I am currently waiting eagerly for the arrival of the latest James Bond film, Skyfall at my local cinema. Unfortunately this is still a month away, thanks to the staggered distribution of these films worldwide. However, it does give me the opportunity to reflect on my history with James Bond. It’s strange, but one of my clearest memories of my childhood is not knowing who James Bond was.

It was when I was in Grade 4 (Year 4 they call it now). The teacher instituted a competition of sorts for one of the subjects we were learning (Social Studies, I think), and decided to make it a “Super Spy” challenge. Each of us would be identified by a 3-digit number. As my surname comes up early in the alphabet, I decided to choose “007”, mainly because I thought 7 was a lucky number. And I was greeted howls of dismay and derision from the rest of the class because I’d chosen James Bond’s number. I had no idea what they were talking about.

Eventually I learnt. In 1985, three years later, I went to a small birthday celebration for one of my friends, and we went to see A View to a Kill. For my 12-year old self, it was awesome! And so, I was hooked. One of the results of seeing A View to a Kill was my acquiring and reading of a few of the James Bond novels, the other main one was the acquisition of the James Bond 007 RPG by Victory Games.

At this time in my life, money was very tight, so I only ever managed to get a couple of the supplements to the game, both adventures: not surprisingly, one was the adventure of A View to a Kill, the other the Goldfinger adventure. Along the way, my young self discovered I wasn’t very good at running James Bond adventures. I was, however, very good at playing them – and, more importantly, a neighbouring friend was very good at running them. So, I spent a happy summer playing several James Bond adventures. I can’t remember at this late stage if I created my own character or if I just ran James Bond; I rather feel it was the former, but I can’t even remember the character’s name if so.

The James Bond 007 RPG is unusual for a number of reasons. One of them is its use of Hero Points; perhaps not the first system to use them, but certainly the first I encountered. The game uses a skill system, where the skill of the character (generally a number in the range of 1-30) is multiplied by the Ease Factor of the check (typically 4, but it could be from ½-10) and gives the chance of success. However, really good rolls would get better Quality of Success results, so you ended up with Q1 (best) through Q4 (marginal) and finally a failure result. Hero Points could be spent to increase the quality of the result, four points being enough to turn a failure into a critical success. Or to protect the character from a villain, turning the villain’s success into a failure.

Crucially, Villains didn’t have Hero Points, they had Survival Points, which could only be used defensively; so a villain couldn’t kill a character with a poor roll. Survival Points kept the important villains alive longer. I once wrote a post on EN World about why I liked this asymmetrical design, which I ran across while researching this post.

One other part of the mechanics of the James Bond 007 RPG that worked incredibly well were the rules for chases. A year or two ago, I picked up the Paizo Chase Cards pack, which is a card version of the rules from their Gamemastery Guide. It was, for someone who had learnt how to run chases with the James Bond rules, underwhelming. What makes the James Bond system so great is that each round starts with a bidding war: the winner gets to choose the manoeuvre for the turn, but at the penalty of having a lower chance of success (you bid Ease Factors). There are a range of manoeuvres, and it also gives the opportunity for the GM to put obstacles into the chase that both need to overcome. The bidding war and subsequent skill checks (of the appropriate skill or ability) keep the tension high. And you could also shoot at the opponent…

In contrast, Paizo’s system just has obstacles. On your turn, you can try and get past the obstacles (a skill check), or you can stand where you are and do another action. I guess like casting a spell. It’s a poor man’s skill challenge, and not particularly well implemented.

Martin, as part of his “I don’t have enough room for this” purge, gave me his copy of a pack of James Bond 007 RPG adventures, the core rules (which replaced my fallen-apart copy) and the Thrilling Locations book. However, there was one key part of the system I didn’t have: the Q Manual, which is one of the great RPG sourcebooks, even if the gear it describes is now (ahem) thirty years old. I was fortunate enough to pick up a copy of that tome in an e-bay auction last week, so, though my James Bond 007 RPG collection is far from complete, it has the books I consider most essential to it.

And, of course, probably the most unusual aspect of the James Bond 007 RPG is that it plays one-on-one: one GM, one player. Although most of the adventures suggest 1-4 characters (one “00”, two Agents or four Rookies), this is a game where – due to the investigation and role-playing required – more than two characters becomes somewhat problematic. You can do it, but it becomes a different type of game.

It’s now about 25 years since I last played the James Bond 007 RPG, but I’d rather like to have another game of it soon. Along with a few other games that I haven’t played for ages (or not at all). I wonder if anyone here would be interested.

My history with the novels is also somewhat spotty. My father had a copy of From Russia With Love, which I read over and over and over and I adored. I also picked up a copy of Live and Let Die, which I also thought was really good. I was very disappointed when I finally got to see the movie, I can tell you; a pale reflection of the novel. I’m currently working my way through the movies again, so we’ll see what I think of it when I see it in a month or two.

Goldfinger, Moonraker, Casino Royale, Diamonds are Forever and Doctor No were found at local libraries, and I don’t know those books quite as well, although I do vividly recall the beginning of Doctor No where M questions Bond about his poisoning in the previous book – From Russia With Love. That, I thought, was cool: a novel that paid attention to the previous book in the series! Moonraker was a disappointment, although Casino Royale was great, despite Fleming having no idea whatsoever about gambling. One does not go into a casino and make a lot of money at the roulette wheel by a “system”. You get lucky, or you don’t. Mind you, if you’re at a crooked table, you’ve got a much better chance of making small sums of money.

Of course, the idea of winning big at baccarat is another problem with the novel. It’s an extremely random game, and there’s only one decision point (if you get a hand totalling 5, you can choose whether to draw or pass). As ties are won by the house, it’s not really a great game for making money on. The decision to replace it with Texas Hold’em Poker in the recent Daniel Craig movie was a great move, as poker is far more a game about reading your opponents and making meaningful decisions.

A few years ago, I finally picked up the other novels in the Bond canon, and I must admit I still haven’t worked my way through them all. The last few are sitting in a pile of unread books; a large pile. I’ve no doubt I’ll get to them at some stage, but I’ve been spending a lot more time on computers, watching DVDs and reading games than reading novels for the past couple of years.

I have all of the James Bond movies on DVD, save only Never Say Never Again, which I really must pick up one of these days. Of course, it’s a remake of one of my least favourite of the canon, Thunderball, which has one of the most tedious end sequences of any film. Underwater combat? Talk about dull. Never Say Never Again is better than Thunderball, but I’d far watch something else. I even have the David Niven version of Casino Royale, which I thought was incomprehensible when I first saw it on commercial television because they’d kept running it during the ads. I was wrong. It’s incomprehensible even without the ads; they hadn’t left things out! Probably. It does have a few star turns in it, especially Peter Sellers, but mostly it’s forgettable. One of the best things about it is a cameo appearance by John Le Mesurier in the first five minutes. Sigh.

I’ll get out some of my James Bond RPG adventures tonight and see how they read. Then I’ll watch a bit more of From Russia With Love. For a property that’s now almost 60 years old, it’s still got a grip on my imagination.