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"It's like Burn Notice," someone said. Sadly, while I'm familiar with the basic premise, I'd never watched the show. So I just asked my friends directly: Is this a cool game?
"Yeah," they said, "this is pretty awesome."
Good enough for me. I see these folks pretty much exclusively in a gaming context, and I know our tastes mesh. Dogs in the Vineyard, Unhallowed Metropolis, Monsters and Other Childish Things, and, more recently, Fiasco are some of the games we've played and enjoyed. So if they say Blowback is awesome, I've got $24 to spend agreeing with them.
I bought the game at GenCon. It sat on my shelf for a couple of weeks, and then I found myself with a one-shot scheduled and no clear idea on what to run. I picked up Blowback and read it, thinking this group would dig a spy game (and honestly, I've done enough horror lately).
The book is well-written and easy to follow. The writing is clean and unpretentious, and it makes its inspirations very clear (that is: Burn Notice). What's more, that game screams "Run me." I read a lot of RPGs, and some of them say, "You should play me," some say "Put me back on the shelf and pretend I don't exist" and some say "Run me." Blowback was a game I wanted to run. I'll explain why anon.
Characters in Blowback are either Professionals (spies who have been disavowed because of one botched job) or Civilians (the "normal" people that they know). All of the players create one of each, and the idea is that you switch back and forth as the scenes demand. Characters have four skills, which define actions in general terms: Pavement is information gathering and intel (as in "hitting the pavement"), Diversion is setting up and then springing diversions, Provocateur is going undercover and meeting/influencing people, and Commando is doing physical fighty-type stuff.
I like how the skills are divided up by goal, and I like that the system is pretty minimalist. We've all seen the RPGs with the huge lists of granular skills, but that's really not what Blowback is going for, here. Your Skills define what you're good at, but also how much you've got in you. You can only use a particular skill X number of times in a job, where X is your rating in that skill. Meaning if you've got Pavement 3, you've got three Pavement actions in you and that's it, for both Analysis and Operation (we'll get to that).
I haven't decided if I like that or not. On the one hand, it encourages the meticulous planning that the game thrives on - you need to know exactly what you're doing with a particular Skill use. On the other hand, if players are used to looking at Skills as something intrinsic to the character, it can be a little jarring to think, "OK, I am out of Pavement actions, so I cannot plant a camera."
That said, you can certainly find ways using any of the Skills to accomplish a particular goal. You just need to figure out how, and that means visualizing exactly what you want to have happen and describing how your character goes about it. More on this later.
In addition to Skills, characters have Relationships. Different types of characters (Professionals, which break down into Lifers and the more specialized Artists, and Civilians) have different numbers to place into Relationships, but the idea is that the people with whom you have Relationships are other PCs. Higher-rated Relationships are given agendas - in the game I ran, one Professional really wanted to get the hell out of the US and wanted one of the other Professionals to come with him. Relationships can get stressed, and if they get too stressed they break. Civilians get stressed by different things than Professionals, and here's where we come to a part of them that I have a real problem with.
It's obvious from the writing that relationships and stress are supposed to be hugely important. There's a whole segment of the game that's devoted to relationship maintenance, toward making promises to other characters, toward repairing stress and how relationships change. Likewise, the game seems to assume that Professionals will be leaning on the Civilians for support during a job, which can stress the Civilians.
I use waffly language like "seems to" because it's not clearly stated. The one and only problem I have with Blowback is kind of a big one: After reading it, I don't have a good sense of how to run that part of the game. The Analysis and Operation phases, sure, I get that (and we'll get there, I promise), but as far as running Civilian/Professional interactions, I just don't know how it should look.
Part of that, I'm sure, is that Burn Notice is obviously a huge influence on the game and I've never watched it. But Blowback is not "Burn Notice, the RPG." The reason I didn't pick up the Supernatural RPG wasn't because I have no interest, it's because I've never watched it and I know that while it might emulate the show well, since I've never seen it that wouldn't mean much to me. I'm of the opinion that, while taking inspiration from a show (or a movie, or a book) is fine, an unlicensed property needs to be distanced enough from the inspiration that someone unfamiliar can still "get it" easily.
Now, I fully admit that maybe it's not the game's fault. I might just be thick and missed how to get the relationship aspects that the game seems to want, and I'm firmly of the opinion that the best way to learn a game is to play it. But I'm pretty familiar with game design and GMing, and after reading Blowback, my thought wasn't "I don't get it." It was, "I think I get it, but man, an Example of Play would have answered a whole lot of my questions." There are a few scattered examples here and there in the book, but they're brief and they aren't followed up throughout. As an example, With Great Power... has examples running through the whole book, showcasing one particular group, they're characters, and how their story evolves while highlighting the (quite non-traditional) game system. Blowback would have benefited from a few pages of examples, just to make things a little more concrete.
So, anyway. Once characters are made, the players make some decisions about the botched the job. And here's another area that I think a bit more exposition would have been nice. There's a very good, workable section on figuring out what the characters know about the botched job, but I would have liked to know if the game assumes that the Agency dispatched the characters to their current location, or just cut them loose? What do they have in the way of resources? Do they still have any of their fancy spy gear, or do they need to jury-rig? This isn't addressed, and it's only important because the game seems to assume that the Professionals are going to lean on the Civilians for stuff like crash space.
