Spycraft 3 - What Classes? [Was 'Scientist?']

[Krensky]

I disagree. I think cars and car chases feature centrally in some modern genres, but disagree a guy who's central shtick is "always the driver" is a central feature in espionage, cyberpunk, horror, technothriller, military, crime, etc. The characters we see in popular fiction may drive, but they do lots of other stuff outside that which is far more definitive of them as characters (literally and play-wise) not related to driving.

The same can be said for combat, skill use, or anything else.

Oh, and you want an example where your argument completely falls flat? Admitedly it's cyberpunk, but Cowboy from Hardwired. The main character, leader of the rebels, and the archetypal panzerboy and inspiration for the Rigger in Shadowrun. Pure Wheelman. Only his 'player' was active and his gm didn't let him demure jsut because he couldn't bring a hover tank, delta cutter, or a sub-orbital fighter to the party. Heck, look at Y.T. in Snow Crash, she's a wheelman too.

Military? Roy Fokker, Amuro Ray, Maverick, Bruno Stachel (The Blue Max), Leona Ozaki, Danny Pritchard (Hammer's Slammers), and countless more. All wheelmen.

That hacker or wheelman wind up sitting in the van is a failure of the GC and players, a table issue. It's not the archetype's fault.

I don't have it in for the Wheelman. What I do have it in for is the wheelman as the getaway driver, the guy who sits in the van, and any other super-specialized activity which either a) gives the character significantly fewer opportunities to shine by doing what he's best at/using the core abilities he has than other PCs, b) discourages that player from leaving his area of specialty for fear of missing a chance or being outclassed by his teammates in adventuring or c) forces the GM to build his missions in a certain way (i.e. always including a chase in his missions) to make sure that the Wheelman has that chance to shine. It's not fair to the player, it's not fair to the group, and it's not fair to the GM. Chase feats are only useful once, since chases often only come up once or twice, during most missions. Compare that to a skill feat or combat feat, which is far more applicable in many situations. Why make a character that's only at his best one or two times in a mission, vs. being good in more broadly applicable times such as skill challenges, infiltrations, or combats?

And despite this you made a character with the same problems in Fantasy Craft. The Lancer is just as prone to sitting in the stable or outside the dungeon or generally not getting involved anytime his mount won't come into it. I am willing to concede that the wheelman as shown in SC 2.0 may be too specialized but that the whole class is pointless and should be reduced to a feat chain and some other character options? That it isn't archetypal enough to be a base class in 10kB? No sir. If the mounted warrior, with all it entails gets a base class, then the expert pilot and driver deserves the same treatment.

You and I are going to have to agree to disagree, then. There are plenty of other ways to have a guy who's good at driving - even doing stuff we define as Wheelman-only right now - through feats, tricks, skill uses, and expert classes. Saying a base class is the only possible solution shackles the entire conversation and set of possibilities. And the things we really see as definitively Wheelman - performing a That's Impossible move, kicking real ass in a chase - are things that don't apply to the base class at low levels right now. A wheelman isn't really a wheelman until the higher levels...so if we had a wheelman prestige class, for example, that had those ablities but started you with the cool stuff, are you out anything? Actually, you're probably up, because that newly minted wheelman has the starting abilities of another class with a broader applicability as a foundation.

So why make the Lancer a base class then? All of those arguments apply to the mounted warrior archetype too.

[Goodlun]

I don't know it's really fair to say "Either give it to me in the book or just give it away." I don't see Crafty as being indebted to the community to produce products for free - we have to eat too

Trust me I am not trying to begrudge you an income.  You work hard for your money in fact probably far too hard for your money, but If I where to go watch a bond film and the box office said to me you want the one with the chase scene for an $1 or the one with out I would just walk out of the theater all together.  I am not saying that is necessarily the case here as it stands you have certainly been overt in the fact chases and wheel man functionality will be available just not as a base class.  I also do trust that you will have a solution that in the end will be satisfactory.  Be it an expert class, skill and feat trees or a reworking of the base class that doesn't encourage sitting around in the van or any number of other solutions.
I will close that I personally do think your products have historically held a high cost to value ratio and am very sure 10K and SC3 will continue to do so.

[Crafty_Alex]

That hacker or wheelman wind up sitting in the van is a failure of the GC and players, a table issue. It's not the archetype's fault.

