicitly in genre. Like for example, hacking in a cyberpunk game, maybe that's, you know, too obvious an example. But infiltration in one of the espionage games, if it's not obvious as to what it is, or perhaps more commonly if there are three skills that could all work. Like, I think the designer didn't, didn't finish. They needed to go a little deeper with honing the set of skills or professions or whatever they are. [00:25:10] Speaker A: Yeah, I totally agree. [00:25:13] Speaker B: All right, I'll, I'll bundle the next three together here. So I think chases and tailing and that sort of thing. I want to see some mechanics for that. I want to see some mechanics for social interactions, whether it's interrogation, persuasion, deception, seduction. You can role play all that. You can just play it out. But it's nice to have a framework and some of the games that we will get into have really neat ways of handling that stuff. [00:25:38] Speaker A: I want to comment on that. Quick, just interrupt. Interrupt me anytime I run into. It's interesting because in some games they will lump intimidation and persuasion. The nice and the, you know, the nicey sugar gets you more than. [00:25:56] Speaker B: Yep, yep. [00:25:57] Speaker A: The force and the, you know, intimidation component. And it is interesting to see games that either lump them together or split them apart. [00:26:05] Speaker B: Yep, for sure. [00:26:07] Speaker A: But just, just a note, of course. [00:26:09] Speaker B: All right, so let's, let's, let's unpack that a little bit because I've just, I've got recent experience from that with Call Cthulhu. So even seventh edition. So I think for anybody who's interacting me with, with me elsewhere knows that I do not love brp. Delta Green is I think the best packaging of it of all. And I like it so much that I, I, I set aside some of my, like, why is there an artillery skill in this game? Like, what's that doing there, guys? Well, if you look at the older versions of Call of Cthul, Cthulhu were especially Bad at this. But even seventh, Sean, it has charm and persuade and fast talk and bargain. Like, what are you doing? [00:26:47] Speaker A: So that's right. [00:26:48] Speaker B: And I and I witnessed it this weekend in a game where the GM was literally like Romeo, persuade everyone at the table. These are pregens. Everyone at the table has 10 in persuade 10. [00:27:02] Speaker A: So everybody fails. [00:27:04] Speaker B: Okay, Everybody. Then he says yes, go on. You know the drill. Were you at that table? [00:27:11] Speaker A: Somehow I feel as though I've been at that table. [00:27:14] Speaker B: Yeah. Okay. Do you have fast talk? Well, what about. What about turn? Just roll charm or even worse in the. In some BRP games, roll charisma. I'm like, wait a minute, what are the skills for? Like. Like it. It makes me insane. Towards the tail end of. Of the. Of a session. The poor guy and I. This GM's ideas are freaking gold dust. They are stellar. He does not know how to run a game without asking for a skill roll every two minutes. And by the end of the game when we were failing so often, he was literally saying give me a navigate or a survival or a whatever or a whatever. And everybody at the table like dice are flying. It's. I'll write that. I'm gonna write this up in my. In the hearth. But Sean, I think I rolled a hundred times in that game or more in three and a half hours. Like it was ridiculous. So take. Take that. Which is the whole octopus of skills. There's too many skills. Which one do you pick? And that even slows things down, right? Like if you have it increases the handling time of resolving the action. Because the GMs like, which skills do you have? The players checking their long list of skills. Which one should I recommend? Right? That sort of thing. [00:28:21] Speaker A: Whereas. Whereas if you had a score and you knew that person had that score, you would just convey the information as if it were just known. [00:28:30] Speaker B: Yes. [00:28:31] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:28:31] Speaker B: Yes. Kind of like mothership does where you have an attribute you're going to roll and if you spot the skill that would add to it. You just recommend that to the GM and he lets you or he or she lets you roll higher. Right? So let's do the flip side before we we move on Operators. The game we've mentioned a couple of times now, which is this weird, has fate dice in it, but isn't a fate game sort of thing. And when you boil it right down that you may have seen it, Sean, it's like a multi hundred page thing. The presentation is pretty horrendous. He's looking for it right now. [00:29:02] Speaker A: I have it back there. Yeah. [00:29:04] Speaker B: It is a big, poorly presented game with a very lean, cool set of mechanics at the heart of it that are kind of hard to, like, find. But to your point, a minute ago, it has two social skills. Talk. And in parentheses, it says soft and talk. And in parentheses, it says hard. [00:29:23] Speaker A: Last night, Delta Green, I had, like, these. These press junket. You know, people in the scenario approach the agents while they're eating breakfast. Like they're intruding and trying to get an interview with them. And my. My buddy Joe is like, can you see that we're eating right now? And the way he phrased it, I said, well, are you. Are you intimidating them? Are you trying to persuade them? Because I honestly do not know. By the tone of your voice, you're kind of right. Right in the middle. And so, yeah, it's. But hard and soft. I like it. [00:29:56] Speaker B: Yeah. That's one that I think we will definitely get to the table in terms of like, a little. A little vignette, because I had not played it much at all. And there's things in it that look really neat to me like that just. [00:30:06] Speaker A: I have to comment. It's very interesting. When you have a number for something, the number indicates how many you need to get to succeed. [00:30:15] Speaker B: Yes. [00:30:16] Speaker A: So if you have a one. [00:30:18] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:30:19] Speaker A: You only need to succeed with one success. So. Which is really counterintuitive to me, like, you want more. [00:30:29] Speaker B: So here's what I've thought about doing with that game. Let's talk about operators just briefly. Okay. So I think there are 15 skills. [00:30:35] Speaker A: I haven't looked all through the whole thing. [00:30:38] Speaker B: We're not going to go into it deep. [00:30:39] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:30:39] Speaker B: But it's not a large. It's not a large skill list. Right. And it's