Can players fill different roles in the same game?

[Thor]

I set myself a challenge, recently, to update my first game. The game was called Tiny Spies and was a espionage variant on the Fantasy Trip.  I was thinking about the materials that had inspired me to do this.

the setting is a ficticious British Spy Service like the Circus  most probably durring the Cold war.

The novels of John LeCarre and Led Deighton, The comic book Series Queen and Country By Greg Rucka and the Mission Impossible and MI-5 TV series'.

Game-wise I was inspired by Wuthering Heights and the Drones with the relations between people being what I was looking for. The mission is important but the office are important as well. There was also a Post back in, I think 2001, about using Sorcerer to do Lecarre but, while it inspired this,wasn't quite the way I want to go.

I want the game to be in at least two parts. there is the field portion of the game where some of the characters go out and do their countries dirty work and there is a second part where the organization they all work for needs to be navigated.  To this end, I developed a character who will be the desk officer above the field agents. the organization is like the City in Over the Edge; full of help and harm and little tribes of people that you need to do your job.

The way I want the game to play the Desk is given the orders from the GM and a certain amount of resources to accomplish the mission.  The desk then liases with the other ellements of the Organization and possibly Outsiders like the CIA or Organized Crime.  In this way the Desk can horse trade for more resources for the field agents. The Desk would then devise the plan which the Field  agents will then perform. There would also be some sort of hero points which the Desk can pass to the agents in the field. The Desk  would be important to the game but not an actual participant in the mission.

My Question is Can this be set up without loosing Group cohesiveness within the game. Is there any president for this sort of dual player types?

The game has a couple of other elements which are still in gestation, The game will deal with the Post Tramatic Stress of the Agents and what they must do to be effective in the field. the Field agents will suffer a lot of burn out and this will be one of the things which they will focus on. The Desk will be a position which will be success oriented, if the Desk doesn't provide the Desk will be sent Down or Moved to some easier job in the Foregn Office. I imagine that the players will make choices about how their character will react to the needs of their character and those choiuces will feed back into the storyline.

[TonyLB]

This sounds a lot like Netrunning in Cyberpunk 2020.  Which is a precedent, but not a terribly encouraging one.

Does this have to all be done up front?  I think the dynamic might be more functional if the Desk's activities were defined retroactively as the field agents turned out to require resources during the game.

Gratuitous example:

FA#1:  Ah MAN!  An electronic crypto lock.  We're never going to break this.  We'll have to go around the long way.
Desk:  Well, we did have schematics of the building.  GM, who would I have had to grease in the organization in order to get one of the new experimental decrypters?
GM:  R&D?  That's Z, of course.
Desk:  Ah crap.  He's still steamed at me about that little sports-car we lost last mission.
GM:  He really did like the sports car.
Desk:  How about if we had our boy Takahashi from the Yakuza "lean" on the security contractor who installed it?  We could have gotten the backdoor code, right?
GM:  Oh, sure, Takahashi leans really well.  He'll want a favor later in return, though.
Desk:  He always does.  And they're always more trouble than they're worth.  But let's go for it.
GM:  Okay.  FA#1, you know the code to punch in.
FA#1:  I punch it in with a little smirk.  "Domo Arigato, Takahashi-san."

[timfire]

Though I've never actually played it, this sounds alot like Inspetres, in the whole 'company success vs. personal succcess'-thing, and the though 'stress' thing.

You can check out a recent Actual Play thread [here].

[Ron Edwards]

Hiya,

If you haven't seen it yet, check out my proto-game Zero at the Bone, which was written to illustrate some points in my Narrativism essay.

It doesn't address the Desk/Agent dual play that you're talking about, but games like Capes and Universalis definitely do.

Best,
Ron

[Valamir]

Hey Thor.  It sounds to me like you're talking about some pre play mission set up as is common with many computer games.  Your given a mission, and then you select from a stable of characters with various specialties who to take on that mission, and then you spend your limited resources to buy up special gear and equipment.  When you get to the point in the mission where you have to get passed the guard without raising the alarm you'd better hope you remember to bring Sneaky Guy with you.  If Sneaky Guy got kilt last mission than you better plan to bring Heavy Weapons Guy and Killing Machine Guy and hope you can just blast your way through the level.

Is that sort of what you're talking about...with an 80s spy flair rather than a commando flair?  The "Desk" then is the player who does decides whether to bring Sneaky Guy or Killing Machine Guy and whether to spend money on advanced electronic lock picks or extra grenades (so to speak).

If so I think the way I'd do it, is I'd have each player design a stable of characters to choose from (maybe 3 each) and select 1 player to play as the Desk.  The Desk would also play as one of the players with characters of his own.  If the mission is successfull characters get XPs and the Desk gets some bonus XPs.  If the mission failed than the role of Desk rotates to the next player.

Special Gear bought with XPs becomes a permanent part of the character.  Anything purchased with the mission budget goes away after each mission.

[M. J. Young]

I can see doing something like this with the multiple staging concept in Multiverser.

The Referee would work with the Desk man to determine what missions had to be done; Desk would choose one Field operative for each mission, give them the briefing, and provide them with their initial stuff. Then another mission would be given to D while the first F starts his adventure.

D has the ongoing job of meeting the needs of the field operatives (as suggested by someone above). Deliver transportation, send an expert, provide supplies, arrange contacts in the field, in response to the various F's requirements. He's got his limits, so sometimes he's probably going to say he can't do X, but he can do Y.

