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Stepping up to this challenge and not swayed by the odds against them is Leverage: The Roleplaying Game. This is the number two of the one-two punch from Margaret Weis Productions, the first being Smallville. Previously, MWP have come out with faithful but derivative RPGs for such popular shows as Firefly, Battlestar Galactica and Supernatural, all utilising their in-house system of Cortex in a very traditional manner. Then came Smallville and blew everything out of the water, using Cortex in a way that broke new ground and set a new standard, as I reported in my previous review. Leverage isn’t quite so outré, but it is equally clever, and takes on a style so dramatically opposed to that of Smallville they make a lovely double act at the extremes of the art of genre emulation.
To wit: Smallville’s mechanics are all about modelling a setting where all conflicts are emotional, and the line between protagonist and antagonist is clouded and shifting. Leverage is about the clever and awesomely skilled (and hardly ever angsty) good guys running a kick-ass play, and the bad guys getting hosed along the way. Which makes sense as it is designed to emulate TNT’s fantastic new show Leverage, which covers just such things, and does so in style. The heist genre and TV adventure shows have always gone well together, and both also work well for roleplaying: they both feature an unchanging group of niche-protected specialists working just outside the law to defeat a new bad guy each week. When you add banter and a few pop-culture references and a fantastic sense of fun, Leverage is one of the best properties for an RPG to come along in years. Except of course, for all those problems I mentioned about the heist genre.
So there’s the challenge, and the pay-off. Now let’s talk about how the job gets done.
Once again, the Cortex system is back, and simple and elegant: roll at least two multisided dice, add the two highest rolls, beat whatever number the GM rolled. Also back in rotation are the standard six Cortex abilities: Agility, Alertness, Intelligence, Strength, Vitality and Willpower. What’s new is instead of a skill list to pair up with the attributes, we have five Roles, one niche for each character on the show: Grifter, Hacker, Hitter, Mastermind and Thief. Grifter here means “face”, and the others are fairly straightforward – although expansive to the point of confusion. After all, thieves are often punching people, and stealing information by hacking is a kind of thievery, and Batman fights with his intelligence as much as his martial arts...
Luckily, this confusion is recognised and dealt with by the rules and the text. Firstly, players are supposed to think expansively in their use of their Roles, in order to mirror the show (such as when the Hitter will just kick down a door instead of waiting for the Thief to come and pick the lock). The player’s desire to use their higher die type (d8, d10) will drive them to think of ways to solve problems that involve their preferred style of activity, thus strengthening their sense of Role in the story. It does mean you’ll always be looking for nails to fit your hammer, but there is an antidote to that which is that rolling a 1 is the only way to get Plot Points, and most of your special abilities require Plot Points to fire up. This means you’re going to also look out for situations to roll your low-rated (d4) Roles, even if they may incur failure or Complications (which are not the same thing). This beautifully mimics the wonderful trope in TV shows where the least-capable team member is forced into using his absence of skill for comic (but often ultimately helpful) results.
The system still isn’t perfect. Wise-ass players are still going to try and hit every situation with their particular hammer, leaving it up to the poor GM to rule what is and isn’t allowed (“surely as a Hitter I know how to sneak around, I don’t have to roll Thief!”). The GM also has to make sure his heist allows room for all Roles to shine. Meanwhile players have to be able to fit their concept into the five Roles, which will prompt a lot of questions (“Where does wheelman fit?” “What’s a mastermind actually do?” “Is a pickpocket a Grifter or a Thief?”) even if you have seen the show. On the other hand they get points for mirroring the show as accurately as possible, and for going to great lengths to answer these questions, both with rules and long discussions of the Roles and their nature, for the player and for the GM.
Indeed, this is the core strength of the entire game: in order to truly model its genre as strongly as possible, it takes risks with unconventional, even problematic mechanics, and likewise encourages the players and GM to strive towards this genre with their own control over pacing and structure, so that it is a game that requires much of its players – but it also recognises these demands and goes above and beyond the call of duty in helping and guiding the players in accomplishing their tasks.
