Retrospective: Level Up: Advanced 5E, Part 2

Level Up A5E is part of the reason Tales of the Valiant did not launch as strongly as it should have. Many of the "Alt 5E" players were already on Level Up, and when ToV did not introduce many new features, people stayed with this system. I don't blame them, and I was one. I had everything I wanted here: the nods to the old school, the challenge, the improvements, the support for the pillars of play, and the better martial classes without resorting to silly "tricks" with weapon properties.

Many felt, "We have A5E, why do we need ToV?"

ToV and D&D 2024 got specialized weapon fighting wrong. Putting "special tricks" on the melee weapons is lame and increases complexity for everyone. Making these moves, fighting styles that martial classes get, and tracking a stamina resource, is far more the "5E way" of doing things. A5E does fighting styles right. Martial classes are fun in A5E, offering options and a new tracked resource. The martial characters and half-martial characters in this game are fantastic fun to play.

A lot of what made D&D 4E special is in this game, and you see the influences. There is a "battle commander" type class, and the 4E races are represented well. You can use this to play a 4E-style Nerrath campaign and have everything you need right there. The system is the best of the 2014 5E and 2008 4E systems, with an influence from the OSR.

Fatigue has real meaning, and pop-up healing can doom your character permanently. Rangers are needed, and aren't just "ranged light fighters" like they are in 2024 D&D. You need rangers to survive the wilderness. Oh, and they finally fixed Goodberry.

Many of the stupid problems in D&D were addressed four years ago, and they fixed them all in a complete rewrite of the system and the SRD, just to remove the OGL. A5E is like D&D with a sanity upgrade and quality of life features.

Oh, and the safety tools presented in the book? They actually went out and got permission to use them. Whether you like safety tools or not, thank you for asking for permission and mentioning that you did in the book, along with who created them. I don't use them, but doing the homework and giving community attribution for elements like this means something.

Your heritage (race) gains an advancement at the 10th level. Your culture (where you grew up) matters. Your background (job) can advance through adventures. The destiny system elevates the inspiration system to the next level, enabling you to achieve long-term goals and reap benefits from pursuing what drives you. D&D's inspiration system seems lame and too "toggle switch" compared to this.

Everything in this game has a deeper layer of depth and detail, which is incredibly satisfying.

With so many walking away from D&D and 5E, and the rest of the D&D crowd handing Wizards the fantasy monopoly and creating the next litigious "video game company" out of them, it will kill the hobby. We already saw Wizards try their hand at a form of "software patents" with the OGL revision, where other VTT platforms "could not do spell animations" and similar nonsense. More of that is coming, and while it will make the D&D YouTube content creators happy, they will get more outrage clicks; the rest of the tabletop hobby will be flushed down the toilet.

I refuse to hand one company a monopoly on gaming, "just because it is easier to play there." I know where this all ends up, and I can't do that and have a clear conscience.

A5E falls into a "Niche 5E" market, and with 5E in general slowly becoming "the D&D Beyond game," it makes me kind of sad to see honest innovation marginalized. Even ToV is like "hold your nose D&D," a sort of facsimile edition that is "hot swappable" for 2024 D&D, but with few core differences, mainly in the areas of class design and subclass power progression. ToV is the better game, but A5E went much, much farther to address core structural problems in 5E, such as the lack of meaning in social and exploration, and the dullness and weakness of martial characters.

Death means something in A5E.

Death means nothing in ToV, D&D 2014, and 2024.

A5E is the 5E that the hardcore players would be playing if they hadn't all jumped ship to the OSR and Shadowdark. There is a level of maturity here, the silly cosplay elements are not in my face, and there is a grittiness and realism to the rules that tell you "this is still a dungeon crawling game."

It is not playing baristas, rescuing corgis, ripping off Harry Potter, visiting planar socialist utopias, or breaking into a goblin birthday party to murder them all like in the new Keep on the Borderlands. The tone of anything D&D these days is like a narcissistic cosplay murder hobo simulator.

And honestly, all those diverse and special citizens of the Keep? If this were original D&D, they would be killed and looted, too. I hate this trend of "art code" characters as "default good." It's more inclusive to have every character potentially be a hero or a villain and let them play the roles they want.

A5E is the only version of 5E that I miss. The design sensitivities were close to how I saw 5E when it came out, and it makes nods to the old-school gamers. While ToV is new and exciting, it doesn't feel that much different from either 2014 or 2024 D&D.

A5E hit differently.

