Mercenaries Spies and Private Eyes-Deep Dive

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Heya beggars. Sean here. If you'd like to get more RPG content from me, you can check out my YouTube channel, YouTube.com PGShawn I also stream there every Saturday at 8am Central Time. If you'd like to consume more RPG goodness from Harrigan, check out his [email protected] we'll have links in the show notes. Now onto some covert action talk. [00:00:26] Speaker B: Strap in operatives. This is Go Bag. Your all access pass to modern day RPGs loaded with bullets, backstories, and a whole lot of bad decisions. And here are your mission leaders, Sean and Harrigan. [00:00:43] Speaker A: That's right, we are your mission leaders. Welcome to Go Bag. Thanks for joining us. I'm Sean and I'm here with my co host Harrigan. Harrigan, how are you? [00:00:55] Speaker B: I'm good, Sean. How are you this fine morning? [00:00:58] Speaker A: It's fine. It's a fine morning indeed. It's the first recording of 2026. Are you ready for the new year? [00:01:08] Speaker B: Well, we're here already, so whether I'm ready or not, gotta tackle it. I am ready, man. I'm. You know, I think we talked last week. You had a pretty decent 2025 in some regards. Some of us did not. So I'm ready to move on to a new year and I welcome. I welcome a new one. There's a. Yeah, there's some things afoot at work. Some fun family dynamics are changing. My son might change jobs here in the next little while. So I am looking forward to 2026, actually a lot. I think I share the const. The consternation that you. That you expressed last week though, especially given recent events. You know, it's a little. A little wild out there. What about you? Looking forward to it? [00:01:48] Speaker A: No, no, no, I'm not. I. Because I had a good 2025. I can only imagine 2026 will be, you know, not as good. [00:01:59] Speaker B: Nowhere. Nowhere to go but down. [00:02:01] Speaker A: Yeah, you know, that's. It is one of those. Like you're kind of at the top. Kind of. I wouldn't say I'm at the top of my game because that is certainly not the case as we had started. [00:02:12] Speaker B: Maybe you are. Which might be sad in its own way. [00:02:14] Speaker A: Well, that may be. [00:02:15] Speaker B: That same thing is true for me. It's a. [00:02:18] Speaker A: It'. Top. [00:02:19] Speaker B: Yes, exactly. The ceiling is low. [00:02:21] Speaker A: Yes. But I just fear for things that I know eventually are going to happen that I don't try to think about often. But it's just like the nature of Life, you know, with aging parents is one thing, and some of those details. [00:02:39] Speaker B: So, yeah, if you're going to go there, then I'm, I'm looking forward to this next year less because I've got similar issues. So. [00:02:48] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yes, but gaming, I stream on Saturday mornings and I've kind of beat this horse quite a bit. But you know, it's always, well, what did you do in 2025? Did you accomplish what you wanted to in the gaming space? And then there is like, what do you want to accomplish in 2026? So as it relates to maybe this show, maybe just RPGs in general, is there anything on your short list that you are really focused on in 2026? [00:03:17] Speaker B: That's a hard question to answer, man, because we've got a little bit of a roadmap laid out for what we're going to cover and whatnot. So that's where my focus is. I'm going to punt. And I will say this, one of the things I have not been good at in the last few months since October is keeping up with Harrigan's Hearth, my substack blog. This show is taking a lot of my sort of extra time, work's been busy, etc. So the next couple of posts there are going to be around the year in review, 2025, sort of, you know, games I play that cons online, play my post, etc. And then I'm going to have another post that's about like the year ahead. What do I want, what do I want to focus on and accomplish and whatnot. No, there's nothing that comes to mind specifically outside of the context of the show that I want to do around espionage, because I got, I feel like my plate is full. I do want to play and run some Delta Green. There's stuff like, there's some, there's some things that are going to certainly rise to the fore here. But, you know, what about you? [00:04:10] Speaker A: So to your point, like, my YouTube channel suffers all the time. I'm like, I get a boost of energy. I put out five, you know, you know, one week after another, five in a row. [00:04:19] Speaker B: And then. And then nothing. [00:04:20] Speaker A: Right? [00:04:20] Speaker B: Yeah, a dearth of content. [00:04:23] Speaker A: I'm trying to find myself on the YouTubes, if you will, in that recorded space, not the live space, because I think that's doing fairly well. And I appreciate everybody that shows up every weekend to kind of tune in and just kind of shoot the proverbial about tabletop RPGs. But so that's one thing. Covert action RPGs in this show. Nothing crazy. Each game, every week. Now I have a game, two games every other. You know, do I fill that off week with another game? So I'm. I don't know if I. I'm like, oh, I could. That's kind of itching. But then I. I know I'll get into it and be like, what am I doing? I'm biting off more. [00:05:09] Speaker B: If you sit and wait, something might come along where you're like, oh, thank God I have time. That happens to me a lot where something pops up and I'm like, man, would I ever like to play that. But I got a regular group. I love those guys. I'm not going to back out of that game kind of thing. So having an off week might give you the opportunity to, like, really seize the day if something. Opportunity arises. I will say one other thing about this show. It has afforded us, Sean, some, like, gaming opportunities. I didn't know we were going to have necessarily when we first started it, the whole, like, vignette thing. I think I was thinking those would be a little. Even smaller form and lighter than they've turned out to be. Like, we're running little mini gaming sessions that are 90 minutes or two hours long or whatever. And they've been, quite frankly, for me at least they've been fun. So that's kind of why I feel like I'm scratching the itch on the espionage side of things. And I think we may have gotten into this on the very first episode, or maybe it was episode two, where I talked about different types of games I don't often get to play. And it was like cyberpunk. It was westerns and it was espionage and covert action. Well, espionage and covert action. I'm playing more than I ever had my whole life. Yeah, exactly. [00:06:17] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, same. I like the vignettes. They're great. I. I actually enjoy editing them quite a bit. [00:06:25] Speaker B: Like, I. Oh, really? [00:06:27] Speaker A: I don't know. It's kind of like. It's strange. I don't know if it is this. If I would use this. I don't know if this analogy is quite accurate, but it's like when you're. When you're in the military and you're polishing a boot and you get that shine on there. But the actual exercise of polishing boots was never something that I was overly a fan of back in the day. But when you get a good shine. [00:06:54] Speaker B: Man, you like the end result. There is a payoff. [00:06:57] Speaker A: There is. [00:06:58] Speaker B: I can totally see that with the. If you like the way the actual plays turn out in terms of your editing and production and all that stuff. [00:07:04] Speaker A: And I think they're good. I think they're fun. I think I enjoy them. And I think it's like. I don't know, I just, I. I'm a skeptic on actual plays typically. And I'm obviously biased towards our own. I think if I wasn't satisfied with them, I would probably, eh, they're all right. [00:07:26] Speaker B: That's sort of how I feel about them. Like, I have no illusions that this is. This is great drama or even great. I don't know. You do a great job, at least with the Bond one. We haven't gotten a lot of them, a lot of the other ones out yet, but they're coming soon, right? There's a top secret actual Blur vignette and there's a Tiny Spies vignette. We're soon to record mercenary spies and private eyes and agent provocateurs. They're coming. I really enjoy making them. I enjoy prepping for them and I enjoy listening to them. You know, just. I don't know. They're. They're fun. [00:07:57] Speaker A: Tiny Spies was a good one. I like the one. I like the scenario you pulled off and how you managed it because I, I could see a few spots in that where it would be like, oh, now what do I do? [00:08:11] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And that's, you know, we may evolve this eventually, right? Because this, this is circling around the bullseye of something you and I long talked about, which is actual plays that were more focused on teaching the game, learning the game, but not in a super dry like page turn kind of way. Like play the game and stop mid moment and say, there's a decision for the GM to make here. Right. And some people, like you mentioned, I think runeslinger maybe has done this. Some people have added like either text or overlays. I know Ben Milton, actually Questing Beast has done a little bit of that as well with some of his home group sort of stuff where he's. I think he's done a little bit more voiceover or something, but people have nibbled at the edges of this. But we could take this up another level at some point and really do that. Like, you know, stream it live, pause midstream, answer questions about the game you're playing. You could do that, you know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. Should we get on with the show? [00:09:10] Speaker A: We should. [00:09:12] Speaker B: What have I been working? What have I been like reading and watching? Sean, it's amazing that you asked that. So Mine. Like I said, mine's short. Not very much is the answer. So here's what I want to say, though. You told me that Pluto had Bond, and I can't find that shit on there anywhere. Zero Bond, Pluto, the network. Zero. [00:09:35] Speaker A: Dude, wait. [00:09:37] Speaker B: Ask me how much bond there is on Pluto. Go ahead, ask me. Come on, Harrigan. [00:09:43] Speaker A: Have you. Have you watched Bond? I think all of them are on Pluto. Isn't that right? [00:09:47] Speaker B: Yeah, I checked and it turns out there are none of them. [00:09:50] Speaker A: Dude, it might have been only for the month of December. [00:09:55] Speaker B: It may have been like a. Yeah, exactly. And maybe it's gone now. [00:09:58] Speaker A: It's not my fault you sat around on your ass having all that time off during the holidays and decided other little things. [00:10:06] Speaker B: I believe it was Michael. I believe it was a code again, who wrote into the Discord and recommended maybe a couple times now, the Kill Chain, which is a book about sort of the modern digital warfare era and why we are where we are. I started that as a on. On Audible, and it is pretty damn good. I do not love the narrator, who happens to be the author, and he's one of these guys who kind of narrates his book like this the whole time, and he just talks and talks and talks about what happened at the Pentagon, then over in the Middle east, and then there was a lot of threats from China. And it's just kind of monotone. But it's not so bad that it's not. Not listenable. Like they should have hired somebody pretty clearly. But it's. So far it's. It's quite good. I'm gonna keep up with it. And then I've also watched one more episode of Spycraft on Netflix, which was all about what they called clandestine collection, which is pretty cool. So it's all about the microphones, the cameras, and the ways to move documents around and that sort of thing, you know, starting back Cold War time up through now kind of thing and how it's evolved. Really, really cool stuff. I would love to see an update to that series. It was made in 2019. I think there are some things that have changed a lot in the last, like, you know, five, six years. What have you been up to? [00:11:15] Speaker A: I think the only thing that I've. That has changed since the last episode that we recorded was my Mission Impossible of finishing the series, the movie series. [00:11:26] Speaker B: Oh, you watched the new one? [00:11:28] Speaker A: I did. W. Not as good as the one prior. Yeah, yeah. No, I didn't. There was. I. Stranger Things are running into that with my wife, and I Where it's like, wow, it's an hour and a half and there are, like, stretching scenes and things, like, really far in the movie or. [00:11:52] Speaker B: Or Stranger Things? [00:11:54] Speaker A: Yes, both. I think in the movie, there's, like, the. The underwater part, which is cool. [00:12:01] Speaker B: I have not seen it. Okay, well, the new one I am less enthusiastic about because I can tell it's. It's just another, like, Cruise sort of ego vehicle around. Look at the incredible stuff this old dude is doing, which is fine. Like the wing walking and all that kind of stuff. It's fine. But I don't know. It's not why I watch those movies. Like, Tom Cruise is my least favorite part of the Mission Impossible movies. He really is like. He's fine. Ethan Hunt's not a very interesting character. He's okay, but I don't. [00:12:30] Speaker A: Scotty from Madison, Wisconsin, Ethan Hunt. [00:12:33] Speaker B: Is he. Yeah, There you go. Oh, that's right. From the. You showed me the ID card shot. Slight bunny trail on Stranger Things. It's pretty clear. They had, like, a couple pages of content and they stretched it out to, like. So my wife and I watched. My daughter was actually the one who was like, hey, there's the new season's on. My wife and I are like, cool, we'll watch it before Christmas. She's like, no, you won't. They're releasing it in these weird blocks, like, one way quite a while ago, before Thanksgiving. 1. 