Mail Room: Covert Ops

Once upon a time, there was the old TSR game Top Secret, and you could roleplay James Bond, Mission Impossible, Mack Bolan, Able Team, or any "spy action commando force" you could imagine - even GI Joe.

That game destroyed our original Mystara D&D game. Roleplaying as a superspy or commando was way more fun than poking orcs with swords, casting the magic missile spell once per day, or hauling 700 pounds of silver coins into town and figuring out the exchange rate.

Our early fantasy roleplaying never recovered when Car Wars came around, and that was way more fun than superspies - since Roger Moore was getting old and James Bond was not that cool anymore. GI Joe kept going, but we switched from Top Secret to Aftermath, which just felt like a better "military sim" to us than the fiddly percentage calculations of the old Top Secret game.

Fast forward 40 years to DWD's Covert Ops game, and this is the great 1d100 system they use in their excellent Frontier Space game, and this does everything superspy and 1980s action movie fast, fun, and easy to play. This is the worthy spiritual successor to Top Secret, the 007 RPG, and many more modern attempts at superspy roleplaying.

All of DWD's games are great, and they feel so incredibly 1980s 1d100 roleplaying in that style and feel. They need a Gangbusters/Noir/Detective focused game, but I am sure that would be easy enough to hack with Covert Ops.

A great game, I love the company and rules, and this is one of those keeper games on my most-played shelves. More soon.

Ninjas & Superspies: Rapidstrike

 

We loved the old Operation: Rapidstrike module for TSR's Top Secret game as kids. The tournament characters went on to be some of the best NPCs we had in one of our long-running games, so it is fun to pull my copy of this out and reminisce.

And since I am currently on a Palladium nostalgia kick, would it be fun to spin up these characters in Palladium's Ninjas & Superspies? I was thinking of doing a fun conversion, maybe playing through a little of the module and seeing how different it comes out.

And I shouldn't have done that.

One of these characters feels like they could raid this island and complete the mission alone.

They are that badass.

I started with the agent with the highest HTH Combat value, which would be the Frenchman Clause "Mongoose" Bouchet. And I made him a Tae Kwon Do Karate fighter. The guy came out amazing, he can kick things directly above his head, throw death blows, do snap kicks, roundhouse kicks, gets four attacks in melee, has an awareness bubble around him that prevents him from being surprised, and he has an entire arsenal of other attacks and defenses that blow my freaking mind.

His skill programs include being a bodyguard, expert thief, guerilla warfare, military intelligence, medical, and Romance (European) languages. He came out like this guy the agency sends into an area of the world to protect a target; while he is working as a bodyguard, he will use his military intelligence skills to figure out the threats and his guerilla war skills to eliminate the threat cleanly without the person he is guarding knowing a thing.

He is Coooo...

I do that in my Eric Cartman voice, and you know if you can say that about a character, you know you are playing a Palladium game. In some games, we get character classes built like high-end European bikes, a joy to ride and incredibly engineered, but they have this almost mechanically sound but not incredibly exciting feeling going on.

I get this feeling from some of the Old School Essentials expansion classes and incredible works of B/X design and rules interpretation. Great designs, they work incredibly well, but my want to play them is sort of in the middle somewhere. A lot of B/X characters have this disposable feeling to them. Mechanically they work well, but ultimately they feel too simple to invest in without pages of backstory.

When I take the time to design a Palladium character, that is both an investment in that character, but also me making choices that give me ideas for adventures. Inspiration is a part of the character creation system.

I feel the strong, cool character is one of their driving design inspirations behind every Palladium game, it is not enough to make a game with a bunch of normal classes, and tropes pulled from movies and comics, or even classes that are more mechanical ideals of design perfection. They also ask if the classes fit into the world and game if they make sense, and how they fit in with the others already in the game. It is more than just cool, honestly, it is a game design that also factors in fun, the world the characters live in, and mechanics.

My Agent

Seriously, I am looking at his skill list, and I want to play this guy - just this guy - and have all sorts of cool adventures with him as an awesome bodyguard assassin. He is deadly enough without weapons; the guy could just fly into a country commercial, kick someone in the face and get a weapon, and complete his mission with that cleanly. Then, wearing his white tuxedo, attended the rich party and danced with the pretty woman (also the target), and know a few hours before anyone who threatened her, he took out by himself with his mad assassin skills.

He is a hundred times cooler in Ninjas and Superspies than in the original Top Secret game.