It is a strange game from an alternate universe where 5E is still cool.

A universe I wish I were in.

Retrospective: Level Up: Advanced 5E

Level Up Advanced 5E is the best of the Open 5E clones. Unlike Tales of the Valiant, they did not "power up" characters to a CR+1 balance; instead, they worked within the original math to refine it, streamline the rules, and add numerous options for characters. A5E is a CR+0 game and very compatible with the original adventures written for the system.

The math in Level Up is very tight, rebalanced, and the exploits are fixed. This has that flat and dry 2014 balance that many fell in love with back in the early days of 5E. They also fixed so much in terms of "pop-up healing" and put real consequences of death and getting reduced to zero hit points.

A5E has all the fixes people wanted in 2014 D&D, but we never got them in 2024 D&D, and Tales of the Valiant never delivered on them. The mechanical support for the exploration and social pillars of play is excellent, and what we should have gotten with Tasha's. Where 2024 D&D strips out all the softer "roleplaying powers" to make AI-based VTT play easier to develop, Level Up A5E doubles down on the roleplaying, social, exploration, and combat powers and gives us more of them.

If 2024 D&D feels too combat-focused and doesn't deliver on social and exploration, give A5E a try.

EN World's newsletter and web team got into a spat with Goodman Games this year over the City State Kickstarter, which was one of the year's lowlights. What was said by the new owners of Judge's Guild was abhorrent, but it is wrong to attack Goodman Games for its efforts in game preservation and its attempt to correct a wrong. Goodman Games also contributed to the issue with terrible communication, so there is blame on both sides.

And both of these companies are pretty forward-looking, and to have seen them fighting just makes me sick inside. We don't need this sort of vicious infighting during an industry downturn; it drives people away from the hobby. However, to put all this on Level Up A5E is just as wrong as the entire ugly episode.

Goodman Games came out for the better, and they had a fantastic showing at Gen Con this year, so they are doing well, and I am happy for them. Their games have a creativity and imagination that this hobby desperately needs in an era of nostalgia-baiting and endlessly rebooting old adventure modules with fresh coats of paint. How many times has Keep on the Borderlands been rebooted? Do we really need this again, only with worse art? There are times when I feel that Wizards will never create something truly great again, such as a Tomb of Horrors or another classic adventure. They don't have it in them.

The best we will ever have is what we already got.

Other than that, head to the indies to find the new classics.

Level Up A5E felt like it came out on the worst side of this fight, and I have seen no mention of it on YouTube in months. I like the game, and there are excellent design choices here. The fight felt like it hurt A5E more, and none of this needed to happen.

Both games were hurt, and I walked away from this, putting both DCC and 5E in storage. DCC is out again, but all of 5E for me is on ice.

Also, Level Up is the older game. Tales of the Valiant is better supported, with regular crowdfunding and new products, as Kobold Press navigates the 2024/ToV tightrope. ToV is better than D&D 2024 by far, but this is where the interest and excitement are these days, not in Level Up A5E. I don't see many people talking about or playing Level Up these days, and my copies are currently in storage. If it comes down to it, DCC will get shelf space over any version of 5E.

ToV is the best supported version of 5E, once you factor in the Shard VTT and owning PDFs.

A5E is the best custom version of 5E.

I like ToV and tried playing this, but I ended up missing the improvements A5E made to the system. Ultimately, the absence of a robust character creation tool doomed both games, with only Shard being the best one so far for ToV, and nothing much for A5E.

ToV's art varies in quality, and it is distracting at times. Level Up does a better job with the art, although it lacks those amazing pieces, by remaining consistent and good throughout.

I grew tired of relying on character creation software for 5E as a whole, as well as the multi-page character sheets. I have DCC. I have OSE. I have ADAD. I have Swords & Wizardry. I have Shadowdark. I have C&C. None of them needs software. They all do the same thing.

GURPS, admittedly, needs software. However, the calculus is different since it is primarily a one-time cost, or Patreon-supported for the other tool (which is still free, but please consider supporting the hard work that goes into it). If I want realistic fantasy with the best characters, GURPS is my game of choice.

Do I need to play with the 5E math, or is B/X and First Edition math superior? I did the numbers, 5E does not maintain character power as well as B/X or First Edition. 5E has a lot of bells and whistles designed to distract you as your character grows weaker in power as they level, and in that regard, it is like any MMO, but far more challenging to jump in and play.