this thing where Sean's talking about. You basically rate five skills as your top level, which is a one in that game. [00:30:47] Speaker A: That's right. [00:30:48] Speaker B: You rate four skills as a second tier, which is a two, and the rest all get assigned a three. Right. So 1, 2, 3. And what it means is you roll four fate dice. So for those who know two minuses, two blanks, and two pluses on a fake die, you roll four of those. And if you have a one, only one die has to come up a plus, and you succeed. So of the four dice, get one plus. If you. If you have a two, it needs two pluses. That's harder than it sounds, folks. And if you need a three, that is really hard. In fact, the percentages when you break them down go from. I might get this Wrong. But it goes somewhere from something like a one is an 80%, a two is a 40% and a three is 10%. Like you, you need to steer clear of those level three skills, but what that's doing is providing a bit of niche protection for the other people on the team. So I forget if it's drive or pilot that it has, but if the regular agent has a tier 3 in. In Pilot, you need the person who's the wheelman to be at the wheel because they have an 80%, not your 10%, that sort of thing. [00:31:50] Speaker A: Oh, interesting. Interesting curve. [00:31:51] Speaker B: Yeah, it is interesting. And point being, you could take those percentages I just mentioned and you could turn them into a variety of different dice mechanics. If you don't want to use the fake dice, there's a whole bunch of ways to do it, from just rolling personal dice to a game that counts successes or whatever by just matching the percentages up. Long story short, I think there's a lot that goes into choosing the right skill list and making it both reflect what you're going to be doing in the game and not having the extraneous stuff that you don't need. At least you know that. That's a. That's a personal pet peeve of mine. So some people love to have the list of 100 skills, and I was a GURPS game master for a long time, and there's no game that's more egregious about skill lists than that one. Right. So I used to love that. All right, should we move on from skills? [00:32:35] Speaker A: Sure. [00:32:36] Speaker B: And you, you. He was. He was giving me the. The nod, guys, when we were doing the. I mentioned that chases need rules as well. He was agreeing. I think we need rules for infiltration, security systems and how to defeat security systems, whether they are physical or whether they are electronic, digital. And I would pile on top of that. [00:32:55] Speaker A: Hacking. [00:32:56] Speaker B: What do you think? [00:32:59] Speaker A: Yes, yes, I'd agree. I don't know why I would disagree, honestly, with those, because I think that's. [00:33:07] Speaker B: Well, there are games that don't get into that. [00:33:09] Speaker A: Well, I mean, there are, and it depends on the era. And hacking, maybe, you know, it could be mechanics, mechanical, electrical, you know, engineering, or electrical tinkering, whatever you want to. It doesn't. I mean, even as far back as, you know, World War II and the. What's the. [00:33:32] Speaker B: Oh, man. [00:33:32] Speaker A: Yeah, the cipher. [00:33:34] Speaker B: The big Enigma. [00:33:37] Speaker A: Yeah, the Enigma machine. And then some of those things. Even just ciphers in general where they were just using manual ciphers on, like a thing. You would turn with all the codes and code breaking. So it's almost like what is that compared to more modern day hacking? Is it the same type of bucket, you know, depending type stuff as well? [00:34:01] Speaker B: Yep, yeah, yeah. In saying that that's also why. And you know, forgive us for our ranging discussion here folks but like World War II is rich with that stuff. Like you're dropping things into France for example from aircraft that the resistance is going to pick up and they might be weapons that are disguised as something else. There's all sorts of things, things that the OSS and the Allies really did that are super cool in terms of how they disguise weapons, describe disguise radios and all that sort of stuff. And quite frankly I don't have Operation White Box on the like our list of games and it really needs to be because not only is it a World War II game based on sort of, you know, OD and white box stuff, but it's really a Commandos. It is meant to be a small team that gets inserted like behind enemy lines type of thing and that turns it instantly into befriend the local populace, blow up the bridge without anybody knowing who did it. Like super cool espionage stuff in the middle of World War II as opposed to being on the front line at the Battle of the Bulge kind of thing. Right. It's, it's quite different. So I think that any game that has like kind of a multi part challenge set of rules, that whole thing where it's like one success leads to the next or if you fail the first roll, it makes the second one harder. All of that sort of chained together stuff and multiple people can take part in the action. It can handle these infiltration security system things pretty, in a pretty cool way. But I do think I'd like to see some nod towards it. And you might remember Sean, that I. One of, one of my goals for what we're trying to accomplish here is I want to see how light I can go with a system and still feel like I'm getting what I need out of the espionage experience. And games like Tiny Spies do not include like, like infiltration security systems and hacking and that kind of thing. There's, it's lip service if, if anything but in many cases it's just not included. It's like just use the regular test to resolve that sort of thing. Right. I think cool gadgets, cool vehicles. Vehicles with spy improvements. Whether it's armor or bomb wants to drop out the back or smoke screens. I love to see that ST Spy Hunter video game. [00:36:15] Speaker A: Yes, it is What a great video game. Love that. Damn. [00:36:18] Speaker B: Yep. [00:36:19] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:36:19] Speaker B: Yep. Oh, yeah. Or yeah, you get the Lotus with the. With the, you know, the missile rack in the back. You know, you get. There's a lot you can do, but I do love that. That style of thing. Oh, you know what? Before I move fully off of security systems and whatnot, if people are interested, check out White Lies and Covert Ops. And I think those are both by. Is it Bill Logan? [00:36:41] Speaker A: Dw, DWD Studios? For sure. [00:36:44] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. Tell you what, I'll look it up. I'll look it up in a minute. Both of those games have random tables for security