The archetype being present as a clear direction of play is indeed a failure at the table. When a player is playing to type, as dictated by his class, you don't call him a failure. And when a GM's storytelling is partially railroaded by the presence of that archetype as a rules option because he's trying to be good to not screw one of his players out of doing "his thing", I can't blame him either.

And despite this you made a character with the same problems in Fantasy Craft. The Lancer is just as prone to sitting in the stable or outside the dungeon or generally not getting involved anytime his mount won't come into it. I am willing to concede that the wheelman as shown in SC 2.0 may be too specialized but that the whole class is pointless and should be reduced to a feat chain and some other character options? That it isn't archetypal enough to be a base class in 10kB? No sir. If the mounted warrior, with all it entails gets a base class, then the expert pilot and driver deserves the same treatment.

Yep, I have the same problem with the Lancer, though to a lesser degree than the Wheelman in that he has far fewer abilities related specifically to "driving" than the Wheelman does (only 3 and a half in fact - the core ability, one-half of Bred in the Saddle, Bred for War, and Master Rider). He has more tools built into the class to fill the "knight" archetype, what with bonus combat feats, Armor feat tree, killer resolve, solid social skills and renown benefits. He'll want to use his mount when he can, and undoubtedly will kick ass while riding, but his class rewards him for doing stuff to get out of the saddle, too. The wheelman cannot say that.

Though they use the same system, comparing FC to SC3 is apples to oranges from the class standpoint, and I need to at every option to serve the needs of this book. But there's nothing that tells me the only path here is base class. Like I said - what defines Wheelmen aside from winning a chase is stuff like That's Impossible. If any character good at driving could become a wheelman expert class, or a feat tree + skill uses, which had all the cool stuff distilled down into a clear path as a specialization, then no one loses.

So why make the Lancer a base class then? All of those arguments apply to the mounted warrior archetype too.

The Lancer is fringe. Fantasy Craft is much broader in its scope and trying to hit the high points of a wildly diverse genre. I very much doubt you'll see 12 base classes in Spycraft 3. If I had to cut down FC's base classes, the Lancer would be one of the first to be pulled.

[Goodlun]

Wouldn't the solution here to be make the wheel man more like the lancer?

[Crafty_Alex]

Wouldn't the solution here to be make the wheel man more like the lancer?

No, the solution would be to get away from a vehicle specialist as a base class. That's where I want to go.

[Goodlun]

Wouldn't the solution here to be make the wheel man more like the lancer?

No, the solution would be to get away from a vehicle specialist as a base class. That's where I want to go.

But I want to be a vehicle specialist at 1st level.  I don't want to have to work up to it.  If my idea is to make a Car thief or street racer or helicopter pilot I don't want to have to wait 5 levels till I start really digging into the flavor of that.  Now with a good combination of origins and specialties I may be able to get that flavor at level 1.   

[Crafty_Alex]

But I want to be a vehicle specialist at 1st level.  I don't want to have to work up to it.  If my idea is to make a Car thief or street racer or helicopter pilot I don't want to have to wait 5 levels till I start really digging into the flavor of that.  Now with a good combination of origins and specialties I may be able to get that flavor at level 1.    

You can be - a first level Wheelman in 2.0 has the Daredevil feat, a core ability that helps with drive checks, and access to the Drive skill. That's all that makes him a specialist. Theoretically, a first level character with a feat and max ranks in Drive would be just as specialized as him (minus the core ability...but given a choice between Dextrous or the wheelman's core ability, I would probably take Dextrous since I can use it more broadly and with more skills and situations).

To flip the sitaution on its head - you want to be a vehicle specialist straight out of the gate. Feats in Mastercraft are a FAR stronger way to quickly achieve mastery than investment of class levels. If the core wheelman shtick (the cool stuff) were on feats instead of on classes, you could actually be a MORE focused vehicle specialist at first level instead of having to wait because we don't keep level limitations on feat trees. AND you could do it while keeping other cool class abilities that help you outside the car.  

That's my point - nothing about the Wheelman as a class makes him more specialized at vehicles at low levels than a character who chooses a specific feat and invests skill points. I would argue nothing in the wheelman's first 5 levels really does (Manual adjustment works on repair, but it's not about driving; Vehicle Familiarity is close I reckon but I don't find the bonus particularly inspiring...maybe others do). The juicy stuff comes at later character levels anyway.

[meadicus]

An Idea that just struck me reading this, how about driving feats organised by vehicle type, like melee feats.

