Until the appearance of the Top Secret Companion in 1984, all those releases had been adventure modules. Don't get me wrong: I have fond feelings toward several of those modules, but, since I didn't get to play all that often, I didn't get as much use out of them as I might have liked. The Companion, on the other hand, was the kind of support material I could simply read without having to use it. In fact, I'm pretty sure I never used anything the Companion introduced, which is why I want to talk about it in this post.
As presented, the Companion is a collection of new and expanded rules, along with some clarifications of rules from the original game. In principle, I should have loved this book – and, in principle, I did. There's a great deal of genuinely interesting stuff here, starting with an alignment system that accounts for a character's views on politics (democratic vs authoritarian), economics (capitalist vs communist), and change (radical vs reactionary). There are also new personal traits, areas of knowledge, bureaus, divisions, missions, and more, in addition to many, many random tables for generating every conceivable detail for player character agents. There are also new and optional rules for weapons, hand-to-hand combat, and equipment, not to mention a genuinely interesting system for improving a character through enrolling a character in special training courses. Topping it all off is a lengthy mission entitled "Operation: Meltdown," dealing with, among other things the space race between the West and the USSR.
If all of the foregoing sounds interesting, you'd be right. I loved reading the Top Secret Companion and thinking about all the ways I could use the new material in my infrequent games. Unfortunately, when the time came to run a session of Top Secret, I never actually made use of any of it. Partly, it was because it simply didn't seem worth it to add new rules to a game I played so rarely and partly it was because so many of the new rules and expansions were of the kind that are simply too fiddly or hard to remember to make good additions to regular play. The Top Secret Companion was thus the first time I encountered a "theoretically good" RPG book, one that seemed to satisfy my desire simply to read rather than to play.
I don't know that the Companion was uniquely perverse in this regard. Indeed, I am sure that there were many people who made good use of the book and its expanded options for Top Secret. If so, I am happy to hear this. For myself, though, this book represents the start of a period in my later teens when I found myself increasingly drawn towards the ideas contained in a game book than I was in actually using them at the table with my friends. In fact, during my later years of high school, I had less and less time to play RPGs at all and yet, despite that, I continued to be an avid consumer of roleplaying game products, many of which I neither used nor, in my opinion, could have used.
From what I have gathered talking to others, my experience was not unique. Many people continued to acquire the latest roleplaying games and supplements for them, even though they never had the chance to play them. From my current vantage point, that strikes me as perverse, but, at the time, reading a book like the Top Secret Companion was a good substitute for playing with my friends, which I did less and less, as the demands of school increased and I had less free time to engage in gaming. Looking back on it, I can't help but wonder to what extent companies like TSR understood this about their customers and so published more and more material that might continue to appeal to people who still considered themselves roleplayers even though they didn't actually play RPGs all that much anymore. It's something I continue to wonder about even today, as I look out on a market saturated with so many games and game products that there is simply no way most of them are being played by anyone.
Perhaps unfairly, I look back on the Top Secret Companion as a harbinger of a change within TSR and the hobby as a whole. The faddishness of the late '70s and early '80s was dying down somewhat and the earliest generations of gamers were starting to drift away from the hobby. Even I, in my mid-teens by this point, played the games that had meant so much to me just a few years prior a lot less. Much of my "gaming" activity was no devoted to thinking about playing rather than doing so. That's probably why a book like the Companion appealed to me so much when it was released. My feelings about it now are decidedly less positive, but maybe that says more about my own personal history than it does about the book itself.
I have very sim8lar feelings about a hige part of the CMI in BECMI and the Rules Cyclopedia.
ReplyDeleteIn theory I loved it all, in practice I ended not loving it.
I think that you hit on a reality for gamers - that quite often the ideas are better than the grubby reality of playing a game. That shifts lots of books especially in the 2e era I think.
ReplyDeleteAs a DM I wanted to be a player in my adventures not those of my friends.
