Was there a reason why superspy games never really took off? I mean, everyone wants to be James Bond, right?
>>94780509Stealth sucks
>>94780509They work better as one-person campaigns. A team like in Mission Impossible is extremely difficult to GM or even play in.That being said you can do an everyone is John game where a group all play a single agent and use their collective wits to get them through something.
>>94780534There's probably a great adventure somewhere for a group of 00 agents coming together to pull off an impossible mission.
Cyberpunk games tend to do similar things but with more fantastic gadgets.
Also being set in (practically) the real world eliminates a lot of worldbuilding which both attracts GMs and sells splatbooks.
>>94780509Very few gamers have the charisma to pull off acting James Bond at the table.
Most spy work is solo, except the planning meetings.Conceptually it mite b cool to do a team spy heist game where everyone plans together, then all the execution is solo sessions with NPCs, until the thrilling climax raid/heist/assassination, but practically, not so fun.I suppose you could run it as 007 and his sidekick(s) do a prep mission, then 008 and his aids (played by 007 and 009's playeers), then 009 with his support (!007 and !008) etc.I'm somewhat fond of games like nWoD and Better Angels where other players play the separate parts of 'your' character, to get the whole table actively involved in most of the scenes.
>>94780509>Was there a reason why superspy games never really took off? I mean, everyone wants to be James Bond, right?Because superspy games require an entire group of gamers to be able to plan and execute solutions that sometimes will not require any violence. Other settings always allow violence as a resolution to conflict, and it's often the preferred solution.TL;DR you can't be a murderhobo (as often) in superspy settings.
Whodunit type games are maybe the closest popular examples? Cluso,
>>94780509... do you have any source or set of data to back up your claim, or you are just bored and want to sir up some shit to pass time?
>>94781279Just to be spiteful to your non-argument: daily reminder BitD and thus FitD exists and they are all about it. It's done in the dumbest and worst way possible, but it exists and is very popular.
>>94780509TSR made Top Secret and James Bond (or maybe that was SPI)Heroes had lots of spy material. It all came apart when 90s games swung hard into fantasy, even more than 80s games becuase urban fantasy trumps action-movie logic.absorbed the action-movie logic.
>>94781699>It's done in the dumbest and worst way possible, but it exists and is very popular.The story of our hobby.
>>94780509I loathe the "spy" subgenre of film and television almost entirely.
>>94782028thank you for sharing anon
>>94780894>climax raidSo the spies sneak up on the villains while they're having sex to steal their orgasms? Why? Are the orgasms in themselves valuable, or is it purely to frustrate them? Leverage in negotiations ("withdraw your missiles from buffer country X or you'll never nut again")?
You know, the superspy genre really does feel like it's underutilized. However action hero logic is built tacitly into every other genre, and it would take a lot of work on the "spy" part of "superspy" to make it feel sufficiently differentiated and cool in comparison to a lot of similar genres (i.e. urban fantasy, pulp action, Eberron style fantasy etc).
>>94780509
>>94780509Problem is like >>94780534The classic super spy examples are a singular agent with a support staff assisting them. The trouble is, most people want to play the guy doing things and not the guy assisting from his couch at home. With the tacit problems of stealth and subterfuge, where dumbass actions can screw you over magnitudes more than other forms of play, it becomes a struggle to have a party on-the-ball enough to not screw themselves out of the subtle stuff quickly. This is especially magnified with a spy team, where a pack of disparately operating spies can screw each other over entirely incidentally. And while big scary cockups are a part of the genre, most people aren't cool with their characters being threatened with death because Paul fumbled the ball an hour ago. But also like >>94780534 said, you could do some kind of single character, multiple player game to emulate the super badass who's wit is the sum of 3-5 amused nerds.
>>94782198Yeah, now you know that not everyone wants to be James Bond.
Reading through the thread, I wonder if perhaps the opposite may have some appeal. The players as a group of villains having to coordinate their plan and protect their base while the GM plays the superspy looking to infil their operation.
>>94783271Ever read Reverse Dungeon?