Where ToV gives you about six "special abilities" after character creation, typically A5E gives you a dozen. This makes A5E characters very heavy, and character creation is slow going. I prefer A5E's final characters to ToV's, and the latter feels like a simplified version of this game. Then again, if I am going to take 90 minutes to create a 5E character, I will play GURPS, spend the same amount of time, and have exactly the character I want with better depth and options.

A5E has some of the best exploration mechanics ever developed for 5E. Resting is not easy. Rangers are needed. Rugged terrain can kill you. Survival is important. Supplies are critical. The hardcore 5E gamers from 2014 want their game back, and they've got it here. This was back before 5E became a player empowerment circus and everyone got soft, in the pre-Tasha's days, where serious gamers could still play 5E.

If I ever return to 5E, it will likely be with A5E. Despite the fight between Goodman and EN World, A5E is a good game. It is wrong to attribute "guilt by association" to anyone, and doing so to A5E is equally unjust.

ToV feels too cartoonish, like modern D&D, with goofy characters and their clown-like appearances. Death means nothing. Resting is far too permissive. ToV also makes minor improvements to the system, and the high level of subclass compatibility comes at the cost of the core game not being significantly better than 2014 5E. The power distribution and fixes in ToV are the real improvements, even surpassing those of 2024 D&D.

A5E rebuilds everything, sacrificing subclass compatibility for improving every pillar of the game. The martial classes and fighting styles surpass 2014, 2024, and ToV. You can find rare and unique spells. Everything is cool.

Level Up A5E is 2014 D&D 5E in a bottle, a game from that era before the hardcore players walked away. This was from that time when people still took 5E seriously, and it wasn't this constant stream of identity marketing, the overused Baldur's Gate 3 GMNPC characters, overpowered classes, designed for a failed VTT, zero-risk gameplay, and games that lacked challenge and got boring the higher level you reached. There was a moment when old-school players still played 5E, and A5E was created for them.

By the time Tasha's came around, we got Strixhaven, Spelljammer, and a whole mess of missteps; very few could take D&D 5E seriously. D&D slowly became a joke, a parody of the genre and itself. People went to Shadowdark and the OSR, and after the OGL, other games entirely.

Pathfinder 2 and ToV captured the alternative 5E market. Shadowdark took the rest. Many have left 5E entirely, sick of the entire mess the market has become.

This left A5E to sit there, still supported, still a good version of 5E, but seemingly forgotten.

Retrospective: Autoduel Champions

I seriously don't know if many people remember this one. I need to set this one up historically.

Champions was still in the multiple softcover books, pre 3rd Edition as I remember (I could be wrong, my Champions knowledge that far back is sketchy). So this was the superhero game of the time.

Car Wars was still the three plastic pocket boxes of Car Wars, Sunday Drivers, and Truck Stop. Deluxe Car Wars has not been released.

Abd the year was 1983. Thriller. The US invasion of Grenada. SDI. Return of the Jedi. McNuggets. Minivans. The release of the Famicom/NES in Japan (US was 1985). The last big year for the Atari 2600.

So the two companies making Champions and Car Wars get together and produce a book that does three things:

1. Add Car Wars to Champions
2. Add Helicopter Rules to Car Wars
3. Add Superpowers to Car Wars

I know...what do helicopters have to do with this? I guess if superheroes fly, then Car Wars needs to fly. Let us break down each rules section and how it worked, and how we used it in our games. Strap yourself in.

Champions: Car Wars

This section created rules for Car Wars cars and combat inside the Champions game. All the movement was done on hex grids, the damage scales adjusted, and the weapon stats converted over to the Champions scale. This was our first look at Hero system, and a lot of this was so alien and strange to us we ignored it until we started playing Champions years later.

One notable change from Car Wars in this section was the use of non-ablative armor on the cars, versus Car Wars' ablative armor. This concept would later show up in the Car Wars supplement Deathtrack as the metal armor rules.

These rules were surprisingly Max Max meets 007, and I could see a lot of Champions players scream with delight at being able to finally have armed and armored cars in their games. This must have been a huge thing for Champions players at the time, I mean, those still not playing Car Wars all weekend at the hobby store. Everyone played Car Wars in our neighborhood. We played D&D and the number one question during the game was, "When are we playing Car Wars?"