1. Recently we watched the one before Thanksgiving, and I was like, okay, it's better than last year, I think, because last year was very. Or the last season, I should say, very fragmented. And if you remember, like, the kids were like, all over. And it was also the first season where the kids like, oh, that kid's like, 23. Like, he's still in high school. He didn't age so well. Fair bit of that going on. But long story short, we. There was the break before Christmas, and we fired up that next episode. And my God, it's so slow moving. And it's this. It's the same story over and over again that we stopped watching it. We got 20 minutes in the new episode, and we're like, you know, let's watch something else. And I have not returned to it. Did you guys finish it? [00:13:42] Speaker A: We have not. My wife has brought it up, like, but I don't think she's all in. I think she's just like, hey, do we want to do you? And I want to watch this and finish it. We have been on a. A Landman kick. [00:13:54] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, Landman's good. [00:13:55] Speaker A: Billy Bob Thorn, man. Awesome. [00:13:57] Speaker B: He's pretty amazing. [00:13:58] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:13:58] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:13:59] Speaker A: And his character, right? And his character is just. Dude, I can. I don't even have it as bad. I'm like, dude, I hear you, man. [00:14:13] Speaker B: I have not seen all those, but I think I've seen three of them. They're. They're pretty damn good. Billy Bob's awesome. [00:14:18] Speaker A: Yeah. But anyways, Stranger things. Not finished yet. We'll see. But not covert action either. But it's. [00:14:27] Speaker B: To your point about stretching content. [00:14:29] Speaker A: It's stretching content, and I think it's like a TV series deal. Like, how much creativity do the writers have in them? And, you know, you got, well, the pilot. Right. It's got to be good because you got to sell it. And once it's picked up, you're like, great. Now we could do season two, which is really, really what we want to get into, and the meat and the potatoes. And then somewhere from like 3, 4, 5, somewhere in there, there's going to be a really crappy season. [00:14:55] Speaker B: Lost. [00:14:57] Speaker A: Oh. [00:15:00] Speaker B: Like, season one and two were like, pretty interesting. What's going on? And then it was like, what? What's going on, dude? [00:15:07] Speaker A: If you're listening to this and you can and empathize with us in your make, we're making you want to throw your phone or podcatcher of choice through a window. Not due to us, but just because of those memories. Yeah, we understand. [00:15:22] Speaker B: Yeah. We should sit the rep. We should keep the. Keep the wheels turn in here. [00:15:26] Speaker A: We should. Let's get into that. Let's get into sit rep. Give me the sit rep. Sit rep is links that we find or resources we want to share with you, the community. What. Maybe it's events happening. What have you. We've got one this week that I know of. Unless Harrigan added a last one at the last minute. [00:15:47] Speaker B: No. [00:15:47] Speaker A: Okay. I don't know if you are aware of this, Harrigan, but the Delta green shotgun scenario 2025 contest is over. [00:15:55] Speaker B: I was aware. I was not aware that they had over to you, buddy. No, they announced the winner. We're smooth, folks. [00:16:08] Speaker A: Smooth. Today it's 2026, man. We have been in like kind of a coma the last month and a half getting the brain worked up again to go back to work. But yeah, I have not looked at the scenarios that have won, but there is a first place, second place, and then there is a, like a People's Choice Award. And so we'll have a link in the. In the notes where you can look at those if you're a Delta Green fan, you might already be in the. [00:16:33] Speaker B: Know, but in 2026, I resolved to submit a shotgun scenario and get involved in this process because I love this process and I love combing through those shotgun scenarios. It's one of my. It's actually one of my favorite little corners of all of gaming. Dom is this little corner of the. Yeah, it is, man. Because it's just this vibrant little community cranking out cool content, voting on it. Stu on stuff. Arc Dream gives product away to the winners and whatnot. It's really cool. And there's some people that we know who submitted. Orcus submitted. Right, Scott. [00:17:07] Speaker A: That's right. That's right, Scott. Orcus Dorcas and from Titter Pigs. TTRPG. Titter Pigs. And of course, his own YouTube channel. So, yeah, he had put one out there. I want to do that too. There are some that Submit four. [00:17:25] Speaker B: Yeah. I had two ideas. I just didn't get time to develop them. [00:17:28] Speaker A: Yeah. And I think in January coming up, as we record this, the campaign one might be coming out. [00:17:40] Speaker B: There's a campaign. [00:17:41] Speaker A: There's a campaign contest. [00:17:42] Speaker B: Contest. [00:17:42] Speaker A: Yeah. I mentioned this in a sitrep a few episodes ago where I had books. [00:17:47] Speaker B: Oh, yeah. I don't, I don't, I don't listen to those. Yeah. I just tune out. [00:17:50] Speaker A: I know, I understand. [00:17:50] Speaker B: Go on. [00:17:51] Speaker A: Right. So I, I, But I, I thought it was January. It could be later. Q2. I don't know. They do the campaign equivalent, but I don't know if it's run by the same people. [00:18:06] Speaker B: Right. Still. Is it still Fairfield Project and all that? [00:18:10] Speaker A: I don't know, honestly. [00:18:11] Speaker B: Okay. All right, well, we'll find out in the next few weeks as it either drops or as it takes shape. Yeah. Cool. So you're going to drop the link to those winners, but I would say to people who are interested in short form Delta Green, it's not just the winners that are good. Like you can. There's some, there's a cool catalog of by now, I think a, A couple of hundred shotgun scenarios. Right. Because they do, they tend to do lately like 50 or 60 a year or something like that. Like quite a few submissions. [00:18:41] Speaker A: Yeah, they, I wanted to. Why does 81 submissions. [00:18:47] Speaker B: Yeah, that's. That's pretty badass. That's, that's pretty great. [00:18:49] Speaker A: That's cool. Some material there. So we'll have that link in the show notes and if you are a Delta Green fan, like Harrigan and I, and you haven't, you know, delved into that, you know, consider it for 2026. Doesn't take, you know, who knows? [00:19:07] Speaker B: Yep, we should delve into communications that are encrypted. [00:19:13] Speaker A: Sir, we have an incoming encrypted transmission. Encrypted comms. If you'd like to throw us a grenade, you could do that by calling in 929big dice or emailing grenadeobagpod.com We've got one this week. Our buddy Gabe Dibbing, I think he has an appreciation for the tunnels and trolls from Flying Buffalo. [00:19:35] Speaker B: He does. [00:19:36] Speaker A: And he writes in about our first go and stab at mercenary spies and private eyes. [00:19:43] Speaker C: Wonder of wonders, as they say. [00:19:46] Speaker B: Wonders never cease. Here. [00:19:49] Speaker C: My good friends Harrigan and Sean read a game that has absolutely no meta currencies in it, even though that's a, I guess, an essential feature according to Harrigan that he needs out of a spy game. Completely rules, rules, light, completely flexible, hackable. Do with it what you want. And it's some rough going, some rough going for these guys. So I have some. I have some comments. By the time you get this, you probably have already played the game and have firmed up what your own impressions of it are. You talked about it, probably accurately. I was. I was amused a little bit about the misnomer that Harrigan pointed out with the save rolls. Absolutely. He's not wrong. [00:20:37] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:20:38] Speaker C: I mean, he situates it correctly in where it is in history. This is a feature of its time. They were called save roles because there was a saving throw in Dungeons and Dragons originally in Tunnels and Trolls. I believe. I believe I'm not a huge historian of tunnels and trolls, but the only attribute that was used for a save roll was lucky. But then later on they realized. People realized naturally. Oh, man. We could just turn this into what? [00:21:11] Speaker B: Thank you for pausing, Sean. Gabe has left us a nice meaty voicemail again, and we can. You know, I've got a couple of notes going here. We'll respond to some other things, but he's talking about these saving roles. You know what occurs to me at the time when Tunnels and Trolls comes out in 75, there are no attribute checks, There are no skill throws or anything. Dnd, which, you know, which Ken looked at, has attack rolls and saving throws full stop in. In its original, original form. I mean, there. There's probably some other little things that I'm not super aware of because I'm not really an OD and D guy. Plan on diving into that a little bit this year, but this is the tunnels and trolls guys saying it's not an attack. Roll. So what is it? It's a saving roll. I think it's that simple. [00:21:56] Speaker C: Today we would call a skill roll or an attribute roll more. More accurately. Right. And you can start doing save rolls with anything to do anything. And that. That language just stayed there in a way too. And I found it was. I find it interesting that it was a difficult read for Harrigan particularly as well because yes, this is a. [00:22:17] Speaker B: It's a. [00:22:18] Speaker C: The combined edition is just. It is what was written at that time. It's a relic of its time. And for me it's kind of a glorious time where things had not been systematized or you hadn't. We hadn't learned best practices in how we are presenting our role playing game. We aren't using terminology, consistent terminology all the time. And we're not. We're certainly not capitalizing any game term right. To differentiate it from normal language in our sentences. It is very much more discursive, very. Just more of a conversation to read such a thing. And as such I sometimes I find those older games a lot more entertaining, more enjoyable to read. I like. Maybe it's just because of, I don't know, my background in literature or whatever. I like to read. It feels more like a conversation. Anyway, I'm getting off off topic. I want to gotcha you guys a little bit. Sean called the Experience points action points. I haven't looked at my tome but I think that they're adventure points. But arrogant pointed this out. It doesn't matter what they're called. And in fact I think right there in the text they're talking about them as adventure points. But then they say also called experience. It's just so glorious, guys. It's so wonderful. [00:23:42] Speaker A: Gabe has a little sadistic side to him, I think a little bit. [00:23:46] Speaker B: Yes. That may be masochistic actually. [00:23:52] Speaker A: That may be. [00:23:53] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:23:54] Speaker A: Yes. [00:23:55] Speaker B: Reading this stuff. [00:23:55] Speaker A: I made the mistake. But hey, it was corrected. It was corrected, but it to the experience. [00:24:01] Speaker B: Well I. I corrected you last week, remember? I was like, I don't think those are action points, dude. No, those are adventure points. [00:24:08] Speaker C: Iq. That is an interesting thing. So yeah, it is not a dump stat. And when you guys play, I'm curious how this is going to go for you if you're going to make characters. Whatever there's. [00:24:18] Speaker A: Sorry. [00:24:19] Speaker C: This is too much fun for me. Harrigan's gonna love this. The iq. The iq. It's a double whammy. Not only do you need like a minimal IQ to be able to learn certain skills so they'll have like An IQ threshold that's required for it. But that's what determines your start, your starting adventure points that you spend on your skills. Sorry, you get so many adventure points to build your skills with when you're making a character and you need. So that determines like your IQ is how many points you get. And then you also, you can't develop anything unless you meet the minimum threshold, the IQ threshold for some of those skills. [00:25:08] Speaker B: Are you as abused as I am at how, how much fun Gabe is having alone on this call in? [00:25:15] Speaker A: Dude, whatever it takes. If Gabe is happy, I'm happy. [00:25:19] Speaker B: He's on the sauce, man. Oh, so you know what a little bit of a segue here. So today's show is indeed a second part, a deeper dive on Mercenary Spies and Private Eyes by Sean and I. And so we both read it more carefully and Gabe, we are going to get into exactly what you just mentioned, which is this whole like double whammy on the IQ front where it's your skill points and it's a prerequisite to be able to do the cooler things in the game. [00:25:46] Speaker C: So yeah, I think Harrigan's gonna love that. [00:25:51] Speaker B: And I. [00:25:52] Speaker C: So he says for the final point, Harrigan is like, I don't know why Gabe thinks this is better than Tunnels and Trolls. [00:25:59] Speaker B: It is. [00:25:59] Speaker C: I mean like you could fix this. I already said that. It's like rules light. There's no meta currencies. It's just, it's a serviceable game and you can just make it whatever you want it to be like. But one of the problems with Tunnels and Trolls that this game immediately addresses is the exponential growth over long term play of the player characters. So you can increase attributes in this game. I'm going to call them attributes. I don't remember what they call them. Which is like your strength, dexterity, luck, iq. Sorry, I love that one, Speed, all that stuff. Right? You can increase those with adventure points, also called experience points. In Tunnels and Trolls, you can increase those forever. There's no cap there. And in fact, Mercenary Spies and Private Eyes, when you're making your character does this as well. So in Tunnels and Trolls, let's try to break this down for you. In Tunnels and Trolls, when you're rolling your attributes, you roll 3D6. And if all of those numbers are the same number, say you roll three D6 and you get three fours, that becomes an attribute of 12. But then you roll all three of those dice again and add that. And if you roll triples again, it's called triples. Add and roll over you can you do it again? And you start getting these like really top heavy, really like large numbers. It's cool to be able to get something for the triples, but Stackpole was like, oh, this is going to be a problem. And so right away you can see if you read through all the text that if you roll triples, you roll 2d6, you just roll two more six sided dice. And even if those are doubles, it doesn't matter. You just add those to your original roll and you basically your characters max out at a 30. That's the top end for having an attribute. What's wrong with Tunnels and Trolls? To me and maybe it's not wrong. I want to play like a long campaign and see where it goes is exactly. That is it's just exponential growth. And until all of a sudden your player characters are like what are, what kind of people are these simulating. And in a Tunnels and Trolls game it's a, it's a different world. Like you're some crazy gods fighting monster ratings that are in the hundreds or thousands if you fully understand how that system works. So Stackpole had to make some choices. He had to make some changes for, you know, a modern game. And that's probably where the skills come in too. I'll be interested in hearing your guys's play experience because I don't think that there's a problem with these skills at all in this game. I think they're a very neat, smart feature. Of course I would not if I were to run a long game of mercenary spies and private eyes. I've already theoretically made a lot of changes that I would implement right away out of the bat because as Harrigan rightly points out, there is a lot of old cruft in this system because it is not changed at all. It's not a new addition. It is a snapshot. It is a relic of its era. So thank you for all the entertainment. Looking forward to hearing your play experience. [00:29:22] Speaker B: Gabe out. [00:29:26] Speaker A: Thanks. Gabe. [00:29:28] Speaker B: Great call. Covered lots of ground. [00:29:31] Speaker A: He did. [00:29:34] Speaker B: What do you have to respond to that? We didn't, we didn't hit when we stopped the recording a couple times. [00:29:40] Speaker A: Nothing too crazy. I think it was more, you know, for Gabe, it's certainly something that he appreciates. I don't know. I don't think it's. We'll get into some of the details about what he mentions and how it aligns with or doesn't align with what he prefers in a game. The interesting part of the game that I have even brought up in part one was if you're trying to mimic a pulp action game, this, this, it just doesn't do it, in my opinion. I don't know. [00:30:10] Speaker B: We're gonna have to play it to find out. [00:30:11] Speaker A: And I may be too hasty in that assumption. But I don't know. I don't think it's a terrible game. I don't think it's a bad game overall. It's not, you know, anything. But I'm also not modifier guy. Tiny Spies maybe have talked about it, you and I, but I don't want to rewrite loads of stuff for a game to make it kind of bright. [00:30:36] Speaker B: Yeah. Not to spoil anything in terms of what we're going to talk about today, but I, I actually really like the points he makes in the latter, like third of the call where he starts talking about how the skill system, the decisions that Stackpole had to make and how Gabe had some changes in mind that he would implement. And when I get right. When I get right down to it, if you want to make this a five minute review, Sean, when I step back from this, like, Gabe and I part ways hard on the presentation of the game. As much as he enjoys the conversational tone, the sort of the we're finding ourselves, there's not a lot of, you know, nobody's laid the. There's not a clear roadway that RPG designers are on. Well, at the same time as this game is coming out, we got James Bond, we got Marvel superheroes, we have some games that are actually. We got Judge Dredd. You want to see, you want to see presentation done right in the early in the 