What's the difference between d20 Modern and Spycraft?

I've never played spycraft, but based on the description in Wikipedia, it looks like the differences are largely cosmetic.

Different skills, Vitality instead of HP, that kind of thing.

A cursory glance at forum threads comparing the two seems to agree with you.

The fact that Spycraft has Wealth makes me very sad.

It's arguments about stuff like which system's feats are cooler or more realistic.

Sounds about right, based on the descriptions I'm seeing.

Campaign Qualities looks like a weird and different thing, but I don't know how it actually affects play.

My only experience with either system is with the SG-1 iteration of Spycraft.

It seemed chosen more for its being OGL than being an actual good fit for the franchise material.

Mhmm.

Well, I can say from experience that as long as you burn the Wealth system to the ground and salt the earth where it lies, a low-level D20 Modern game works reasonably well for a modern espionage game.

It starts creaking at the seams around level 8, and by 12 there's flaming pieces everywhere.

Well, Spycraft failed utterly to capture much of what makes SG-1 interesting.

Namely--character-driven moral dilemmas.

I don't think anything in the OGL family is going to give you good systemic support for that. :)

Nope.

And in this case, the most time and mental effort a player would spend on mechanics was in choosing gear for a mission.

While that might make some sense for a more Bondian spycraft game, I don't think that's a real focus of SG-1.

If what I vaguely remember about the show is correct.

Yeeeeah.

It was my first exposure to an RPG based on a franchise I was familiar with, and so it was the first time I got smacked in the face with the fact that a system could utterly fail to support its own goals.

Ouch.

The rulebook even dedicated several pages to explaining why Spycraft --and particularly the Wounds/Vitality mechanic-- was a good fit for the SG-1 experience.

lol

yeah that was quite unfair

I really thought we were gonna have fun with that campaign

I can get why vitality is a good thing for pretty much every TV or movie setting, because of the way most media treats injury, but there's more to it than that.

Thing is--Vitality sounds like a good fit, but it really isn't.

What doesn't work in this case?

Because attacks don't go through Vitality to hit wounds at dramatic moments: they go through because one side has firepower superior to the enemy's defences, or because the dice rolled a critical, or something similar.

Ah, I see.

The ability of a TV/film character to emerge from hails of bullets unscathed, but succumb to a single well-placed blow to the head, is the result of narrative timing.

It's got nothing to do with gear superiority or random chance, and in fact attaching it to those things flies directly in the face of what it's actually about.

yeah,.. when a main character is supposed to be being bad ass, no one is gonna hit them because it is WRITTEN that way

in a game based on stats and dice rolls, its gonna be a lot more random anyway

Do you know of a system that mechanizes that kind of narrative timing in a satisfying way?

Cthulhu Dark's insanity escalation mechanic comes to mind.

The Fate point economy pushes success to rise from failure and places its timing consciously in the hands of the group.

Pilgrims of the Flying Temple has a weird sense of narrative pressure that I have yet to understand fully.

So broadly, they tie success and failure to timing (for some definition of timing, which can be group-tuned), and tune the timing to work with the game being played.

Yeah.

Different stories have different kinds of timing conventions.

Are the damage numbers for different guns very different in Spycraft?

Yes.

Ah. I think that might be a big part of the problem.

In Modern, damage numbers are similar enough (broadly speaking) that gear superiority on that level isn't really a thing in most games.

Fate is designed for stories that have regular up-and-down tension/resolution cycles which combine to escalate toward a major confrontation, the resolution of which usually produces new problems to re-start the cyle; Pilgrims is designed to slowly escalate toward a chaotic denouement in which everything is resolved neatly.

Like, pistols do a die type less damage than rifles, but it only ends up being a point or two of damage per shot difference.

I think the other problem is that OGL combat pacing in general is meant to be intentionally swingy. The kind of story that OGL games model best is the story where sometimes the heroes totally wreck their enemies because they were lucky, and sometimes a clear victory becomes a rout based on a poorly aimed shot.

