A Review of Shadow Ops, or On the Merits of Explicit Design

Disclaimer: I wouldn't normally review a game I haven't played, but in this case Christopher Peter, the designer of Shadow Ops, reached out and asked me if I'd be interested. I could hardly refuse a free PDF of the game, so I agreed to do the review. I'd like to think I've been as honest as possible and acknowledged where my perspective is limited, but grain of salt etc.

Prologomenon

There are, as far as I can see, two main types of person who read a TTRPG review.

1. THE USER: You want to see if you should get a copy of the book. Main (overlapping) subtypes:
1. THE PLAYER: You're interested in running the game, or persuading somebody else to. Probably interested in how well the mechanics will allow you to do things that you want.
2. THE READER: You're interested in reading through the book and going 'huh, cool!' then putting it on your shelf to gather dust. You may think you're 1.1 but 'never get around to it.'
3. THE DESIGN NERD: You want to know how the rules and the book itself were put together in order to magpie ideas for your own projects.
2. THE FAN: You want to read a review about the book because:
1. You're a FAN OF THE GAME and you want to see what other people think of it.
2. You're a FAN OF THE REVIEWER and want to see their thoughts on almost anything.

These aren't terms I'll use in the review, but they do help me decide what information to include. 

I'm not under the impression that I have any diehard fans of the reviewer beyond a couple of my own players, which is probably good because my personal emotional response to the game I'm reviewing today is entirely defined by the fact that it's trying to emulate a genre I have no personal interest in, and I tend to prefer good simulation of a setting over emulation of a genre anyway.[1] Similarly, I think the only time it's helpful to talk to fans of the game is when you have your finger on the pulse of what they're already saying, and I'm not even on the discord for this one. As such, this review will be primarily pitched at users of all stripes. 

From this perspective, if you want what it's offering, I think the game is good! What it promises, it appears to deliver. Its strongest trait, though, to my eyes, is simply that it promises - for Shadow Ops (SO henceforth) is one of the best examples I've seen in a substantially-sized game of something I've taken to calling 'explicit design'.

TL; DR: Shadow Ops is a traditional-format big-book game up to its elbows in the innovations of the indie scene. It achieves the mixture of interesting and flawed to be expected from a one-person game, largely delivering on its objectives. Its greatest strength is that, at almost all times, it is clear about the intent behind its design choices. Design nerds should read it as an example of the benefits of consistently-applied craft, and players might enjoy it if they like the genre it's aiming for. Conveniently, it makes this genre very obvious. For readers, the jury is out. 

Like this intro, the game's cover tells you what it's about immediately. You don't get much more direct than 'Several James Bonds are about to shoot you and your flanking partners.'

The Offer

Writing this review has been made very challenging by the fact that the game describes itself at the start. Forgive the substantial quotes - they're important:

'Shadow Ops is a role-playing game of cinematic espionage action. You play agents going on daring nighttime infiltrations, arranging meetings with dangerous people in seedy warehouses or high society galas, and tailing people through crowded marketplaces. You’ll take part in highspeed chases through city streets and across rooftops and engage in intense gun battles and fist fights. This is not a game focused on the quiet business of tradecraft; instead, taking its cues from the best in over-the-top action cinema and fiction, these spies engage in missions where explosive excitement is never too far away! 

The rules make all this excitement easy: the core mechanic provides flexible results and creates emergent storytelling possibilities. Character generation contains an expansive suite of customization options. Dedicated rules facilitate the kind of violent action seen on the screen, as well as furious chases and tense shadowing scenes. And it’s all contained in one core rulebook!'

And then:

'Shadow Ops ... is intended to emulate small teams of (generally attractive) hyper-competent agents running missions with limited backup, constant paranoid tension while out in the field, and plenty of outrageous action and violence. TV shows such as Nikita and Alias and movie series such as Mission: Impossible fit well within this specific sub-genre of espionage gaming. ... 

First, Shadow Ops is not intended to emulate the common trope of the single super-spy who either works alone or perhaps with a couple clearly less capable companions. ... More agents on the mission ... allows characters to have specialized niches in training that can be highlighted in play and takes away some of the anxiety when the success of the mission relies on the efforts of a single person. 

Second, Shadow Ops is not intended to be realistic in its portrayal of violent action. While agents cannot safely wade through an endless hail of bullets, the rules are designed to make it difficult for agents to die. Instead, failure in combat leads to complications and short-term problems that add layers of complexity to the mission going forward. By the end of the mission, some agents may die, but at least one of them will likely live to tell the tale. ...

