Tips For Running A Spy Game

Currently running one and somebody asked so I figured I'd do my best to throw together some simple but concrete things:

-Choose a place and a time you know as well or better than your players

I once got to say "Actually, I've been to Pollock's Toy Museum and it's fucking tiny and the coat check is right next to the entrance" instead of looking stupid when running Night's Black Agents for Ken Hite. Though I did pretty much rip the system into shreds accidentally kind of constantly but whatever that's another story.


-Figure out how much spy stuff you want the players to have and how hard you want it to be for the players to get it

One of the nice thing about Night's Black Agents for one-shots is you spend no time shopping, and even though I run my own games using a modified Call of Cthulhu (basically using the NBA skill list) the point is you want to have a clear handle on how the parent government or patron's largesse is going to shape the adventure. Technically the CIA could always call in an airstrike, and that could be boring. You need to carefully calibrate how you want to use the system and scenario to decide how much recourse the players have to crazy tech that can solve their problems before they come up.


-Get comfortable with how spy pacing is distinctive

Ok, in a super-hero game, you can run a 2-hour session of which an hour and a half is one fight with one villain and not only is everybody happy but that pretty much can be an average session. A little drama--biiiiiiig fight, lots of powers, done. Satisfying. That's why superhero games are pretty easy to run. Similarly, D&D games can typically be paced out to like a series of 5-10 moments of opening doors or entering hexes or encountering NPCs and then dealing with some unexpected consequence.

In a spy game, the unit of "something happened" is basically each time the players get concretely closer to their goal or some other major confrontation. That is a "beat" in a spy story. I roll successfully to see if I can detect a pattern in Worthington's tax returns over the years--beat. I talk to the bartender and he makes me as IRA and waves me off. Beat. Get comfortable with that--let the players enjoy the little world you're creating with these details. Make that as fun as the rooftop gunfight you know is coming.


-The spy equivalent of the dungeon is the heist

And I don't mean in structure, I mean in terms of reliably providing a session's-worth of reliably spyish activity. You name a target, a time, a place, and tell the players they need to steal, assassinate, kidnap, rescue or neutralize it. The rest is up to them.

It sounds preposterously simple but trust me, it works. Here's a freebie. They'll spend a half hour or more planning, they'll get in, they'll fail one crucial roll and the consequences will provide the fuel for the rest of the night.


-Hunter/Hunted is a good one to have in your pocket

"What if there's a crucial clue the players miss?"
"Oh just use GUMSHOE! Or the three clue rule! They'll never miss a clue again!"
Screw that, let your players deal with the consequences of their appalling incompetence. It's good clean fun and a plot structure so tight it's hard to think of a spy story that doesn't use it. Here.


-Red herrings

In yesterday's game I told False Patrick that the cell data he Traffic Analyzed revealed:

-One number that gets called all the time
-One number that calls the target, only after they've consulted that first number
-One number that gets called the same time every week for 20-30 minutes

Patrick looked at the 3rd number and went "That's probably just his mom". And I was so happy--not because I'd fooled him, but because he had guessed exactly right. In the years he played in my games he'd gotten used to the idea that just because there's a detail doesn't mean it's important. Only hack GMs only give players details that turn out to be meaningful later.


-Enemies are whatever

Opposed NPC stats can be just average people 90% of the time with like one good stat and 1 skill. You don't even have to write them up ahead of time if you have a good handle on who they are. In most spy (and horror) systems, PCs are fragile enough that regular people with guns are quite enough to make a genuinely frightening combat.

The final boss can have stats, but even just an interestingly exotic place to fight and a lot of hit points or a bullet-proof vest results in a memorable encounter.


-You don't have to invent plot twists right up front

In making a D&D setting I recommend running that first adventure, then extrapolating the setting from what happens there. It worked for Tolkien (you got a....ring? Ok, let's see where the ring came from...). Run the first adventure, figure out what kind of PCs the players made and what kind of stuff you had to pull out of the hat that day to make the game happen. Then develop the plot twists out of that between sessions. As more and more elements come into play (one player is CIA one is MI5, you can do inter-agency rivalry, none of the players speak any other languages--give them an unreliable translator, etc). The twists will come organically once you get your feet on the ground in the world. Just character creation for 4 people alone will generate enough question marks to build plot out of for weeks.


