Greetings gamers from all systems, places and timelines!
For DM Dave’s birthday game (which, yes, is one of our trademarks), we broke out the Top Secret: New World Order system. We took on the role of a spy on their first mission, just like any other 1st-level party. But instead of trying to clear out a mine which has been overrun by goblins, we needed to recover a kidnapped scientist who could create a biological weapon of mass destruction. So grab a coffee and let’s talk about the mechanics of the game, and what it was like to attempt to stop an apocalyptic event when we not only knew nothing about the system, but our characters were coming right out of the shrink wrap.
“Mr. Bond, I presume?”
The party was rather diverse, unlike my D&D parties from back in the day, which were more like the cast of The Hobbit. Each character had a different background rather than a different class, and yes, we were all humans. Sadly, there wasn’t a well-dressed gold dragonborn with a mysterious scar at a high-stakes poker game, perhaps a missed opportunity there, but I digress.
All of the characters had specific backgrounds, such as criminal, ex-military, or former police officers, which gave each of them a certain set of skills. So, for example, my character came from a criminal background and was surprisingly very good at shady things. So if a scene came up where we needed to BS our way out, it was time for me to tag in. This not only gave each background a definable feel to them but inherently made us work well as a team because no one was soloing this mission.
“Your Mission, should you choose to accept it…”
In some games, the hook was subtle, but this one came in like a wrecking ball. As I said in the intro, a scientist needed to be recovered who could reproduce a bio weapon that could easily kill tens of thousands of people. So obviously this was the kind of operation that couldn’t go south because the stakes couldn’t be higher. In-game, when you hear a pitch like that, you instantly feel compelled to say, “I’m in!”, without even thinking of negotiating for more money. However, somewhere in the back of my mind, I couldn’t help asking myself, “Were we really the best choice for this since this is our first mission?”
However, it set an interesting vibe for the game because this was not some open-ended adventure where we tried to discover a mysterious temple that had been lost for hundreds of years. This created an unspoken tension where time was of the essence, and each decision we made was an investment of time we could only hope would pay off.
The Mechanics of the System
The way DM Chris rolled it out, this was a textbook system intro. The new players to the system told him what they wanted to try, and he would tell them what to roll, and then we figured out the results. Honestly, the portions of the system that we used did not feel overly complex, and everyone seemed to pick up on it pretty quickly.
Every character we used came with their own pre-generated stats, abilities, and specialities. If you attempted an action tied to something for which your character had higher dice values in these categories, the higher the chance of success. Also, if you rolled a maximum value on any given die, it became an exploding die, and you would get to roll it again and keep the total value rolled. This gave me some flashbacks to when, back in the day, we played in the WEGs Star Wars system and someone just kept rolling sixes and would end up with a random astronomical success!
“How can an idiot be a policeman?”
There was a moment in the game where DM Dave’s James Bond-inspired character (Reginald Remington Kincaid) had a chance to stop the White Queen (the antagonist and not Emma Frost!), and he leaped at her helicopter as she flew away in it.
Now, it is obvious the real James Bond or Ethan Hunt wouldn’t have had an issue pulling this off. However, the dice can be unkind at times, and this quickly devolved from Roger Moore having a heroic moment into something which should have had a laugh track in the background.
He eventually got her, but the entire scene was a mess, and I was pleasantly surprised he didn’t break his own neck during his birthday game. To which, while Dave’s character had all of the skills and abilities where that type of action would have made sense in game, sometimes the dice are just not in your favor.
Reality vs Expectations
While Dave’s character didn’t end up in the ER, Matt, “The Monster Wrangler,” and I did. The one thing which I haven’t really touched on yet is that my character had six Health (hit points, in Top Secret), and any given bullet can drop you like a bad habit.
So imagine this for a second, your in-game spy character has an awesome set of skills and abilities, but you have all of the durability of a character from Call of Cthulhu, where you literally can die from walking down a sketchy set of stairs.
This has good and bad aspects in the game. The positive side was that it forced our characters to lay plans that weren’t like, “Let’s just go in there and shoot all of the bad guys.” This also added a gritty feel of realism, which encouraged stealth and tactics, where someone wasn’t afraid to walk into the next room because they still had 65 hit points. On the flip side of this, things go very south very quickly in games grounded in realism.
System Complexity
DM Chris did not open us up to nearly the full set of rules involved with this system because of its level of complexity in an opening game. And I get it; we have played in multiple Marvel games, and if I had to either craft something or assemble a special vehicle, it might have been easier if we had just done this in real life ourselves.
What we did see of it ran well and didn’t have any obvious flaws. Remember, exploding dice are cool, at least until one of the bad guys shoots someone on your team with a handgun for 36 damage!
Final Thoughts
Top Secret: New World Order is a fun game, and it’s worth having a game with your friends as a one-shot. If you happen to be running it, I advise that while great cinematic moments are cool, where everything comes down to one die roll, this should be avoided. Depending on the situation, you could consider a skill challenge or keep the challenge ratings less threatening.
Lastly, in a world where one hit could take you out, I strongly advise a DM screen, which is for your players’ protection, not yours. Or maybe consider a rule where if being shot consumes all of your health and knocks you out of the fight, it lets you return to the game badly wounded with one health left at its conclusion.
In this way, if someone gets shot in act one, they aren’t changing characters or roleplaying selecting food for the hospital cafeteria.
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