[picks up a table from the book]

So, single-shot mode pistols. 1d10+1, 1d12, 3d4+1, 3d6+1, 2d4.

And then we look at the main alien weapon... 6d6.

In Spycraft?

Jesus christ, that's insane.

In Modern, pistols are all 2d4 to 2d8.

The trade-off is that you get a massive penalty to hit with the alien weapon.

The 2d4s are basically Derringers, and the 2d8 is a revolver. The rest are 2d6.

How massive? -4?

Well, first off you get a -2 to initiative.

Rifles are 2d8 to 2d12. The 2d12 is a 50 cal sniper, the 2d10s are mostly sniper rifles and shotguns, and everything else is a 2d8.

Then you get a -2 to attack with it.

So even a fight between pistols and rifles is pretty even.

And if you don't have the right feat, a -4 on top of that.

-6 to attack for X2 or 3 damage is a trivial tradeoff to make in most circumstances.

Critical error on 1 or 2, critical hit on 18, 19, and 20.

And presumably the aliens have the feat, so they're taking a tiny penalty for a crazy amount of damage.

Those numbers make my design sense cry.

Oh, and you need a Str of 12 or the recoil makes it basically unusable.

Also, armour piercing.

Mulph.

Let's see... rifles to compare...

What level were you playing at?

We started at level 1 and never got past the first session.

Assault rifle damage: 4d4, 3d6, 3d6+1.

Sniper rifles are 2d12+2 and 1d8+2.

Everything that you're describing makes me really sad.

I would be willing to bet that the combat systems in Spycraft are really poorly designed in general, based on those numbers.

It's almost like someone tried to make D20 combat as deadly and sudden as GURPS.

And using Vitality in a system where normal weapons get 3 dice of damage is asking for trouble.

Pick up a shotgun and run around with 5d6 or 6d4!

Seriously?

Yeah, but you take a -1 to attack if your Str is under 25 (23 if you use both hands).

Well, if you were ever interested in trying OGL in a modern espionage game, it sounds like D20 Modern is way better than Spycraft, as far as making a good narrative is concerned.

My biggest problem, really, was that this whole thing is pointless for an SG-1 game.

This isn't where the mechanics should group for that franchise.

Mm.

Advocating for Modern makes me feel dirty. :P

You shouldn't need to know what it means that the team's most common weapon has the qualities AP, BP, RG, single-shot, M burst, or strafe mode IN day/night sight.

That's way more than the show ever cared about its P90s.

In all the Modern games I played, the most I needed to know about my gun was its range and damage. Occasionally its magazine size, but that rarely mattered.

And there wasn't much 'picking the right equipment', because guns are basically all the same, and there isn't much in the way of stats for other equipment.

[sigh] And yet, I still have an SG-1 campaign I really want to run. Maybe in Fate...

Anyway, must go re-configure our Internet hardware. The brownout from the storm seems to have reset it.

Good luck!

Success!

Just hope the power stays on...

@doppelgreener Babbage was described as "the best shaved man in Europe."

Good afternoon!

Evenin'.

What's new?

L5R thoughts and bug fixing both going on, and suddenly only one week left till LRP, so I procrastinate here, I guess.

We're good for that.

Indeed, that's why!

I'm going through various RPGs and trying to winnow down what I should focus on with my old college buddies when I go visit them in a couple weeks.

At some point, I'll have to do something like that. But for the moment I'm technically supposed to write a PhD within the next few months…

We played 3.5 almost exclusively--where "almost" means "one player had previously run a WoD campaign nobody else in my group was part of, and also there was an abortive d20 Modern Star Wars game."

How did you play 3.5? Did you throw out much stuff from it, or did you play it by the book?

Pretty much by the book for combat, which led to a lot of frustration as we struggled to understand how system mastery would let us all stay in the same power brackets.