80s. Look at that game. Like there are people out there really presenting the game concepts clearly. This is not one of those games. This is one of those games where it's not badly written. It just meanders and goes on and on. And I will fully admit maybe that's on me. I know, Sean, I think you tend to agree with me. That's not how I best learn a game. That's not how I want to read about a game. Gabe, I'll speak to you directly here. This even explains to me why you love swords and wizardry so much. As you've told me, Finch's style is that conversational tone of, hey, this is the way I did it and this is the way it was done back in the day. And here are two or three other ways you could do something. Stores and wizardry being sort of Finch's take on, you know, the OD and D and the White Box edition with some add ons like Greyhawk and Blackboard and that kind of thing. And Gabe has always said to me, I love the way it's written. And this is the same thing. This is Stackpole writing these, like, almost like he's almost explaining it as he goes to himself. And he's almost convincing himself that it is the way it is because, you know, it's just. It's a certain way of doing it that just doesn't resonate with me when I'm trying to sit and learn a game is all I would say, go ahead. No, I have a part 2. [00:32:38] Speaker A: The same with me. I agree. I also learn like, it goes back to my teenage years. I actually had this occurrence when I was in junior high. I was moved out of an English teacher's class because the English I would. There would be an essay question and I would answer in like two sentences. And the English teacher. [00:33:04] Speaker B: Succinct. [00:33:05] Speaker A: Yes, that was my approach. And my English teacher docked me for it heavily. And my, you know, my mom and I do. I go, I'm answering the question. And my, my mother had taken up. It was a big fiasco not to get into my teenage years life. But it reminds me of that. I don't want to read a huge paragraph. Some of it, it's like, it's good that it's there. Great. It's fine. An example like that he puts into the play. Great. I could put that context if I need more. But I just really want to get to the point when we're at the table and somebody has a question like, well, I'm going to do this. Okay, well, what is that? Okay, plus one for this. Do this. Roll 2D6. Got it. Okay. I don't want to filter through a paragraph or two paragraphs to get to that meat. That's just me. [00:33:58] Speaker B: So there's a common denominator here with your story and it's English teachers. Gabe is an English professor at a college, so it's hilarious. He likes words. [00:34:09] Speaker A: He does. [00:34:10] Speaker B: She loves the words, apparently. [00:34:12] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:34:13] Speaker B: He should read some Kevin Crawford. What? That's what he. [00:34:15] Speaker A: Oh, I think he would maybe fall in love with some nut without number. [00:34:20] Speaker B: Yes. [00:34:21] Speaker A: Falling in love with RPGs without number. [00:34:23] Speaker B: Yes. Yes. Oh, my. But you know what? It's a great call because I actually listened to it before I sat down last night to kind of do a little bit of a deeper dive on some of the things. I wanted to brush up on some of the rules part of this that we're going to Talk about here today. And I was able to remove myself from a lot of the like the what I consider kind of the direct drudgery and the dreck of the of the read and just say, oh, I can see through this. And I actually think there is a pretty sweet little game at the heart of this. And Sean, I don't think it's all that far away from something like tiny dungeon where like little tweak here, click, little tune there, click, click. And you actually have something that's pretty lightweight. So let me give you a for example, Gabe's point is spot on. I think the skills are a good addition to the game. I don't like Stackpole's implementation of them in this because of the way they're written up and there's almost 100 of them etc, but if you were to narrow that to like a nice trim skill list of 15 or 20 or 25 skills, now we're in business and the mechanics work well. Because here's the part I didn't pick up on. I'm sorry, I'm jumping ahead here. It's because of Gabe's damn call. [00:35:30] Speaker A: I know. Damn it Gabe. [00:35:31] Speaker B: I didn't pick up on this. The first my verse read through where you can actually apply more than one skill to your attribute role. So that 2D6 role that's based on like your strength or your dexterity or your charisma or whatever. You look at your skill list and they're you know, between zero and whatever. But when you first buy them they're at one and you just add one to it. Right. That's really flexible. So you could actually have your own skill list. So the mechanics work well. I don't love stack poles the way he went about it, but I think that's just a sign of the times. That's the Girp Gurps Hero rolemaster Swords and chivalry. Like all those like skill heavy systems just it's just the time. I don't think I had anything else on this call. Let me look here my notes. I do think it's funny that you know, he starts off with like I can fix this. I know I would make changes immediately. We're trying to look at this rules as written initially and we're going to play it rules as written right. When we run the actual play, this will be not without any tuning but I can already see what Gabe is talking about where. Oh man, you just throw a couple levers on this and you open up a whole bunch of pretty cool little Things that work the way I want them to anyway, that's all I got. [00:36:40] Speaker A: We better get into the mission brief before we go off. [00:36:43] Speaker B: Yes, have a seat. Let's get on with the mission brief. [00:36:48] Speaker A: As we mentioned, this is part two of a more deeper dive into mercenary spies and private eyes. If you haven't listened to part, listen to part one. Go back and do that. We talk more about kind of the, the format and the layout and, and some of those details. A little bit of the history and who's owned the rights to it and things of that nature and what it's about. Check that out. In this episode we're going to go into a little bit more details about the. The mechanics and some of those inner workings of the game. [00:37:17] Speaker B: Yeah baby. [00:37:18] Speaker A: Where do we want to start? Let's start. Go ahead. [00:37:21] Speaker B: Go ahead. [00:37:22] Speaker A: No, you go ahead. [00:37:23] Speaker B: You want me to go ahead? I thought you were going to take the lead on this. [00:37:25] Speaker A: We could do. I mean I always start with the PC. [00:37:29] Speaker B: Well and it does that in the book. Like character. You know what, let me look at something. Actually I think I have me look at some. There are three. Let me do this. There's a little bit of scene setting inside of the hardcover and we're talking the combined edition that we talked about at length last time. There are three quote unquote books inside of that hardcover. There's the. And then what I would describe them as is like there's the game itself which is character generation. It's action resolution, it's combat. It's all the kind of crunchy bits that how does the game actually work? Then you get into like scenario design and, and oddly there are some ads in that scenario design session. This is where you get into the whole like they treat mercenaries, spies and private eyes a little bit differently. Like there's a, a one or two page section on each running those types of adventures for each of them as, as though they are very separate. But there's also hit location and car crashes that are thrown into book two. I don't know why, because book three is really where you get into all of the optional add on but also all the equipment. They call them provisions which to me is like that's something. I'm going to eat a provision. But their provisions are all their weapons and like tools and equipment and all that kind of stuff. And then you get into the optional rules around aging and you know, additional resources of many kinds. The stuff that you pointed out last time felt like authored by different people, maybe sourced from a magazine or a zine somewhere and then gathered together felt like that. Right, so. So having my set the stage like that, the first book gets into character generation and saving roles and all that. Do you want to take us through some of that stuff? [00:39:01] Speaker A: Yeah. Some of this is not going to be a huge shock given the time the 80s that it was released. So the stats that a PC is going to have are going to include strength, luck, intelligence, dexterity, constitution, charisma and speed. 3d6. Add them up now to our, to our friend Gabe, in which he mentioned if all three of those dice come up three of a kind, then you could add two more dice. So you roll two more dice that can be rolled and then added to that. So if you max out at three three six S, you're at 18, you roll another couple D6s, you're at 30 total. That's the max for every stat. So you could potentially have some pretty mediocre 9, 10, 24, you know, 12, 16. [00:39:56] Speaker B: Yeah, it's wider ranging than your usual 3 to 18 span. I actually really like this span. And this is the point Gabe made that, you know, if people don't know Tunnels and Trolls that he blew past in his call. In Tunnels and Trolls, you keep rolling triples. So if you roll triples, you don't roll 2d6, you roll 3d6 again. And if you get more triples, like, so you're. You can start off with like a 50 in strength. And that's what he's talking about. Like what kind of characters even are these? So Stackpole puts a cap on it, which I really like. The other thing I really like actually from this first set of this, these are from Tunnels and Trolls. Right. This set of attributes luck. In 1975, this is the first time we see luck in role playing games, which is pretty cool. Like as a, you know, as a. It's not about the player's skill, it's not about how good they are at something. It's. It's, you know, it's their connection. In this case, their connection to like the cosmos and the fates and that kind of thing. Right. [00:40:50] Speaker A: Yeah, I think a 30. I don't know, I guess if you wanted to say, well, I'm going to be a James Bond or, you know, and I think it. They even attribute that to the pulp piece. Yes. [00:41:01] Speaker B: And that's why I think maybe you're a little off base when you keep saying, I don't think it's pulpy, I don't think it's pulpy with the Expanded range of stats. Now, maybe if you start from the ground up and you roll poorly. Yep, you're right. You could have a schlub. But if you. This is one of, you know, one of the points where if you just change things a little bit, like maybe roll four or five characters and choose the best one, or there's different ways you could. You could roll whatever. [00:41:24] Speaker A: Right. [00:41:25] Speaker B: But one thing I think is cool that we're going to get to is you can picture the difficulties are like level. You know how it's like level one, level two, level three for like a save test, which equates to like 20, 25, 30 as a target number. You can picture if you've got an 18, you are not failing very often against those level one, quote unquote challenging tests. Right. But there's a dice mechanic that accounts for that that we're going to get into, which I think is pretty cool. So you're not just going to flatten the lower skill, the lower challenge ratings. Yeah, keep going. [00:41:57] Speaker A: Okay, so you flesh out your character, which will include sex, nationality, race, age, level, mention the stats. Then you have the combat adds, which is any point above 12 on strength, dexterity and luck. Specifically, you add one to the combat adds and then you subtract a point for each one that is below nine in those stats. That's. That plays specifically into hand to hand. [00:42:30] Speaker B: So briefly, combat ads are not the same. Like, what you're doing generally on combat is you're building a dice pool based on your weapons and whatnot. So you're rolling a bunch of. And this is, we should say this is a D6 only game. Every die you roll is a D6. But the combat ads are kind of cool because they are essentially take West End game Star wars pips. When you remember you do like 6, 66 plus 1 plus 2, that kind of thing. That's what they are in tunnels. That's what these combat ads are in tunnels and trolls is they're adding single digits kind of thing. [00:42:59] Speaker A: And then the next one, missile weapon combat ads. Only luck applies with missile weapon ads. And it's the same 12, 9 rule, 1 point extra for anything over 12, and then subtract 1 for anything less than 9. Money equals 3d 6 times 100. [00:43:17] Speaker B: Boo. I'm gonna say that right now. Like, if this is. I guess, you know what, maybe I retracted for spies. I don't want money in my game. Like, you know how Bond handled it. And Tiny Spies doesn't care about it. [00:43:29] Speaker A: Like, oh, it gets better. [00:43:31] Speaker B: It does It. [00:43:32] Speaker A: Wow. [00:43:33] Speaker B: Top secret. I didn't like the money in that game. [00:43:36] Speaker A: They got taxes in this game. [00:43:38] Speaker B: Oh, that's pulp. [00:43:40] Speaker A: That's where I'm going. [00:43:42] Speaker B: Okay, take us there. [00:43:44] Speaker A: That's the way at the end, though, because I wanted to talk about specifically that component, but it's not as emphasized. It's kind of an optional thing. So I don't want to harp on it. Too bad. But you could potentially be independently wealthy. Do you know how you become independently wealthy in this game, Merrigan? [00:44:02] Speaker B: Nope, I don't. [00:44:03] Speaker A: Well, I'll tell you. [00:44:04] Speaker B: Tell me. [00:44:05] Speaker A: You roll the 3D6, and if they all come up triples, then you multiply it by a thousand. [00:44:11] Speaker B: Oh, wow. So you could have $3,000. [00:44:17] Speaker A: Monthly income. [00:44:20] Speaker B: Oh, is that what it is? [00:44:21] Speaker A: Monthly income? Yes. So it is okay. If you. [00:44:24] Speaker B: That is wealthy. Yeah. [00:44:25] Speaker A: If you play rules as written, it it. You roll up the 3D six times. 