systems, which is really cool. So you can roll and get things like, you know, there's a barbed wire, there's a fence with barbed wire at the top. There's a guard with a dog. There are cameras, there are laser trip wires so you can randomly generate what the security system is. And they have pretty decent mechanics for detecting, circumventing, disabling. So they really mechanize all that. So that's not for everybody. But if you want to see a pretty cool treatment of that, either of Logan's games, I think get into that. Pretty. Pretty hardcore. [00:37:21] Speaker A: I know it's DWD Studios and I know it's pretty sure it's Mr. Logan. I don't know if Bill is his first name. [00:37:30] Speaker B: Here it is. I found it. It is Bill Logan. Yeah. So interestingly, he's done two competing games in White Lies, which is more of the OD and D O SR framework. And he's done covert ops, which is the bare bones role playing, I think it's called, which is a lightweight percentile system. [00:37:49] Speaker A: Good recollection. Bare bones. I forgot he did that one. That's definitely a derivative. [00:37:54] Speaker B: Covert Ops is a bare bones offshoot sort of thing. But both games, you can see the same authorship because both games get deep into this tables for developing like an organization that you're fighting against or these infiltrations that you have to do and that sort of thing. [00:38:07] Speaker A: Side note, and remember Hisham, he showed up in the stream this past Saturday. [00:38:13] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:38:14] Speaker A: Did the illustrations for Covert Ops. [00:38:16] Speaker B: Oh, no kidding. [00:38:17] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:38:18] Speaker B: Those are cool. Yeah. [00:38:20] Speaker A: There you go. [00:38:21] Speaker B: Nice. Nice. Love it. All right, so moving on from vehicles, here's one that's kind of a. For me, it's a big one. And that is. Does the game model reputation, recognition or fame? So you are James Bond and people like late, especially in some of the later movies, like people just know who he is. Right. Which also makes people say James Bond. Is an espionage. It's an action movie. Off they go. Right. I get that. [00:38:52] Speaker A: Just insult, like, everybody who's listening to us. That's fantastic. [00:38:56] Speaker B: I know at least two people I did just insult. [00:38:58] Speaker A: Okay. [00:38:58] Speaker B: But I know them. I know them both pretty well, so it's okay. [00:39:01] Speaker A: Take that. Neener, neener. [00:39:03] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. But. But I think. Didn't the original Top Secret have something around this? And James Bond definitely does. [00:39:11] Speaker A: I cannot remember. I think that I can't remember if Top Secret had reputation or not. I thought. I think maybe it's been so long and I need to brush that one. [00:39:22] Speaker B: Yeah. So people will hear me gush about this James Bond game, which later we have classified as a retro clone. I'm going to gush about that game a lot on this podcast because I think it includes a lot of the elements. It's a little heavy in terms of some of the mechanics. It's very, you know, of the 80s kind of thing. There's a lookup table. Yep, exactly. [00:39:40] Speaker A: Your finger through the air. [00:39:42] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. Sean's like drawing a matrix on the. On the glass here. So it has some of that. But it also covers so many bases. But I think one thing I have to be careful about is that I think it pulled a lot from the, like the 1980 version of Top Secret. It came out in 83 bonded. I think it pulls a lot from the early version of Top Secret and it refines it. It puts a different spin on it, in my opinion, improves it. But a lot of those ideas came from the original Top Secret, not from the Victory Games, guys. But it has a just fantastic way of doing this recognition, fame, reputation thing where when you're making your character, if you are exceptionally tall, it costs fewer character points, but you have more recognition. If you're good looking, you have more reputation, more fame, but it costs you fewer character points. [00:40:31] Speaker A: I have it right here. I just read that. Now that you bring it up, I'm like, yes, the point wise, if you're tall or short makes a difference. Yes. Yep. [00:40:39] Speaker B: In other words, if you're memorable, if people can recognize you more easily, you can build your character with fewer character points, but you are starting to climb the ladder of being recognized. As you move around the world and get made by people, you don't want to. To know who you are. Right. So I love that. I think. I think for me to have the optimal spy experience the game, the RPG has to have something like this in it. [00:41:02] Speaker A: Imagine Jaws right in. Right, Right. Like, come on, you know, you recognize. I can't remember the actor's name. Right. But he. His metal teeth, whatever. Right. Going through an airport or something ridiculous, like. [00:41:21] Speaker B: Absolutely. So. So I think that's pretty cool. And you know, the games can sometimes fold in like, scars and that sort of thing. Right. So. And then this leans to sort of the modern Mission Impossible movies around disguises. So it's just a lot of the genre that gets wrapped up in that recognition part of it, I think, which I. I just like to see that in the game. I. Anything else on that want to cover? [00:41:43] Speaker A: No, that was good. [00:41:46] Speaker B: I like all my role playing games to have what I call easy bake enemies. So in other words, I don't want to have to create a full character sheet for the foes that people are coming up against, especially if they're doing it like, let's say the PCs go off track and they're investigating a train station that I wasn't anticipating them to investigate, and they run afoul of the guards there or some thugs jump them. I want to be able to create those stats. Either look them up in the book, like super quickly or have them so that I can jot down three lines and I have everything I need. What is. What is your perspective on that? [00:42:19] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, I can't argue and disagree with that. I'm. I am not a big fan of big stat blocks in general. I've come to quite loathe them, like to an extreme. So even if I did have them, I don't even know if I would read them and use them extensively enough. Maybe the big bad evil guy at the end, but even then it's got to be. I'm all a big fan of MOOC rules and, and some of those, like, even. Even to your point, Harrigan, Savage