And I am sitting here wondering why people complain about the complexity of Palladium characters when they just come out so darn interesting. I look at the Top Secret character, and he seems simple and one-dimensional, the best HTH guy with a night vision scoped sniper rifle and pistol, the highest charm and coordination, three throwing stars, and 50' of rope. If I were playing this module, the only things that stand out about him are his high HTH, throwing stars, and his rifle. Maybe the rope. He has four skills in broad areas, such as military science and physical education.

This other guy? A James Bond-level agent ready to go. Freaking Chuck Norris martial arts skills. A guy who knows how to be a professional bodyguard, assassin, sniper, spy on radio communications, scramble his own coms, patch up wounds, survive in the wilderness, pick locks, kick out the lightbulb directly over his head, use a map, disguise himself, set up surveillance cameras, encrypt messages, and do tons of other cool stuff on his own. Everything screams out cool on him. I look at his character sheet, and I get excited to play him!

And what I like about him has nothing to do with his gear. He could have any gear, no gear, or stolen gear and still be cool. He could be wearing Bermuda shorts, flip-flops, and a white hat and be cool.

And I stopped there because I was so shocked the other agents would be just pure sensory overload.

Too Simple?

A lot of the TSR games made during these times had this really simple design, and you see this in all of the TSR d100 games (Top Secret, Gangbusters, Star Frontiers) and also B/X style games (D&D, Gamma World). This is what made them so popular. Looking back, I love the nostalgia that a B/X style game gives me, and it feels familiar and comfortable. I can jump right in.

But I see why other games with a slightly higher complexity appealed to so many, especially in character design. Some systems had complex systems of character design that felt like more work than what you got out of them (Rolemaster, Space Opera, by-the-book Aftermath, and a few others). This, combined with complicated play rules, "felt" like a complex game, but the time it took to play them weighed it all down.

A few systems and Palladium had this moderate level of complexity in character design but kept the combat and task resolution rules simple like B/X. When I was playing, I could keep all the rules in my head, and honestly, many rules were up to the referee to rule on as things came up. But the slightly more complex characters felt exciting and a lot more capable than their more concise counterparts.

My nostalgia for B/X and those classic, simple games feels broken now.

I am feeling simple is not always better.

Today versus Yesterday

I know that these characters were designed for game convention play, and the game should be able to be picked up quickly by people wandering by and signing up for games. It quickly gave them a cool spy experience and made them want to buy the game. That is great stuff, and we sure loved Top Secret too.

But today?

I look at the Ninjas and Superspies version, and I instantly want to take him on a hundred adventures. The Top Secret character seems like meals I used to like as a kid, but I am just okay with that type of food today (and some of it, wisely, I stopped eating). He is average but not something I would choose if I had a choice in what I would rather spend time with on my adventures. And I don't really need or want that team of six agents. I could spin up one of them and have hundreds of interesting adventures.

I create a Palladium Fantasy character recently and got that same feeling. I ended up with a seasoned bard in many areas, ready to take on the world and do all sorts of interesting stuff. Lots of different social skills that would benefit the character in interactions and lore. While others may be more capable on the battlefield, this character will excel when a tricky negotiation comes up, an ancient elven scroll needs to be saved from a goblin outpost with a bit of stealth, and a lost elven song on that scroll is decyphered and performed for a visiting elven dignitary. Perhaps an extra mile would be done by re-transcribing the scroll in a more beautiful document complete with elven runes and artwork and presenting that as a gift to them.

That bard is going to shine. No one else can do that.

My B/X bard had a short sword, leather armor, and a few spells. I did not get that same feeling of competence and excitement other than, "This is the playing piece that casts spells through music." I exaggerate a little, but I feel a simple class leaves a lot up to the player (which is both good and bad), and you get my point.

The question comes up, would I get this same feeling through a B/X game with non-weapon proficiencies? You could do all those as skills in an AD&D 2e style game. But I never felt as inspired by those games, and they always felt like the classes were a bit too generic, and the fighter could eventually pick up those same skills and do what I do. The skill packages for these classes, combined with their fighting styles and magic, make each OCC design cool and unique.

Instead of a game that lets us stumble into cool with a generic design or skill system, the Palladium way gives you a solid yet cool design.

All Six Together?

And if I spun up those six agents and sent them into this island fortress, the team would instantly feel like an Avengers-level of superspy team up instead of "six basic characters with different skills and weapons." Like if we had six different "00" franchise movies done over a dozen years coming together for one epic adventure.

