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But there was more to it than just sour grapes. Serenity just didn't feel right, and a big part of that was the core system – Cortex as it is known. It was clumsy and inelegant, and flopped about a lot, never really doing Serenity justice or exciting the imagination.. So when Margaret Weis Productions (MWP) went on to give us more Cortex-fueled licences – twisting the knife, as it were – with such legendary names as Supernatural and Battlestar Galactica, I despaired at both the tempora and the mores. Now they're also doing an RPG for Leverage, a TV show that I've never even seen, but is apparently some kind of new A-Team team heist show, which for someone of my belief system is not unlike a second coming. I love the caper genre in general, and have always been interested in ways to emulate it in an RPG. So this is in my wheelhouse, and for my sins I managed to accrue a review copy. And here we are.
Not a copy of the whole RPG, I should stress. For the simple reason that it isn't out yet. Stopping us from heisting MWP is the Quickstart Job. It's pretty much your classic intro package except unlike White Wolf's versions, it isn't free, but that might be because, unlike White Wolf, MWP is not richer than profiterole lasagne. It's also not like White Wolf's because it is sharply written, instantly playable and the adventure doesn't suck donkey hats.
It helps that the system is clear and simple, refining Cortex down to its basics and refusing the urge to gussy it up any further. The principle is still the same: stats and skills are rated from d4 to d12 and so are skills. Roll stat die and skill die, add the two highest together, and try to beat the total of whatever the GM rolled (base d6+d6). Now, as a GM, I view rolling dice in much the same way as I do learning the rules: it's something for players to do, not me. I have enough trouble picking difficulty levels, if I have to pick one and then roll dice, I'm doing double the work for none of the fun. But for once, there's a reason the GM rolls dice, and it's pretty cool.
Basically, whenever the GM rolls a one on his dice, something happens that puts things in the PC's favour. A guard is particularly stupid. The returning bad guy has to stop at the train crossing. You find a power drill from where they were installing something. You could even imagine this representing Michael Weston or Tom Clancy explaining how you can cut open a door with a tin can and your mum's hair-dryer. Of course, you can spend Story Points to do these yourself, when you come up with something awesome. But one big part of heist shows is stuff sometimes just seems to happen randomly, and that's what this mimics. It means that random spanners are being thrown in the works actually randomly, not from players' brains.
Meanwhile, if the players roll ones, the GM gets to throw his own spanners into the works. The bad guy phoned in your cover story and nobody's ever heard of you. The guard that leaves every day at 5pm comes back to get his keys. Turns out the dilettante majored in chemistry and she knows you just made all those words up. Whether in their favour or against it, these things actually get noted down on some scrap paper, usually with a d6 added to them. And every time they might affect subsequent tests, then they get added to the PC's dice, if they're a good happenstance, or to the GM's pool if they're an unfortunate one. You tell the guy that of course the guys on the phone denied your existence, it's standard procedure and he believes you...but he is more suspicious from now on. The guard raises the alarm, so goodbye trying to bluff people that you belong there. The dilettante follows you around for the rest of the mission, distracting you with witty putdowns. So as well as the players trying to out-think the hay-wiring, there's these lovely mechanical benefits and drawbacks powering these along. And yes, they can get rid of them if they're good enough – or they can make the same ones worse, scaling up those d6s to d8s or more.
It's nice. It's clever. And it slips into a fairly standard traditional task resolution system in such a way as to be neither obtrusive nor gimmicky. Nice work.
You know what else Steve likes? Steve likes short skill lists. And in the genre of heists and capers, where everyone can do lots of everything, oh man do you need short skill lists bad. And Leverage delivers. In fact, the skill list is basically a class list, and it spans the genre perfectly: grifters (aka mouths, faces), hackers (includes gadgets), masterminds (for when plans come together), hitters and thieves. It fits so perfectly you can see why I've always believed that RPGs and the A-Team genre are so made for each other it's difficult to believe they weren't made for each other. That it took this long to get something truly focussed on the genre is kind of sad, but at least the bus is here now.
There's a nice twist, too, from the short skill list, and that's that something's going to have to be low-statted, and eventually your hitter will have to talk to someone, or your hacker with the giant ass have to sneak somewhere. And if they've got a d4 in that, they're much more likely to get a one. Now this is very important because players therefore get to choose not just what they are bad at but which stats they are critically bad at. And since great chunks of television shows thrive upon the fish-out-of-water plot where the geeky Wesley has to pretend to be suave Angel or the greasemonkey gets a chance to play society gal for a night this is not just a clever mechanic that allows players much greater control of stat outcome than just success or failure, it is also a nigh-perfect television show mechanic.
So as well as the five mentioned skills, there are the six Cortex attributes: Agility, Strength, Vitality, Alertness, Intelligence and Willpower. As with any game with short lists, it is kind of easy to make somebody unstoppable at their chosen field – masterminds and hackers really only need intelligence, most of the time, so tuning this to a gritty genre full of failure might be tricky, although this is balanced by the prevalence of opposed rolls, with NPCs using the same stats and ranges too.