Worlds where you have the three levels. Right. The name, if it's named, that's a whole different. It's an extra. Yeah, right, right. [00:43:00] Speaker B: Versus all the way up to a wild card. [00:43:02] Speaker A: Right. Wild card, yes. Thank you. My ignorance of savage worlds tells you how much and how often I play, but I know enough. [00:43:08] Speaker B: There's a lot of games, man. [00:43:09] Speaker A: Yes. [00:43:10] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. So, yes, that tiered level of enemies is kind of, guess what, getting what I'm getting at as well. Like the easy bake thing is what I call it. But like, I. What I really like is for some enemies to be like a single number you're either rolling against or that affects the. The PC skill or whatever. So it's super easy. And how many hits do they take to go down? One Right. Like make it that simple. Right, yeah, the mook part. So that's where you get. I divorce that a little bit from the quick generation and the quick reference, quick lookup. Because when I think of mook or rabble or cannon fodder rules, I think we're moving away from gritty. Remember, I'm talking about all espionage. [00:43:50] Speaker A: Right. [00:43:51] Speaker B: Like, like think of the number of either stories you've read or movies you've seen where you're in, you know, you're in Europe, you're in Prague, it's raining, they're in an alley, two dudes show up and the protagonist is like, oh, there's, you know, there's two of them. I'm in trouble. Versus the, the, you know, the more adventurous, high flying stuff where they, you know, they take on eight guys and they knock them all out. [00:44:13] Speaker A: Two guys, that's all you got. That's all you got. [00:44:15] Speaker B: Right, well, but there's some parts of this fiction where two guys is bad news. [00:44:20] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:44:21] Speaker B: Right. So I don't think you want mook rules or cannon fodder rules for every version of the genre. I think you want to be careful with those. That's what I would say. But I think you have to have them. If you are playing the higher flying stuff like, you know, Kingsman or Mission Impossible or whatever, where there's just, you know, punches are flying and feet are flying and people are getting thrown through restroom doors and their faces bashed on sinks and it's all smash cut, quick bam, bam, bam, Right, Yeah, exactly. Exactly. [00:44:51] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:44:52] Speaker B: Sean's acting this out. [00:44:54] Speaker A: Henry, Henry Cavill's scene in Mission Impossible. [00:44:57] Speaker B: Oh yeah, with it, with the. That's right. [00:44:59] Speaker A: Yeah. All, all, all imprompted. By the way. That. That was. [00:45:03] Speaker B: I read that. [00:45:04] Speaker A: Yeah. I think Tom Cruise was like, when he did it, was very impressed with his shaking of his arms muscles. [00:45:12] Speaker B: If I remember it right, they were shooting that. It took them all day to shoot that scene. All day. And at the end, like, I think he was like tired and sore cat was. And it was literally a. We're gonna do this again. And he did it. And Cruz went, oh, you're doing that in the movie. That right there, we're putting that in. [00:45:31] Speaker A: Oh. When he was literally like, oh, my arms are tired. [00:45:34] Speaker B: Well, he, I think he did the one, two like bam, bam with this, with the, you know, like loading up. And Cruz was like, oh, yeah, we're using. And then I, I frankly don't remember if it was Cruz the director, but the, the story that I read was basically. It was an impromptu thing from Cavill that they brought into the movie. Yeah, it's pretty cool. [00:45:49] Speaker A: Fantastic. [00:45:50] Speaker B: But that's a perfect example of it. I mean, that's. That's a little more. That's a boss fight, essentially. Right. That's not quite what we're talking about. But you've seen those moments where single karate chops, you know, one hit to the solar plexus and people are going down. Those are the cannon fodder rules where people just have to be able to mow through. Mow through people. Here's a big one. What do you think about metacurrency in games like this to help the players out? [00:46:18] Speaker A: I'm not. Okay, so now Harrigan is opening Pandora's box a little bit. But I will make it as brief as possible. I'm not a huge fan of metacurrency and this is why. And I could be swayed. It can be implemented and used in a way in a game that's like, oh, this is fantastic. I love it. But my. What I find as a game master, because I run many more times than I play probably is. It seems very. You can't do that game master unless you have these chits. And the way you get those chits is when I choose to do something X or. Yeah. So you. Now you get it. We. And I'm a fantasy flight Star wars guy, so I know destiny points. And they get. [00:47:05] Speaker B: I'm so sorry. [00:47:07] Speaker A: I get. They give the dark side, light side gets flipped. I've played, you know, Conan with our buddy Gabe. But I. I just find, like, if you're going to. As a game master and something comes to a lull or you want to in GM intrusions in cipher system, like, if you're just going to do something as a game master, then just do it. Like, you. You have the ability to say, okay, well, I'm gonna. Because this happened. Or they're making huge amounts of noise. They're shooting guns in an airport. Yeah. Security is coming from all over the place. There's, you know, whatever happens, I don't need a metacurrency to say, well, because you're doing that, I'm going to spend this. And now everybody comes into the airport and starts to, you know, take action against you. That's my beef with meta currencies. [00:47:59] Speaker B: So you have taken the metacurrency football and run straight into the GM end zone. There's a whole other side of the coin here because I don't disagree with you around gm Metacurrency. Just to sort of finish that, that thread. My natural instincts are to not have to rely on the fact that I've either earned something or gotten something from the players or whatever that is. Just like. Yes, yes, that's, that's my, that's my instinct as well. [00:48:24] Speaker A: Right. [00:48:24] Speaker B: I've warmed a little to the idea of some metacurrency for certain villains or to really hit hard or make things like totally upside down. And I have not run enough 2d20, which is kind of the modern version of this, to, to know what, how I feel deeply about it. I know I don't like cipher intrusions. I know that there's other geometric currencies that I've never just. I just don't. Don't love. But