Would each character be this complex system of fighting and skill usage? It would be, but it would be insanely cool if you played with friends who could each master their character and fighting style. Frankly, I would limit my first game to either the "basic" simplified agent styles or just the two martial arts forms these were based from. 

But I would have a game where every one of my friends would play a superspy who felt instantly like an MCU-level character. A somebody.

Given the little time I have to play as an adult, I would rather have more satisfying and complex characters who instantly inspire me to take on adventures. The simple ones I look at and get my nostalgia hit, but not much else.

A strange experience and feeling from this exercise and an interesting one. We learn a lot about rules and game systems with conversions of characters we "thought" we knew, but seeing them in a different light can open our eyes to things we may have overlooked because of the warm, familiar glow of nostalgia.

Modern and Spy Games: Classes

One of the more interesting things about Top Secret were its three "character classes": investigator, confiscator, and assassin. There was no concept of a "James Bond" style class in this system, and I remember one of the Dragon Magazines actually writing up a "superspy" class for that reason - and all of a sudden all my game's players felt massively uncool.

Ah, TSR, stop creating classes to fix problems or chase the cool. To be honest, the game was destroyed by the official 007 RPG, so they were probably throwing poison darts at the wall and hoping people would stay if they tried to fix things.

Mission Impossible

One of the problems is the game was more Mission Impossible than it was James Bond, and I feel that made a better model for "party based play." You look at 007 - and that guy is a loner. He works alone, does things alone, and is a one-spy army. How well does that translate into group-based play? I don't think too well, because really, are we going to send 001 through 005 on one mission all the time? It weakens the premise, makes the concept of a superspy seem ineffective, and runs counter to the mystique of the gentleman or suave female superspy.

The older Mission Impossible model, where every mission needs a "team of specialized experts" fits the party play model much better. As long as everyone has something to do and the game just isn't combat. Yes, in this game it was fun to sneak into bases and cause trouble, talk to contacts, and play the supercool spy - but combat was fun just like combat was fun in D&D. You could stat-build, gun design, toss grenades, and martial arts your way into a night of modern dungeon crawling constant gunfire fun. I know that is not Mission Impossible but that is what we did.

One of the problems with Top Secret were the classes really didn't do much else than provide an XP chart for leveling. They gave a $25 mission bonus for certain mission if you were the right type of character, but not anything else. You could earn XP doing other agent's mission types. Your XP went into raising ability scores, and that was really the few bonuses of leveling (except for fate/fortune points).

My B/X Spies Game

If I were making a B/X spy game with classes, the classes would do things, give me some thief-like percentage abilities to do cool stuff and cause trouble. I would rethink the class trinity too, as assassin was way too fun, investigator got to shuffle through file cabinets, and confiscator only showed up to work the forklift and drive the truck away. If you were doing more single-person superspy I would go classless and let players develop the spy of their dreams through character advancement.

If you were doing team of experts I would go more along the types of characters in the older team-based shows: mastermind, muscle, gadgets, face, thief, and doctor. No assassins and no soldiers! Too much fun, and honestly, why have a class that is essentially a fun magnet? Spread combat responsibilities out to everyone, and give their classes special combat abilities. You need to push back on the special forces commando classes too, since once you get the military involved you lose the "average citizens doing cool things" mystique of the game.

Everyone gets the same combat modifiers as they level up, just what they do in combat is influenced by their classes. Masterminds fight smart, muscles twist you into pretzels, thieves are sneaky, and so on.

This game is a fantasy of the everybody being able to walk out of the office and normal lives, and into international intrigue. Not walk out of the office and join Seal Team 6. Frankly that sort of "commando not spy" thing has put a shadow on 007 in many of the films in my feeling, as what 007 does shooting up military bases and playing Top Gun is just...no, it doesn't feel right to me. The fantasy is broken and that is a superhero with guns and explosions like Arnold or Stallone.

Plus, with those five classes, I would have a hard time deciding what to play - which is a cool thing. Doctor would need some interesting powers to knock people out, give buffs and immunities, target weak spots, administer mind-altering substances, and other cool medical and science powers, psychology and hypnosis, because they feel the weakest.

I would play that. It supports party play, gives role protection, and lets everyone participate in combat and gives their class unique abilities to use. No one is left out. The game keeps a "combat is fun" feel while keeping out-of-combat options open and powerful.