Motorcycle Basics, Mastery, Supremacy
Truck Basics, Mastery Supremacy
Car, Jet, Rotery-wing etc

Each with tricks and the like appropriate to the vehicle type.

That way the driver can specialise into his own flavour just as a soldier. Or would the car feats be just so much more valuable than the rest to skew the thing into uselessness. Perhaps just Driving, Riding, Piloting and Sailing trees instead.

Just a thought.

[Nepenthe]

Bond is a former Soldier gone the High Roller route with loads of Action Dice and big bonuses for them. He can make intuitive fixes on things in a jam because of said AD. Now, I do believe he is a very skilled driver/pilot and SCUBA diver with a talent for demolitions and seduction. If there is a Knowledge skill, he'd have a high amount in that too. The James Bond RPG used the Connoisseur skill or Field of Expertise to simulate much of what he knows or does in many ways regarding things like wine, champagne, Baccarat, etc. He also has a large number of connections in places of high society based on his Gambling.

Which Bond are we talking about here? Connery, Craig and probably Brosnan are all clearly Thug -> High Roller...

And in case anybody cares for opinion (fewer after the previous line, I'm sure), I don't see much point in the Wheelman class, either. But that's of course related to my big fandom for 'broader' classes, in general.

[mathey]

That hacker or wheelman wind up sitting in the van is a failure of the GC and players, a table issue. It's not the archetype's fault.

I have to disagree; if there's a Wheelman archetype, its pretty limiting compared to the other archetypes they highlighted in 2.0. I've not observed the same problems with justifying the presence of Hackers that I have seen with Wheelmen. The Hacker has skills and abilities that are much easier to integrate into a range of modern adventuring scenarios than those possessed by the designated driver/pilot. This is despite the fact both are examples of specialists who rely almost entirely on access to a particular bit of technology or equipment.

I have seen situations in vanilla cyberpunk games where hacking could be a pain, however; that mainly boiled down to the fact that the system was its own kind of minigame that the Hacker PC would play with the GM while the rest of the players sat around and waited for him to finish zapping matrix security. There were some situations where you could do hacking and physical infiltration in parallel, though, and even given a clunky and involved cyberskillz system it didn't lock out the other PCs.

Driving a car or helicopter or other vehicle in a dramatic fashion (i.e. chase or dogfight) is necessarily rather more restrictive and even less inclusive. The only ways I could keep all of my PCs involved in a 2.0 car chase involving a Wheelman were to put them in separate vehicles or have the other characters give directions or shoot out of the windows. Everything else about the chase was clearly the dominion of the Wheelman and once the often perfunctory action was over (NPC skills scaled against specialist PCs tended to be a washout in every Dramatic Conflict), he was little more than backup. Sure, he had a BAB comparable to the Soldier, but his core and class abilities - about half of his PC mojo - were locked up in being in that vehicle while it was moving at high speed. The same can't be said for specialists like the Hacker or Faceman, who could make with the research, forgery, disguise, and other chicanery in all sorts of settings and without the reliance on having a very precise set of circumstances and opposition. For that matter, even the low-skill, high-BAB Soldier could typically contribute as much if not more than the Wheelman in non-fighty scenarios AND he was much better in all sorts of combat thanks to his multitude of related feats and abilities.

I want to avoid having classes like that in Mastercraft, and I certainly don't think anybody's given evidence that Wheelman is a "must have" for spy action SpyCraft 3.0. Vehicle skills? Sure, they could crop up. But a whole class who is known just for driving/piloting in a spy game? I don't buy it.

[Desertpuma]

The problem is also that people playing the Wheelman, on the average with few exceptions, choose to sit in the vehicle. I know of two different Wheelmen characters who made it a point not to be stuck in the vehicle. They chose to get out. People tend to forget that there is more than Drive or Mechanics on the Wheelman's skill list.

Acrobatics, Athletics, Electronics, Impress, Intimidate, Notice, Profession, Security, Streetwise, and Tactics are the other skills the character has. Most people playing a Wheelman do not take advantage of using them. A Wheelman who emphasizes Electronics, Security and Tactics is excellent. The street racing Wheelman would make Impress, Intimidate, and Streetwise more effective. The problem is most people do not think beyond the Drive skill. This is not the fault of the class but the shortsightedness of the player using that class.

[Sletchman]

The problem is also that people playing the Wheelman, on the average with few exceptions, choose to sit in the vehicle.