I'm also talking about player metacurrency and I think this so PC metacurrency. I think this ties into the very first thing we talked about, which is the PCs need to feel competent. Right. So I'm talking about the ability to push, reroll, use a chit for an auto success, those sorts of. Like a Benny. Think of a Benny, right? A fate point, that kind of thing. He's still shaking his head, folks. [00:49:12] Speaker A: Well, I think, I think yes, to be clear, I am good with, with meta currencies part of the game. I roll with it and it depends how they're used and implemented and to Terragon's point, how they, how it's. How they work in the game and what they're trying to facilitate. So to the, to the point of just. Well, I can't do that because I don't have enough bad markers threats in my little threat pool here. So I guess I just have to wait and roll with it. But to your point, with like Benny's, that's fine. Gumshoe is a huge one. How many points do you want to spend? Right? So that's, that's a big one as far as competency goes and really loading up because you have a target number. It's a D6. You know, if you really want to blow it out the. The door, you add like four points to it and more than likely you're gonna exceed succeed the target number. I think it's. Is it two in. It might be two in what? Gumshoe? [00:50:13] Speaker B: I don't recall two or four, but. [00:50:14] Speaker A: I mean if it's four and you're spending two points, I mean all you got to do is roll 2 or higher on a D6. It's pretty good odds. [00:50:23] Speaker B: Yeah, I have to look again, I think. I think you're maybe not doing justice to Gumshoe. [00:50:28] Speaker A: I may not be. You're right. You learned this about me. [00:50:32] Speaker B: You roll or you spend points. I think like the two. The two sets of skills behave differently. I think one of them is definitely on the like e roll of D6 and I think it's maybe even a sliding target number depending on difficulty or something like that. Yes, I could have that wrong. The other one is like you spending, you know, 1, 2, 3 of your. Of your skills, like diamonds of Medicare and C kind of thing. Right. A little, little fill in boxes. [00:50:55] Speaker A: All right. [00:50:56] Speaker B: Yeah. So here's, here's what I'm. Where I'm coming down on this. I actually think. I really. I like seeing metacurrency in these games because it gives the players that ability to do like the doubling down, the, you know, the extra effort, the this moment really matters. I'd prefer it not be an auto success. I don't love that. But I do like the. I want to go all in. I've been either saving, saving for this moment or whatever it might be. And I mean the proofs in the pudding here. This is like, it depends on how it's implemented. Right. It's like some Medicare systems are like, oh, not what. Not what I'm looking for. Others, others I quite like. Like, I think. And this is where we're going to get taken to task, Sean, by the, you know, anybody who listens to this, who knows this stuff better than we do, which is probably a lot of people I don't remember. I don't know the origin of this type of metacurrency. I think it's top secret, maybe. Bond certainly has like hero points sort of thing. And some things you can do with. There's some things you can do in those games with. With meta currencies that help the characters be a little bit larger than life, I guess, is what I would say. Right. And by all means, folks, correct us if we got that wrong. But as I go through some of the other games here, there are games where I feel like, like Tiny Spies is one of them, actually. So it's the tiny D6 system. It's very bare bones, minimalistic, lightweight, and it, I think, is far better at gritty play than it is at cinematic play. And part of that is because you have absolutely no recourse to do anything other than roll your dice and you are rolling 1, 2 or 3 D6s and you're trying to get a 5 or a 6 and the number of times you can miss on 3 D6 is pretty high and you're out of luck. And you know what, if anything else you want to say about metacurrency or I can flow this into our next topic. [00:52:40] Speaker A: Go ahead and flow. [00:52:41] Speaker B: So part of the metacurrency thing is about like ensuring success or at least making the character like be good at what they're supposed to be good at. Right. I think the GM should always employ like a fail forward mechanic. And precious few games call it out. They're getting better about, you know, saying when the dice fail, it doesn't have to mean nothing happens. It doesn't mean the character looks stupid, it doesn't mean that, you know, the sky falls, but it should, it should mean that the scene progresses while bad things happen. The whole fail forward thing, right, where you get through the door but the guards are alerted, you avoid the guards but you find yourself locked into a place you can't get out of. All of those, like, no buts, right? That kind of thing. I think whether it's the GM bringing those rules forward, great. But it's better if they are actually embodied in the game and they're called out. Agree. [00:53:34] Speaker A: Yes. I would, I was, I would go as far to say that. Yeah. And to your point where, yeah, you succeed, I think sometimes in role playing games in general, when there is a test or a check of some kind and you don't succeed the check, you don't succeed in what you're trying to accomplish. And I think there is has to be. And some games do it pretty well, others not at all, that you can just have them succeed on what they're trying to achieve, but it has that setback and you know, failing forward, like you mentioned, power. PBTA is big on it, but I think it's always, it seems always, sometimes in some games, black and white, oh, you try, you failed, okay. Then it doesn't work and you don't do it. [00:54:23] Speaker B: That's, that's kind of what I'm getting at is that like once you've internalized it, right, this whole, this whole concept we're talking about, you can apply it to every single game you play and it works great in every freaking game. But if you are reading a game and you're like, I want to, I want to run this rules as written. Some games are very explicit about what a failure is, right. And in many cases it then leads to that, like, I tried and failed. And if there's no rules for how many times you can try A skill test. Do they just try it again or does the next person in line try it? You get into this super goofy like, you know, it's a comedy of, of errors kind of thing where no one can succeed. And I, I don't love it like your con game. [00:55:02] Speaker A: All right, all