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.

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."

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].

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

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.

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

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.

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.