100, it just says starting. [00:44:31] Speaker B: Yeah. So every month after that, that's your cash on hand. [00:44:35] Speaker A: Every month after that, you are broke if you spend it all and you don't go into, you know, Montezuma's tomb and find the treasure. [00:44:44] Speaker B: So if you're running a mercenary game, money's important, right? Private eye game. You got to take that job, sweetheart. You got to pay the bills. Spy game, less so. But I don't know. All right, so it's in there. [00:44:58] Speaker A: Yeah. Cool. Yeah, so that's kind of interesting. But it's only interesting if that applies. Like, oh, I'm independently wealthy. Then every month I get like huge amounts of money and then I can spend it in the game. Otherwise you're just. You have a bunch of money. Anyways, continuing on, adventure points, not to be confused with action points. You're welcome, Gabe. They start at zero. They are also experience points. So it's a level based system. There's armor, there's provisions. Obviously, if you want to deck out your tune with that stuff, then. Weapons. They mentioned compatibility in weapons. Did you see that? [00:45:44] Speaker B: Remind me of it. [00:45:45] Speaker A: So here's the thing about some of the little nuances about being pulp versus simulationist. For example, my character has a 9 millimeter pistol. Harrigan's character has a.45. Hey, he ran out of ammo. Shawn can't give him any ammo because he has 9mm ammo. That's not gonna work in his.45. [00:46:08] Speaker B: You are treading dangerous ground, my friend. [00:46:12] Speaker A: Am I? [00:46:13] Speaker B: Pulp games still need to respect that cartridges are different. [00:46:17] Speaker A: Oh, do they? In whatever movie is like, there's Clips flying all over the place. Hey, here's a magazine. Like, you know, it works. [00:46:31] Speaker B: I'm gonna play the fifth on this one because I'm so deeply rooted into handling the firearms accurately. Right, like carry on. Right. [00:46:39] Speaker A: And then you put into the height and weight and then that should be pretty much about it other than getting into your skills. It also stipulates in the rules that if it's not written on your sheet, it. It is fully within the rights of the GM to deny you the benefit. [00:46:56] Speaker B: Yep, it's true. Which True old, old school play. [00:47:00] Speaker A: True old school play. Like, hey man, show me where that's. [00:47:03] Speaker B: Written on your sheet. Nope. Access denied. Nope, can't have it. You don't have rope. [00:47:08] Speaker A: You sound exactly like 15 year old Sean. Uncanny. [00:47:14] Speaker B: Oh, dear. [00:47:16] Speaker A: Did I miss anything? [00:47:18] Speaker B: No. Great coverage of making the character. [00:47:21] Speaker A: Any comments to add? [00:47:23] Speaker B: And all of that is literally called flushing out as well, which I think is pretty funny. Flush out the PC. Oh, you know what? You did miss one. And it's easy to miss because there's a whole page on it and it's one of those ones where like Stackpole's got verbal diarrhea and it's just like, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. The background, they say you should have a background and when they're. One of the things that Stackpole does in the book is he builds a PC as you go and you kind of follow this character's kind of their little story. And when he does examples, it's around this character kind of thing. And that character, he develops quite a little background. And there are no hooks, no tables to roll on. There's no, nothing in the game to develop the character background. Stackpole does say it's kind of cool to have one and you should look at your, look at your attributes, look at your skills and there's, you know, look at, look at the way you flesh the PC out to kind of build it. Like, what's your nationality? Like, what was something that very 1983. It's like you can't send a white, a white American to China and pretend. [00:48:22] Speaker A: To be, you know, pretend to be Chinese. [00:48:24] Speaker B: Yes, yes, something like that is in there. [00:48:27] Speaker A: But there's very verbatim almost. [00:48:30] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, there's a pretty chunky section on background with zero mechanical support. And a lot of other games, like what a lot of other games have done now and starting back with Traveller is they give you a little life path. They give you a little like table to roll on around where you are from and what your hooks might Be. But it's just a sign of how early we are in the genesis of all this. Right. Even though it's the combined edition in 2019, these words were written long before that is what I would say. Next section is saving roles, right? [00:49:01] Speaker A: Do you want to touch saving roles? [00:49:03] Speaker B: Yeah, I'll do standard roles and then you return with skills. So these are all those, you know, Gabe described them as sort of attribute checks. Luck checks initially in tunnels and trolls become attribute checks, become saving roles that are really broad based for anything. Like you're going to be rolling these quote unquote saving roles in combat, which is handled fully differently by the way than your average saving role. But if you're basically trying to use your skill, you're trying to like, like woo somebody or convince them or you're trying to make a. This is one thing that gets a little, little complex if you're trying to make a trick shot with your rifle. It uses different roles than combat. Combat's a whole separate thing. But you would roll, you would roll a saving roll to make that shot. So to break it down 2d6, add the attribute, add any appropriate skill levels as well. So this is, you know, you're looking at basically going, my attribute is 11. Or that's. Let's do this. Let's say it's 11, but you then look and say I have rifle at three. So you're adding 14 to a 2D6 roll. And what the GM is doing at this point is determining the difficulty level of this saving roll and it's won through ad nauseam. I think it goes forever. They have a formula. It's basically one multiplier or the skill level, difficulty level multiplied by 5 plus 15 is what they're after. So you can picture that a one is a 20, a two is a 25, a three is a 30. And that's the number you're trying to hit on those two D6 with your. Your bonuses, which I think is called the modified attribute role. [00:50:39] Speaker A: I don't know if you're either wrong or you're. Or it's unclear to me and how you explained it. You take the stat. [00:50:47] Speaker B: Oh, I know what happened. Go on, this is funny. [00:50:50] Speaker A: And you sub. You take the stat and you subtract it from that target number that it's the, it's the to hit number. Well, that's how you derive it. So to Harrigan's point, so if you have, say I as the GM, think it's a level 2 difficulties quote unquote, then it's a 25. If Harrigan has a attribute of, say strength of 12 equals, you take the difference of those two and Harrigan has to roll that, that becomes your target number. [00:51:24] Speaker B: So mathematically it's the same. [00:51:27] Speaker A: Is it? [00:51:27] Speaker B: But you're. Yes, but you're right. I'll explain in a minute. My. My monkey brain last night I was like, why is Stackpole doing it this way? [00:51:35] Speaker A: Oh, okay. [00:51:35] Speaker B: Why? So literally like what, what did I just say? A scale of 11 and a. Or a, an attribute of 11 and a scale of 3. So a 14, right? Correct. So if it's a. If It's a level one difficulty, a 20. 20 minus 14 is six. They're trying to get six or better on those 2D six. [00:51:53] Speaker A: Yes. [00:51:53] Speaker B: That's what you're saying. [00:51:54] Speaker A: Yes. [00:51:54] Speaker B: And that's how stack pole. That's how Stackpole describes it. [00:51:57] Speaker A: Okay. [00:51:57] Speaker B: It's to my brain. My brain is like, what are you doing? Just try to hit the 20 by adding the 14 tier 2D6 roll. It's the same thing. [00:52:06] Speaker A: I see. [00:52:06] Speaker B: Like you, you are 100. Correct. It's not how. What the way I described it, it's the way I internalized it and the way I would describe it, not the way Stackpole does. So we should go. We should abide by the rules. Well, so you're right. [00:52:17] Speaker A: And that's good that you point that out because I was like following you and I'm like, wait a minute, he's not saying the exact same thing that I have in my brain. So it is the same. You're right, but I didn't realize that. So. [00:52:28] Speaker B: Yes, just a different way of doing the math. It's almost like a faco thing where some people look at it one way, some people look at it a different way, that kind of thing. To continue on that 2d6 roll, there's a couple of little things that are. That I think are pretty neat. The first is that again, returning from character generation, doubles are rerolled. So you get this whole like reroll, open ended thing going on so you can succeed in those long shot scenarios, which I think does support the pulp play. And we also talked about how you could theoretically start this game off with a characteristic or an attribute of like 25. If you rolled, you know, 15 and then you rolled two dice after that. I got a 10. Yeah, 25 and something. You're never going to fail on those 20 or 25 difficulty. Level 1 and 2, level 2. Level 1 and level 2 difficulty tests. Well, the game also says on the 2D6 roll. If you ever get below 5, you fail. Now there's an exception in that two of those numbers that could be below 5 are doubles. So double ones would be rerolled, double twos would be rerolled. So what it means is if you get some combination of a one and a two on your two six sided dice or a one and a three, you are failing no matter what your skill is. So there's always a pretty decent chance that you're not gonna just pancake whatever's in front of you because you happen to have a big beefy attribute characteristic or a big skill, that kind of thing. Looks like you wanted to say something there. [00:53:54] Speaker A: Well, I know that's exactly, that was exactly it. I was waiting for it. I'm like, yes, it's the five role. Yeah. [00:54:01] Speaker B: So I, so. And that's kind of what I was getting at with like the tiny dungeon end of things. Like it's pretty simple. It really is pretty simple. Like pick up your 2D6, look at your attribute, look at your. Look at the different skills that can apply. And that's where things get very cool. Like if let's, let's. For example, let's say you're trying to rep. Your rifle's been damaged, you're trying to repair it, you're going to look at your rifle skill. And I don't have the skills at hand. But if there's some kind of mechanical repair, you could add both of those to your pile. Which is kind of cool, right? So you take that two D6 and you add. Excuse me, you don't add. You're subtracting from the difficulty. Let's say the GM is like it's really wrecked. It's a 30, it's a level three to fix it. But you may have a couple of skills that come to bear. You get back down into a reasonable range, roll your dice, reroll your doubles. What do you know, you can actually succeed kind of thing. Between that and the way combat works. Like combat can be super cinematic, dude. Like more cinematic than many games that I know of. I think those things really do lend it towards pretty high flying action. There's just a lot of 80s stuff that you brought up around money and taxes and other stuff and you're going to get more into that. Ah, one last piece. And my notes here from last night. Strange that they subtract the modified attribute from the target number and then try to hit that with 2D6 instead of rolling. 2D6 plus model. That's just a personal preference thing. But here's the last thing that I pulled up and I thought was pretty. Pretty interesting, actually. There's a little footnote, almost like the tail end of this section. It's not really a footnote, but it's like, it's easy to miss that says, hey, there are zero level saving roles. They have a target number of five. What that is doing, if you think about it, is they are emphasizing here that there's some, like, don't roll a level one challenge, which is a 20 as a difficulty. Don't roll that for every little thing. In fact, the stuff that is super, like, routine that you'll be able to do, you can either. You can do it or just succeed. Or if you want to roll out the dice, go for level 0 saving roll, which is a 5. So the only way you can fail a 5 is by getting that 1 and 3 or 1 and 2 on that 2d6 I talked about before. There's virtually no other way to fail that. What it does is it sets a baseline. I think that these are pretty badass characters. Like the routine stuff. Yeah, Roll against the five. It even reminds me a little bit. I don't think you played with us, Sean, but when I ran Operation White Box for our Thursday night gang, one of the rules in that game that I just adore, you're playing World War II, 81st Airborne, or British commandos, like you are Special Forces in the Second World War. Dudes are trained up the ass, right? They got the kit, they got the gear, they're tough as nails. There's a rule in that that says if you're trying to, like, climb a fence, fix a shortwave radio, get a. Get an engine working, you've been trained in all these things. Roll a D20, and as long as you don't get a one, you succeed. When combat rolls around, like, all bets are off. Like, it's really easy to die in that game. It's a brutal, really fun game, actually. But when it comes time to, like, there's a door and you have to figure out how to get through the door, these Special Forces commanders are going to freaking figure out how to get through that door. Robo D20, don't get a one. This strikes me as a similar kind of vibe in that it's like, if you want to do a little bit of showcasing of how competent these guys are, you can do that with zero level saving roles. Did you pick that out as well? [00:57:23] Speaker A: I did. Not until you kind of highlight it. But you're Right. I mean, yes. But I didn't put two and two together. It is great in that respect because going to the competency of COVID action. Dude. Yeah. I don't want to screw around with something ridiculous like can you breach a door unless the thing is like three feet? [00:57:43] Speaker B: Exactly. Make it. If you have the tools, make it a file. I mean, you can also just do it, but some people really don't like that. Like, just do it. [00:57:50] Speaker A: Right. [00:57:50] Speaker B: This gives you a way to say you're. It's almost like just don't get a critical fail. You know, just don't. Don't. The bed with the dial and. And you're fine. [00:57:59] Speaker A: Yeah. And then the military. That is a, an actual phrase we would use like. [00:58:03] Speaker B: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:58:05] Speaker A: Completely. The bed. So. [00:58:06] Speaker B: Absolutely. All right. That's all I got on saving rolls. You want to take us to skills? [00:58:10] Speaker A: I can try. So, skills. There are two types, actually. One is static and one is levelable. [00:58:19] Speaker B: Yep. [00:58:20] Speaker A: And the levelable are more action oriented. The info skills are like, you know, information skills that you would, you know, need to know something. Those are binary. You either have it or you don't. You neither know it or you don't. It's not a. Which is, I guess, nice. [00:58:40] Speaker B: I think it's cool. And it means that you're not worrying about those skills when you're, when you're building that saving role we talked about before where you're. You're plucking the modifiers. This skill applies. This skill applies. It's not in that scenario. It's just something that you have or don't. Like a language you speak, for example. [00:58:53] Speaker A: Right. [00:58:54] Speaker B: That kind of thing. [00:58:55] Speaker A: So skill points equal your intelligence score and you use one for one. It's a one for one basis. You're not spending like. Well, it takes three intelligent points to make one skill point. Nope, it's none of that. Except for two, which includes psychic and title, which costs three for each one of those. You laugh. [00:59:19] Speaker B: I just, I skimmed over this part. I'm like, psychic titles, there's a lot of heraldry and mspe, man. [00:59:27] Speaker A: It's mercenary. That's right. Oh, you can save some of your skill points. You don't have to spend them all when you have them. So you can bank them, especially for some higher cost ones. And then they can be increased via adventure points slash experience points. And then there are how many? Like, I think on the back of the book it touts a hundred. [00:59:58] Speaker B: Almost 100. It says. Yeah, I don't even know if there's that many. But I don't know. [01:00:02] Speaker A: That sounds like a lot. [01:00:04] Speaker B: Page 120 has a quick reference. It says. Except it doesn't. There is a little bit of. There's some editing goo still. Of this refers to the wrong page number and that sort of thing. Nothing too serious. [01:00:25] Speaker A: But it's also broken down in the book by IQ. So IQ, four skills, IQ, what is it? IQ. [01:00:33] Speaker B: That goes up to like, 16. [01:00:35] Speaker A: Yeah. But it's in increments of two, and they have it broken down. [01:00:42] Speaker B: This is the point Gabe was making in his call that I. That I made last show, which is basically there's a. There's a paywall. You're not allowed to access these skills unless you have an IQ of a certain level. And you're right. It goes 4, 6, 8, 10, 12. [01:00:56] Speaker A: And then there are some that also require not only for you to spend a point, but also to have a. Not only the iq, but also the stat. Oh, and money. [01:01:07] Speaker B: And money. I think some of them. Yeah. You know what? It's a beefy skill section. So beefy that it's kind of what put me off on my quick read of it. But when I. Like I said, when I sit back from it, like I did last night and just put a colder eye on it, I'm like, no, this is. I could work with this pretty easily. By