Thus the Fs are pursuing their various unrelated missions in cooperation with the referee, and D is supporting all of them. In theory, he could try to work things out so that, for example, F1, who is expert in explosives, can be sent to help F3 who has to defuse a bomb, unless of course F1 is too far away.

Anyway, I think I'd do it that way.

(For what it's worth, I am currently running several players in a spy world in Multiverser, on different missions; but the Desk position is part of my non-player hierarchy, so this would be different. I can see doing that, but at the moment one of my spies just got killed so I'm down to two, and they're both enjoying well-earned respites from the action.)

--M. J. Young

[Thor]

Thank you all for the attention. Let me see if I can identify what I wnat to emphasize from yopur responces.

TonyLB wrote:

Does this have to all be done up front? I think the dynamic might be more functional if the Desk's activities were defined retroactively as the field agents turned out to require resources during the game.

I must not have expressed my view of what was intended. That is certainly one of the features I want the desk to have.  In many ways this is a remote hero point system where someone who isn't there is felt through his "preplanning"; at the same time I want the Desk to be actively working the organization as the function of the character.

Also I have to thank TonyLB because he got this whole thing started almost a year ago when I mentioned in an off-hand way that I was trying to develope a spy game where the characters could do anything they wanted to do. He didn't like the mechanic and by now I don't either but the game has been wearing away.

Timfire:

In some ways it does sound like InSpectres, except that you are a part of a company which sees you as a "projection of force" to be disavowed at any time. Still I like the comparison.

Ron:

I had forgotten about ZATB  but I will dig it out and reread it. There were two things I wanted to accomplish in the rewrite of the old game.

The first was to try to make the premise "what will you do to stay in the game"  function for the players. In looking at the inspiration material I latched onto the idea that actions in the field can cause the characters to suffer PTSD's and dealing with the limitations which they bring would create some of the back story for the characters. I am trying to make the adventure the point and the premise the ongoing developement of the character.

If your nerve (which is not unlike the Humanity from Sorcerer) is brought down you don't have what it takes to go into the field and do your job there are a number of things which will improve your nerve, Seeing the Company Shrink is the best but it tends to limit your upward mobility takes a long time and keeps yopu from the job you love. You could turn to Drink or Drugs certain combinations of which will increase your nerve but at the cost of your other abilities. You can get married, which has less of a downside as long as your spouse doesn't mind you being in danger or in more melodramatic campaigns gets into danger herself (sexist, sorry).

I'm still not clear how I want to work that whole part of the game, but the other idea that i lached onto was the world of the office and the little kings and kingdoms in the average office. I wanted to bring office infighting in place of the combat of the game.

I don't know from Capes, but Universalis has been a useful tool for thinking about the mechanisms in the office.  I have been thinking about ways of making the system more token passing than dice rolling but i'm not there yet I still have to get the flow of play right in my head befor I know what system to use.


Valamir Wrote:

Hey Thor. It sounds to me like you're talking about some pre play mission set up as is common with many computer games. Your given a mission, and then you select from a stable of characters with various specialties who to take on that mission, and then you spend your limited resources to buy up special gear and equipment. When you get to the point in the mission where you have to get passed the guard without raising the alarm you'd better hope you remember to bring Sneaky Guy with you. If Sneaky Guy got kilt last mission than you better plan to bring Heavy Weapons Guy and Killing Machine Guy and hope you can just blast your way through the level.

Is that sort of what you're talking about...with an 80s spy flair rather than a commando flair? The "Desk" then is the player who does decides whether to bring Sneaky Guy or Killing Machine Guy and whether to spend money on advanced electronic lock picks or extra grenades (so to speak).

If so I think the way I'd do it, is I'd have each player design a stable of characters to choose from (maybe 3 each) and select 1 player to play as the Desk. The Desk would also play as one of the players with characters of his own. If the mission is successfull characters get XPs and the Desk gets some bonus XPs. If the mission failed than the role of Desk rotates to the next player.

Special Gear bought with XPs becomes a permanent part of the character. Anything purchased with the mission budget goes away after each mission.

That was how the game used to be. It was based on the Mission Impossible series and the "Master of Disguise" was the guy who walked into the building and then he would lower a rope from a window to get the "Tech Guy" in  to download the data from the laptop which the "Safecracker" would have gotten from the safe.

I wanted the game to be less about specialization. Bernie Sampson may call in a safe cracker but he does all his own stunts in the field.

That feeling of well, and roundly, trained agents was one of the features I wanted to capture. These guys can do all of the Mission Impossible stuff if they just keep their cool and plan it well.

As to the pre-planningof the mission, It seemed to me that there was allways someone who takes the lead in whatever game we were playing. there was a character like that in many of the inspiration pieces so I figured why not let that person fight for the chance to hold the position. In Len Deighton and John LeCarre they seem to allways be the people least qualified to run things and it might turn out that way in the game. I like the idea that the guy who sets up the mission isn't the one who goes on it because the mission stands a better chance of being a deathtrap. Another reason is that I want to be able to do Mole Hunting Missions  and with the Desk going to certain people for help certain clues to enemy agents could be planted his way. if the GM does all of the functions of the desk there is less chance for the clues to be felt.

One of the Co-designers has suggested that the field agents be done away with and everything is played by the various desks, another feels that the desks would be less funand we should go back to the field agents.  Either choice would loose some of the flavor I was looking for but might be the best solution.
Phil (the pro desk friend)  has suggested also that there be two seperate games one an online wiki style game where the desks and the Offices of both sides do stuff to each other PBEM and then everyso often when the moood strikes to play in the field we take a current line of spy stuuf that looks like it would be fun and play out the action. Has anyone had good luck with this sort of compromise.