Case in point: the Plot Point system. Players can spend them to add an “Asset”, worth an extra D6 to their die pools (or step up an existing Asset die), representing something to their advantage under a specific set of circumstances. Likewise, whenever they roll a 1 on a die, the GM can give that player a Plot Point to create a Complication, equally a d6 (or more) that now works against them. On the surface, this is very simple, but the gentle sway between things going in favour of the heist team and things going against them is the heart of the pacing of those stories, so there is a lengthy and detailed discussion on their use and application. There’s also heaps of special abilities for each Role that help prod players in the right direction, as well as satisfying the need for Kewl Powers.
Other genre-appropriate mechanics similarly developed are the call back rules, allowing characters to do on-screen references to past episodes to power up their abilities, and a flashback mechanism which provides a simple but effective way to add extra success at the end of a job and help get more of that “even smarter than we looked before” feeling. Naturally, such an authorial stance will not please hardcore simulationists, nor will the clever idea of doing chargen during the first game, allowing the needs of plot to dictate what your character and cannot do. But without such conceits, tapping into the heist genre would be pretty much impossible.
Of course, even these mechanics can only go so far. Perhaps unfortunately but probably necessarily (especially with rules so simple), there is more talk than rules when it comes to supporting the genre. That said, talk is not cheap here. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the last half of the book is probably the best single examination of the heist genre and how to write it ever written, doing for the genre what Nightmares of Mine did for horror. It also takes detailed care to establish which effects and techniques do and do not apply to roleplaying games, as opposed to other media, and the ways in which the requirements of different media change the demands on your structure and pacing. There’s also a solid breakdown of different kinds of scams and how they work, and likewise for the different kinds of victims and different kinds of villains. It’s an excellent taxonomy, and put with all the rest you don’t even need to see the show to get the gist - although it helps for specific details. Unlike Smallville, this game runs deep on its source and thrives on it. You don’t have to know the source, but it helps a lot.
Speaking of the show, there is also an excellent guide to the two series we’ve seen so far, episode by episode. There’s also character sheets for all the main stars and a few of the minor ones, and the de riguer use of full-colour stills from the show throughout. Best of all are the references to episodes which pack the text, helping to not only cement the show in the reader’s mind but to also provide concrete examples of every technique and rule discussed. It’s a pretty book, although not quite as spectacularly well laid-out or clearly written as Smallville. Some of the explanations are as clear as mud, and there simply aren’t enough summaries, diagrams or recaps, making it all the more problematic that not everything is where it should be when hunting by chapter (nor is there any kind of index). What makes this so great a shame is that the rules are so simple they could easily be summarised and tabled. Most egregiously of all, it is short on examples, especially an example adventure. There are dozens of pages on what goes into an adventure, how to build them and pace them and shape them and stat them and run them and present them, how to generate them randomly and improvise on them freely, but there’s no finished example of what these things would look like. There isn’t even an example of play. And it burns for the lack of them. It aches for the lack of them.
Presentation is thus the only but very lasting problem with this game. Where Smallville took a difficult, demanding game with tricky ideas and tricky mechanics and presented it so well it almost played itself, Leverage takes a difficult, demanding game with not as tricky ideas and much simpler mechanics and obfuscated those mechanics, and buried the ideas in verbiage. Yes, the verbiage is excellent, but it sometimes errs on the side of being too much the heist-genre version of Nightmares of Mine, rather than being a true toolbox; an enlightened discourse, not a plug-and-play seduction of the senses. So much so that after reading chapters, I would find myself returning to the show, because I couldn’t quite get that zest, that balletic flair, or even that sense of pure fun from the game itself. It mirrors the show, but it doesn’t live it well enough.
On the other hand, when you’re the best work on the genre ever written, when you are the heist-genre equivalent of Nightmares of Mine, when you’re intelligent, elegant, innovative and slick, you can get by without flair. A book of piano music doesn’t have to be as beautiful nor as crystal clear as the Tchaikovsky you can make from it, after all. Buy the game, watch the show, and get your own ballet going.
Style: Four (pretty and well-written, but lacks in organisation, clarity and examples) Substance: Five (knows its world inside and out and mimics it to the hilt)
Gratuitous Plug: If you like the game, you might enjoy a Suitcase Full of Cash
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