Car Wars: Helicopters

This section introduced totally broken helicopters into Car Wars, and these were later cleaned up in Deluxe Car Wars. The weight allowances on these flying beasts was so high you could stack hundreds of points of armor on them, and your only option for fighting these flying takes was to shoot the flimsy rotors off and watch the armored flying safes fall to the ground, take hundreds of points of damage in a collision with the ground, and watch the passengers crawl out unscathed because the damage from plummeting thousands of feet from the sky did not penetrate the insides.

We never really designed out choppers that way. We could, but they weren't fun. We stuck to faster, lighter armored and armed choppers that mirrored car designs - which we in fact a lot more deadly because of their acceleration and mobility on the battlefield. A chopper that can fly and has double or triple the acceleration of a ground vehicle gives you a whole lot more options when fighting in an urban environment. I am just going to hover low over this tall building where you can't see me, wait until you take a course of action, and circle around to your weak spot at my leisure.

Very few arena cars had decent top armor when this came out, and even fewer could shoot straight up (or a map with a slant range long enough) so it made chopper versus car battles like turkey shoots unless you custom designed cars to fight choppers.

Still, we thought these rules enough were cool to use in our games, and we had a lot of fun with these massive sky behemoths. When Deluxe Car Wars came out, our massive week-long 100 car arena and helicopter battles were all but over, so we never really got to enjoy the revised helicopter rules in DCW.

Car Wars: Superpowers

Now I owe an article on this one, but we used the original Traveller RPG as our rules for our Car Wars RPG. The skill ratings were extremely similar. Both systems were 2d6 roll-high. The format for characters means we could quickly roll them up, spend the 30 starting skill points in Car Wars, and have a character quick - or hundreds of them.

This superpowers system in Autoduel Champions was our superpower system for years, at least until Marvel Super Heroes came out. This worked very well, scaled nicely with the Car Wars rules, and gave us these cool Traveller superpowers that worked very well with our houseruled system. You could rate various superheroes easily, give them armor that defended against the types of weapons they could buy flight, energy blasts, super speed, running, stretchy limbs, and other powers with a quick and easy system that fit well within our Car Wars and Traveller framework.

When Marvel Super Heroes came along, Car Wars and Traveller fell by the wayside, and the superheroes (sadly) took over our games. At least in Car Wars with superheroes, there are equalizers against the massive powers of superheroes and villains. Your combat car could even the odds, and the average person could fight a superhero. Heck, they could be a superhero with a car like that and great skills.

The End of an Era

And then that era was over as the Marvel and DC pen-and-paper games came in, blew out the power level of our games with cosmic energies, and all of a sudden the average person was a nobody again.

There was no great equalizer.

Superheroes were again, the "chosen ones."

Of all the things I don't like about the modern superhero movie and myth, it is this denial of the power of the average person in comparison to the hero on the screen. We wait for superheroes and strong figures to come and save us from ourselves. Back when I went to college, we were taught the power of collective action. If a manufacturer was selling weapons to oppressive regimes, and this company also made consumer goods - like refrigerators - than our community agreed to not buy those consumer goods. We recycled because we knew if millions of us did, it would make an impact. We divested in countries with horrible human rights abuses. If enough of us did together and all as one, we would make a difference.

We were all superheroes back then.

Today, I feel we have been trained well by Hollywood to simply wait for the next savior. Let's not individually make a difference in anything, we can just have some "figurehead leader" do it for us. If someone is worried about carbon footprint, for example, do they shop that way? Do they demand Amazon give them information on a product's carbon footprint and shop for lower alternatives? Do they live that way and make informed choices? Do they make a small difference in their lives and urge others to do the same?

Nah, let's just wait for someone or some slogan that makes us feel good about ourselves. Even if the plan does not work or the person will never accomplish the goal let's fight for it like it is the end of the world. The superhero. In essence, I feel the superhero myth has become mass-market collectivism, a false corporatized feeling of doing good sold to us like junk food. You see this in the Marvel and DC movies, those heroes never inspire the people of those worlds to help save themselves, nor could the people of those worlds ever hope to.

Champions Allows Talented Normals

This is likely due to Champions allowing normal people some chance against superheroes. There is this model in the Hero System where everyone uses the same character generation rules, so theoretically a highly-trained super agent could equal the power of a superhero. They wouldn't have all the damage resistances, powers, and immunities - but at least those points could be put to work in some way that could best a hero's powers with skills, abilities, and training.

And Autoduel Champions leveled the playing field further. Combat cars out of Car Wars could help even the odds against those with extraordinary powers. With the Marvel Super Heroes and DC Heroes games, I get the feeling normal people and even highly trained agents are still inferior to heroes with powers. This power level only seems to get worse as time goes on and the superheroes get stronger and stronger.