-In other words, relax

I am making this sound easy, but it some ways, it kind of is. You don't have to genuinely scare people, like in horror, you don't have to invent some new exotic traps or weirdness, like in D&D, you don't have to make your villains seem as vivid as real comic book villains like in a superhero game, you just have to make this slightly alternate take on reality feel real. The spy genre is about how mystery and danger are hidden in banal objects--the bomb in the apple, the elevator with the frayed cable, the Man Who Goes Through The Blue Door--luxuriate in these details and other lives. Rushing toward set pieces isn't necessary--these players want to spy on things, let them.

And if that doesn't work, like Chandler said, just have some dickhead show up with a gun.
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Here, Have A Free Night's Black Agents Adventure (It's 5 lines long)

The two easiest systems I ever saw for fun low-prep one-shot gaming are Marvel Superheroes FASERIP and Night's Black Agents--Marvel because the fights are so long, but hyper-kinetic, NBA because the players can't really do anything without talking a lot (thus doing a lot of the GMs' work for them) and because assassinations and heists are way easier to make up than the mysteries that drive NBA's parent game, Trail of Cthulhu. All you need is a building.

Here's everything I needed to run adventure that kept my Night's Black Agent players busy for four hours:

• It's Die Hard, except…
• There are more of them
• Your employer's got a tip the Gruber gang is coming in 6 hours or less 
• And your employers wants you to get into the hotel and get something out of the vault before the bad guys do
• And they won't tell you what's in the vault, just the box number
• And what's in the vault is, of course, horrible

Grab a skyscraper you've been to off Google maps, give the bad guys 2d6 health and 2d6 points to blow on whatever and you're ready to play.

And remember: dead civilians force stability tests.

My players' first move was to spend a bunch of points to create a cover as a celebrity chef "Like Gordon Ramsey, or just…as Gordon Ramsey."

Night's Black Agents Player-Vs-Player-By-Post Orientation

Welcome to Sofia!

If Australia was smaller, made of water, and in the middle of Eurasia, it'd be the Black Sea. Bulgaria is a country on the west coast of it. Sofia is the capital of it.

You are either one of a handful of people playing a game of player-vs-player Night's Black Agents set there or are one of thousands of people reading a message to those people about a game you aren't playing.

(For the latter: I'll try not to make a habit of this.)

Ало! Откачалки!

The big news this week is, around midnight on a Friday, Viktor Gavrilov--portly, mid-fiftyish owner of several exotic dance clubs in the city--appeared sweating, crying and dancing on stage at his very own Club Nefertiti wearing nothing but his headset cellphone.

Rumor has it this was because one of the Russian mobs moving into the city was telling him, through that very headset phone, that they had his daughter and were going to kill him if he didn't.

This incident is just one of many lurid acts of intimidation and violence perpetrated by Russian gangs in Sofia in recent months.

What does this mean for you? Who knows? Depends on who your PC is--gangster, spy, waif, diplomat, and what your PC's secret goal is. That secret goal I've probably already given you along with your character sheet.

Achieve your goal and you'll win!

Die before achieving it, or be placed in such a position where achieving it is impossible and you lose.

There will likely be multiple winners and multiple losers.

Since this is a play-by-post game, you each have been given a private channel to talk to me on, but you may talk to each other or to everybody if you like, just remember to add me in.

Some of you have characters completely made that I gave you.

 Some of you will need to add some details using the handy reference below...

click to enlarge

Either way, here's the important stuff...

That grid of numbers at the top is your health. You know what that is. Most bullets do d6 damage.

Everybody ignore the stuff about the size of your group.

If you already have a pre-made character I gave you, don't worry about buying points of stuff in red and blue. You already have points in stuff.

No matter how you got points (I gave them to you or you built your own PC) the way the system works is you spend them to do stuff.

