Wrangling Leverage hack ideas has put me smack up against my old nemesis – magic. Magic systems hold endless fascination for me because they are so easy to come up with, but so easy to do poorly. It’s not a problem with an easy solution – it’s not even a problem with a single solution. There’s a reason that Fate core had something like 8 different magic systems, each to capture some specific idea, yet SOTC and the Dresden Files use entirely different systems.

So, let me take, for example, Shadowrun. It’s a well known game that makes for a good conceptual match with Leverage. It is mostly a one for one port. Even cyberware is fairly easily wrapped up into the asset rules[1], perhaps requiring a few more signature assets. But magic, well, magic is an oddball. Unlike other settings where we might swap magic into the mix by removing something else (probably hacker), magic layers itself on top of the rest of the game as something else that needs to be added on. Shadowrun magic also has some fairly well-established and concrete rules. Broadly speaking, mages come in two stripes – full mages and adepts, with adepts having some specific subset of magical ability. Within that, there are also other distinctions hermetic vs shamanic traditions, and the oddball case of physical adepts. T here are a lot of rules for how the physics of magic work, though a lot of them are weird fiddly bits that exist to prevent player abuses. The key ones are that magic tires you out (measured as ‘drain’), and that summoning stuff is part of what magic can do, but everything else is just fairly vanilla spell lists.

In pulling this over to Leverage, I am willingly shedding a lot of detail. In Shadowrun, there are very important differences between a fire blast and a mana blast, much as there are very important differences between a revolver and an automatic pistol. It’s pretty clear to me that the transition will make for a fuzzier system, but the question is always what gets lost and what gets kept. For starters, I’ll keep the idea of drain, the basic split (between mages and adepts) and the system idea that you pay for magic by being less good in other key areas.

A lot of this is mechanically easy. Being a mage is this easy: Add a 6th role – Mage (or Shaman). For most people, it’s zero. To make your character a mage, distribute your role dice as normal, then reduce them to buy up your mage die. A one step reduction (dropping a die size) in a role increases the mage die by one step (Increasing a size, with the first step being from 0 to d4). Right off the bat, i dig this, because a d4 mage is a magnet for trouble, and does a wonderful job of modeling one of my favorite Shadowrun concepts that never worked mechanically – the burnt out mage.

Adepts work on a similar principle – reduce one of your role dice by a step and add a specialization to the role of your choice, based on the role (only one per character). They’re structured a little different than classic adepts, but the underlying principal is the same.

Hitter: Combat Magic or Physical Adept or Bear
Hacker: Technomage or Metamage or Raccoon
Grifter: Enchanter or Coyote
Thief: Illusionist or Physical Adept or Raven
Mastermind: Mind Magic or Summoner or Spider

Mechanically, it’s a piece of cake. But now comes the tough part – what are those dice going to do? I can see some rough shapes: Summoning creates assets of the appropriate die size. Complications on magic dice tie to drain or other interesting problems. But that’s all fuzzy. I could easily come up with some rule of thumb stuff, especially for adepts, enough to fake it at the table, but that’s not a solution. I’ll be chewing on this for a bit, and write up what I figure out.

1 – A fiddlier system could be arranged, but tabling that for the moment.

People have been talking about ways to hack Leverage to play games of a similar style in different settings. There are a lot of possibilities for this – there are very few genres which can’t support a good caper (or at least a team of awesome folks executing on plans) so there’s a lot of potential different places to take it. This introduces a lot of questions for how to support these other genres, especially when they don’t quite match up with the roles of the core game.

Four of the roles are pretty portable – Hitter, Thief, Grifters and Masterminds are pretty universal. You might want to change the names for tone – Soldier, Burglar, Charmer and Leader – but the basic functionality is just about the same. The problem comes in the form of how you handle the Hacker.

Now, yes, some Hacker skills, such as forgery, are nicely portable, the thematic core of the role revolves around computers, networks and such fun things. That demands a fairly narrow band of time, either the reasonably recent past (say, post War Games) to the near future (think Cyberpunk) with brief side jaunts into alt-history where the goggles and gears annoy Charles Stross. So when you step outside of that sphere, what do you do with the hacker?