Third, Shadow Ops is not intended to be especially true to the principles of real-world tradecraft. Simply put, the 21st century has radically changed the way espionage works when compared to its modern origins in the mid-20th century. ... 

Fourth, Shadow Ops does not take any position on real world politics or the complexities of international relations. ...

Finally, the rules of Shadow Ops are squarely aimed at emulation, not simulation [with] rules meant to capture the particular feel of a setting, even to the point of using narrative conceits that don’t make sense in the real world.'

This is only a fragment of the full material, which fills several pages. Nor is this approach unique within the book. For example - the game is structurally quite typical of the post-2000s big-book milieu, in that it focusses on providing a lot of character options to maximize player customization. However, it avoids the normal trap of, uh, trap options which is virtually inevitable beyond a certain degree of customizability by explaining when one of its 'skillsets' (packages of abilities roughly analogous to classes) is particularly niche or limited and not designed to be taken on its own. For example, 'The Bulwark is an agent that refuses to die ... This is a support Skill Set. While it is possible to invest ten levels into this Skill Set, it is pretty limited. It serves better as a set of particular Abilities supporting a broader combat-focused concept.'

YMMV on what you think of this approach. Die-hard elegance fans will doubtless say that a Skill Set needing such a descriptor is one that could have been cut or merged into another; meanwhile, ivory-tower design advocates will argue that this approach devalues system mastery. I love it. You could make an intentionally bad character - I've mentioned before that the near-inability to do this is one of my quibbles with PF2e - but the book isn't going to let you stumble into doing so any more than a good GM would with a new player. It feels like a GM walking you through their beloved, elaborate, painstaking system of houserules that've overtaken a now-unrecognizable base game like a flood of verdure over a forgotten city, translated into book form. 

I'd be shocked, actually, if SO didn't start as something like that. According to the appendix, it began development 'around the time when ... the John Wick series started a renaissance of over-the-top action movies', so it's had about a decade to grow. The presence of 3.5/finder bones (via Spycraft, per the appendix) is hinted at by three specialized defence stats in Spirit, Speed and Stamina and huge piles of 'classes' with the aforementioned variable utility. This number of Skill Sets is, I think, mostly justified by the explanations of their use cases. I'm still a little unsure about the added value of some Sets. To pick an example from the air, despite the game selling it as an 'action coder' in contrast to the archetypal 'man in a van,' the IT Operative doesn't have a lot of features that seem to predispose them to the front lines beyond a sense that the PCs should be doing that, in a rare disconnect between the game's fiction and design. Sometimes the names are odd, possibly as a result of already having used all the better options: Commando specializes in heavy weapons, Counterintel is the 'generic' Set, and ... why?

Other Sets are weirdly similar the Wheelman (generic driver) and the Combat Driver, or the Ninja (high-tech/stealth/acrobatics/martial arts) and the Shadow Warrior (stealth/combat) and the Wuxia (acrobatics/martial arts); some of them feel like they might have arisen from the desires of specific players for a rather niche concept, as often happens in homebrewed systems, and since their ability lists are short and often overlap the elegance advocates might have a case here. Still, my tolerance is increased enormously by the explanations. I'm broadly quite sympathetic to even the most rambling homebrew hodgepodges, and if that is what this started as then it's been smoothed substantially.

The Crunch

On which note, I guess I need to mention some systems. On that particular note because the rules feel like a combination of 'one neat dice mechanic idea' and 'bits and bobs magpied from elsewhere' that I, as an inveterate heartbreaker-maker, recognize. Shadow Ops is not doing anything mind-blowing here, but it synthesizes its elements well. Primary mechanical inspirations appear in the appendix - the game wanted to improve on Spycraft, drew ideas on advancement, character building and pacing from Shadow of the Demon Lord, and pulled inspiration for its core dice mechanic from Sentinels Comics, none of which I've played so I can't comment on exactly how much is original. 

