I remember playing this rpg back in the mid to late 80s at a convention in London. Don’t recall much about it other than my character managing to shoot down a helicopter with his pistol. Shortly afterwards, my school gaming group got into Ninjas and Superspies and we played that a lot, being fans of other Palladium System games (especially TMNT).
I think at the moment I’m skating on the edge of running-too-many-games and trying to retrench a bit. But JB007 is still in my mind.
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Would it help if I were to run a stand-alone adventure for you?
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If you fancy it and if we can line up schedules (or PBF), sure!
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Well, I’m in UTC+11 until the 4th of April, and you’re in UTC+0 until the 28th of March. So if I started a three-hour session at 8 AM that would be 9 PM to midnight in Blighty. Whereas if I started a three-hour session at about about 8 PM it would be about 9 AM to noon in the old country. After the SAN-busting contortions of the begending of daylight saving I will be in UTC+10 and you in UTC+1. That makes it completely impractical for me to GM in the morning for you to play very late at night, but makes the time-slot between my finishing an early dinner at 7:00 PM and my turning into a pumpkin at 11:30 correspond to a 10:00 AM to 2:30 PM window of opportunity for you.
For me to GM during your evening would be marginal if we did it before the end of March and impractical after that. So the plausible possibility is from me to GM after an early dinner for you to play before a late lunch.
When I was in form, with confident and decisive players it used to take me about four and a half to five hours to get through as much material as a typical thriller or action feature movie. We would probably need two three-hour sessions to complete a stand-alone adventure by way of videoconferencing or whatever and because of our unfamiliarity with each other’s play. And we ought to do character generation beforehand.
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So, as The Great Sages revealed in episode 101 of Improvised Radio Theatre with Dice, we carried out the plan outlined above. I was not in form, and my familiarity with JB007 was very rusty, and the character-players were not confident and decisive because they were learning the rules and not familiar with my style. So we didn’t manage to get through a whole adventure in two three-hour sessions. Nevertheless I think a good time was had by all, and I did get a couple of things to stick their landings when the players recognised Operation Grapple and Obersturmbahnführer Otto Skorzeny.
My main regret is that I did not get to demonstrate the awesomeness that is the James Bond 007 random encounter system to anything like the extent I would have liked. Many of the genre conventions, such as being captured so that the villain takes you to his lair and explains the plot, are built into the encounter system. In terms of the rules, movie Bond succeeds in his missions despite (perhaps even because of) being a bad secret agent because of the way the encounter system works (or can by made to work, if you spend hero points judiciously).
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I still find myself quite tempted to try running it at some point. Perhaps with pre-gens.
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In which case my work here is done.
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Definitely with pre-gens. Playing other SIS agents would be good too, some of the female agents could be allowed to reclaim their competence and prove Bond to have been a mysogynist git! For an edge how about one player being (randomly so even the GM doesn’t know) the “you secretly work for the villain/GRU/CIA/DGSE, find an appropriate time to betray SIS or your employer as you see fit… card”…
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As.opposed to Paranoia, where they’d all get the note.
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They may still…
I love, as GM, not knowing which one is the traitor