The first option is to see if there’s a setting equivalent for technology. This may take the form of magic, but only if the magic is fairly low key. For example, Scott Lynch’s Lies of Locke Lamora has magic, but it’s so powerful that making hacker into mage would be simply overwhelming. However, the setting has very interesting Alchemy, and that would probably be a much better match. It makes a good match for some of the sort of things the hacker does, especially producing gadgetry.

Similarly, you could easily enough use a kind of “low magic”[1] stand in for hacking (in my mind, I’m imagining Egg Chen from Big Trouble in Little China as an example of this). In some ways it’s an almost perfect match. You can produce little relics, scry for information and so on. This is just one way to handle magic in the Leverage system, but that’s a topic I’ll get into more some other time.

The other possible approach is to treat hacking as a signature of the genre. That is to say, hacking is a signifier for a certain time-range and style of play, and in other genres, the signifier might be something else. Consider, for example, the Pilot in a game based loosely off Firefly – it’s a role that is very important to that sort of group, and while it may not have any similarities to the hacker in terms of what the character _does_, but it’s similar in term of how it fits into the group. Of course, the one problem with using Pilot as an example is that you need to make sure that it comes up as often as the other roles do in play. Pilot tends to be a little bit rough in actual play because the ship just sort of goes most of the time.

This approach takes a little more work (especially because it means rewriting the talents rather than simply reskinning them) but it’s the sharp point for how to start making a more drastic change to the system to capture other genres and ideas. And that’s almost certainly where the path leads next.

1 – As contrasted with the Fireball tossing magic of the usual D&D mage.

It’s always interesting to see a finished product. No matter how much work you put into it the original product, there is always room to be surprised. While there were no real surprises, there were plenty of tweaks and points of polish that caught my eye. Similarly, there is a difference between playing to see how the game works and playing something that’s done. Which is to say, I learned some unexpected lessons in actually playing the finished game.

Talents
The talents were a lot of fun since they were mostly new to me, having been written up by the ever-talented Clark Valentine. Lots of good stuff in them, and the section on creating your own is nicely concise (and very handy for potential hacks). That said, upon seeing them in action, I was pleasantly surprised to find the ones that really engaged the system were more fun. Not to say the ones that just added dice to certain activities didn’t work well, but the ones that did things like enhance asset dice or move plot points around were awesome. In retrospect, I would try to make sure every character has at least one talent too take advantage of opportunities because I think those might be the most fun of all.

The Complication Dial
Cam pointed out that I’d made a mistake in play by creating complications as d8s rather than d6s. He’s right, but that got me thinking – the d8’s actually worked fine and, I think, accidentally kept the challenge level up for a short job. That lead to my thinking that it makes a fantastic dial to set the seriousness of a job, with d6 being the normal level for the show, d8 for a bit harder, and d10 for the fecal matter hitting the rotating blades. Similarly, saying the GM’s complications start at d4 is a great way to declare a job will be more wacky and lighthearted than average.

It also could be used as a tool for escalating tension, if you’re playing a game for which that is appropriate. At some point during the game (either time-based or event-based) tension ratchet’s up, and complications now start at d8, and by endgame, maybe they’re d10s. There are definitely specific genres and styles this suits better than others (and default Leverage only really suits this for the two-parter episodes) but it’s handy for hacks.

Looking for Info
I made a call on the fly that I’m very happy with to handle situations where the player wants to hit the streets and talk to people to get information. The player may choose whichever role they like when they make this roll, but the roll they choose indicates the kind of people they’re getting information from. That is to say, you can always excel at this, but it’s always looking for trouble.

That said, the more useful trick for players in this situation (which I’d forgotten to suggest) is that this sort of scene is exactly the right time to create an asset for the person you intend to talk to. Let’s the player create their own informant and gives them a bonus at the same time. Much more satisfying.

The Bucket of No
When in doubt, the GM rolls 2d6 in opposition to the players. This is a handy rule of thumb, and when the actions speak directly to the various assets and complications in play, it is very easy to build an opposition roll that it about right. The problem comes when the players are making rolls against things that are tangential to the job but are still important enough to roll – without modifiers to really tilt the rolls, things can get a bit weird.