Outside of combat, we'd often throw the rules out--but not consciously, we'd just get so excited doing free-form RP and then we'd feel kinda bad when we remembered that there were rules for that stuff we were ignoring.

I spent about five years trying to bend D&D 3.5 into a shape that better fit the sort of gameplay experience I and my players desired. We had fun, but it was work.

I don't remember how I got from Midgard to other RPGs…

In particular to those better suited to my play style.

For me, we moved to 4e after the balance problems in 3.5 became too much to handle. That experience taught me that the bigger problems I was facing were inherent to the D&D ethos, not any particular mechanical iteration of it.

Meanwhile, my players toyed with systems like Dogs in the Vineyard and All Flesh Must Be Eaten for a session or two every once in a blue moon, so we slowly opened up to other systems as a viable route to take.

Then we started reading the Dresden Files books, I found the franchise RPG, I found the RPG Stack Exchange, and whooosh.

I think I avoided 4th completely. I haven't played much of the others either. At some point about three years ago I had a regular group that played something different every Sunday.

My original college group hated 4e for all the "people who have obviously never actually given it a chance" reasons, and I bought into it for many years.

When we finally tried 4e, it was with a totally different group, several years later, after we'd wrung all the enjoyment we could out of 3.5 and all agreed we needed a change.

@Arrowfar Hi!

I think I went from Midgard, which has some aspects of trying to model a reasonable and interesting world, to try more “realistic” systems (Hârnmaster, and reading Riddle of Steel and Burning Wheel), and then that showed me that there are systems better and worse suited to my tastes.

Which is now actually on the opposite side…

Hi!

Ah, yeah. Let me dig that link up...

meta.stackexchange.com/a/5187/244929

No problem.

So, I'm pretty sure that my old college 3.5 players have been basically in the 3.5/Pathfinder ethos for the... eight years... since I left.

Trying to think what's best to work with 'em. They were awesome RPers, but very mechanically minded as well--very much the sort of mindset that question earlier this week called "mechanics as metaphyics."

Roll For Shoes may be the best palette cleanser.

I also want to show one friend games that he can use with his kids--Pilgrims of the Flying Temple, Princes' Kingdom, Happy Birthday Robot...

Then, of course I want to show them Fate. And Cthulhu Dark would be fun, and Lady Blackbird...

@BESW How is your Friendship is Magic project going?

It's on the back burner.

I've got almost enough to playtest, but there's an actual paying game design job that I need to get playtested first.

I do really not play that mechanically-minded, so I don't really know the cross points there, but I have to think of how eg. Diaspora contains some “minigames” for various types of combat, and one thing I was thinking about testing if I ever had a more-DnD-lot was having a look at Crane's Torchbearer.

From which I have only read blurbs and such like, but it sounded like it had a lot of well-thought-out mechanical minigames tying seriously into each other.

I may have to look at that some time.

I generally prefer my systems with fewer conditional rules rather than more, but it's good to have a lot under my belt.

So do I, but what I read from Torchbearer I might give it a try at some point anyway.

@BESW Can you say what about?

@Anaphory It's a Fate hack for a video-game-inspired intellectual property.

It's kinda like Save Game, but for a genre other than console nostalgia.

Nice.

Mostly I'm just freaking out because I've never done a playtest sort of thing before.

We've got good ideas, it's the implementation process that eludes me.

If I remember correctly, Vincent Baker's blog lumpley.com contains some good stuff on playtesting, but it may be buried deeply in old posts.

I'll see if I can wade through that some time, thanks.

@BESW I found a very playtesting-critical guest post on there – lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/565 – and some implicit stuff how he does playtesting – like lumpley.com/index.php/anyway/thread/783 –, but it seems like I misremembered seeing a big post on playtesting by him, it's more a lot of puzzle pieces.

(The article behind the first link may be less helpful than the discussion below it.)