There is an article waiting here, as in Champions feels more grounded in power level, character design, and scope. This game also does not have the power of brand names, so your heroes are the most important in the world instead of the trademarked ones.

Blinded by the Marquee Lights

Looking back and seeing the organic system we came up with, and how equal that made each side, versus the later official games, makes me wonder if we didn't make a mistake in abandoning what we had back then. Both the Marvel Super Heroes and DC Heroes games felt like they intentionally weakened the balance between the average person and superheroes. If you played an average person, or even your own creation, you were a nobody compared to Batman or Wolverine.

And our Car Wars superhero game became more of a super-heroic soap opera past that point as we switched to those systems, and the grim and gritty life on the street, and the average person along with it, faded from importance. The balance was gone. There was no equal to these modern gods.

And after that we gave up on our characters and played with the copyrighted IP characters of Marvel and DC. The superheroes each year only got more and more powerful, both in powers and in our imaginations. Like a Lovecraftian monster, our humanity and ability to affect change was crushed by the people in the spandex tights.

Looking back at this game, as broken and as of an era as it was, makes me wonder what we lost when we fell in love with the hype. I get this feeling our game, our campaign, and the world in a larger sense.

Some interesting feelings today for a book very few likely remember.

Retrospective: Gangbusters 3rd Edition

Gangbusters is one of my favorite systems that I rarely played as a kid. I love the era, the genre, the cops and robbers theme, the private eyes, the violent Noir setting, and the artwork. We rediscovered this game and it still shined through with its ease of play, simplicity, and pure pick-up-and-play value.

No cell phones. No TV. No computers. No Internet. You wanted to do a records search? Have your secretary go down to city hall, the newspaper office, or the library. You read the newspaper and listened to the radio, and no, there wasn't 24-7 news either. Air travel? Very, very limited and not commercialized. You took a boat to Europe or Asia.

The 1920s and 1930s Noir era is as close as we will get to a fantasy setting for the modern gaming. This is still all about your name, who you are, and your reputation with others. Legends, like Elliot Ness, can still exist. A city can live in fear of a criminal gang, and it will take a crack team of a few incorruptible G-Men to save the day. This is a fantasy setting with guns and cars.

When we did revisit this later and play the game, it was still as wild and violent as we left it. This almost played out like a Batman movie with the criminals getting more and more outrageous with their plots and schemes, and the good guys of law enforcement fighting a daily war against pure criminal anarchy. And our love of radio shows came through in these games, with some players adopting the shadowy identities of masked vigilantes to fight the rising tide of lawlessness. Players mimicked The Shadow, the Green Hornet, and other crime fighters, modified their Packard Sedans to become armed crime fighting vehicles, and waged shadowy wars on the streets as the gangsters increasingly became frustrated with their shipments of alcohol getting blown up by the good guys.

Booze is the Vice

And booze was the vice of this game, so it was a more innocent time and you had this "screw the rich" theme going on. This wasn't crack cocaine or human smuggling or some dark crime in the corner of the Internet with a tragic human and societal cost. This was a sort of innocent vice being cooked up and smuggled in to feed the excesses of the rich who ignored the law, and the poor who had to suffer and live by different rules.

The gangsters were working as violent proxies for the rich flouting the law, and the good guys were the average working folk trying to enforce the law equally for all. So the more booze you busted, the more the rich suffered, and you chalked up another victory for the working class and equal treatment for all. There still was this notion of "right is right" based on working-class principles and the common person in this genre.

Criminals were either tools of the rich serving a need for contraband, or using death and violence to get rich and join that club. When corrupt, law enforcement was a tool used to protect the rich. At its ideal and most chivalrous state, law enforcement was the guardian of the working class and its "what is fair is fair" values - and in essence anti-wealth. The press played into this as well, exposing corruption and taking down the scions of power and influence through public outrage.

Contrast that above paragraph with today's world. If you go into this game with "today's assumptions" about wealth and power you may not see some of the core conflicts in the game. I feel you do have to go back to your traditional fantasy tropes about good and evil, fairness and wealth, and frame the conflicts in this game against a simpler time.

Figures like Al Capone were the "dark wizard" corrupting all which they touch and the rising tide of darkness threatened to overturn a just and fair kingdom of light.