The first example of this came up when the thief was stuck in the office with a “Big Dog d8” and the grifter attempted to soothe the dog over the comm. Strictly speaking, that should have been a d6 (the default) and a d8 (for big dog) against the grifter. Sure, I might have thrown in a complication to represent the difficulty, but this was a full on crazy idea, one so improbably that I was inclined to just say No. Instead, a turned to a physical manifestation of the “Say Yes or roll the dice” principal – three d12s that I have set aside as my bucket of no. The are respectively labeled, “No”, “No Freaking Way” and “Are You Kidding Me?”. When I am tempted to say no, I just add the appropriate number of these to the roll. In this case, I dipped in at the “No Freaking Way” level, but the players still won the roll

There were a few other lessons, but they’re a bit more involved, and more suited to making very extreme hacks of the system, so those will probably percolate for a while until something comes of them.

I don’t want to get into a play by play of every scene that lead us to our finale, partly because I don’t think that would be useful and partly because I’d be hard pressed to recall all the details precisely. Instead, I’m going to talk about _how_ it played and the sort of things that happened at the table.

One of the player’s remarked that if the game does well it might be worth investing in 3M based on the sheer number of post-its used. By the time the game was finished I had pretty well covered the table in front of me with them. Index cards or a whiteboard would probably have worked equally well, but post its definitely hold up. Pro-tip: Use a sharpie if you can, to make them legible all across the table.

The first three notes were the three objectives for the game: Find the dog, sort out Rose and get the client to the hearing on time. The 4th had the time written on it. While the time changed, none of these had any direct mechanical impact on play, but they were useful for providing focus (at least for me).

Next, I put down post-its for the situation. One for the mark (Grifter d10, Evil d12, Psycho d12), one for the client and one for the dog (“Mr. Whuffles, yip dog d4”). It was only after Max’s player’s comment to this effect that I added “In a microwave d8”. Since there was also a guilty conscience in play, I put in Rose’s secretary (Secretary d8, secretly in love with Rose d8, guilty d4). Then I added “The Mob is Interested, d4” and that was pretty much the starting spread.

Thankfully, at that point the system stepped up and helped start bring things to life. After the characters talked to the client (at one point sending her further into hysterics with the kind of tact that makes it clear why Nate doesn’t invite the whole team along on client interviews) and things switched into investigation mode, something that many GMs may recognize as a bit of a bear trap.

Right off the bat, the players threw a curveball at me that I hadn’t planned for, asking if the dog was chipped (that is, had a microchip implanted for tracking purposes). I hadn’t even considered that, and there was an instinct to just say “no” since that would make things too easy, but that was a bad instinct – I just needed it to be playable, so I switched it to a “Yes, but…” – the dog was chipped, but the client didn’t have the code for it, her vet did, but he was out of the country (but presumably had it on file in his office).

I want to flag this one to any would-be Leverage GMs. What followed from this was procedurally very simple (and right out of the Fixer advice in the book) but was great fodder for play. The players had a clear goal (track the chip), a clear obstacle (It’s locked up in the office) and a clear course of action (Break in!) with the added bonus that it was clear _who_ should do this (the thief, of course). All of which is to say, when that little voice that says “no!” pops up, you should listen, but not obey. It I probably a great opportunity to throw up an obstacle rather than an insurmountable barrier.

The break-in ended up illustrating failure and complications very well. The thief utterly botched his original roll to case the joint, not only failing, but also handing me a complication (more on that in a second). Obviously, I didn’t want failure to stop things cold, and it would be silly to not have the thief be able to break in, so I asked the question instead “How can I move success to a different arena?” and determined that the issue was no good external access – to get in you’d want to go in through the adjacent office, which was open for business. The thief was forced to roll some grifter but managed to pass himself off as a patient, and got into the office, which is when the complication came up.

Procedurally, whenever a player rolled a 1 (creating a complication) I would pick up a d8 from the pile and put it on top of my post-it pad. When it came time to use it, I’d either write the new value on a post-it already out there, or I would (as in this case) take a new post it and write down the new complication. In this case it was “Big Dog d8” for the pooch that had busted out of his kennel. The subsequent scene of the grifter attempting to be the dog whisperer over the comms was unbelievable, even more so for it working.