right. Who, who's is everybody? What, what do you have? What do you have? [00:55:06] Speaker B: Literally? Literally. Literally. Was that so I think taken together the whole metacurrency failing forward thing is for me is around this whole competency. Like the PC should be good at what they're doing. Like, you know, and not every game calls it out really explicitly. [00:55:20] Speaker A: Well and sometimes if the game, whether the game does or not, sometimes the game master just has to like roll. I don't know. Sometimes game masters put a lot of weight into winning the game. Like it, it's, you know, I, I don't want it to make it too easy. You know, I want them to ear and so. Oh, they failed and they failed and they failed. And like yeah man, just give them the, just give them the keys. Give the, like something else is going to bad. Something bad. Something other than that's going to happen that's bad and negative. Don't worry about it. [00:55:56] Speaker B: Yeah. And I mean the, the indie RPG space and the OSR have solved a lot of these problems. If you go and look, look at how they handle things like failed skill checks where it's like you can't try again unless the situation changes. So in other words, you get a tool, you have more information, you have a different approach and it's, and it's a one liner but it solves like all these in game problems and maybe to everybody they're not problems but it's like heartache for me at the table when I'm watching this stuff unfold. [00:56:21] Speaker A: I hate it just kills me when a wheel person can't drive a car. [00:56:25] Speaker B: That's what I'm getting at. That's why I like metacurrency and failing forward. Like of course he put the car where he needed to, but he flattened the tire. Right. That whole. There's ways to do it. Right? There's just ways to do it. [00:56:37] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:56:38] Speaker B: All right, moving on here. I don't, I know we don't want to spend forever on this. I, you know, you heard me say I was a bit of a gun nut before. Like I love when the, when the firearms rules are fun, but when they're also dangerous. Like I don't love a firearm doing D6 of damage and everybody has 30 hit points. Don't, don't love that. [00:56:57] Speaker A: Right. [00:56:58] Speaker B: And no way for it to be a one shot or whatever. But the other thing I would say is I love it when the games include things like all of the, like the tactical gear, like bipods and. Right. And sniper rifles that break down into a suitcase. Holographic and red dot sights, silencers, like all that stuff. I want that stuff in the game. It's an espionage game. Right. I want that stuff in there. What about you? [00:57:21] Speaker A: I remember growing up on Top Secret and they have the different types of ammo and this was before Sean had had any idea that kind of thing. Yeah, well, they had. I can't remember. Like AP was the big one. [00:57:35] Speaker B: Right. [00:57:35] Speaker A: Armor piercing. There were dumb, dumb rounds. Yeah. And each one had different damage. And so of course I'm gonna pick the one with the highest, you know, amount of damage. Why would I pick any of these other ones? And I wouldn't even know what the difference was between some of those. Right. I was 13 years old. I probably never see a bullet at that point in time. [00:57:56] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:57:56] Speaker A: But yeah, I do. But also it's really. So, yes, I think it would be interesting and fun. Yep. But that can get rate of fire and all that stuff really crazy. Like, so the first round is zeros sec. You could shoot three for the, you know, rate of fire, three for this. Okay. First round, zero, second rounds minus two third recoil. Yeah. And then it's. [00:58:22] Speaker B: Yep. So one of the most egregious games for this is Gurps. And I @ the time, I wanted this level of detail. I loved it. Like a.38 Special does different damage than a 9 millimeter. Even though they're essentially the same diameter, the 9 mil is a little more. [00:58:38] Speaker A: A little hotter. Right. [00:58:40] Speaker B: And it would, I mean, it, it had, it had rules for a.45 doing more damage than a 9 because of the diameter of the bullet. So it would do more damage to somebody, but it had less penetration. As, as in real life. A.45 actually does have less penetration. So they were modeling at that level. They're modeling like the malfunction of individual models of gun. A Browning high power malfunctions less than a, you know, whatever. Like. And for a while I really dug that. That's not what I'm talking about here. What I'm talking about here is I just think that I want to see representation if it's a modern rpg, espionage rpg, I want to see the modern weapons represented. I want to see like, not everybody has it as an Uzi. There are, there are other submachine guns now, right. And for people who aren't gun nuts like me, it's easier for them to be represented in the game. So it could be a little more authentic, a little more like, like what is, what does this particular commando force? What would they carry? They carry an MP7 because the MP7 is the new heckler and cockpit weapon that fires around the summer between a pistol round and an assault rifle round. Right. Like, I want that, that level of detail, but it doesn't have to be mechanical, but I do want the cool stuff represented. To your point. Let me, let me just make one little like deep dive here. As I was thinking about this over the week, like one of the things that I've always loved since I was a kid and in all of this fiction is like the silenced kill. The person walking down the hallway screwing the silencer onto their pistol. Maybe they got the silencer from somewhere else because some other oper hid it somewhere. The whole weapon, they pick it out of the potted plant. If you're, if you remember the killer, you know that, that kind of thing. But in reality, what a silencer does is not just to have baffles to make the gun quiet. It slows the round down and you have less range, you have less stopping power. And the chances of the gun malfunctioning, not cycling, goes up. But I don't. And once upon a time I wanted to model all that. Now I don't care about any of that. So I had as a bullet point, I want realistic silencer kind of action. And I thought about it. I'm like, no, I don't. No, no, I don't. I just want the. I want somehow for it to say it makes the gunshot harder to hear. [01:00:56] Speaker A: You want the movie. You want the movie silencer version? [01:00:59] Speaker B: The movie, yeah. [01:01:00] Speaker A: Not the real life silencer. [01:01:03] Speaker