the way, there are IQ 13 skills, but not always by two. [01:01:26] Speaker A: Oh, interesting. It must have leapt off somewhere. [01:01:30] Speaker B: It's a kind of skill descriptions where it's like there's a lot baked into each one. So there's a lengthy description of each skill. So there's just. It's not like it's a tiny spies equivalent or. Or even like Agent Provocateur, where there are skills. Yeah. But there are like, what was it, 16 or 18 of them or 15. Some odd number in that game. 15. There's a lot in this game, and you kind of have to like, wade through them to understand what they're. What they're about. [01:01:55] Speaker A: Yeah. The doctorate is an interesting one. [01:01:57] Speaker B: Yeah. Master's degree. The doctorate. Those are. Those are pretty interesting things, I think. [01:02:01] Speaker A: Yeah, very. My humble opinion. Some of those are very simulationist, especially like the doctorate and the master's degrees. [01:02:10] Speaker B: Well, you. You heard me say as we were finishing the first part of the show and diving into the. Into the deep dive here. I like the skill system, but not how Stackpole implemented it. This is what I mean. Here's an example. There are pugilism, street fighting, and brawling skills. They're all different. And I think that's just. That's just junk like, get rid of that. You, you know, people by now, if they're listening to the show, will have heard me complain about it in various places. People who read the Hearth will know that, like in Call of Cthulhu. I think that skill is way too long and there's way too much overlap between certain things. This is another example of that. But it's also not that hard to clean up and say, you know, unarmed combat. Cover, cover it. [01:02:51] Speaker A: All right. So I think that is skills for what I have. [01:02:57] Speaker B: Can I add to it? [01:02:58] Speaker A: Yeah, by all means. [01:03:00] Speaker B: So the combat shooting skill, one of the things we're going to be. And you know what? Maybe we didn't. We'll get to this in combat, I guess. But basically, this is the interesting part. Skills don't add to combat at all. It's stone. They don't. Then we'll do that when we get into combat. But what. There's a school skill called combat shooting. So you're thinking Harrigan now. Are you out of your mind? [01:03:24] Speaker A: Not to be confused with firearms. [01:03:28] Speaker B: Correct. So combat shooting specifically, and this is what I meant by they're almost like feats in a way. Like. Like you have to read it to understand what combat shooting is. It just allows you to dual wield guns. So you can have a gun in each. In each hand. But it says at the very end of the skill description, it says, but no two fully automatic weapons. To which I say, Chuck Norris would like a word with you. You know, little invasion, USA. [01:03:55] Speaker A: Actually, Rambo used his M60 with one hand. [01:03:59] Speaker B: He did, but he had the belt draped over the other, like his arm to kind of. [01:04:03] Speaker A: Oh, yeah, you're not holding that thing with one hand. [01:04:06] Speaker B: He was holding what he had tucked in. He had it tucked in. [01:04:09] Speaker A: Oh, he did. He didn't have a shoulder. [01:04:10] Speaker B: He fires the M60. Maybe he had a shoulder strap. Maybe he did. [01:04:14] Speaker A: He might not have. But if he did, he's. Well, okay, Much respect. [01:04:17] Speaker B: My point is this is. This is like. You see how sort of off the wall the skill is. Like, it's not your traditional sort of district skillshare. There's a fair bit of that, like Sean was saying about like. Like the doctorate. Like, it gets into all sorts of. There's just all sorts of stuff that's in the skill system that really, you could kind of breathe. You could compact it. You could put it into a vice and compact it down. So it's still this cool little set of Skills that are appropriate for mercenary spies and private eyes games. But you don't have to have all this. All this kind of jank that's in there. Yeah. You could make this system sing. It does not sing. Currently. That's all I got. I'll go to combat. [01:04:56] Speaker A: Let's get into combat. [01:04:59] Speaker B: Go for it. [01:04:59] Speaker A: I'll start with the order and then I will turn it over to you. [01:05:03] Speaker B: Okay. [01:05:04] Speaker A: The combat order is as such and exactly like this from the book. Numbered bullet. Numbered list in one of the few. [01:05:13] Speaker B: One of the few call out text boxes in the entire book. What? [01:05:17] Speaker A: It is indeed. Yes. Why? Probably because everybody wants to know exactly what the damn combat order is. [01:05:25] Speaker B: Indeed. [01:05:25] Speaker A: Call it out. Great. Fantastic. It's right there. Would be listed in the jam screen. Bam. Number one. Martial arts make speed saves and are within six feet of. Of the target. Not within six feet. No. Martial arts. Next. First missile weapon round. Who's firing missiles? Okay, you're up next. No. Nobody? Okay, next. Martial arts attacks between 6 to 20ft of target. That's me. I'm going to do a flying, flying, flying kick 20ft, 20ft away. Okay. All right. Go ahead. All right, Next. Movement. Arrogant says he's going to move. Okay. Move. [01:06:18] Speaker B: I'm going to move. [01:06:20] Speaker A: All right, Next. Everybody moved? Everybody not moving? Yes. Next. Second missile weapon round. Still want to go on this pulp, huh? Still. Still. Yeah, man. Pulp, dude. [01:06:36] Speaker B: Stand by. [01:06:37] Speaker A: Okay, Next. All right. Everybody gone. Hand to hand is resolved. Going back to the now you're there. Chop Saki flown across the room as the second missile is shot. Do you land your kick? And then the last part of the combat order is movement. [01:07:04] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:07:06] Speaker A: Okay, Everybody get to move again. [01:07:09] Speaker B: Yeah. Two movements. Right? [01:07:11] Speaker A: Two movements. It is very much not the move and attack, attack and move or two actions. So. [01:07:19] Speaker B: So much of this is born of one war gaming demand where the rules were put in place to prevent this whole idea of like you've got a chip on the table in a hex. How could it advance up to my forces when I could shoot it? How can that happen? Well, you have a missile fire fire phase first. That's where all this comes from. [01:07:39] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:07:41] Speaker B: Homie don't play osc. So I don't know. [01:07:44] Speaker A: It's. It is. It's movement. Melee missile magic. [01:07:51] Speaker B: Okay. [01:07:51] Speaker A: I could be wrong. [01:07:52] Speaker B: Which is kind of cool. I like magic going last because it keeps that risk of having your spell interrupted on the table. Right. [01:07:58] Speaker A: And it's very much a. What are you going to do? I'm going to cast the spell. Great. They're doing that as the first. [01:08:03] Speaker B: We'll come back to you. [01:08:04] Speaker A: Yes. You should already be done when we get to you. [01:08:07] Speaker B: Yep, yep, yep. I, I don't hate this order. And you know what? I've been resistant for a long time in my role playing career to this type of phase combat. Right. Like you should see champions, John. Like champions. If you're going to do phase combat, champions is the game to play. [01:08:22] Speaker A: But I don't think champions is. Well, I guess champions is super heroic. [01:08:28] Speaker B: Which could be super, super heroic. The idea there being that like that phase combat allows the speedsters to act like six times versus the average person's one, two or three times kind of thing. So it's actually very emulative of what you're trying to do. This style of phased order, which is very D and D, very old school. I've been resistant to it, but I have found in more recent times, and specifically it is the Walking Dead game which has a similar rigid phased order. I kind of like it. [01:09:00] Speaker A: Yeah. But in Walking Dead, it's like you're choosing one thing and that's what you do. [01:09:04] Speaker B: I know, I know. It is different. It's lighter, it's simpler. I am very curious to see how this particular order plays out when we play our actual play because I generally don't love these super rigid sorts of things. [01:09:17] Speaker A: I think with us, if it was a duet game, that can go pretty quickly if you're talking four players at the table. [01:09:23] Speaker B: Oh yeah. [01:09:25] Speaker A: Okay. Let's go part A. Yeah. [01:09:30] Speaker B: And especially when you get to like round two. And does it, does it talk about how you. Who goes first and all that sort of stuff. [01:09:36] Speaker A: I haven't gotten into initiative. That's. That was. That's just the order of combat. Initiative is what we're. I was going to tackle or that I have on the outline next. If you want to tackle it, you're all yours. [01:09:49] Speaker B: So I don't even know. I don't know if we interpreted this the same way actually. Why don't you break down what you think? Because I think your initiative role is actually. That's the combat role. [01:10:00] Speaker A: Oh. [01:10:01] Speaker B: That is the role that determines what happens. You know what? Let's do this. Let's do this. And this is just a good sign of how the game isn't super clear about itself because you have to read paragraphs and paragraphs. And by the way, before I forget, you know what I just brought up in front of me? The Mercenary Spies and Private Eyes GM screen which I bought and downloaded from From Drive Thru. [01:10:21] Speaker A: So news flash, the GM screen does exist for this game. [01:10:25] Speaker B: It does. And it's a pretty good little. It's got a bunch of like movement, got hit location, it's got order of the combat, turn, cover, missile fire. [01:10:33] Speaker A: And Harrigan had pointed out, if you listen to the first episode that he said, if this, if this thing's got a GM screen and it highlights some of the things that are kind of all in the mix of the text. Great. [01:10:45] Speaker B: Yep. And you know what? Oh my heavens. So the GM screen has the saving role that we described. How. You know how we described. You could read it two different ways. It displays it my way. [01:10:58] Speaker A: You're kidding. [01:10:59] Speaker B: The saving roll equals 2d6 plus attribute plus skills, not the whole subtract attribute and skills from the difficulty number. So it does it the other way. Now, this thing may have been put out later. This might be a much later product from Flying Buffalo at the time. So it doesn't match up with how, how they were writing the game back in the 80s. But long story short, let me do this. Let me describe at a high level how combat works and then you can get. You can either course correct me or, or give me your nuance as to if your read was different than mine. Because the part that's so interesting about this game, this is one of the things that I think makes it very pulpy. Put aside that, put aside that combat order for a minute and let's talk about just either, let's just talk about hand to hand only. Missile fire is a little bit different because if missile fire, you're still, you are still making a saving roll to hit somebody with your weapon. And you are still. The GM is still setting a difficulty. 1, 2, 3, 4, 20, 25, 30, 35, etc. And there's a, There's a table on the chart on the GM screen that does all of that. Where did it go? Give me a second. So missile weapons are categorized into like whether they use chart one or chart two. And there's different range bands kind of thing. And if you are 5 yards or less and you are standing, your difficulty is oh, and your target is standing and aiming, Your difficulty is 10. If they're moving, the difficulty is 15. If they're dodging or behind cover, the difficulty is 20. Let me put it this way. Missile fire is still very like, take your turn, do your thing, the other side might get hit. And the way, the way that I think that works is for every point you roll above the difficulty number. So let's Say they're undercover and you roll a 22 and the COVID means the difficulty is 20. They take two points of con damage. Right. That's how that generally works. The more interesting part to me though is like the tunnels and trolls bit that, you know, garn a lot of attention is there's these big 30 second long melee turns where everyone just puts all their dice into a pile. So if there's four characters and there's five foes, the five foes pile all their D6s, which are based on their weapon types, and then they roll them all to get a total. The players pool all their dice. I mean, you can roll your individual dice, just come up with a number and add it. But let's say four players might come up with a roll of 50 and the foes come up comes up with a 60. That means you. Your side lost and you have now absorbed 10 hits that have to go to all the different cons, the constitution scores of all the. All the different player characters. Right. So which is very cinematic. Like what happened in that route. You don't. You're not even choosing a foe or anything. You're just rolling some dice. You're not picking out any individual person. And then what the GM is supposed to do and the players are supposed to do is spread any damage across the entire load of combat combatants. Which I do have some concerns about, by the way, because to me it seems like that means the combat will be a slog because everybody degrades very slowly. You can never decide to pick off foes and, and like eliminate, you know, certain people from the field because they're more dangerous to you type of thing. I think there's ways to. Around that you can separate into individual combats instead of group combats very easily and that sort of thing. But is my re. My overall read, is that aligned with what you were thinking? [01:14:22] Speaker A: I don't, I didn't. I don't get. I didn't get into missile combat. [01:14:28] Speaker B: Well, the, the missile. The whole reason why I asked you a minute ago, like, how does initiative work for missile fire? We'll have to look at it here. [01:14:36] Speaker A: So my correction was hand to hand. Like when I'm talking about initiative, it's specific to hand to hand. [01:14:41] Speaker B: Yes, yes. And that is the opposed role, which is it's. It's like combining initiative with fighting with the actual battle itself. It's just. It's a single roll of all these dice and whoever comes out on top, you won the day or the round at least. Right. Missile fire. Is a little bit different. And I don't have at the top of my head. [01:15:01] Speaker A: The only thing that I had for missile in my notes was there are factors that include distance, the shooter's action, targets, action and size. And referencing the charts which you had touched on just now. Yep. [01:15:13] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, you know what I'm just seeing, there's some. Some neat modifiers here. Like night shooting, it makes it 10 harder to hit. If you have a scope and you're at a long range, it's 10 easier, you know, to your difficulty and all that kind of stuff. Bow. If you're using bow weapons, you have to add 10 to the hit number because they're obviously shorter range than a firearm. It doesn't tell me though, who goes first. I don't think it must be in here. I just didn't see it. Let's not sweat it. There's a. There's a couple of things that, that. This is where I, I like the cinematic style of this, Sean, where it's just such a fray depending on if you win or not. You can describe the action in a bunch of different ways. I do think there's some weirdness around, like if you're firing missiles into this, like, let's say it's the second round and the melee's been joined. And I'm thinking now less of spy games and more of like tunnels and trolls type games. Everybody's in hand combat and you're firing missiles. There's a pretty good chance you're going to hit the wrong people. If you're, you know, there's no rules for that either. There's no friendly fire rules or anything like that. [01:16:13] Speaker A: I also have a note that says that hand to hand is different than