>>94783271>effectively omniscient player runs the infiltratorThat doesn't sound practical.
>>94783036noted, thank you
>>94783316I have not! Feel free to elaborate.>>94783373I mean a shitty DM is gonna be a nightmare for this, obviously. But I'm less thinking about "everyone bad together against the DMPC" and more "What if 007 was the big bad?" Shouldn't be any weirder than a fallen hero antag in a fantasy campaign or a megacorp assassin antag in a cyberpunk/shadowrun game.
>>94780534>on-person campaignsNah. If you don't want to do Mission Impossible then the other option is that you're all rival spies for nominally friendly agencies. Think 007 and Felix Leiter after the same objective, but you're trying to get there first. Think party of frenemies all trying to get to their objective without blowing their cover.
>>94783496>I have not! Feel free to elaborate.It's a 2E AD&D module where the PCs are the dungeon inhabitants trying to fight off an incursion of adventurers
>>94783584Okay I definitely need to check that out, then. Thanks for the rec!
>>94783603Might also be able to farm some ideas from My Life With Master, which is a weird game about playing the Igor archetype who's subservient to a villain.
>>94783610Onto the reading list it goes
>>94783496Then the players would be purely reactive. Worse they're forced to react to something their characters shouldn't know anything about at first because secrecy is the whole fucking point.
>>94780509Has anyone actually played a secret agent/spy game? If so, what system and how did it go?
>>94783923Yes, a few.>Spycraft 1e (good ideas, but core game is borked)>ConspiracyX (modified) (worked fine, combat quite deadly, more Bourne than Bond)>Open D6 (worked really well)It's a good genre, and I (like OP) don't see why it hasn't taken off more. Ditto GTA-style ultraviolent crime games.
>>94780509the bigger team, the worse stealthsome players cannot intosome GMs cannot intoit is boring eventually, saving world again this week?
>>94780509unfortunately, like others have said, you either do a solo or you run oceans eleven and have it be spies instead of a heist. and not many systems can meaningfully run the latter.
>>94784692As spy squads go, you could probably hack it as a duo. Three at absolute most. Anything beyond that is just too unwieldy to be reasonable for the narrative.
>>94784955>Three at absolute most.Again, there is precedent for this.
>>94784964
>>94784955The A-Team managed fine.
>>94785051The A-Team weren't spies so much as they were off-the-books mercenaries - shadowrunners, if you will.
>>94785058I mean, they were doing 80% of what superspies do, and I bet they could blow up a submarine base like JB does if the need arose.
>>94785128>they were doing 80% of what superspies dobut much much lower rent, dealing with nasty pet-hating property developers, not the megalomaniac with a super space laser
>>94785341AND they were dodging the government, too. That's a lot to juggle.
Always had the feeling JB was kinda "your dad's softcore power fantasy". Well, with varying degrees of tits and asses, but you get the idea.Nerds always had their version of this shit (if not really at the table, at least in comics and whatnot) and if you have your Conan ripoff with his bitches, muscle and booze you can't really replace him with other bitches, savoir faire and -possibly finer- booze. Nowdays superspies aren't really a thing even at the movies and the uber-englishman is a REALLY tired idea, so it would be even harder to do it.(funnily enough I think that at the same time the JB formula needed badly not to take itself too seriously and the fanservice goofiness is a foundation of its charm, but still)Also >>94780894 I suppose it can be done with spies, if pretty strange to the genre, but seems really hard with SUPERspies (who gets to be JB and who gets to be the sidekicks? What about the interpersonal bullshit that spies thrive on?).Night Black's Agents: Solo Ops might more or the less in the general direction, but I presume it's relatively down to earth.>>94781699Not even remotely a spy game, if pretty good.
>>94780534but things like blades in the dark exist and seem to work well enough, what's the different with a mission impossible mission and a heist with thieves, isn't it the same thing just with a different aesthetic
>>94785360Spies also have to dodge the government though.
Best spy game comming through
>>94781279Mercenaries, Spies and Private Eyes kinda tried to solve that already in the 1983 by trying to shove detective, macho commando and secret agent play styles into same ruleset. It is wonky but it also just works.