Players also get some Talents (some of which are keyed to their “class” ie the skill they favour) and some character Traits. Traits are like Aspects in FATE in that they can be keyed negatively or positively, depending on whether they are making your life better or worse. In the former, they add d8 to your die pool, in the latter, they add d4 and give you a Story Point in exchange (and again, the increased chance of having something interestingly go wrong). Traits are pretty general – it would not be difficult to almost always bring your Gorgeous trait into play if you're a Grifter, for example – but because it's only a d8 and you only take the two highest dice, that won't mess things up. Whereas if the Hitter adds a d8 for “Smarter Than He Looks” he could really shake up an Intelligence+Hacker roll of d6+d4.
I like this because I like to be surprised a lot in gaming. Very often when you tag an advantage or character trait, it means it automatically dominates a scene, or gives such a large bonus it is almost guaranteed to do so. In this, you tag things all the time and sometimes it pays off. Likewise the alarms going off doesn't necessarily throw all the plans out the window, because sometimes that d6 complication die the GM is rolling isn't going to affect your success (and sometimes it will even throw out ones, and act in your favour). The dice, in other words, keep adding new ideas to the mix, instead of just relying on the player's imagination or on their strategic choosing of when to spend their precious plot points. Which are here, for making up beneficial facts or adding the third-highest die to a pool, if you want such things, but they're kept rare and precious (and thus interesting), like Fate points in Warhammer, not falling like rain like they were in Serenity (and thus dull).
Combat works like any other test: quick and easy attribute comparisons with each side maybe getting extra dice for weapons or outnumbering the other. Each side also gets an Endurance to beat down to zero, and zero can mean whatever suits the story best. Yes, this abstract system can work for any kind of conflict. A slightly switched around version appears for actions that need to be done as fast as possible (like cracking the safe before the bad guy gets back to his office). These are just enough meat to make violence and timed stuff extra exciting without needing any significant more brain power. Likewise there's a flashback system for going “ah, but while it looks like the bad guy got away despite our best efforts, we earlier drained his petrol tank”, but it works much the same way as generating bonus dice, so again: extra functionality, no extra thinking.
It can't quite do the ultimate heist trick where the characters know more than the audience, but without mind-clamping your players, this may ever prove elusive, and meanwhile, Leverage has taken a good shot at all the other essentials.
Okay, so I like the system. I do. It's not just a good base system, simple to learn yet robust and useful, it's also been trimmed down to an essential elegance and tailored to the genre in frighteningly clever ways. The question now is how does the adventure stack up?
It's not too bad. The introduction is a little twee, being done entirely in character and making me hope the TV show writers are actually funny, but the plot is strong and on genre: schmooze a party downstairs to keep a bad guy busy while the thief breaks his safe upstairs. Then there's a twist in the tale and then it wraps up. Problem is, it's very short. There are only five scenes, and those scenes can be as long as a single die roll. Literally: the first scene in its entirety is the players making spot checks at the party. You can think of that as a scene in a TV show, once everyone makes a roll and roleplays around it, but it could last ten seconds. Even if it doesn't, you could probably play this whole adventure through in about half an hour. Add in twelve minutes for banter and sixteen for commercials and it fits, I suppose – which could be a good thing, and not just for emulation reasons.
Still, not a lot of meat on the bones, even for a Quickstart, but at least what is there is solid and fleshy. It is also somewhat railroady, in that it starts with the plan already laid out and in progress, but I can forgive that because a) planning is boring and b) it fits the genre. We narrate over the top of the actual action (montage!) what everyone is doing, not plan it in advance. That does cut down on what the Mastermind can actually do, but I'm sure there's more on that in the rulebook proper.
The result of it being damn short and tightly structured is that in every scene the actual die rolls going on are easy to predict and can be laid out in detail. This is important because success and failure aren't always obvious (again, in the genre, failure is rarely failure) and because players and GMs alike need suggestions for good d6s and bad d6s if ones are rolled. Too often RPGs think that just because they're imaginary games that they can not do the heavy lifting and provide ideas by the bucketload. Leverage not only gets the dice to pull their weight and throw in stuff, it provides plenty of fodder at every step of the adventure, too.
I like that. I like a game that understands that I'm way too lazy to be anything but spoon-fed. I want a game that's as easy to run – and run well, and hard to genre - as it is to watch a TV show, and I'd prefer it to be as quick as a TV show too. I'm a busy man, I want action, and I want it now, and I want it to last 42 minutes or less. And that ncludes time to learn the rules and do chargen, but since the characters are pre-written and their sheets explain the rules on them, this will only eat up about a minute.
In short, this is a TV show in a can: short, sweet, simple and slick as hell, and perfect for non-gamers for whom a major barrier of RPGs will always be time investment, not to mention a lack of familiarity with fantasy genres. I would say I'm interested in the core book, but what I'm actually looking for is more of these Job PDFs. One a week on Thursday nights would be great, 9.30pm. Ten central.
Style: 5 (well explained, ridiculously easy to use) Substance: 4 (on genre, but too damn short)
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