martial arts. [01:16:17] Speaker B: It is, it is. Martial arts is this whole on thing that I'm frankly not going to get into because I don't like it. It's neat. It's just not necessary. It's, you know, all these games, from top secret to, you know, many of the. These 80s games treat martial arts like they're, you know, they put it on a pedestal. You know, these guys are going to the dojo and they're, they're watching the movies. [01:16:38] Speaker A: And I blame black belt theater, man. But so, yeah, martial arts gotta be there. [01:16:47] Speaker B: Yeah. And not only that, but it's also first in the order. Right. Like the martial artists will shine. They'll be the ones who are like, taking the fight to people and all that kind of stuff. But if you boil it down, which I think is Kind of what Gabe was getting at too. Like around, like there's a good, you know, there's a great chassis underneath there. I really like the. Hey, everybody just roll your. And it's your. It's interesting. It's your damage dice that you're rolling. This is where I mentioned before, skill doesn't matter. Like, you are not looking at your skills for this. You are looking at your rifle, if that's what you've got, or your, you know, your knife. And you're picking up the D6s that go with that. And that's what you're adding. When Sean, when you mentioned earlier, there was this whole, like the combat ads that come from your high attributes that are above 12. This is where they factor in. So let's, let's take a real one here. Let's look it up. Okay, let's look at this military rifle. You say you got a Lee Enfield 303, eight dice. So if one character has a Lee Enfield bolt action rifle smle they have. They're rolling eight D6s into the pool of this like fire. But the missile fire. The missile combat seems to work a little bit differently. So I'm gonna. If you have an ax, you've got three dice plus two pips. If you have a spear, you've got four dice. It's that kind of thing, right? Where you adding in your combat ads, both sides are rolling. So I think it's just this kind of cool flow back and forth. I don't think one side or the other loses dice until you lose like combatants. And to lose a combatant, your constitution score has to go down to zero. And when you know there's a. There's some rules around that where if this is a fist fight getting to zero won't kill you. It means you're knocked out. You have recovery time if you get to zero. The healing rules in this game are pretty nasty. They're like a month plus recovery time if you ever get down that far. So if you're that hurt, it's. It's gonna be. It's gonna be a big deal. One more thing that bugged me about the missile fire. And this gets to your point about not being pulpy and being. And being too simmy. The part that's super weird. These combat rounds are called out as 30 seconds long, right? So this is kind of like. It's almost like an ADN D kind of thing where AD and D doesn't get it right because you've got your, you know, you're Fighting and you happen to get like, you know, you have one opportunity to strike a meaningful blow melee wise. Right. So you get your one attack per round, which is a minute in AD and D. But if you have a bow, you get two shots. So like, why do they get double if it's 30, if it's a minute long and you're, you're abstracting it to the level that, you know, you just have one good opportunity, why does the bow get two and not three and not one and not whatever. Tunnel control suffers from something similar and so does mercenary spies and private eyes where in MSPE they've added recoil. And I'm like, man, if the combat rounds are 30 seconds long, do you really want to be worrying about freaking recoil and penalties and that kind of thing? I don't think so. Like, keep it abstract. Keep it at that level of like you're, you're really rating the force on one side and the force on the other and how they're applying them. And you can, you know, through, I'm sure through smart play, you can get bonuses and whatnot to get the difficulties lowered and to get more dice and all that kind of stuff. Right. But I don't know, I've talked for a long time about this, this combat system that I like at its heart, but I think it's got some weird edges to it that I haven't got my hands around yet. What was your take? [01:20:17] Speaker A: Agreed. And I thought you were actually going to talk about multiple shots and multiple targets and automatic weapons, all that. [01:20:23] Speaker B: Yep, yep. [01:20:25] Speaker A: Which I think is like a plus two to the target number for everyone, if I'm not mistaken. [01:20:31] Speaker B: Yeah. Again, if you're, if you're saying melee is this big abstracted thing and you're just packing all these dice together, why are the missiles treated so differently? It's because of freaking Gary, that's why. [01:20:46] Speaker A: Gu. [01:20:49] Speaker B: Yeah, I don't know. It's one of those things that I want everyone I want to see play it up a table. And I think I'm gonna have to read the missile fire section very carefully to understand. Like if they're shooting at each other, who goes first? Is it. Are you back down to it being an opposed role? Like the melee combats in opposed role or, or not. Because it's usually difficulties that you're talking about. [01:21:09] Speaker A: I thought it was simultaneous. Like if you roll higher and oppose, that difference is the damage to the other team. Right. [01:21:17] Speaker B: Well, remember that in missile fire, it's not an opposed role. The GM is establishing a difficulty Based on range. [01:21:23] Speaker A: That's right. [01:21:23] Speaker B: And this is, this is like, it works. It's, it's a little janky. And you know, maybe someone like Gabe can understand it because he's, he's played it more. [01:21:29] Speaker A: Right. [01:21:29] Speaker B: But it's like, is the missile fire still against the whole other side? I don't think so. I think you're picking a target. [01:21:35] Speaker A: I think you, you have to because you have to reference those tables. Right? [01:21:39] Speaker B: Yep. So, exactly. So the, the melee is this grand thing where you can picture the battlefield. People are crashing together, there's people running all like clang, clink, clank. [01:21:50] Speaker A: I'm going in the mosh pit. [01:21:52] Speaker B: But then mimicifier, you're back to like I got my crossbow or in this case I've got my sniper rifle and I'm going to pick one target and the GM is going to assign one difficulty. And my question is, maybe I'll just read this. But when we're done, my question is, what if the opposing side has a counter sniper, another marksman and they want to shoot you first? Like does that become opposed or is that, is it simultaneous that just happens simultaneously? Or is it. Yeah. And you know what, I feel like this is on me, maybe on us, because it's probably in there and I just didn't pull it out because of the way the God damn game is written. [01:22:30] Speaker A: It's not easy, folks. Like if in many, in many of the games that we would review, if we don't have it like completely annotated in our notes, we could pull up the PDF and probably find a call out relatively quick. This game is tougher, man. We gotta weed through text to find those components. And that's what the, that was the message from Harrigan in episode one. And that's what we're referring to now. It's just. Hold on a second. I think I could pick this out. [01:22:59] Speaker B: Right? [01:23:00] Speaker A: Yeah. Reading like four paragraphs to find it. Yeah. [01:23:05] Speaker B: And so let's sum it up this way on the missile fire thing. All the things that stack pole adds like recoil and multiple targets and the stuff that you mentioned, it all is like pretty simulation sd and it's in genre because it's just firearms in this game versus tnt. But I don't know that it makes it pulpy or fast like, like it does. The action doesn't flow better because of all that. [01:23:26] Speaker A: I should also stipulate the order that I had just mentioned falls under specifically missile weapon combat. [01:23:36] Speaker B: Yeah, right. [01:23:37] Speaker A: It's not combat in general. So you know, maybe I overlooked the Combat for hand to hand and how that is handled because it may not be. It may not fall under that or the tape or that call out is in the wrong spot. [01:23:56] Speaker B: Yeah, the hand to hand is what we described. It's the biggest post roll. [01:23:59] Speaker A: Right. [01:24:02] Speaker B: All right. Okay, we're stuck in the mud. [01:24:04] Speaker A: Here we are. [01:24:05] Speaker B: Did you, did you see the Megadeth luck saving roll? [01:24:08] Speaker A: Did you see? I did not. Please tell me more. [01:24:12] Speaker B: So in the combat section, there's a little header that says Mega Megadeth and dying. I'm not sure why they call it this, but basically, let me read from the book here. It is a very simple observation that the weapons in these rules are very deadly. Because of this, it may come a point when a GM wishes to modify the damage received by a character. The character may allow. The GM may allow a character a chance to sprint unscathed. Unscratched. Actually it says unscratched through a hail of gunfire. Something that happens, however improbably, in countless novels and movies. In the end, this is like a wild saving throw that you get to try and make to succeed at something. Don't do this one sidedly. If the characters can do it, the GM's characters can do it too. What happens if you fail it? Oh, you're dead. Yep. Okay, if the character's dead. Is that right? Character is six. Oh, this. No, this is the whole. Are you aware of this? When the, when your con hits zero, you have six minutes, 12 hand to hand combat rounds to get medical assistance before you are irrevocably dead. So it's quite different from the Megadeth Sailing Rule Megadeth saving roll thing to understand what it does appropriately. High luck saving roll to avoid any damage regardless of the hits. No, it doesn't. Doesn't say much about like what the outcome is. I think maybe it's the same as failing any other save. Right. [01:25:50] Speaker A: What level do you put it at? [01:25:52] Speaker B: That's what I mean. If you put it at like a four, if you're like, oh fine, you can try it, but I'm gonna put it at a 40. [01:25:56] Speaker A: Sure. [01:25:57] Speaker B: Right. And you know, God help you if you fail. Because I think, you know, there's that whole thing where the amount you fail by can be damaged and all that sort of stuff. Yeah. Similarly, Martial Arts is convoluted and gets into the whole. Not it's, you know what guys? Is not that convoluted, but it's lengthy and gets into detail that we don't need to get into today. The the back part of the book remains. I know we're running a little bit long. Should we, should we skim through the last few chapters here or do you have more to say about. You probably want to cover car chases and that sort of thing. We're going to get to those, right? [01:26:28] Speaker A: Have car chases listed. Yeah. And then adventure points and then some NPCs and then some just commentary from what I've noticed which is like the aging and the tax man I think. [01:26:39] Speaker B: I'll tell you what, let me give it, give you a blurb on my final thoughts here. And then you run into all that stuff there. And by the way, it's this car crashes, not car chases. [01:26:48] Speaker A: No, there is a part with car chases though, isn't there? [01:26:50] Speaker B: Oh, okay, okay. Well while you look at that, here my, here are my final notes on all this. There's some, you know, you get into those latter chapters of the book and there's a lot of chapters on like how to run the game and spy agencies and all that sort of stuff. Right. And I really laughed when I saw that the table had the CIA, the kgb, Interpol and the rcmp. I don't know why the RCMP is on there. I mean I know they do national security in Canada but you know, CSIS is a thing. The Canadians do have an intelligence service so it was kind of funny to see that. And then just like cherry picking here. I think I kind of like that wound system actually. Like there's this whole thing about how much con you've lost and how long it takes to get it back. I don't know if you saw the section on live clues. There's a whole article about how to prepare your gaming room with like hidden dossiers and keys and files, you know, larpish. Far away from how I want to play but there's a whole section on that. And I will also say I think there's some later versions of Tunnels and Trolls. There's some better rules that you could bring into this game that include things like spike damage. Have you heard of that? Picture this Sean in the, in that big opposed role we just talked about, right. One side rolls, ends up rolling 45, the other other side rolls a 40, there's five damage. The side that won suffers 0,0 harm. Right. So it can, can turn to be something that's pretty one sided. What spike damage? If I have this right, I think what it does is say anybody who rolls a six on either side that's going to do a point of damage. Whether or not you actually win the. Win the day or not win the round or not. So even if you are victorious, if the other side rolled like six sixes, you have six points of damage you have to put out into your. Into your group. And what that says to me is that my, my gut that tells me this might be a bit sloggy if you're spreading the damage every time, that this is one way to start accelerating the damage that's being done. That kind of thing. And I actually have a house rule that I dreamed up last night when, which I would implement if I were to run this long term. If you're shooting into combat with your missile fire, every one that you roll in your, you know, in your stack of dice is, is going to be a friendly fire incident if you're just blasting into the melee kind of thing. But that's. That that wraps up a lot of the stuff that I had around this. Maybe a few little straggling things when you go through the next few pieces. But why don't you close this out with car chases adventure points? [01:29:22] Speaker A: And I was wrong again. It is car. Car crashes. Car crashes in book one. [01:29:29] Speaker B: And we'll finish. We should finish on your anti pulp realism treatise. Yes. [01:29:34] Speaker A: And we have to follow up with your checklist. [01:29:37] Speaker B: Oh, I haven't even thought about that. [01:29:39] Speaker A: Anyways, car chases. It is car crashes. And it has underneath that header in the book, in the table of contents, it has single car accidents, multi car accidents, people in accidents, ramming, other considerations and then how speed affects braking distance. Yeah. Yes, Very pulpy. Well, you know, I mean, can be, I guess. So car chases or car crashes in this game relies on fast driving skills and the speed attribute. Those are the two components for every 10 miles an hour over the safe top speed. So every vehicle has a safe top speed, but if you push it and you go over that, every 10 increments of 10, you must make a deck save and then the Difficulty goes up +1 per every 10 miles an hour over the safe top speed. [01:30:40] Speaker B: And that's where your fast driver skill would come to bear. [01:30:42] Speaker A: Right? Correct. [01:30:43] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:30:44] Speaker A: Braking thinking distance plus braking distance and doubling the speed quadruples. Braking distance. Just one word. No. Crashes. Driver fails a roll, the damage is equal to the speed divided by five. So if you're going 55 miles an hour, it equals 11 dice of damage unless you have a successful luck save. [01:31:28] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. [01:31:32] Speaker A: Okay. [01:31:33] Speaker B: 11 dice is a lot. [01:31:34] Speaker A: That's. [01:31:35] Speaker B: Does it have seat belt rules? [01:31:37] Speaker A: I did not notice that I picked this and picked that out and put it down. And that was kind of it. [01:31:43] Speaker B: A seat belt would make a big difference there. [01:31:45] Speaker A: That may be other. Under other considerations, sir. [01:31:49] Speaker B: Fair. [01:31:50] Speaker A: Who knows? That's all I had for car chases. Just as an overall overview. Nothing too crazy because it is total. The car crashes chapter is three pages. Now that may not sound like a lot, but when you're talking three double two column pages with very minimal breakups, it's quite a bit there. So I don't want to slide it, but I'm going to. Because I think it would be, you know, shaman at the table be like car chase. Okay, hold on a second. Let's look this up. And I'd probably use the GM screen. What does the GM screen say? Does it say anything about car chases? [01:32:35] Speaker B: It's got vehicle crashes. So it's got how much damage you take if you're in certain types of accidents, like head on damage to occupants. Class zero through seven, I think those are vehicles. Like zero is a person or an animal. [01:32:48] Speaker A: Okay. [01:32:48] Speaker B: Class one's a motorcycle. Class two is a subcompact and it gives them con scores. And these con stores are ridiculous. [01:32:56] Speaker A: That's what I want to touch on a little. [01:32:58] Speaker B: A subcompact car has a con score of 250. [01:33:05] Speaker A: Remember? [01:33:06] Speaker B: Yeah. Okay. [01:33:06] Speaker A: Yes. And then we went in going into adventure points. So some of the criteria for adventure points, which is your experience points, which you kind of touched on in the first goal with this game. It's kind of like going through as a checklist and awarding certain number of points for each particular piece or point or criteria like risk and daring, combat, adventure, resolution, saving rolls, skill, adventure points, and then anything discretionary. That's all I had. Now you wanted me to get into like. Well, if. [01:33:43] Speaker B: If there were some pieces like aging, I think in the taxis part where you're just like that. You don't feel like it's supporting the pulp style of play that we haven't touched on yet. [01:33:53] Speaker A: Correct. [01:33:55] Speaker B: Is there more to say than that or is it just that? Is that the treatise That's Sean's. Is that Sean's two sentence. Two sentences that makes his English teacher mad? [01:34:03] Speaker A: I don't pretty much. Yes. I don't like it. [01:34:05] Speaker B: Well, yes. [01:34:06] Speaker A: Can you elaborate, sir? No. [01:34:08] Speaker B: It was okay, right? [01:34:09] Speaker A: It depends. So aging, it's in book three, so it's not. [01:34:17] Speaker B: These are all add ons later. [01:34:18] Speaker A: It's not in the original. So all fairness to the game. But aging table. There's a table for natural death. Each game year GM rolls to see if The PC dies of natural causes on their birthday. That's not Pope. It's just not. [01:34:38] Speaker B: That's mean is what that is. [01:34:40] Speaker A: Now somebody would. Now don't throw a grenade at us and say But Sean, book three, that's all optional stuff, man. That's all stuff. But PCs, it's optional. [01:34:52] Speaker B: It's optional inappropriate stuff. That's what it is. [01:34:57] Speaker A: And then the PC over 45 must roll to see if they lose points in con strength speed decks due to encroaching middle age. Now that's fine. Games at the time AD&D had age factors, you know, and those abilities would move up or down. But again, yeah, my, my, and just to be clear, my kind of objections with the game isn't this like, okay, you want to put age in there and it can factor into how your strength declines and your or your con declines and your strength declines but your IQ goes up. That's fine, I don't have a problem with that. But don't say it's like pulp and then implement this, this stuff. [01:35:43] Speaker B: That is the difference. Like top secret does not say it's a two fisted bulb game. [01:35:48] Speaker A: Not at all. [01:35:48] Speaker B: And it has all that semi stuff in it, right? And it's, it kind of belongs there. James Bond says get ready because we're going to do the James Bond movies and we're going to be pulpy as hell. Tiny Tiny Spies is the same thing. And you're right, this one kind of does too. And this one falls short in terms of like a lot of the stuff that gets bolted on or that is added is not pulpy. It's more detail, it's more crunch, it's more sim that they're adding. [01:36:13] Speaker A: Right? That's the biggest beef. Like I don't have a problem with like how the rules are handled and all this other stuff. There's the tax piece bringing home. There's a component in there called bringing home the bacon which calculates the PC's disposable income and then the GMs. Now it does say the GMs are encouraged not to run an accounting business through this thing. But it says unless you want a campaign to track rent and phone bills that are deducted monthly. [01:36:42] Speaker B: When did the second, the when did the other edition come out? The sleuth edition 86 was it? Is that right? [01:36:51] Speaker A: I'd have to look at the original. [01:36:52] Speaker B: Notes so that, that taxes and like the amount of money you make every week and all that sort of stuff. Man, that is like hardcore from the Gurps playbook And it was, it was to support simulationist campaign play. Like the whole like grips even had points in it where it was pretty cool. There are job tables in all those grips books that talk about different time periods and different eras and different places where it's like, what do the typical jobs look like? And how much money could you make at those? It's because people were doing that whole like three months passes and you know, before the next adventure. And the characters make a few rolls to see, oh, I'm actually low on money or I'm this how much I have in the bank or whatever. This is similar. So it strikes me that this is. This is the fans of the game or the people who took over the game saying, let's add in some of these like long term campaign things that make it sing. Which is not. They're not pulpy, but they are. They're just of the time, man. You know, I think I can sum this up and I actually want to. I want to apologize to listeners. I wish I had a better handle on the combat part of this before I dove into it around the. Like, I need to figure out that this missile fire piece and how it intersects with what is a really pretty sweet melee combat system. I will say this, I didn't enjoy reading this game even a little. Like, I like, not as bad as Top Secret, Top Secrets, worse just because of when it was done and it didn't have as like this game. Liz Danforth laid it out great. It's very legible, very readable, you know. You know, you can picture Gabe with his pipe by the fire going, yes, yes. Look at all these words. Oh, yes, excellent. [01:38:25] Speaker A: I love words. [01:38:26] Speaker B: Right? He's reading it. Top Secret was more of the, like, what the hell am I looking at? Because of the way it's all patched together. But of the two games, Top Secret, I don't want to play. Like, nothing about that game attracts me. There is a beating heart in this game. The tunnels and trolls part of it. The, the simple saves. The. This way they do mass combat or this. Not mass, but this like cinematic combat that really makes me want to give it a shot and try it. So I think I can see through the jungle on this one. And I'm like, oh, look at the game that's in there. Cool. I want to, I want to give that a shot. Whereas Top Secret, I look through the jungle and I'm like, whoa. I don't want anything to do with that. Whoa. Let's just close the curtains on that one. You know now will this be a game that you know, supersedes Bond or Chinese Spies? I think of the two favorites we've got so far and Agent Provocateur sort of hangs out there unloved because we haven't played it yet. I don't know what's your. What's your overall takeaway from this? [01:39:24] Speaker A: I agree that there are something there to be experienced and there are some benefits to it over something specifically like Top Secret. Top Secret's tough. That's just a. But I played it a lot. I played it more than any other probably covert action game, honestly, even more than probably Spycraft in the in itself modern day. Because we just played it when we were kids. But a lot of it was just played. I would imagine that when I ran Top Secret, I ran it as a hand me down of knowledge. Oh, that's the game master prior to me ran it like this. This is how I run it. Yes, there are rules to reference, but we already knew them by heart because we played it so much. So it was kind of that type of hand me down rules. This one. I think there is some. I mean it's all D6. Like what do I roll? I don't know. The square dice. Sweet. You know, what do I do? Add this great. Fantastic. But there are some of the subtle nuances that I'd have to see at the table to really see if it kind of sings. [01:40:29] Speaker B: In some ways it's a different kind of game. Right? [01:40:31] Speaker A: For sure. [01:40:31] Speaker B: And I've run across this in a couple places recently. Chris McDowell had Brad Kerr on talking about his like McDowell's the. Into the odd guy right? From. From the OSR, the mythic bastard Land etc. He's got a little podcast he does whenever he puts out a new product he tends to put out like a short form, six or eight episodes of people who are in the industry talking about their influences. I think he calls it like the something of the rule of three or something of threes. Like tell me which three games kind of made you the designer you are today kind of thing. And he and Kir get into tunnels and trolls and Kerr talks about how deeply this game is played by some groups. You know how you hear about those folks who play AD&D for like 40 or 50 years, like at the same table. Apparently there are equality tunnels and trolls, groups like that too. And some of it may get to the whole, like how expansive it can be, how high your skills can go and whatnot and your or your attributes can go. But there's A collection of, like, super fans around these. These games that I'm not plugged into and I don't get at some fundamental level because I haven't played them. I don't get the experience the same way that they do. And I think you have the same thing. Probably going from top secret. [01:41:39] Speaker A: Yeah. Would definitely admit that one of the things we didn't touch on was the bureaucracy as a stat. [01:41:47] Speaker B: Is it a skill? [01:41:49] Speaker A: No, it's. So it's good or bad, Right. If you're in a law enforcement agency, it's usually bad. [01:41:56] Speaker B: From my own experience, if you're a. [01:41:58] Speaker A: Law enforcement agency, you treat them as a character. [01:42:03] Speaker B: Oh, I missed this bit. Is this one of the parts at the end? [01:42:06] Speaker A: It might be in the end, and I don't know if it's necessarily optional or just one of the end things, but it was also rated on. So some of the things that some of those law enforcement agencies are rated on are records, how good their filing system is, corruption, politics, how likely it is for them to drop a case due to pressure, judicial, how easily they can get warrants, forensics, the quality of the lab work, acceptance, like how well they treat outsiders, swat do they have paramilitary capabilities? And those have. Each one is broken down to that. So when you are trying to accomplish something, well, you'll have to see on what agency you're working with and what those entail in what you're having them, what you're having them do or if you're a part of that, what they're good at or what they're bad at. And then there's the red tape, which is PCs make saves against these attributes. That's the red tape behind it all, which is again, like one of the things I kind of was like looking through is, okay, pulp action. Great. Let's read through some of these things that don't make it pulp. And these are some of the highlights specifically that I thought were. But again, if that is the game you want to play that there's nothing wrong with that. That's not my argument. Like, knock it out, dude. This may be right up Cold Shadows, that piece. [01:43:31] Speaker B: Well, the part. The part that's weird, though, is that the saves we've Talked about this 2D6 exploding dice mechanic and at least the melee combat, where it's this pretty grand cinematic way of doing it, just doesn't align the same way with all the crunch that gets bolted on, you know? [01:43:48] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:43:49] Speaker B: I don't know. [01:43:49] Speaker A: Yeah. And it may be just. Well, this was the original. I mean, when Michael Roy, he wanted a cap. Like, to Gabe's point, he didn't want that. Tunnels and trolls, somebody with a stat of 45. Totally understandable. So he wanted to make. Obviously there was a. Let's reel that in, because I don't want Superman, the adventurer, pulp adventurer. But I want to make it reasonable where we could have an Indiana Jones who is flawed but can get as. Get. Find ways out of certain things and excel at certain things, which is great. Doc Savage, whatever. Insert pulp hero. And then I think there was like, well, what is about these simulationist components like that? That seems, like, unrealistic. Let's bring her down to Earth a little bit. And that I think. [01:44:36] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, the 80s is that era where they're just doing more is more is more. [01:44:42] Speaker A: Right. [01:44:42] Speaker B: They're just like, they're adding to the systems. They're adding rules or adding tables or adding skill. Just, you know, they're taking those earlier simpler, simpler games and making them, quote, unquote, more realistic. Yeah, right. All right, to close out, I have a couple of. Couple of things for you. One is roll. If you have two D6s, roll D66 for me. Let's try their hit location table, which I just remembered I. I had access to. It's a not. Not a very good hit location table. [01:45:07] Speaker A: But I saw that. Hey, dude, I'm not kidding. I rolled a 66. [01:45:11] Speaker B: 66. So that's the head. And I only had to. I had to, like, scan this list a couple of times. They're not in order. [01:45:19] Speaker A: Do they explode? [01:45:23] Speaker B: They do not. But it's, you know, the. The hit table is as specific as, like, left shin, spine, left shoulder, left kneecap, right forearm. It's kind of funny. Kind of funny? I don't know. Yeah, you know what? It's this weird. It's like a collision of a lightweight game engine that could do pulp and a bus packed with crunchy sausage that just exploded all over it. They had an accident. It's just this awful scene on the highway. You come across like, what the hell happened here? There's meat all over the road. But when you take the time to, you know, reconstruct the scene, you're like, actually, there's a pretty cool game in here. [01:46:10] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:46:11] Speaker B: I'm sorry for who I am, Sean. You know that. [01:46:13] Speaker A: No, never apologize. Never apologize for who you are. [01:46:18] Speaker B: Okay, the MSPE checklist, let's run it down. And I've reorganized, you know, the same items, but I've moved a couple around to make sure they make a little Bit more sense. Sean, in mspe, are the spies competent? [01:46:33] Speaker A: Yeah, I always get hesitant because it's like competent is like kick ass or just like. Okay. I would say they're competent because they're. They got talents that can deal with things, I guess. [01:46:48] Speaker B: Well, they got, they got the skills that help and remember they have the ability to like roll your 3D6 and you get 2D6 adds if you get triples and. [01:46:57] Speaker A: Oh yeah. [01:46:57] Speaker B: So they can, they can turn out to be larger than life kind of characters, I think. Yes. [01:47:02] Speaker A: And they can have those stats at like up to 20, 30. [01:47:05] Speaker B: Right? 