You are totally correct here - but the cause of the problem is the Wheelman class itself.  Players see that as a level 6 wheelman they have a Core Ability, a minimum of 3 Chase feats, Vehicle Familiarity and Drivers Only - all of which only apply to vehicles or chase scenes.  At level 6 the only thing they have that doesn't apply to vehicles is Manual Adjustment*.  That's the reason most players choose to sit in the vehicle - if all their abilities are based on being in a vehicle, why the hell would they want to leave it?

I know that the argument is that the wheelman has great base attack, an excellent skill list, and can use it's level based feats to fill in many gaps - and all of this is completely true.  The problem is that none of these things come from actually being a Wheelman.  You could do the same thing with your skill list and level based feats almost any other class.  Those skills aren't unique to the Wheelman - the teams Intruder can have all of them too [except perhaps Profession, which doesn't exist in the new hotness anyway] as can others on the team.

For what it's worth, I like the Wheelman class - if I had my way the Chase feats would become "Chase or Gear" to make him a more flexible character, but I still like it.  Has anyone played a wheelman in a long term game that had no chases, when you have plenty of chase feats that never come into play?  I played a level 11 Wheelman [complete with 7 or 8 chase feats] and all I got to use from my class was Manual Adjustment.  It was a frustrating thing.  Yes you have your skills and level feats, but most of your class abilities will never come up, and that sucks.

<sub>* I know that several of the Drivers Only abilities are useful outside of chase sequences and vehicles, but my experiance shows the players pick things like Elbow Grease and Skill Mastery (Not Drive) long after they grab the other cool stuff - notably Most Deadly, Spare Keys and Trade In.

** Also this post isn't actually directed entirely at you Desertpuma, you just had a good quote to use.</sub>

[Goodlun]

Has anyone played a wheelman in a long term game that had no chases, when you have plenty of chase feats that never come into play?

No, apparently the Social Contract I have with my group is apparently way outside of the norm.  We have always had the concept that part of the GMs role is to make the game fun for everyone in the group and to take the characters they are playing into account.  We also have always had a wheel man in virtually every party typically whos 2ndary role was that of picking up the skill slack where others had not.  Then again I play with a very small group most of the time 4 PCs typically at most and sometimes as low as 2 PCs.
I suppose when you only have 4 players it is easier to take time out of a session to focus in on any one PC out of the group and accept that at some point during the session you will have your chance to shine.  This isn't too say the other PCs just twilled their thumbs during the various dramatic actions the different PCs are good at they typical do and have found useful things to do.  So chases are a part of the action we experience on a regular basis because we have a wheelman in the group.  Hacking is also.  Of course our soldier gets plenty of action time also most likely less than in other peoples games but his skill set and non combat feats get put to good use.
Interesting side note for us it was the wheel man/chase dramatic action that made us transition away from standard old D20 modern.  Of course it should also be mentioned in fairness of full disclosure the people I game the most often with one is a Pilot, one has been a fabricator in the car/off road scene for years, the other one is a translator(Hebrew, Russian, Arabic and a couple other languages from the Baltics and middle east area I just can't think of them) oddly enough its the translator that mostly ends up picking the wheel man class.   The last guy who typically picks up the wheelman class if the translator doesn't isn't that much of a car guy but when we had a regular demolition derby out here he participated in it quite frequently.
Anyways the point of all of that.  Maybe it is a better class for a smaller group where it is easier to focus in on someone for a little bit and any extra body with skills that someone else hasn't taken really matter.

[Desertpuma]

Just my experience Sletchman, you offense taken. Besides, Spare Keys is always my favorite Driver's Only one to take. Then again, my LSpy character had Safe House as a Feat for a reason. I always liked having a back up hideout or bolthole while on a mission.

The number of people in your gaming group can have an influence on who plays what. I ran a 3 person team once: a Scientist (of pharmacology specifically), a Fixer/Faceman mix, and a Wheelman (who besides being a devotee of boats and improvised weapons also made his own moonshine on the Scientist's bunsen burners when it was his turn on watch. Codename: Gator)

[Goodlun]

The number of people in your gaming group can have an influence on who plays what. I ran a 3 person team once: a Scientist (of pharmacology specifically), a Fixer/Faceman mix, and a Wheelman (who besides being a devotee of boats and improvised weapons also made his own moonshine on the Scientist's bunsen burners when it was his turn on watch. Codename: Gator)

Now that is a nice 3 man team.  Looks like most bases would be covered pretty decently.