Anydice is great, until you ask it to do something it doesn't want to do

@Arrowfar There's no built-in formatting for it, so you have to build it from pieces. You can put the number/mark inside <sup></sup> in the text, then at the bottom do the same for the note itself. If you want a nice hanging indent though, you have to put the number outside the <sup> tags, which leaves the number a larger point size and makes the alignment off. Tradeoffs. Sometimes a horizontal rule before the footnotes looks good, sometimes not.

Man, Fate is hard to wrap my brain around.

I'm still being surprised by it after more than two years of using it as my primary system.

agreed @DuckTapeAl -- it's surprisingly hard, even in its slimmed-down form

I'd say, especially in its slimmed-down form.

@SevenSidedDie Do you want to add the toad point? My brain is too fuzzy right now to write stuff. (As evidenced by the fact that it took me 2 minutes to write this.)

Streamlining Fate emphasises the ways it's unlike "traditional" RPGs and strips away a lot of its more familiar trappings. And the Accelerated book is also devoid of the game-goal discussions that make iterations like Core and ARRPG easier to digest.

Toad Point would be a good name for a band.

I think Fate's saving grace is that it still works quite well if we don't understand it. The system is very forgiving of just about everything so long as the group using it is collaborating to maximise their fun.

Last session I accidentally jumped the gun and took us into a conflict instead of a contest.

@BESW -- indeed!

But we still greatly enjoyed the conflict.

It looks like it's Fate Core that I'm reading. The thing that keeps messing with me is how I'm used to a precisely-specced system like 3.5, and it's hard for me to figure out what a reasonable Create an Aspect can do.

This is for a Harry Potter game, where being able to apply the Disarmed aspect basically removes someone from a fight.

Then that's your answer: Create an Advantage shouldn't, by itself, remove someone's ability to express agency in a conflict.

It's a narrative unit: Create an Advantage represents a shift in the amount of agency the character/player can exert on the environment through the chunk storytelling that particular aspect embodies. It's the Attack action which represents the character/player actually attempting to use that leverage in order to remove another fractal's agency altogether.

@Miniman Same, actually! So I'm not sure how to phrase it now either. But it'll keep.

So... perhaps you should re-evalutate whether expelliarmus really does take a character out of the conflict. They can scramble for their wand, or wrestle someone else's wand away, or wade in with their fists...

@SevenSidedDie Cool. I'm still not sure about that question, but I suppose I did have to modify my answer slightly, so I'll trust your judgement.

Anyway, must dash. Got a class to teach. ttfn

@BESW -- yeah

Well, it wouldn't be a Taken Out per se; you'd definitely still be able to do non-wand things. My concern is that the first and best action that you can take in a magical fight is removing the other guy's wand, and that that action can be taken with a single successful roll.

i feel we could riff a Windows Is Shutting Down style poem off this title about murderhoboism

afters all what are good of friends

@doppelgreener Well, not entirely. The "becomes hostile afterwards" makes it fundamentally a murderhobo-ish spell.

The real question here is "What good are friends who become enemies after 1 minute?"

Also, does that poem bother anyone else? "Windows is shutting down" is correct grammar.

@Miniman -- is the poem trying to say that that line is grammatically inkorrekt?

@Shalvenay Poetry isn't my strong point, but it certainly seems that way: clivejames.com/poetry/james/windows

It's correct grammar if you're taking "Windows" to be a singular thing, but since the word "Windows" is also the plural form of the word "Window", it's possible to see it as poor grammar, since you're using "is" with a plural word, rather than "are".

Given that all the poor grammar in that poem is improper use of pluralization, I think that's what they were getting at.

@DuckTapeAl -- heheh.

and "Windows" as in "Microsoft Windows" is a rather singular entity

@Miniman the riff is off the title alone, context aside

@Miniman ^ which is exactly what the poem's about. taken out of context the "Windows is shutting down" message is an incredibly strange sentence.