Left and middle columns are investigative/autosuccess abilities--you get 20 pts to spread throughout  these 2 columns. Each thing you have at least 1 pt in means you can use it once in this game to find something out with it. You will get information. You spend these points and they do not come back during this game. Most of these abilities will have 0, 1 or mayyybe 2 pts. 3 if you're insane about that thing.

They aren't autosuccessful if another PC opposes you. But they usually won't for these abilities.

Nota bene: I am misusing this system and it isn't supposed to work exactly like this.  It'll be ok, trust me.

The 3rd column is general abilities, in combat or tense situations they work on a gambling mechanic--they can fail. You spend them, too. 8 is a lot. Basically you roll a d6 and try to hit a threshold number I tell you or don't tell you, and declare how many pts you wanna spend before you roll. These points won't come back either.

Special/confusing stuff on there:

Human Terrain:

like anthropology and social sciences--"reading" a group or city or whatever.

Preparedness:

This is the skill to see if you have special equipment you need on you at any given moment.

Languages:

If you are making your character, you start with 1 language and get 2 additional languages per pt spent.

The following two are confusing because the points you get in them are recorded in the right column, but their specific details are recorded on the left.

Network Contacts:

These are people you know who do or know stuff. They have ratings and spend like other investigative abilities. You make these people up and assign them point values, like you can go "My brother Edgar is a 5 pt shoemaker" and now you have a 5 pt shoemaker contact. Those 5 points are in Edgar until you have Edgar spends them to do stuff, then they're gone. You can (and probably should) split your points up on multiple contacts.

Covers:

A lot like contacts--these are alternate identities you have. The more points you put in them, the more convincing they are. Once spent, these covers are useless.

You can let cover and contact points "float" until you actually need them--they don't have to make up specific people/identities they're assigned to right away.

The game starts basically immediately: you can send me private messages or your can post public behavior or rules questions in the G+ thread under this entry or you can start conversations with other players, just remember to plus me in to them.
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Diet Night's Black Agents

Every role-playing game is different and requires sort of adapting to its own peculiar mindset in order to run it properly or really fully explore the distinct imaginative space it opens up.

But, really, who the fuck has time for that? It's all one fucking game and if it doesn't run like D&D then why in god's name would you even play it?

I really like the way Night's Black Agents' skill system forces you to think about and talk about spy stuff--it reinforces the themes of the game as the creepy pseuds say--and I like that character generation spits out a PC as detailed as a Call of Cthulhu one but way faster (at least after a little digging). 

However, when you find yourself trying to figure out if getting a cab is Urban Survival, Streetwise, or random luck, you've got yourself a non-intuitive skill system. And when you've got yourself a non-intuitive skill system you might have to read the rules. And under no circumstances should you ever have to do that.

So, to that end I've cleaned up Night's Black Agents so it runs more intuitively. Or at least more intuitively for everybody I know.

Other than rolling standard d6-for-each-side initiative, not using any of the special rules/cherries, and just doing rulings-not-rules for combat stuff, here's the bulk of it:

Mashing together Vampirology and Occult is specific to my game--it's light on vampires so far.

Streetwise and Urban Survival are one thing. Like: Streetwise is talking to junkies and urban survival is talking to the homeless and well what if you are talking to a homeless junkie? And which skill do you need to tell the difference? Fuck it: one skill. Anything too technical or Straight World to be "Streetwise" is covered by Criminology anyway.

Infiltration and Weapons have just been clarified on the character sheet so I can hand it to total newbs and they can get what those words mean in the context of NBA.

A quick flashback to smuggling marshmallows and a pack of roasting skewers past the Hollywood Blvd bouncers last thursday reminds me that you'll be piss poor at Filch if you can't Conceal and vice versa. They are two distinct skills but they're likely possessed by the same people and there are too many edge cases for me to bother with.