I played the hell out of Top Secret in 7th grade (1981-2)! We had a largish group (5-7 of us, if I recall). We played as a joint-agency special ops. We had CIA, DIA, NSA, and I played a confiscation agent from the IRS (hey, those super spy bad guys weren't paying their taxes on those undersea bases!)
ReplyDeleteFor the last time, the undersea PHANTOM lair was built in international waters. The IRS has no claim on us, and we've got the accounting records to prove it!
DeleteHankerin Ferinale of Runehammer talks about this in a podcast episode. He calls it the "core fantasy" of GMs. Basically he thinks that a huge part of what appeals to GMs as apposed to players is the archiving of rules and contents and sorting through it, like a scholar in an vast library, reading over ancient tomes by candle light trying to decipher the texts. We are hobbyists and while all of this content might never reach the table and it's nothing to feel bad about. Learning for learnings sake and seeing what else is out there in the community is a valid part of the hobby!
ReplyDelete"...it's hard – but not impossible – to justify a "party" of spies, necessitating a smaller group of players than most other RPGs."
ReplyDeleteAnd yet real-world espionage is almost invariably carried out by teams, not individuals. They might rarely (or even never) all meet up with one another personally, but they work together and are at least partially aware of what the rest of their operational cell is doing, and know the identity of at least some other members. Doesn't have the mystique of Hollywood nonsense like Bond and it might be difficult to execute at the table, but a semi-realistic espionage game seems like it would be a good fit for playing online, perhaps via email to maintain limited information.
Just don't blame me when the black helicopters start circling overhead because the wrong agency took a look at your game and decided you're as much of a threat as, say, some aid worker driving around with water jugs in his trunk.
Individuals doing their own thing is hardly a party now, is it? In any sense of the word party.
DeleteNonsense. A team working towards a unified goal is the very definition of a party in most roleplaying games, even if they're literally never all in the same room with one another. And many RPGs have long traditions of the party operating while split for much of any given story arc - look at the way most Mythos games handle investigation, or the way Shadowrun often divides into hacking, astral, and physical activities occurring simultaneously during a run.
DeleteHaving all the PCs in one group is hardly a guarantee that they aren't doing their own thing either. Awful lot of groups have at least one member who's scheming for their own benefit, and in many cases everyone's got a separate agenda. I'd call that less of a "party" than a geographically divided group of isolated agents - at least in part because reasonably modern tech means you're never really out of touch if you have access to a phone or other internet access. If anything, spy games ought to be easier to imagine and run now than they were when TS was written.
I believe that the problem with "teams of agents" are the same kind of problems that constantly plague (just to name the most common occurence) Cyberpunk teams.
Delete- The "hacker" is supposed to act to benefit the party, except that s/he usually has to work on a different timescale and often with totally separated rules for hacking. So while the others storm the enemey offices or access the physical goods by stealth... the hacker is just waiting for stuff to happen after having opened the backdoor or shut down the security cameras.
- In other words there are support roles in a team (just think of 007 & Q, or Tom Cruise vs. the rest of his team) which are probably more suited to NPCs, and "star" roles which are better done by PCs.
- If you really want to mount a complex, coordinate operation where 4 or 5 PCs have equal chance to be actually effective, get an equal share of actions at the table and so on... you will soon find out that the tightly scripted sequences of events that are at the basis of espionage, thriller and heist movies... are basically impossible to pull off with PCs. Even more so with "legacy" rule systems like Top Secret, where player agency is limited to roll against their skill and stats.
I also kept going through the motions long after I stopped having time for playing, buying games I'd never run. I did the same thing with comicbooks. I was months behind in reading any of them, but still kept on buying. Old habits die hard. Or maybe it was just denial, like staying in a relationship after you know its over.
ReplyDeleteI think my experience of the TS Companion is similar: much read, often thought about, hardly ever used at the table. Also, espionage-- and a large party therein-- was rarely touched on at my high-school-era tables.
ReplyDeleteAs for never-fulfilled-dreams of games, those may have started appearing about that time, too. I'd not thought of that until now, but you've brought that to light.