Once the group figures out what happened on that last job, the Agency (the GM, that is) presents the current job. The opening scene of any given episode of Leverage is a good way to think of it - the characters learn the problem, figure out what intel they have, and then begins the Analysis phase.
"Analysis" is preparation and information gathering. During this phase, characters can follow subjects (Pavement), stash weapons and gear for later (Diversion), establish undercover identities (Provocateur) and intimidate or rough up enemies (Commando). Players can accomplish this by taking action Without Incident (no roll and no risk) or Going for Broke (rolling dice equal to their Skill). In either case, the Agency and the team gets Prep Dice. Failures here create Opportunities for the Agency to shake things up, introduce new elements into the story, complicate things, and so on. Again, while there's a good GMing section, it talks in generalities and I'd had loved to see a few "used in anger" examples, especially since the author of the books mention how her GMing style differs from others'. I found myself wishing for a few scenes written out so we as readers could see how Opportunities and Analysis scenes work out in play.
Analysis goes as long as it needs to, but too much Analysis leaves the characters with no actions left for Operations (remember, you only get to use Skills once per dot per job - when I ran Blowback, the characters burned through all their Pavement in Analysis, leaving a lot of Commando for Operations).
When the team is finished with Analysis and ready to enact the Operation, the team leader (working with the rest of the team) makes a plan. The plan is broken up into steps, with a certain amount of dice allocated from the Prep dice that the Analysis phase provided. These dice add to that step, and only that step - in fact, if a character wants to abort a given action during an Operation, the player must burn one of the Prep dice to do so.
Meanwhile, the GM takes the Prep dice earned during Analysis and sets up the opposition's defenses, based on what the opposition knows. This is meant to be done without paying attention to the team's grand plan, which I liked - the Agency isn't omniscient, and so it would be possible for a clever team to trick the bad guys into shoring up defenses (and leaving dice) someplace that the team has no intention of going.
In Operation, the players roll against the GM (as opposed to in Analysis, where there is no direct opposition). Failures here result in something going wrong - injury, mayhem, betrayal and so on. The Operation ends when everyone is safe again, more or less, regardless of how the job ended. And then we get into Blowback.
In the Blowback phase, the GM is meant to confront the team with their actions, and have the chaos they've caused come home to roost. Relationships get stressed, strained and repaired - basically, this is where the consequences come in. We didn't wind up doing this phase when I ran the game, for three reasons:
One, it was late. Lots of time in Analysis plus general gaming screwing around, and it was pumpkin-time when we finished Operation.
Two, the players needed some catharsis, and dealing with consequences just wasn't what they needed. More fun, that night, to just win the day and then call it (though, that said, we did have a couple of instances of stress on relationships that were quite clear and would have required addressing this phase).
Finally, once again, I wasn't sure how to approach it. Without some kind of firm guide on how to handle stress and so on, it was hard to know what Blowback should look like. As such, I didn't worry about relationships during the game proper, so this phase would just have been out of place. Which is a shame, because it's clearly important.
The book rounds out with the aforementioned section on GMing, which talks about how to make your hometown a fun haven for spies, how to complicate things when players fail rolls, and a "push pyramid" - something else I didn't use because I only ran a one-shot and it takes place between jobs. The push pyramid deals with the ongoing story and creating some tension, and starts on the bottom level with things like "Isolate one character" and then moves up to "Force a character into enemy territory", all the way up to the top: "Death of a major character." It looks like an interesting tool.
And really, that sums up my whole take on this game: It looks really interesting and awesome. But reading it cold, I just am not sure I'm doing it right. I would love to see an AP of Blowback that goes all the way from character creation to post-job Blowback, and shows me things like relationship stress, Civilian/Professional interaction, dice allocation for both the team and the Agency, and Operation resolution. Right now, I feel like I'm missing quite a lot, and I feel like if I'd gotten a chance to play it with someone who knew it, I'd have no problem at all running it.
I'm rating the game at 4 Substance because, for all of the problems I had with it, my players really enjoyed Blowback. And, like I said, it yelled "Run me!" in a really unmistakable this game is cool kind of voice, and that doesn't happen with bad games.
I'm rating the game at 2 Style because there needs to be more help for the GM. Now, I should mention that you can download character sheets and other stuff from the game's web site, and there are nifty flowcharts in the back of the book to help you with the dice system. But on the other hand, that site also has some notes about game design and emulation that, in my opinion, should have been fleshed out and translated directly for the text.
Also, my copy of the book is literally falling apart after a week of occasional flipping. I have pages falling out, and that's just not cool (no, I haven't yet contacted anyone about it, but I will). So that's kind of some negative Style points, too, but honestly, you could run this game just fine off a pdf.
So, in conclusion: Easiest game I've ever run? Hell, no. Hardest? No way. Simple system, mostly intuitive. It's just that I want to run this game as the author intended, and I'm having trouble doing that. The issues I have with Blowback, I think, could be fixed with a few detailed APs. As such, I'm quite happy I bought it and I'd love to run Blowback again - or better yet, play it.