Make the Era Yours

That said, the era was one of massive racial and gender inequality, but you could make this pretty color and gender-blind and let everyone live out their fantasies in this era. Again, this is fantasy, and if players were uncomfortable with an exact historical recreation of the time, just ignore history and make the game your own. Any game set in in the pre 2000's modern era is going to have this issue, and how I deal with this is to know my players and deliver the fantasy they want to experience.

We are here to have fun.

I know it is in vogue today to say a game is a reflection of a past we should forget, but in our young minds at the time, that past never existed. The game, as written, is mostly color and gender-blind with fun and opportunity for all. If you did a modern version of this? Tweak the art, add some iconic female characters, and say this is how things are in the game and this world. Warhammer FRP did this with the art direction of the new game and I feel this is a good way to include more players in the fun.

I can't sit at a table and tell a player she can't be a female Elliot Ness, Sam Spade, or Al Capone, or a player with a skin tone that wasn't reflected in the time they couldn't be that either. Are you serious? I would be a dick GM to pull that crap. To me, those character archetypes sound incredibly fun and I want them at my table.

Otherwise what you are doing is transposing the biases on the past onto the players of today. If your group is okay with a period-accurate world and wants to experience the time, sure, explore that, but the core of this game is pulp, fast action, cops and robbers gangster shootouts and deep-shadowed Noir fun. Everyone should be able to see themselves in that world and enjoy being a part of the fun.

Fast Characters

The TSR d100 systems were incredibly fast to create characters for, and Gangbusters is no exception. These games simplified play by having most of the common checks covered by ability scores.

Muscle, Agility, and Observation were the game's three primary ability scores, rolled on a weighted d100 scale. These were checked directly for combat and all actions, and Agility covered gun combat and melee to-hits. We always ruled it was Muscle for melee to-hits as a houserule to keep agility from being so important, and to keep the "muscle is for feats of strength" theme going.

Presence was a charisma like score rolled on a weighted d10. For all intents and purposes, this was just like a d100 score divided by ten, and the unique range was more of a reaction-roll thing to keep this score unique and apart from the others.

Luck was a d100 roll divided by two. This was an innovative score and it answered a lot of questions in the narrative simply and easily. Did the nearby farm have a working phone? Luck check. Was there a an empty taxi waiting outside the newspaper office? Luck check. Did the killer leave an important clue at the scene of a crime? Luck check. Did the warehouse have guards posted tonight? Luck check. This score did more work during our games for narrative fill-in moments than I can ever count. Top Secret and Star Frontiers were jealous of this ability score, and it just sped up play and defined options incredibly.

Hit Points, Driving, and Punching were derived scores - and Driving was the only derived score that was checked against.

There were skills in the game, but they were more like generic "areas of expertise" like fingerprinting or art forgery. The rules for creating a character could fit on one page of the book, but they use two here to provide examples. Even if you had those "skills" you would use your ability scores to make rolls in them. Spot an art forgery? Have the skill and roll Observation. What mattered were ability scores, not formulas, and not skill levels and tertiary chances of success. Contrast this with Rolemaster's pages long lists of skills and formulas for calculating the success chance of each one. How much easier could that game be if a skill was a simple "unlock" for performing tasks and your ability scores (and possibly a level) controlled chance of success?

Story > Character

A lot of games today state that, "Our rules are more important than your character." When you give a character simple stats and leave the rest up to the player you empower the player a great deal. The "game" isn't figuring out the complicated puzzle the game designers left for you in "optimizing your build" and "min-maxing" for the highest chance of success and damage output. Honestly, this is what Pathfinder and D&D 3.5x felt like for us, figuring out the best build in the complicated mess the game designers created. And the rules needed to be long-winded and complicated to conceal the best strategies.

With a B/X style of character creation, where as little of the game is as hidden as possible, you get a more solid player to gamemaster contract. I am not some "keeper of the secret tome" of "the best way of playing" - I am here as the storyteller, and the players are here as participants. The rules are the same for everybody. Your ability scores do most of the work for you. The game is more about your decisions in the story than your decisions in the rules.

Do I like diving through complicated rules systems and figuring out how they work? Yes, a part of me has been doing that for 40 years playing these games. I enjoy depth, but I also enjoy the game getting out of the way of the story. But a huge failure of games promising depth is they always end up broken and needing a new edition to fix things all over again. Until the next edition.

When a game goes out of print and unsupported, then the profit cycle stops. The community can come in and clone it and make it a timeless classic. This is where we are with B/X. I really hope the TSR d100 games follow suite, since there are some timeless classics here.

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.