>>94787692UZI guy there is fucking kino.
Is there a reason why it matters they "never really took off"? I mean, everyone knows you can make whatever game you want, right?
>>94790466Your dedication to picking fights is not an admirable quality. This thread is discussing a specific genre of rpgs.
>>94785604Yeah I think you could just do it as effectively an Ars Magica clone if there was a cohesive vision of what it is cool to have superspies do. But, like, the Bond franchise has been shooting blanks since arguably Goldeneye and certainly since Casino Royale, with the recent movies showing that they really didn't know how to reinvent the franchise in a way that would make people care about it. -There isn't a credible Evil Foreign Country with elite counterintelligence agents that would require superspies to evade.- Evil Billionaires with Cutting-Edge Technology aren't particularly credible because (based on their social media) most modern billionaires come off as kind of pathetic outside of their business specialty and most modern Cutting-Edge Technology is some form of scam.- Evil Conspiracies in Our Own Government don't really work out. We have seen the "deep state" and it's just a bunch of petty spiteful bureaucrats working in large numbers, something more akin to a slime mold instead of something where you can cut off the head.You sort of have to do althist or parallel-universe shit for one of those things to not be true, which means you have to build investment in two things at once and sort of have to pull stakes out of your ass, and also means that, if the setting and cultures are made up anyway, you might as well run it as fantasy or capeshit to give yourself or your players more creative freedom. An archcriminals game that takes after Diabolik or whatever would give you more believable obstacles, but is also close enough to Shadowrun conceptually that you might as well just run that.
>>94790647This is basically admitting that propaganda and marketing wings of large organizations are doing their jobs properly and that's just kind of depressing, honestly. Literally all you have to do is say that Boeing assassins are having a beef with the Clinton assassins and both of them are getting chased down by Pinkertons because of a contract dispute and you've got your assassins and spies game, you don't have to dive particularly hard into the conspiracy well for it.
>>94790500>Your dedication to picking fights is not an admirable quality.Challenging the validity of a topic isn't "picking a fight", especially when it regards a low-barrier to modify medium such as TTRPGs.>This thread is discussing a specific genre of rpgs."Spies" isn't a genre. Spy movies are generally works in the action/suspense genre.That aside, if they never really took off, how could spy TTRPGs be considered their own genre?
>>94790884>Challenging the validity of a topicIf you're a mod and decide this thread is off-topic, then delete it.If you're not a mod, just close the thread.
>>94791294Why don't you want a discussion about the topic?
I played a few good games of Corporation back in the day, although it's in the same realm as Shadowrun, but the players openly work for a corp.
Why don't you want a discussion about the topic?
>>94792418>>94791312Why don't you?
>>94787037A superspy typically has some manner of support network behind them.
I never liked james bond or spy stuff much. Spying is sorta gay.
>>94793750>Espionage is gayI get it if you don't like fighting dirty, but still.
>>94793750>thread about a thing>"I dislike a thing"Thanks for your valuable input
>>94793869OP made an assertion, I said that assertion was false.
>>94792991I do, hence why I asked the reason it matters.
>>94780509>everyone wants to be James BondI'd rather be the hot scientistpreferably cyberpunk
>>94780509Spy-themed games are hard to pull off. That being said, I've had some great times playing Blades in the Dark where the whole heist was just planning, information gathering, and infiltration. If you roll well and use your abilities effectively, you get out of the situation with what you came in for and you aren't even caught.
>>94780509imho the easy way to go is an infiltration + assassination plotit's pretty fun in most settings
>>94780509Maybe you just never saw the games because you're a DnDaggot with no taste
>>94793869>make a claim>someone disproves claim>WELL I DIDN'T ASK YOU?!?!???You have the temperament of a woman.
>>94796668>it's pretty fun in most settingsWhat about in games?
>>94780509>>94796091>Not wanting to be the supervillainI'll show them!I'll show them all!