Anyway, I won’t get into the details of the other scenes. The Mastermind talked to people in the mob (mechanically, the mob interest go bigger, then I later introduced “the real Danny Rose d10” into play). The Hitter found the guys who had stolen the dog and beat some information out of them. THe Grifter spoke to Rose’s secretary and as a 7-11 (using That Thing I Gave You) managed to acquire video footage of the Mark. Eventually the Hitter and Mastermind descended on the place the dog was being held. The Mastermind took out the guy at the door (somewhat to his own surprise) while the hitter took out the three upstairs, incorporating the “Dog in the Microwave d8” into his roll (A piece of debris bounced off one thug, opening the microwave, and the tiny dog jumped on another thug’s face). I rolled three 1’s on that fight, and our Hitter was a Badass (He basically takes out a mook every time I roll a 1) so it was about the most decisive victory imaginable. They got the fog back, got the client to the hearing on time, and as the wrapup, arranged for the two Danny Rose’s to meet, leaving that outcome to the viewer’s imagination.

It was a good game, and as noted, finished very quickly, and while I could probably have stretched it out a little, I think fast was just right for the room So with all that in mind, next post I’ll wrap up with lessons learned.

For the caper, I went straight to the tables and rolled it up in front of the players. I note I could have kept some of the elements obscured if I had wanted to surprise the players, but I opted to lay it all out there and trust the players to keep IC and OOC clearly separate. The caper rolled up as follows:

Client: Politician or Public Servant
Problem: Threatened
Pressure: Out of Time and The Courts Can’t Help (rolled twice)
Mark: Grifter
Mark’s Angle: Evil
Mark’s Power: Scary, Sociopath (rolled twice)
Mark’s Weakness: Phony
Mark’s Vulnerability: Time
What Else is in Play: Guilty Conscience, Hostage
The Twist: The Mob Has Their Eye on This

This ended up being a surprisingly tricky spread, even beyond the number of 10’s (which spawned the double rolls) that came up. Certain elements gelled immediately. A threatened politician or bureaucrat is almost certainly an honest one who the mark is trying to stop from doing something. Plus, the mark’s vulnerability to time dovetails well with the Out of Time pressure suggesting that this job was going to be very much on the clock. The problem was the Mark.

That particular combination (Evil, Scary, Sociopath) is a tricky one to use, in part because they’re all secondary elements. They are fantastic for complimenting some other foundation for the mark to stand, but they’re a really, really strange match with Grifter. Not that it’s hard to envision and evil, scary, sociopathic grifter, but that’s only half the challenge. A mark like that would be one that the players would be inclined to go after head first because Scary and Sociopath are the sorts of things that work on other people, but not on heroes (even somewhat tarnished ones). And since the whole point of designing a caper is that you can’t just rush in and kick a guy’s ass, I couldn’t go with any of the obvious options.

The key came in the combining his weakness (Phony) with the Twist (The Mob’s interest) – Our Mark is not actually a scary guy, but he’s trading on the name and reputation of someone who actually _is_ that scary. That worked well because it gave him access to underworld resources (thugs!) but it clearly suggested an endgame where the mobster in question finds out about someone using his name. Awesome. That’s a workable mark. But what the hell was he doing?

Again, the answer came out of the table: the Hostage. I had originally envisioned some undefined person, but then I thought about the mark, who was a very small man pretending to be a much bigger one. He wouldn’t have the moxie to actually kidnap someone, would he? No, probably not, unless it was by accident. But he would be willing to kidnap a pet.

And bam, there it was. The Mark had kidnapped the client’s dog and was threatening it to keep her from doing something in the very near future. With that skeleton it was easy – I picked zoning out of the are because, hey, real estate development is big money. The woman had a damning report to present to the zoning commission before the voted on the site for the new All-Mart, and the commission was meeting today at noon. The Mark had taken her dog and made it clear that the report should not be delivered. To emphasize the time crunch, I had the crew find her (a woman crying on a park bench) and started out with the frame that the vote was at noon and it was now 9:45am. Go.