B: Not all the other stuff where you have to use subsonic ammunition and like, you know, all that. We don't need that. If you want to put, you know, if the player wants to inject that, as I would in the narrative, sweet, but we don't need to bug the mechanics down with that kind of stuff, right? [01:01:19] Speaker A: Yeah. All right. [01:01:20] Speaker B: Similarly, I think there should be some pretty cool hand to hand combat abilities, whether it's the ability to fight back, as you see in Delta Green and some other games, or whether it is subdual or garroting, like, you know, killing via that kind of, that kind of like wire around the neck. I think it's, that's in the genre. That stuff's like all through the genre. So again, if, if unarmed attacks do 1D3 and the person has 20 hit points, that is not this sort of like engaging combat that I'm after. [01:01:53] Speaker A: What about the. [01:01:54] Speaker B: What do you think about. [01:01:54] Speaker A: What about our Russian buddies in. In Poison also true. [01:01:59] Speaker B: And well, radioactive poison these days. [01:02:01] Speaker A: I mean, yeah, pull it out. Pull out the uranium and let's make some nastiness. [01:02:08] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So some, some of that gets into some of the gadgets as well that we talked about earlier. Like I do think I love to see a nice rich section. And one of the things I may, I think we might get into on this podcast, Sean, I may pour through these books and make like a master list of the coolest. What I think are the coolest gadgets. Because any one of these books, this is something, the gadgets thing is something that they all do a pretty good job with. Like it's such a staple. They've all got a chapter on it. Right. I'm going to pour through because I've seen some really neat ones recently that I think just, you know, I'd like to see them get more airplay rather than be buried in a game that's from the early 80s kind of thing. [01:02:42] Speaker A: One of the things I want to bring up at some point is I have a book that I bought at like a half price books. I think you can get it on, you know, Amazon for cheap or even your local half price books if you can find it. But it's a illustrated. It's like an illustrated guide to spycraft or spy devices and it has, it shows what a one time pad looks like. It shows what, you know, the, the pen needle injection device looks like. And in real, like pictures of real. [01:03:11] Speaker B: Yeah, the real stuff. [01:03:12] Speaker A: Stuff. Yeah, it's, it's fan and it's. So you can always just. I have it because if I ever need to pull it out at a table and say, this is what you see. [01:03:20] Speaker B: That's awesome. Yeah, that is, that is very awesome. So I'm getting near the end of my list here and we'll, I think we can, we can wrap up the. You know, the main part of this I do like to see and this is something that you don't see in every game for sure. And this is sort of a personal preference. I like to see rather than just straight death on the table when you're taken out of the scene, whether you go to zero health or you have too many wounds or however it's represented. I would Love to see the game have some like, interesting consequences other than just death. And, and that temporary harm that comes right back, like either lasting injuries, scars, the fact that you're now more recognized. Like there's other ways to make things harder for the character than just saying you're dead. Roll a new character. Right. It's. That's maybe one of the least interesting things that can be an outcome. But what's your, what's your call on that? [01:04:08] Speaker A: Yeah, I can't. I'm not a big fan of the, you know, you take a rocks fall, you die. [01:04:16] Speaker B: Yeah. And it is where like there's a number of OSR or spy games and White Lives is one of them. And I, I don't love that whole like, you know, you go to zero hit points and you're dead. I have to look at White Lives. It may have some sort of saving throw beyond that. But I, I still think like when you get to zero, there should be a little table that you now roll on which tells you what might happen. Whether it's a, you know, this is a bad injury, like you better get to a hospital within 1d6 hours or you will die. That sort of thing. I think far more interesting than just dead at zero or dead from a save or whatever. I think one thing that you and I encounter a lot in games that we play together is the assistance rules. The helper rules. When someone is. Only one person can accomplish the task, but someone else says, what if I were to do this, this and this? Will it help? Right. And I think it's particularly important for an espionage game because you may have the handler or the controller in your ear. They are talking to you, providing intel. They're giving you real time information about where the guards are because the satellite over has the imagery or they have a drone that's showing like a heat map of where the guards are moving. [01:05:25] Speaker A: Right. [01:05:25] Speaker B: And they're relaying that. So I think I want to see in these games some sort of cool like assistance or you know, mechanic. Whether it's somebody helping you directly or whether it's coming from a piece of gear or it's coming from somebody who's like talking to you. Thoughts on that? [01:05:41] Speaker A: Yes, that is, Yes, I think that makes sense. Plus it prevents the old skill piling thing if there's, if it's fleshed out well enough. [01:05:51] Speaker B: Right. It is wound a little into the whole like way that skills are accomplished like we talked about earlier, where you can't just do one after another and all that. [01:05:58] Speaker A: Right. Well, and I find people when they help. It is the. I don't. I find those instances very strange and awkward at a table. I've run con games, I've played in games and people say, can I assist? And you say of course, but how? And what are you trying to do? Well, can I, can I have a laser from like, can I have a satellites from space? Like I'll tap into a satellite and I'll project it down and like laser this person in the head or something like that? Can, can I do that? Is there a role I could do that with? You're like. [01:06:40] Speaker B: No, stick to your guns, Gio. [01:06:42] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:06:43] Speaker B: Point being, I think some nice crisp rules around how a gadget might help you. [01:06:48] Speaker A: Yes. [01:06:49] Speaker B: Having the right technology or. But what made me really think of it was this whole idea of like, like I love the idea. Like you got a controller that's