30. All of these games, I would say kind of proofs in the pudding. Left to see how it feels. It's one thing to eyeball up but I mean there's some games you can just tell like oh my heavens, their chances of succeeding are no better than an everyman kind of thing. Right. And I think mercenary spies and private eyes probably does have competence spies. Is there trade craft in the game? Does it cover, you know, all the passing information and etc. [01:47:36] Speaker A: Yes, I would have to look at the list of skills. [01:47:38] Speaker B: I think that long list of skills probably covers off trade craft pretty well. Are there chase, tailing or vehicle combat rules only crashes. There were crashes. So I'm going to give this partial grade. A partial grade. What about social interrogation, persuasion, deception, seduction, etc. [01:48:00] Speaker A: I'm looking through the skills again in that confidence. Confidence. This is skill combining charm with a glib tongue. [01:48:10] Speaker B: I'm going to give it kind of a partial grade again. Like I think what was the other game that was like this? Maybe Agent Provocateur was like this. This where there are skills that cover it but there aren't like dedicated mechanics. Like Bond has that like how do you seduce somebody? Correct. And Top Secret has that. You're trying to convince a contact to do something. You got to look up the result on a table so they are like fully mechanized. This is more along the lines of you got a skill and you and the GM can interpret what that means. [01:48:37] Speaker A: And there is actually a skill called seduction. It's 1 point slash charisma plus 10 plus. I think that's the prereq. Right. You have to have a charisma and then iq. [01:48:51] Speaker B: Iq, iq, yeah. [01:48:53] Speaker A: Yes. You know, in this point, in this point, for this one it is charisma, it's not iq. [01:48:58] Speaker B: Oh, is that right? [01:48:59] Speaker A: Right. I. Right, okay. Yeah. [01:49:02] Speaker B: So a couple of prerequisites then. [01:49:04] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Well, you need the points to probably buy it from an I. How would you Buy. You wouldn't buy seductions as a skill. Right. [01:49:12] Speaker B: Point being for, for MSPE, you are going to like have the GM establish the difficulty or whatever that level of like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 that relates to the 20, 25, 30 difficulty you're shooting for. There's not much to the to it beyond that. [01:49:27] Speaker A: Right. [01:49:28] Speaker B: So it has mechanics for it, but it's not like built in kind of the same way. And I would say the same thing might be true for Infiltration, security systems and hacking. It does it. It's just like a tradecraft. Tradecraft Social and Infiltration are all like. Sure. But not in a robust way as much as some of the other games. [01:49:46] Speaker A: Right. As electronics, electronic countermeasures as skills. Yes. [01:49:51] Speaker B: Does it have multi part challenges mspe? [01:49:55] Speaker A: I don't think, I don't think so, no. [01:49:57] Speaker B: It's an older game. They don't, many of them don't have that concept of like you know, multiple successes and partial successes or successes in this, this section, but not that section mean something different. So I'm going to say no. Are there gadgets and vehicles? Yes, I think yes. Is there a recognition or reputation or fame system? [01:50:18] Speaker A: I don't think so. [01:50:19] Speaker B: I don't remember checking. I'm gonna say no, man. I don't think there is. I just looked through it as well, a whole table of contents and nothing is. Nothing is like tripping my memory. [01:50:29] Speaker A: No. And I think adventure points are xp like in a nutshell. [01:50:32] Speaker B: Yeah, we've already mentioned it. So the reputation of fame is a. No, no Easy Bake enemies. [01:50:39] Speaker A: No, I think it's a full stat block. [01:50:42] Speaker B: Well, you know what, like where are some enemies we can look at here? What my point was going to be is like there's not a section unlike foes. Right. Correct on enemies. So while, while it's really pretty easy to do it like you, you know, if you're, if you're doing something that's not meant to be, like a big combat affair where you're going and gonna go into that phase combat and all that sort of stuff. You could just assign a difficulty to somebody. It could be a single number. But the game doesn't really tell you that, does it? All right, I'm gonna say no. And the same thing is. Oh, you know what, I'll give it a pass on this next one. The next one related to the Easy Bake enemies. Like whether or not it's, you know, you can have a short, small stat block. Are they easy to create? Can you create them on the fly kind of thing. Right. The answer is no per Raw. But you can certainly do it with this rule set very easily. The easy bake enemies. And I think it does kind of COVID this idea of mob, rebel and mooks like cannon fodder. In other words, can you make an agent look really good by having them defeat multiple people at the same time? I think the combat rules cover that. And in fact there's even provision in here. You might remember this when we were reading it. There's provision or a comment in here where they say be careful with your, with your mass combats or with your like group combats that one skill heavy character doesn't dominate. In other words, one PC with all kinds of skills could help a team of 10 beat a team of 30 or 50 or 100 kind of thing. And they actually talked about break it into smaller combats so that nobody's dominating. All of that to me says there are mechanics in here that I think can handle the, the mob or cannon F side of things pretty well decently. Is what I would say. Are the firearms rules fun and dangerous? [01:52:32] Speaker A: Maybe. [01:52:36] Speaker B: Great answer. [01:52:39] Speaker A: Maybe. Could be. It depends. I mean firearms, not to be mistaken for hand to hand which is sometimes handled differently anyway from game to game as well. But it has hit location so that's. Some might appreciate that. [01:53:04] Speaker B: I don't know. I'm. I'm gonna. It. It does have rules like, like for example, it has that whole thing like what's the shooter doing versus what the target's doing. Are you standing, moving, dodging. [01:53:15] Speaker A: Yes. [01:53:16] Speaker B: You know, it has all that stuff. I don't think that's particularly fun, but it is in there. And then when you get to the actual weapon stats. Let me just zoom. [01:53:25] Speaker A: I think we also have to say that too. Like when we say does it have good firearms mechanics or interesting firearms mechanics, somebody out there is going to go dude, that's awesome. [01:53:38] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:53:39] Speaker A: So it's like here's what they are. [01:53:42] Speaker B: It has them. Yes, it has them. I guess, you know, in the context of that though, that was me and you, you and I at the beginning of the show saying what's. What matters to us. [01:53:51] Speaker A: Right? [01:53:51] Speaker B: Right. [01:53:51] Speaker A: Yes. [01:53:52] Speaker B: And I think the interesting firearms rules matter more to me than they do to you. But I would, I would suggest some of the games that we've gone through are like, there's some fun stuff you can do. Whether it's like follow up attacks or multiple. Like they incorporate aiming into the like all that kind of stuff. Right. This, remember we actually just stumbled on how exactly does missile fire integrate with melee combat? And we kind of struggled a little bit. [01:54:15] Speaker A: Right, right. [01:54:17] Speaker B: I mean beyond that, I, I would say that I do like that they don't, they don't drown you in weapon stats and like the little features, it's basically what's the capacity of the gun and what are the dice and the ads that you're adding to this big overall pool. Cool. I kind of like it. I think they do look kind of fun. So I, I'll give this one a pass. I'll say, yeah, they look kind of fun. We haven't played this yet. But what I've heard, they are pretty dangerous. So I'm going to say yes to the firearms. How about hand to hand? There's the whole martial arts thing right? [01:54:48] Speaker A: There is. [01:54:49] Speaker B: Remember different phase and all the rest. [01:54:52] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:54:55] Speaker B: I am, yeah, yeah. [01:54:57] Speaker A: I don't know. I think my take is if a game has some hand to hand rules, whether it is, whether somebody wants to call it martial arts or I just bop them over the head with my like I do the one punch knockout, like boom, knocked him out 80s. But I think all the rest can be flavor. [01:55:21] Speaker B: Yeah. I guess it depends on your perspective, right. Whether you like, you want lighter weight ones and actually I was talking with Gabe Dibbing about this recently. The write up in MSPE about martial arts is kind of funny where Stackpole gets into this whole thing about the fallacy of like dojos across the country at the time and how people were all into karate and also how you can never really. There's no like on the job learning from, from fights where you can only train in a training scenario and learn to get better. And there's some, it's, it's worth, it's worth reading I guess I would say I did not find the martial arts rules particularly compelling. And I, and I don't love drawing them out of everything else that they happen in a different phase. Like you're saying it's, it's almost like top secret. Top secret, quite frankly, forgive me, is much, much worse because it does the whole like what martial art are you using? And let me cross reference and if you have a, don't have a certain skill rating or rating in something else, you're not allowed to have access to those martial arts skills. And it's the whole like judo versus wrestling versus boxing versus street fighting, blah blah, blah, all that stuff. There's a little bit of that here. It's nowhere near as bad but there's a little bit of that, that make me just wrinkle my nose. And I want the. I want the rules to flow faster. [01:56:38] Speaker A: Yeah. [01:56:39] Speaker B: That's the bottom line. All right, we're almost done. Are there rules for assisting? [01:56:44] Speaker A: I don't recall. [01:56:48] Speaker B: I don't think so. I think this is one of those older, older games where they weren't designing, they weren't thinking about the things in the same way. [01:56:55] Speaker A: You can't help. [01:56:56] Speaker B: I would also say in a. In a mass combat or one of these big combats where everybody just totals their. Their offensive, like, factors up and rolls or dice. [01:57:04] Speaker A: Right. [01:57:05] Speaker B: That kind of models it. [01:57:06] Speaker A: True. [01:57:06] Speaker B: Kind of does. Especially the GM is. The GM is lenient about, like, add a D6 for this or that or that kind of thing. [01:57:13] Speaker A: In that case, moving it up from one level up to. To like, meta. Like, as you get down, I would say grittier. Grittier. You know, grittier and grittier and tactical. [01:57:23] Speaker B: You know, it's just not codified like, we wanted to see it done today, but it's again, where someone puts their hand in the air and I say, hey, Biff is going to help Dale lift that thing. Then the GM is either going to allow, you know, an improvement to the role or they'll lower that difficulty because there's two people doing it. So there's. There's provision in here to do it. It's just not. It's not called out strongly. [01:57:48] Speaker A: Well, to that, I don't know if, like. Well, as a game master of that time, you would just say, well, of course you're helping. Okay, I will give you a, you know, bonus this, bonus that. Okay. Because you're doing that. It's. It's this. So it's more assumed that a game master would make a judgment call in the moment versus putting it in text. Right. [01:58:09] Speaker B: Which I think in general, the Tunnels and Trolls framework is pretty good at. [01:58:13] Speaker A: Sure. [01:58:13] Speaker B: It's pretty good at allowing that, like, just change the difficulty a little bit. Or in mass combat, you can give some extra dice. [01:58:18] Speaker A: Right. [01:58:18] Speaker B: That kind of thing. What about adventure and mission design advice? [01:58:22] Speaker A: There is just tons of it, including the. [01:58:27] Speaker B: Even the first part of the book, which is like the original text. It calls out mysteries, espionage and detective work. Right. Like a. Or reaction or whatever. What, however, defines them. But they're like different essays on each of the styles. [01:58:41] Speaker A: There is. Yeah. Okay. [01:58:45] Speaker B: In agreement. [01:58:46] Speaker A: I agree. [01:58:46] Speaker B: Is there metacurrency? No, no. Is there any discussion of failing forward or, like, what to do if you're in that situation where you got failure after failure piling up and how do you move forward kind of thing? I think I'll just say it. I think it's one of those things where it's just an older game. They just. They weren't. They weren't designing for that. [01:59:08] Speaker A: Right. [01:59:08] Speaker B: They weren't trapping for that. For that thing. So no is the answer there. All right, so that. That covers it for mspe, where I think there's a bunch of partials that we just answered. Where it can do it if you bend it, if you look at it sideways, but maybe it's not called out directly. Agree. [01:59:25] Speaker A: Agreed. Cool. Anything else to add before we wrap this sucker up? [01:59:32] Speaker B: Only the question of who's going to run this, you or I? [01:59:36] Speaker A: Dude, I don't know. I have yet to run. I've yet to run anything. I don't know if this would be the game for me to be like, oh, I got this. [01:59:44] Speaker B: Maybe Asian Provocateur. [01:59:45] Speaker A: Yeah, Agent Provocateur. We need to find out who Harrigan is as an agent. [01:59:51] Speaker B: We do. And you've run more YZE than I have, so you'll probably be quite comfortable in that game. [01:59:56] Speaker A: That might be debatable, man. I don't know. [01:59:59] Speaker B: No, maybe not. But maybe not. [02:00:01] Speaker A: I would feel more comfortable with Agent Provocateur for sure. [02:00:05] Speaker B: I did it. I. I will be. You know, like I said, I'm a little disappointed in myself for not having some of the answers here. My fingertips. I'm going to dive more into this combat chapter and really try to pull apart the missile thing and how it intersects with the rest of the game. So, yeah, I would be happy to run this when the time comes. [02:00:22] Speaker A: Excellent. Victor Drake. Is he alive? Well, you'll have to wait. [02:00:29] Speaker B: It's a pulp game so we can continue with Victor. [02:00:32] Speaker A: Well, that's People. People might not know he's still alive. Harrigan. [02:00:36] Speaker B: As of this recording, people don't even know what happened to Victor in the Tiny Spies game yet. They may not even know that Victor's in the Tiny Spice game. [02:00:43] Speaker A: That's true. We don't know what ever became of Victor Drake. [02:00:48] Speaker B: Yes, Tiny Spy. [02:00:50] Speaker A: Stay tuned, folks. It's coming. You'll find out. [02:00:53] Speaker B: Cool. Yeah. That's all I got, man. [02:00:55] Speaker A: All right. Excellent. Thanks for tuning in, everybody. On behalf of my esteemed colleague, co host Harrigan. I'm Sean. Thanks, and we'll catch you on the next one. See ya. This episode of Go Bag, brought to you with help from the following field operatives, special age agents, black ops directors and friendlies. Joe Swick, Roger French, Merkel Froehlich, Tony Sugarloaf, Baker Hus Caro, Laramie Wall Eileen Barnes, Heptalima Aaron Rilya, Wayne Peacock, Gold School DM Jeff Walken, Yorcas Rex, Eric Salzweedle, Phil McClory, Jason Hobbs, Michael O. Holland, Remy Billodeau, Crystal Egstad, Eric Avia Voronak, Brian Kurtz, Chad Glamen, Jim Ingram Orchestra Christian Chris Shore, Brian Rumble, Victor Wyatt, Kevin Keneally, Andy Hall, Jason Weitzel, Salt Hart, Kelly K. Ness, Tad Lechman, Nicholas Abruzzo, Matthew Catron, Curtis Takahashi, Angela Murray, Mr. White 20 Jason Connerly, Shannon Olson, Ryan West, Kristen McLean, Larry Hollis, Glenn Seal, Jake At Faded Quill Gaming Tess Trekkie, Tim Jensen, Kelly Ness, Nubis Christopher Lang, Crowlog, Peter Skaines, Farty McButterpants, Fraser, Ronald and 1D4 Khan James thank you, agents. We appreciate it.