Ninjas & Superspies: 1985

Ah, yes, nothing dates a game like references to technology.

Memory Chip - Nothing more than storage for simply numerical or text data. Each chip holds about as much information as 20 typed pages, or enough digital audio signal data for a 10 minute sound recording, or sufficient digital images, for 4 photographic-quality images or one minute's worth of standard video recording. The memory chips can be installed in series for more storage.

This is kind of like the Space Opera situation where computers that run battleships have like 4K of RAM. Don't get me wrong, you can run a space program off computers like that, but your crew will be flipping a lot of gigantic banks of switches and dials.

The guns, technology, vehicles, and entire vibe of this game are stuck in the mid-80s. The cybernetic technology is not, and that feels like it came from an afternoon kid's cartoon with a title something like "Cyber Agents." And yes, there was a toy line to go along with that.

And don't forget the ninjas. Whole lotta ninjas.

So the game is dated?

Yes, and that is why I love it. I get to put together a 1980s playlist on Spotify, watch some of the great movies from the time as inspiration, get the hair right, play some Miami Vice music, and play a great game in a time before the Internet and handheld cell phone usage (they still had them in some places in cars and suitcases).

That computer chip, you bet I am playing that for laughs when the gadgeteer walks up to the team, something like Q out of a James Bond movie, and says, "And this chip holds twenty entire typed pages! Amazing! But please don't give up your day job and think you are going to be a novelist, agent."

250 single-spaced (or 500 double-spaced) typed pages equal a megabyte of computer storage. So this chip is about roughly 80K of memory, and you could say 64K if you wanted to be Commodore 64K authentic and give a little wiggle room for spacing.

And a standard roll of chemically-developed film in the day holds 24 high-resolution exposures (some did 36) compared to four low-resolution images (320x240 or 640x480-ish max) on that chip. Some things were still way better in analog back in the day, like vinyl LPs, Kodak film, rolls of movie film, giant audiotape reels, and stacks of typed pages, but that is cool.

This is very much an analog world. Give up on digital and embrace 80s tape-punk.

And one of the cybernetic upgrades for cyborg parts is a "modem chip." So if you have one of those in your cybernetic hand, plug your finger into a phone jack to transmit the data back to HQ; your hand will make those silly, loud, and embarrassing modem connect noises. You will smile with a smug smirk on your face like this is the coolest thing ever, but 40 years later, we are going to laugh.

And you still would have been cooler than us.

Mid-80s Cool & Tarnish

My game will be set in the nebulous mid-80s era. The end-point is definitely 1985 for any music and cultural references, as the 86-88 era felt like a downturn of cultural energy and tackiness. Once you get Iran-Contra, the Challenger Disaster, Chernobyl, and the stock market crash, the decade starts to lose its innocence and positive mojo. From 89' on, that is the 1990s, and you start to get a lot of modern cultural influences (Simpsons, Seinfeld, etc.). The year 1984 is the high point, but that extended into 85' so that music was cool as well, and the world was riding the 80's new wave. The 80's started to end in feeling in September 1985, so we can just push that through to Xmas and call it our cultural inspiration.

For some, the warts of the 80s may be a bit much. You are talking inflation, AIDS, the rich-poor gap growing, Central American wars, terrorism, drugs, the decline of inner cities, structural intolerance, the farm crisis, the crack epidemic, the S&L crisis, corrupt televangelism, the Satanic Panic, African famines, and a whole bunch of other problems that TV and movies tend to ignore. If you are doing a more lighthearted campaign, you should probably downplay or ignore those elements and live in the plastic, fictionalized 80s that our memories seem to idealize.

Some of those could probably be introduced in spy stories, like the Cold War, terrorism, gun-running to Central America, and the "Miami Vice" style drug trade - but some topics may upset some, so tread carefully and create the fictional setting that you and your players want to play in and agree to ignore the rest.

What You Want them to Be

Some say that every Palladium game is played however the group wants it to play. I heard some say that since these games were developed before the Internet, every group came up with its own way of playing the game, some used d20 (or d30) attribute checks (and that rule is not in the game), some used modified percentage rolls, and everyone figured out how to play these games themselves.

Everyone made up rules to make things work, and that was cool. Houserules to get things working the way the group wanted them to were common, GMs and players just made a lot of things up, a GM made a final ruling on how a situation was handled, and play continued.

And then the Internet came along, and everyone assumed there was one way to play these games. There wasn't, there still isn't, and while things online may be great rulings and ideas for how others play the games, they are not the way you should play.

You need to come up with that yourself.

In a way, the Palladium universe of games exists in this strange temporal time loop, one where trying to tell people how the game is played is like trying to explain love or the meaning of life. This is something you need to find for yourself. The tools are there; it is up to you to use them and build that meaning and experience with your friends.

Many old-school games are like this, and the original Traveller black books were like this. A lot of rules and "how to play" stuff did not exist. You made it up, house-ruled, and every group played Traveller slightly differently. Where rules did not exist gave you the freedom to make the game your own thing. So many of the games of this time had that freeform "you make it up" feeling, even earlier versions of D&D before they simplified the games for younger audiences.

I feel we lost a lot when these games went mainstream.

They stopped being games of imagination, and they became structured play activities.

We Tell You How to Play

Contrast this with today. We need revisions of the games telling everyone how to exactly play everything. Every ambiguity is reviewed by a grand council of hundreds, cleared up, official rulings and compromises made, and everything laid out in boring and exacting detail and procedures. Rules are patched like videogames, and I remember how bad it got during the 4E days when the books became worthless after a few months because all of the information would be horribly wrong.

Even worse, games that push the "official rules" narrative and paint your group in a negative light for breaking with what the company "says" about how the game should be played. You surrender your freedom and creativity to a billion-dollar corporate entity.

Your choice, but understands what they are asking you to agree to.

I feel it is a fast-food, slick, corporatized role-playing experience.

You don't need any imagination to play the games or interpret the rules. I have had some games I DMed where I felt like a DVD player reading the story and setting up the combats. I have seen players dutifully follow the script laid out for them. We had rules questions, and no one needed to come up with an answer. It was in the book.

How You See a Game

I feel that some games go wrong today is they lose that place where rules are left up to the group, and they try to be too much of the perfect reference guide on how everything works. They become more dictionaries than games that invite you to make up your own way of playing.

When our family played Monopoly, we made up all sorts of silly house rules, and we tried new rules every game. That was normal to do. The Free Parking pot of money for fees and taxes. Buying your way out of jail or paying for an extra die of movement. Buying another player's house and moving it to one of our properties. Adding extra houses and hotels with buttons and thimbles. The game was ours, and we decided as a family how we liked playing.

Today I feel we put too much faith in rules and accepted procedures of gameplay like we are all computers that need programming.

And I know some games appeal to those who like more structure.

Other games give you a box full of crayons and paints and tell you to make your own.

To a lot of players today who grew up inside that strict structural definition of what a game is, some of these more freeform experiences may not even seem like games. But to us kids who picked up sticks on the playground, called them swords, and made up our own cool playground games, a few pieces of "this and that" and our imaginations were all we needed to get started.

And the rest was up to us.