All in all, I think it was a great illustration of the generator in action. Even with a slightly rough spread, it had all the materials needed to make the game work.

Tomorrow: Actual Play!

Fred held the Dresden Files dice packing party on Saturday, and it was a great opportunity to see people, new and old. I also got roped into running a game of Leverage for some of the attendees which did not, I admit, take much arm twisting. It did demand some rapid reading of the parts of the game that I didn’t write and some of those I did, but that worked out fine because I got to be really impressed by the game several times. There’s some really good stuff in there

I’ll talk about the game in detail in a minute, but I don’t want to bury the lead, so here’s the thing that really impressed me: including caper design and character generation, the whole game was done in just about two and a half hours, and it was a complete (if not overly intricate) caper. I was utterly gobsmacked by this – it was a lot of well structured, fast moving play in a small window. This suggests some pretty fantastic things for weekday nights and convention games.[1]

Anyway, rather than do a recruitment job (a fantastic chargen method) I opted for fast chargen because I wanted to take the caper generation system for a spin. Chargen was, I admit, made easier by the fact that everyone at the table was familiar with Fate, so explaining distinctions was very easy. I also listened to their descriptions and just picked two talents for everybody (like stunts in SOTC, Talents are the element most likely to slow down chargen because there are the most choices and interesting options). The crew ended up being:

Hitter – Hare (properly, Peter Rabbit, which might or might not have been his real name) a Badass with a penchant for improvised weapons.

Hacker – Max, a seriously antisocial woman who spent much of her time snarking at all her teammates except sledge, because he was the boss. Max’s player gave me one of my favorite moments of the game upon realization that I was cheerfully taking the throwaway snarky comments and folding them into the game fiction, which is where the eponymous “Dog in the Microwave d8” came in.

Grifter – Benny, who just wanted to help. And if helping required a doctor, well, he could slap on a lab coat and step in, right?

Thief – Sam, and older black gentleman in a bowler cap, modeled after the Fables character of the same name. I am pretty sure Same generated more complications than the rest off the crew put together.

Mastermind – Sledge, scion of a an extended (and connected) Jewish family whose bagel shop served as the team’s base of operations. His mastermind schtick was less about having complex plans so much as knowing a lot of people. He was also the team’s leader, though only tenuously, since everyone else but the hacker had taken Mastermind as their secondary role.

Thoughts on Chargen:

• I needed a better summary of what Mastermind does, or more concretely, when you might roll it. The other roles are very clear in their application, but Mastermind is a bit fuzzier. Having chewed on it a bit, I’m pondering summarizing it as the thing you roll when your action is really asking the GM a question, but that may not quite be right.
• The talents were very well received for their clarity and color. I’m pretty sure those came from the ever-talented Clark Valentine, and I think they ended up being a big selling point for the game.
• I definitely could have used a cheatsheet during chargen, since the material is a little spread out. This was mostly made a problem by the fact that I was running it out of a PDF copy on my ipad, and much like my experience with Icons, a PDF copy tends to fall short at the table when you need to reference it a lot (as is the case in chargen). The inability to flip or mark pages is pretty telling.
• I ended up pulling a few framing questions out of the air (Where’s your home city? How long has the team been together? Is the Mastermind the boss? Where’s your base of operations?) and they were useful enough that I need to see about building a fixed list of them (or see if such a list exists in the book)
• It was not instantly obvious to the players where to write specialties on the character sheet because the line under each role looks like a divider. Small thing, but something I’ll bear in mind if I do a character sheet redesign.
• Specialties, as it turns out, are almost as much fun as distinctions as a way to flesh out the characters. Really happy with their final form.
• One of the players (Ben’s I think) noted that a structurally pleasing element of the game is that the talents can be easily modified to add other genre elements (like magic and such) without touching the bones of the system. He’s right, and that’s a pretty big plus, though I think a lot of genres also end up needing a bit of redefining of what “Hacker” means.

Tomorrow: Caper Design!

1 – I’ve obviously run short games before, but usually they’re the result of me freeforming a bit, so the throttle is entirely in my hands. Leverage has more rules structure than that yet still plays very fast. Like, Fiasco fast.