working with you, you're a single operative, you're trying to break in and they're doing the, you know, you need to go left instead of right now because I've disabled the cameras there. That whole like super cool sort of scenario and I think, you know, you don't want it to be too easy but there should be some sort of advantage or something, something for that. Lastly, in the game I love to see some sections on like adventure design. What should an espionage adventure have in it, what types of things should be happening and then expand that to campaigns and then maybe include some real world or some stand in spy organizations so you just kind of get more of the like the world of espionage and the types of operations that happen. I see you nodding. [01:07:35] Speaker A: Yes. Anything that helps out a game master run a game better, faster, quicker, lesser prep. More interesting. It's been years since I've delved into a lot of the games that we're going to be looking at and some never. Right. I never cracked James Bond. I never had it. You know, spycraft probably is the most familiar. Ish. Because it's D20 based. But I don't know, you know, having come from like OSR territory in the fantasy space and tables and random encounters and building an adventure and scenario, I think that the espionage genre and action space could use some of those, some of those components. [01:08:19] Speaker B: Yep, yep. As we go get into the games, you'll see some stuff that I consider kind of next level. Like Classified and Bond before it Classified took from Bond. Not only has what I just described, which is like how do you know how should adventures be framed? What, what elements they can do they contain, which is you know, exotic locations, chases, the top trains and, you know, look, all the kind of stuff that we, I think we're going to talk about further. But they get into like random tables for spy encounters. Like you run into a femme fatale, you run into the villain from the last movie that's back, or their henchmen, like really cool ways of like, like emergent storytelling that come out of it. So not every game does that for sure. [01:08:59] Speaker A: Right. [01:08:59] Speaker B: So I think it's. I don't know, anything you want to. You think is a general topic that we haven't touched on. I got just a couple more to talk about that are specific to either gritty or to cinematic style play. But have we missed anything big? [01:09:13] Speaker A: I can't think of any off the top of my head. [01:09:17] Speaker B: I bet people who listen to this can. So we'll, in a couple, in a few episodes, we'll, we'll circle back, right, and we'll talk about this maybe during the, the right section, during the encrypted comm section of the show. So to round out here, I do think the gritty version of spy games, these are not superheroes. So even though I've been spending the last half an hour saying I want competent spies, I want them to have metacurrency so they can succeed at the things they're supposed to be good at, I also don't want them to be in the gritty version. They should not be like, I can shrug off a bullet wound, right, because of the way the damage mechanics work or whatever. So I think that's true for gritty. On the cinematic side. We've actually already touched on both of these. I think you do need these mob or these rabble type of, type of rules mooks. And I think maybe there should be maybe some more metacurrency. Maybe it's just. Maybe you just have more of it to play with in the real cinematic stuff. So that you like the Dogs of War game, which is based on Barbarians of Lemuria. So it is more in the style of sort of the A team Mac ball and stuff we talked about, we talked about last week. There are hero points in that game which let you take your damage and it's a 2D6, you know, hit a target number of nine type game. If you hit, you roll, you know, a D6 for damage type of thing. Right. If you roll four, you do four points of damage to a foe. Well, if you spend a hero point or you get the right level of success when you roll the 2d6 that's not four damage, that's four people you took out. [01:10:46] Speaker A: Whoa. [01:10:46] Speaker B: So if you. Yeah, so it becomes much more like. Like you're not always doing that, but you have this mechanic to step it up and kill every mofo in the room when you need to. Right. At that level of. So I think for cinematic, I think that's, it's, it's well suited. I have a whole bunch of stuff that I'm not going to get into detail in detail because I think we'll talk about it later. But there's a bunch of stuff that I'd like to see in the books that aren't really about system. They're not mechanics and they're more about like, like the themes and whatnot. Like double agents, interesting places, villain bases, the different types of missions, like escort, surveil, intercept, assassinate, infiltrate, planting bugs, blackmailing people. Like there's a load of stuff that won't have any mechanical heft. It won't be tied to whatever the dice mechanism is. Right. But it sure is cool to see that kind of stuff like embedded in the game. [01:11:37] Speaker A: Those are some of the things that I had pinned to the agenda is what are those things that kind of are very typical to a espionage type game. And you know, the mission brief your. The agency you work for or are burned from. Right. Some of those details that are more on the, the flavor flavoring side of the, of the game. What. [01:12:02] Speaker B: Once upon a time. I hope it's once upon a time. You would call fluff and I would. And it would make me angry. It's not, it's not fluff. [01:12:09] Speaker A: I refrained. [01:12:11] Speaker B: Yes. Yes. So in this style of game. Exactly. And even for people like, you know, us who are interested in these games, it's great to have a set of references in the game that talks about the types of missions, the, the almost the flow like you said, like the briefing and then travel to the location to meet the first contact who knows more about the operation and on and on from there. And some of these games are very structured in terms of that. It's kind of cool. But I think that stuff's pretty important too. For sure. But that wraps up Sean, what I had for like, what do these games need to contain to really sort of power the right type of play. [01:12:51] Speaker A: Excellent. Very good. All right, I suppose we should bounce out of here. Until next time. Keep your go bag ready. Your cover story straight. Your dice within reach. Extraction complete. I'm Sean. [01:13:07] Speaker B: Till next time. I'm Harrigan. [01:13:10] Speaker A: Mission Support provided by Mr. White. 20.