>>94797164He doesn't want a discussion, he wants people to mindlessly dick-stroke shitty spy media.
>>94797164You're certainly invested in whatever it is that's upset you.
>>94786777Blades in the Dark fucking sucks though and almost every heist devolves into combat anyway. Might as well save yourself the trouble and just play D&D for your fill of shit gameplay.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9FzgsF2T-s
>>94799070https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJwX1sfdv30
>>94804840https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSIbNbW8vBchttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNAxyyj9qkghttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENQsyHKj03I
>>94780509The campaign options are pretty limited. Assassination, sabotage, heist, maybe a kidnapping (which is a heist to steal a person) and that's basically it.
>>94809322The only kinds of rpg activities are Combats, Location Crawls, Heists, Raids, and Mysteries. Everything else is flavor, context, and framing. You've described a genre that can hit all of those, it's stupid to say "the campaign options are limited."
>>94780509There was a great superspy game. SpyCraft. A D20 game put out by AEG. The same guys also put out the Stargate SG-1 game. The game had different types of Spies. Soldier, Wheelman, Snoop, Faceman, Fixer, and Pointman. There are mechanics for gadget and vehicle alocations. It's not bad. In answer to your question though the main reason Spy games don't fare well is most games devolve into military opertion games.
>>94780509no, i dont want to be James Bond, I want to be Cpt. Price, John "Soap" McTavish, Ghost. Thats what I want to play as.but most of the time I end up being more like Forrest Gump in Vietnam, being autistically good at the basic stuff and having to drag my party out of a firefight, dead or alive.
>>94781721Top Secret, and Top Secret S.I. are both fantastic games. I'd love to run it for my group but we barely play anymore and when we do they want AD&D or CoC. Pick up a used box set on ebay. They go for pretty cheap. It's a great system.
>>94816564So you want to be an operator. You want to split the difference between "spy" and "soldier."
>>94780509I wanna be an evil james bond
>>94782693Thank you so much for posting this. I looked in every folder, every archive, and every trove I could access for two weeks. I couldn't remember the name and Adult Swim RPG does not get anywhere near the mark.
>>94821219>an evil james bondjust say mossad
>>94787665I do love this game but I've never seen it as a spy game but more of an action espionage game in true 80s fashion. Less Manchurian Candidate more Big Trouble in Little China. Less Eiger Sanction more Cliffhanger. Not to say it can't be a deep espionage game but the rules support action and adventure over investigation and skullduggery.The martial arts alone are worth the price if you like Palladium games though. I've got a Transdimensional TMNT game brewing that is going to blow my players' tiny little minds.
>>94799068>Blades in the Dark fucking sucksdebatable but sure>almost every heist devolves into combat anyway. Might as well save yourself the trouble and just play D&Dweird takeWhy even get out of bed, amirite?
>>94780509Enough points have been said about why superspy wouldn't work for a teamWhy not a setting like Burn Notice though ?
>>94825705ultimately I feel like ttrpg like progression doesn't work for games of deception and an emphasis on non combat.cause if you're just a stealthy guy in a combat based ttrpg then why not play any of the sci fi ones?a modern aesthetic is fine but people really obsessed with being a spy play deception based board games like Mafia or the one with the Werewolves.
>>94780509It's not for everyone but I feel like Paranoia: High Programmers could easily be homebrewed into a fun silly superspy game
>>94825719>deception based board games like Mafia or the one with the WerewolvesI'm interested in this could you remember the names of these games please ?
>>94824868NP bro
>>94793750Showing up in an attempt just to shit on others is really gay. But then again, if your mom didn't have unlimited diarrhea that one night, you wouldn't have be shat out into this world. The gay diarrhea boy. That's you.
Most spy games are usually just super games anyway. That's why I always used FASERIP for them.
>>94793750lol gay diarrhea boy
>>94825742I think it's called Werewolf or One Night of Ultimate Werewolf
>>94784321>>Open D6 (worked really well)Could you please tell us about your game? I want to run D6 at some point because I like how it reads but I only have experience with D&D.
>>94833338>pic
