My folks, who were in town for the holiday weekend (and Katherine’s birthday), sat in on part of my game on Sunday. And, amazingly, seem to have enjoyed it, or at least found it interesting, or, at a minimum, sufficiently varied to be able to comment politely on it.
They also commented on how much hard work it seemed to be, which gave me a bit of a tingly feeling inside. 🙂
Anyway, it was fun seeing the game from the perspective of non-gamers unfamiliar with it. And now my folks will have some idea of the sort of thing I’m talking about here when I natter on about it.
To which end, Sunday was also the wrap of our using the D20 Spycraft rules for my espionage campaign. For D20 fans, some good stuff there, but the ever-burgeoning sim increases and need to buy a never-ending stream of supplements, pen in errata, etc., was getting to be too much. So we’re transitioning to using the FATE system, as of next game.
Which means I still have a lot of work to do …
I bought all the Shadowforce Archer sourcebooks, and I have to say that AEG has done a much better job of organizing their RPG books in the past. It’s too hard to find the information in the books themselves.
And after looking at the 30-odd page errata PDF, they’ve also done better fact-checking and editing in the past.
Good luck with the FATE conversion!
Thanks. AEG’s done a fine overall job with Spycraft, but what started out as a decent, playable system has become a thorny hedge of rules for the simulation completist. There are some fine abstracted mechanics in there — budgets/gadgets, chases — but not only has everything but the kitchen sink been thrown on top of it, it’s been thrown in a jumble of rule books and expansion sets, each of which is also, internally, poorly organized.
For someone wanting to run a modern *D20* campaign, I’d certainly urge taking a look at Spycraft. I think we can do as well (and, hopefully, better) without the D20 part of it, though carrying along some of the aspects of Spycraft which work.