Mercenaries, Spies & Private Eyes

This is a role-playing game.

I don’t really play role-playing games. I just read RPG rulebooks for fun. There’s probably some deep psychological reason for this – something about putting rules around imagination. No idea.

(Watch this video some time: Theoretical Gamers VS Practical Gamers )

(Also, read this: Are Computers Just Really Expensive Dice?).

This book/game (hereafter “MSPE”) go me thinking about something – how you do define the line between (1) general scene setting, and (2) quantitative rules for how your world works?

RPGs exist on two levels. They’re products of the imagination, which is vague and amorphous and subjective. But they also have rules, which are objective and necessarily strict – I mean, we literally call them rules.

The beauty of an RPGs exists in the intersection of these two things. You can be super strict about rules and reduce imagination, which means you’re Monopoly or Catan or some wargame.

Conversely, you can be very vague about rules, which means you’re one of the types of games I’ve been reading about lately. Ordered from most vague to least vague (which is still pretty damn vague):

• Love and Barbed Wire, which is barely a “game” in any sense
• Hometown Holiday, which might be parody
• Gran Meccanismo: Clockpunk Roleplaying in Da Vinci's Florence, which is an RPG, but which tends toward the interpretive more than the strict

MSPE strikes a pretty good balance. Fully half the rulebook is scene-setting, which is interesting because the of the title of the book – it caters to three genres: mercenaries, spies, and private eyes. All three are distinct, but the Venn diagrams overlap quite a bit. (A point which I find interesting in and of itself: what about these three genres makes them fit together so well?)

The rules system was apparently lifted from Tunnels and Trolls from the same author. It seems solid. I liked the rule about “if you roll doubles, re-roll and add.” That theoretically makes anything at least slightly possible, and injects some chaos into the game.

The game was originally published back in 1982, but it was recently re-released with some new material. The artwork in particular is really amazing. A lot of carried over from the ‘82 version, but some of it is new. And the cover is just fantastic.

What’s interesting about this genre is how wide-open it is. When RPGs hit the mainstream (see The Elusive Shift), they were naturally about dungeons. I’m convinced this is because characters could be easily contained in dungeons. Dungeons lend structure – you have to have a marching order and you can show everyone on a map, and if there were questions about what was going on, the answers where limited, because you were in an enclosed space. There was only so much you could do.

None of that is true for a “real-life” genre like this. Your characters can do anything, and how do you manage that? If a character is looking for something, they could say, “I fly to Nepal, climb Everest, and use the summit as a vantage point.” There’s nothing stopping them from doing this, and how do you manage that? The world is a large, complex system, and how do you manage all the possible cause/effect relationships that could spawn from that scenario?

(I remember reading the introductory adventure of another espionage role-playing game which had a dungeon-like map of a downtown area in Europe, and you actually had to specify a marching order for your little party of spies, like you were wandering around this place in a group, looking for monsters. It was inadvertently hilarious.)

So, I find games like this lend more towards the scene-setting and how to help gamemasters to control the characters and keep them heading in the right direction. Indeed, in adventures for the James Bond RPG, the “winning conditions” are really wide open – the GM is given all sorts of possible ways the game could end up, and how to “score” those for experience.

It would be perfectly legal for the characters to say, “I pay the neighbor kid to investigate for me, and I go home and eat Cheetos on the couch.” In this case, do they win?

This gets to that elusive concept of “the spirit of the game” or even “the suspension of disbelief.” How do you make sure everyone is playing along? Again, dungeons make it nice and objective. When your setting is the whole world…well, it’s harder, and a lot of it just comes down to trust in your GM and your desire to be a good, dependable player. “Rules lawyers” might have a field day here.

I realize this “review” is less about the MSPE game itself, and more about the philosophical constructs that surround the game. But, whatever – that’s what I kept thinking about as I was reading it.