MSPE

Yes, I am bringing up MSPE, the game often forgotten in the Top Secret vs. 007 battle. This game gets a lot of the solitary movie hero tropes right for a classless system. You level up, and work on skills to specialize. You can do teams or solo heroes, and it supports solo play a lot better than either of the games. Combat is not as fun because it is deadly, so you are going to get a lot of interactions, sneaky stuff, skill use, and social encounters - which fits the genre of movies from 1930-1980 a lot better in my feeling.

Sam Spade isn't walking into every bar with twin 0.45 pistols and blasting his way in and out to talk to a contact. You could do that in this game, but really? Okay, do that if it is fun for you.

Also, the way this game treats skills is way better than either 007 or Top Secret. Skills gain XP through every use, track XP per skill, and level independently of the character's level. You can't be a shooty combat-oriented Sam Spade, gain a level, and improve investigation skills you have never used. If you want a high-level non-combat skill - you have to use it. This encourages roleplaying, sneaky stuff, non-combat stuff, social encounters, and skill use in general.

This also modifies adventure design, as referees need to put in non-combat skill opportunities into the adventure rather than just lining up combat encounters to fill the night's session time. What is involved in completing a mission? What tasks need to be done? What skills will be needed? Can players make their own approaches, change things up, apply their skills effectively, and come up with creative solutions on their own? 

Are the varieties of challenges varied, or should they be given the situation and group's play preferences? You may want a combat-focused game, and that is fine. You may want a social-oriented game, and that is cool too. The game supports this, and the characters develop along the play style and adventures the group goes through. You may want a balance, or a mix of two or three styles of play.

The questions of single superspy and "team of experts" is solved as well, since the game supports both. This is less done "in the rules" as the B/X and TSR model enforces, and more goes into the "build as you play" classless design in games like Skyrim - you develop your character as you go instead of making an initial class choice and getting better in a limited set of abilities. If you want a James Bond, pick and level up the skills that would make a character like that. If you want a Mission Impossible team, that can be done too by specializing the character designs.

Also, unlike 007 and the original Top Secret (I know about the updated Kickstarted edition), this game has survived the years in its original old-school form. You can still buy it, buy adventures for it, and experience the game as it was played back in the day.

Classes in a Modern Era?

I prefer classless systems for modern and sci-fi games. People change, their roles change, and once you get into the game world you can feel your class doesn't have much of a use based on your play style. If you are the only player playing a charismatic face class, and the other five players at the table are all combat freaks - yeah, you are waiting for the gun smoke to clear to smile and charm the people still left alive. You could feel like you aren't contributing anything to the team, your class makes you weak at the primary group focus, and you are pigeon-holed into being the "expert the group drags around."

Plus, classless and build-as-you-go lets your game and players change. If Sam Spade picks up piloting and wants to be a South Seas smuggler and airborne two-fisted adventurer like Indiana Jones - run with it! They will have that PI background, but their new skills will support the fun the campaign morphed into. No new characters need to be created, and characters will pick up the skills they need.

Another point with systems that force you into a role, is that I feel there are times they limit your choices as a player, and as a referee for that player. If a class is a sneaky-thief type, you need to put in sneaky-thief parts or the player will feel like the choice they made was bad. The group may make choices that limit sneaky-thief opportunities.

If a player in a classless system acquires sneaky-thief skills - no matter what they do - those are now an option used to solve problems for that player instead of a requirement. The skills you choose will be influenced by your play style, and you will assemble a tool-box of unique abilities to handle the situations the referee comes up with. To me, in a modern setting where things change rapidly and characters need to be jack-of-all-trades, this is a much better choice for player agency and freedom that a system that enforces strict classes.

But again, all of the above is modified by player and group preference. It may be that you like strictly defined classes in modern settings because those give you direction and the special powers you like. More power to you! But as a referee, I need to understand that with special classes I need to provide opportunities for them to shine and feel like they are contributing. Also, as a player, I need to be aware that the group's choice may be sidelining some of my fellow players. This is unavoidable in some situations, but if it happens all the time the group needs to be aware this is happening and work to make it better for everybody.

Retrospective: Top Secret

TSR's original Top Secret game was the game that started our adventures in modern-era roleplaying. This game powered our first spy adventures, started our GI JOE campaign, and kept serving us well until Aftermath took over as our preferred modern roleplaying system. Aftermath did vehicle combat and heavy weapons a lot better than Top Secret, and did not have as much of a problem with very high ability scores.

