Thanks for taking the trouble to investigate de-crunching the crunchy, entertaining and interesting as usual and much food for thought.
A lot of this has been stemming from my attempts to understand some of the more popular modern games in context with earlier generations of games and the revisions attempting to freshen them up as viewed against say Blades in the Dark and PbtA types of game thus leading to my question.
I think that your modern game has a different sort of crunch.
In Traveller the crunch is about “this is the sort of starship you can build” and “this much armour protects you against those weapons”. In modern games it’s just as complicated, but it’s about “this is how your trust X” and “this is what you can get your group to do for you”. This is obviously much harder to model (because biological things are squirmy and slippery); but it’s also much harder for someone to argue against on grounds of realism.
One of the Wharties is interested in running Blades at some point so I may eventually play it…
No, no, I mean that I’ll probably say that (the suggestion having been made) whether or not you send the money. (I am a very bad salesman. I think this is what makes me a good game demonstrator – many gamers don’t like to be “sold” something.)
@1:13:00 or thereabouts, I agree on the corrosiveness of random character generation. As has been shown with other primates, we have a sense of fairness and can recognize when someone is getting favorable treatment. Even if we are reasonable people and can consciously deal with a character who is underpowered (relative to others) through no fault of our own, I think there is still a subconscious resentment and frustration that can bubble up, even if it only manifests as simply not having fun.
With the right people I could probably enjoy an uninspired mechanistic dungeon bash, but I’d be a Casual Gamer in the Laws taxonomy, there for the company rather than for the game. (In fact when I’ve had enjoyable games of Terraforming Mars, which I should say is a game that many people other than me enjoy tremendously, that’s been why.)
I’ve been saying for years that a good GM can make any game (i.e. mechanics) good, and a bad GM can make any game bad. How that interacts with the scenario could be more complex; I suspect there are published plots which simply don’t work no matter who’s running them.
A good GM knows how to tailor an adventure to the players and the PCs and knows how to ignore or interpret the rules to maximize fun. At some point of tinkering, it cannot be said that the good GM is running the published plot or the bad game and they are instead running something of their own creation.
I liked 007 RPG a lot in it’s day.
My friend adapted it to Space Opera.
It’s quite playable. Confidential is the retro clone from Expeditious Retreat Press. Ambush was an excellent VG squad level game.
My friend and I have played a lot of Bond using Fate Accelerated, it works well.
007 was very well suited and I would play it again.
Some of the IPR issues were resolved later…
I disagree about the fixed professional expertise being a problem.
If you want to try a B/X version, try Modus Operandi from Fortifer Games.
With regard to making gear head games less crunchy for lighter play… @RogerBW has it right, the GM just manages the design work in the background. Lots and lots of pregenerated stuff is available.
Classic Traveller, and Mongoose Traveller are very light with regard to actual player facing mechanics. The recent Traveller Companion has a package approach to character generation if you want to avoid the lifepath generation, although that is really quite a fashionable concept.
My friend Tonio Loewald adapted JB007 (with elements from SPI’s Universe and Commando) to make an SF game: ForeSight. It worked very well, and I’d still GM it if I could get players.
What’s the skinny on DoubleZero? I have Classified, which is usable but does not make me love it. The author changed “Ease Factor” to “Difficulty Factor”, which set my pedantic hackles up to no good end.
Edited to add:
What the hell, it’s only US$8 for the core rulebook and gamemaster’s guide in a discount package. I’ll buy it, read it, maybe run it, and drop a review on this site.