After 25 years, one of my favorite roleplaying games remains James Bond 007. Yet in all that time, I've never written a review. As I'm very likely going to be in a new campaign using the system in the near future, I thought it was time to give it a good hard look and see how it holds up.
The system was innovative for its time, and has many concepts that have since been adapted to other systems. It was one of the earliest point-buy character creation systems I remember playing. There are three ranks or tiers of characters: Rookie, Agent, and "00". The number of build points you start with is based on your rank. This allows the system to be used for a variety of different campaign styles and "power levels".
It was the first game I played that had Hero Points, for example, allowing the player to alter a roll or make things happen in the game. In Bond it's tied to mechanics, a reward for rolling well, rather than tied to good roleplaying as most modern games execute the rule, but it's possibly the first instance of this type of rule none the less.
The system does have some unique quirks that I've never seen anywhere else, but these things also make it work as a spy-genre game. There's a fame mechanic, which reflects how well known and easily recognized you are. It's kind of hard to sneak into the enemy's secret base when any schlub can glance at a security camera and go "oh look, there's James Bond wearing one of our uniforms trying to sneak in". Mitigating your Fame at character creation are your height, weight, and appearance. Being tall, short, fat, thin, beautiful or ugly makes you stand out. Looks count. You buy degrees of these things, defaulting to Average at no point cost. If you want to be tall and handsome, or short and deformed-looking, you can, but your Fame is more likely to precede you. The other way to control your Fame is with Experience Points following adventures; instead of adding or increasing abilities, you buy down your Fame. In-game explanations for this include plastic surgery, fake identity papers, and your agency suppressing the media and distributing disinformation.
Another oddity of the system are Fields of Experience. A starting agent is assumed to be 27 years old, and to have worked at some profession prior to joining the agency. For each year above 27, up to a maximum of 33, that you spent in that profession, you gain a Field of Experience. These are mostly knowledge-based skills, with the twist that you don't have to roll to use them. Have Political Science as a FOE? When the situation arises, you know what you need to. You're the expert. That's presumably part of the reason the agency recruited you.
As for the task resolution mechanic, it is both elegant and bizarre. Your base chance is equal to Attribute plus skill level, each of which is rated up to 15, so your base chance can theoretically be rated up to 30. The gamemaster determines not the difficulty, but the Ease Factor of the task - high is better, or "more easy". Lower is bad. This reversal of the norm throws people initially. You multiple your base chance by the ease factor, and that's the number you want to roll under. For example, if your base chance is 17 and the ease factor is 7, you need to roll under... this is why these tables are printed right on the character sheet... 119. Seems easy, but you always fumble on a 00. The object is to roll low, and the number you roll indicates your degree of success, also on a table on the character sheet. The best possible success gets you a Hero Point, so the better you are, the higher the chance you'll get Hero Points. It plays a lot more smoothly than it sounds, and again, those tables are right on the character sheet.
Experience points and Fame are awarded at the end of the mission, based on how well you did. Was the villain's plan foiled? Was the villain captured or killed, or did he get away? Did you managed to maintain your cover and keep it low-key, or were there major running firefights through crowds of bystanders.
A word about equipment: Weapons, vehicles, and gadgets are the crunchiest part of this system, from a gamemastering standpoint. I say this because the lists in the book are a quarter century out of date. If you're running a campaign set in the "classic Bond" era of the 60s and 70s, you're golden. If you want to run something more contemporary, you're going to have to stat out equipment. The rules for doing this aren't in the main book, but in the Q Manual, a separate equipment book that can be hard to find. The rules for equipment creation also require that you have some statistical data on the items. In the age of the internet, that's not so hard to find, but it requires work. My friend Scott write his own Q Manuals, adding newer cars and guns. It matters to him that the stats are accurate, that this car gives the character a +1 rather than a +2 handling bonus because it's got faulty framistatic brakes and anti-lock torquemadas. I, obviously, and neither a gearhead nor a gun fondler, so I tend to fudge it. I don't sit in movies or watching TV shows grousing that a certain car wouldn't do that and that a particular gun would do such-and-such. Close enough is close enough for me. Your mileage may vary.
The system holds up well, and even though it hasn't been updated since the Roger Moore era, it could easily be used for the darker Daniel Craig Bond. It can really be used for any action, espionage or crime drama quite well, and I'd use if for things like 24, Leverage, Burn Notice, NCIS, and so on. It's a good, solid set of rules. The only things that would need to be updated are Professions, Fields of Experience, and equipment, all of which have changed in the past 25 years.
While the game is out of print, used copies are readily available for reasaonable prices, and copies of the boxed set (still in the original shrink wrap) turn up on occassion for little more than the original cover price.
Comments
I had a ton of fun with the James Bond system when I was in high school. Ran a number of games and we always had a good time trying to keep up with the bad guys, quips, and capers!! Thanks for reminding me of it. :)
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