Very Fiddly and Chart Based

We ignored the melee combat system in this game for a straight "blow for blow" one because the system was just too fiddly and left or right side attack-based - almost like a boxing simulation better suited to a "king of the ring" RPG than a secret agent game. A lot of the weapons too had miniscule range modifier differences that made each one special and unique, but in practice didn't really impact your overall chance to hit - you either had an okay chance or you were hoping for a critical hit. There was lots of percentile math in this game for very little good reason other than to give our pocket calculators a workout.

High Ability Score Breakage

We have characters with strength scores of 120% and more, there wasn't a cap on how high your score could go, so beside heavy negative modifiers we had characters who were broken and could do it all in most tasks. Ranged combat though took everyone down to size quickly, recoil, situational, and range penalties were very high, from -100 to -300% just for long range alone, so no matter how good you got that 5% hit chance was all you were getting.

Strong Theming

One of the strongest points of the system were the very strong theming. You felt like you were supposed to be playing a spy when you opened the book. On any page you flipped to, you felt like this was "spy stuff" and it got you excited to be roaming around a foreign port, sneaking into an enemy factory, lockpicking, disarming sensors and traps, avoiding guards, stealing the mission target or rescuing the hostage, and speeding out in your rubber raft to the waiting submarine while your combat guy fired his Uzi SMG at perusing enemy agents in speedboats.

Few other games give me this feeling. Weapon choice mattered, from draw speed to concealability, or raw firepower. Shotguns were viable choices, just as much as SMGs or assault rifles. You could get away with bringing a pistol too. Grenades were powerful. Combat was deadly.

You needed specialists too, from your technical specialist, to your medic, to your gun person, to perhaps your martial artist. They needed other skills too, such as fine arts, piloting, bookkeeping, and other skills to decipher items found along the way or at the mission site. Gadgets mattered too, like safecracking devices, night vision, and other cool gadgets.

The enemies could employ hostile animals too, like killer guard parrots - which is why you brought the shotgun to turn Polly into a cloud of feathers. Or had the martial artist strike the parrot in the beak when it lunges and kill the parrot in one swift and silent blow.

The 007 Game

For many, the licensed 007 RPG replaced Top Secret and took over the genre until Top Secret SI came out and both games sort of faded into history. We never really switched to the 007 RPG, since Aftermath still did everything we needed it to. That game is very iconic, strongly themed, and I may talk about it here soon.

The 007 Game was heavier, with way more skills and percentages thrown around, and a task resolution system that required you to compare a roll against divided percentages. This sort of "level of success" worked its way into the color-coded charts of Gamma World and Marvel Super Heroes in a more easy-to-use, but still cumbersome form.

Sandbox Dungeon Crawls

One of the modules we loved for this game was the old Rapidstrike module, which was basically a huge dungeon crawl with spy gear, modern guns, and plenty of room to wreck havoc on a enemy island. A lot of people liked the modules that followed this that had the really in-depth plot lines and detailed NPCs, but being kids, we loved the spy gun-play and two-fisted action more than the drama and careful talkie parts. You could do a fun dungeon crawl with Top Secret more than 007, and you could play this to walk in the front door and deceive, sneak around at night with stealth, or go in blasting with guns - or any mixture of the three.

OSR B/X Spy Game?

Like the recently discussed B/X Gangbusters, I would love to find a B/X spy game that gave me the same feeling. I have a hunch it is out there waiting to be found, and me not looking for it is why I haven't discussed it yet.

Back when this came out, we wondered why it didn't use the D&D rules. This was the first game that solidified "percentile is modern gaming" in our heads, and that continued on to this day. It would have been cool to have this compatible, as around this time Dragon Magazine released a "modern guns" article for D&D that was fascinating and horribly unbalanced.

The TSR Percentile System

This game was also one of the first that used the TSR d100 percentile system, which was similar to games like Gangbusters (which simplified the system greatly, and added a fun Luck score), and finally Star Frontiers. We kept using Star Frontiers for quite a while and liked the d100 system, despite its flaws and difficulty to play at higher ability score levels. The d100 system played better at lower "levels" and eventually broke itself as you got experience and raised scores.

Style Matters

For us, Aftermath did a lot more. These days, there are better options for modern role playing, but back then we didn't know much (we were kids), and having a system that did melee combat to vehicle combat was a very cool thing, and that game replaced Top Secret for us as our home system.

That said, Top Secret always had style. When you opened the book, you felt like a secret agent. Your imagination was fired up in ways a generic game could not even touch. I can't see being as excited to play secret agents with GURPS or even Savage Worlds as I would be with the Top Secret book and a pair of crayoned-in percentile dice.

More on this game soon, and it is fun reminiscing about one of our old friends.