Notice is telling if there's a guy or a gun, Surveillance is telling if there's a guy following you or if a guy has a gun when you looked at him, Sense Trouble is telling if there's a guy following you and he has a gun. We call all that "perception" in D&D and it's one roll. They're likely three things because the game wants you to say "surveillance" a lot (of which I approve) and because Sherlock Holmes has Notice but isn't sitting in a white van all day ordering cheeseburgers and trying to stay awake and because of some errant vestigial GUMSHOEish idea in the game's DNA about characters spotting clues having to be some kind of different kind of skill where things aren't left to chance but whatever. I'm no spy but if you can't Notice shit I bet you kinda suck at Surveillance. 

Electronic surveillance, being by definition a technical thing requiring familiarity with specific devices with brand names, can stay its own skill.

NBA fans will notice I took a huge wrecking ball to the social skills--Flirting, Flattery, Interrogation, Negotiation, and Intimidation are, yes, all different things but frankly trying to parse apart which thing someone is doing in the middle of a functional moment of role-playing without having to constantly have either the GM or player or both constantly referring back to the skill list is a pain (interrogation, for instance, includes "Put someone on the defensive during an ordinary conversation"). So I basically grouped it into Flirting/Flattery/Charm ("carrot" social skills) and Intimidate ("stick" social skills). As for interrogate: I've never noticed gamers particularly needing much character sheet help thinking up functional interrogation methods....

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Zero Dark 29, 28, 27...

Been trying to think of why Robin Laws' GUMSHOE system works pretty well for Night's Black Agents (spies v vampires) despite the fact that all Laws' "players want this players want that, drama drama, ice cream Pavlov Hamlet" rhetoric about why it works doesn't actually make sense or line up with what I've ever seen at the table.

And what kind of game is this? In a nutshell: in Night's Black Agents you can spend a point of your Preparation stat to have a flash bang grenade on you, even if you didn't before and had no idea you were headed into a firefight. It's that kind of game.

I bought these sunglasses retroactively once I realized we were in Afghanistan

In essence, you use the point-buy character-creation system to make a PC and then kinda keep using the system throughout the entire game--inventing contacts, equipment, cover stories, etc as you need them. Somehow it works even for non-hippies, why? Short answer: it makes sense for a spy game.

Long answer:

It's Fast-moving In A Gamey Way And In An International Spy Story We Need That

GUMSHOE's spend-to-do-it system makes moving from scene to disparate scene (essential to the international espionage genre) mechanically interesting.

Like, consider this situation:

GM describes a target. PCs outline a plan and step one of their plan involves secretly flying to Istanbul.

In GUMSHOE, I go "Go ahead and spend a point to get a plane, but remember spending that point now means you won't have it later and you can't use 'Well Connected To People Who Have Planes' points later in the session..." which is an interesting choice to have to make.

If I ran it Call of Cthulhu/BRP style then I have two choices:

"Ok you automatically get a plane because it makes sense you'd be able to get one" (which is an ok GMing call, but not especially interesting mechanically and you just do it and move on and forget about it, maybe secretly deciding "Ok, now you owe Manuela a favor before she helps you again".)

or

"Roll to see if you can even get a plane" (which if they succeed, yay good, if they don't, well, they have to do something else but that having to choose some other plan is kinda arbitrary and they will find another plan but it won't necessarily be any more interesting and so the consequences of failure didn't make the game better.)

Now the Call of Cthulhu plane example above could be made interesting if there was a ticking time bomb situation ("Use your Credit Rating score to get a plane and if you don't you only have one day left and figure something else out") and that points up a genre difference:

In D&D or Call of Cthulhu, the thing that makes their probabilistic systems work so well is the assumption the PCs are under some kind of pressure. Often time pressure, but it could also be something like dwindling resources or just fear of getting killed if you don't kill the monster first. So what do you do? You think of a plan that puts the odds on your side, then roll. It's tense, it's exciting, it requires thought.

The spy genre does not work like that though. Quite often at the beginning of the mission the spy is under no obvious pressure. Failure isn't interesting here--can't stay at the fancy hotel? Oh well, stay at the cheap one. Pointless, pressureless leisure--at least in the beginning--is part of the genre. This leisure gives the protagonists time to build the world around them (see 3 below).

In Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Zero Dark Thirty the main character's not under any external pressure, really. It's just work. The worst that could happen if a resource is denied is if the GM rigged up a situation where if a plan doesn't work (failed probabilistic roll), the bad guys notice and change up.

Using GUMSHOE's nondiegetic-thinking-style spendy mechanic, you, in effect buy ease and choice at the beginning of the session and pay for it with desperation at the end of the game. Which is different from the all-desperation-all-the-time mechanics you want in an exploration-and-wonder-oriented genre.

Exploring... Vs Playing With... 

For my players specifically:

In a made-up setting: getting to see what's hidden in it is fun. More fun than helping to write the fiction called "the setting" which they like mysterious and not-in-their-control. They want the slow revelation.

In the real world setting: getting to fuck with the real world is fun. Because they already know the setting--they live in it and hear about it every day. So the revelation that there's a really hot country called Australia that has giant jumping pocketbeasts is not something they need held back for dramatic effect. So a mechanic that suddenly  makes an ASS (or whatever the Australians call their secret service) member your friend isn't a blow to an essential wonder and isolation you need to enjoy the game, it's a fun reminder that in this version of the familiar world the strange is always hidden behind the familiar.

Revelation vs Showdown

Ok most horror, sci fi, and fantasy stories ("adventure" stories broadly) are built on the idea of the revelation. Westerns, spy movies and kung fu movies ("action" stories broadly) are built on the showdown.

The revelation is the new awesome thing you get to see that vastly exceeds expectations. The space ship, the creature, the magic, the crazy city built from bells and beehives, etc.

The showdown is characters you already know about from the beginning finally confronting each other. John Malkovich is bad and smart and weird, Clint Eastwood is good and tough and clever, who'll win? Watch In The Line of Fire and find out...

Many stories incorporate both* but they pull in opposite directions, broadly speaking.

The revelation requires the players do not know about things before they show up. The less is known, the more of a revelation it is.

The showdown requires the players know all about things before they show up. The more is known, the more of a showdown it is.

D&D and Call of Cthulhu are naturally set up for The Revelation (exploration) and any Showdown requires the GM to do all the work building the threat. GUMSHOE is naturally set up for The Showdown and any Revelation requires the GM to do all the work, carefully hiding the fullness of the threat from the players.

Games relying mostly on Showdowns want the world to feel connected and, ultimately, knowable--everything is about you and your big fight coming up. Games relying on Revelation want the world to feel abstract and unknowable--everything beyond you is a mystery in the great beyond.

In the revelation story, the players are small and the world is large. In the showdown story, the players are large and the threat is large and the world is a backdrop.

In NBA's espionage version of the showdown, this backdrop is really just a kind of weapon the PCs have a certain amount of points to spend to design--like magic item creation or building an invention in a superhero game.

I get the feeling this is also related to Hard SF vs Sci Fantasy. When I hear SF is "about ideas" that usually implies "about the revelations" whereas when you hear its "just an adventure story with laser guns" that implies "about the showdown".


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One more thing: just as having a Showdown-worthy NPC that matters is a perennial problem for D&D GMs that the game leaves them pretty much on their own about, my guess is making the vampire conspiracy really seem like a Revelation full of wonder is going to be a perennial problem for NBA GMs. I mean, in a game where you can use a stat to, in the middle of a fight, have totally already remembered to bring holy water, you got your work cut out for you.

Also--if you click that link at the top there are a few things I did to make the game more problem-solvey and a little less button-pushy.


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 *Noir and crime stories are often all about both: building to a confrontation with a known figure and revealing a hidden underworld at the same time. To see a story where the final showdown kinda lacks guts on account of it having been somewhat too obscured under an overall aesthetic of revelation, see the original-- and mostly excellent--original Sin City miniseries. When Roark is revealed we know who he is but we still don't know anything about why Marv confronting him will be interesting. To see the typical noir solution--having the villain there all along but only revealing they are the villain at the last minute--see The Maltese Falcon. To see one variation on it--having the villain front and center but only revealing the weird extent of their villainy at the end--see Chinatown.