For most checks, you'll be rolling 3 dice from d4 to d12, one for a relevant skill, one for an attribute, and one for how stressed you are. NPCs roll a single die based on their 'Plot Armour' stat (I find this very funny). A 'result die' is picked and used to generate a result - a complication, a failure, a success with some number of perks, or an 'awesome success'. Usually the result is determined by the middle die, but there are various circumstances which change that up or down. Sometimes these will be difficulty modifiers, but in line with its aspirations to emulation over simulation, the book's very specific that 'in general, if a Skill Check will help move the story forward and/or is a good idea on the part of the players, there should be no modifiers for difficulty [unless] the GM thinks a task is possible, but very difficult'. More often, the modifiers are going to be the result of a character's abilities - which may be a 'forte' (picked at level 1 to add some variation to your single Skill Set pick at that level), a 'Skill Set ability' or a 'general ability'. I'm not wholly convinced that general abilities and fortes needed to be seperate categories, as they don't seem to have a clear thematic or mechanical line between them beyond one set being first level only, but whatever.

Major sidebar for a moment: It was whilst reading the general abilities that I had a positive realization about this game. I'd already observed that some of the Skill Sets, such as 'Insurgent', were not the typical protagonists of a spy story, occasional 'heroic ex-IRA' types in certain American movies aside. It was,  however, when I read the 'bio-warrior' ability, which means exactly what it sounds like, that I realized that the opening statement that 'Fourth, Shadow Ops does not take any position on real world politics or the complexities of international relations' might not mean the typical 'we're somewhere in the political centre and don't want to question our assumptions about the world'. There's still a bit of that going on, in that there's minimal discussion of real 'shadow ops' and their victims, but the game does genuinely seem to want to enable dramas about espionage action even if that action isn't something which the average person, perhaps any person, would endorse. I generally like games which let you play somebody the author (and you!) might disagree with in the strongest possible terms. This is a very strong mark in the game's favour for me.

Anyway, there's not much more to say on the core rules. The stuff you'd expect from a big-book game is in there. Rules for helping each other, contested checks, nothing innovative. There are 'focus points', especially broadly-applicable[2] bennies which characters earn in a few ways including an OOC schedule. The big win of the system is the presence of lists of perks, generic positive things that could be applied to any particularly good check that generates them - five lists actually, one for abilities that generate them before a check (8 items), another of those for combat (9 items), one for checks that generate them (6 items), another for combat (17 items), and one for perks useful to NPCs (10 items). Every game that includes a 'scale of success' should have a set of examples like this. This game could stand to apply the same philosophy to examples of how long tasks take - apparently it doesn't want to be too limiting by dictating this, but that leads to some pretty serious GM fiat in how powerful entire class abilities are. For example, the Champion (a 'champion of a cause', in one of several quirks of naming of Skill Sets) can suppress a piece of inconvenient information for... 'at least several days, though its continued opacity is up to the GM'; the Investigator 'can locate a specific Named NPC anywhere in the world. The amount of time this takes and the precision of the location is up to the GM's discretion'; the especially egregious Brainwash allows you to make checks to influence a captive NPC 'more frequently (GM's discretion)' - !!! There's a lot of this. With so much of the design being laid out for the reader, would it kill them to insert a chart or two like this?

Mongoose Traveller 2e

Have you intuited what the skills and abilities look like by now? They're a lot of small bits of mechanic that buff a particular skill, modify a type of roll, or grant the ability to make something happen in the narrative once per session or something. I like a good 'make a thing' happen ability, and some of them are fun but none jumped out at me and forced me to heap praises upon them (Brainwash was closest, but again, is let down severely by its vague timespan). [3] The 'alter this particular mechanic' abilities are largely dependent on the strength of those mechanics to be interesting, so let's move swiftly along to those. 

It's an indie design truism that a game is about what it gives you systems to play. I might quibble with this a little (another post!), but it's at minimum partially true. Given this fact, Shadow Ops can be judged to be about three things: combat (23 pages, 11% of the book), chasing people (20 pages, 9%), and 'shadowing' people (14 pages, 6%). Compare to the 12 pages of core rules. (On the other hand, compare to the 100+ pages of chargen, Skill Sets and abilities - there's perhaps a case that this game is really about making characters and using their abilities). Interestingly, only a portion of a single page is given over to infiltration scenes, which one might imagine would be a greater part of stories of the sort it's telling, but the implication of the explanatory text there is that the game expects you to play these out as detailed narratives with many smaller components most of the time and use the systems there only when infiltration [4] is being handwaved.

So, crude quantification aside, how are these systems? Well, obligatory reminder that I haven't played this game! I don't know! But they look rather impressive on paper.

Let's hurry up and get to the good stuff, shall we?

Flush Them Out and Follow Suit

Shadowing and chases run off very similar systems, to the point that I was a little surprised that shadowing feels rather like it could be a set of special rules for chases. It's for situations where one party is actively trying to evade another, but it hasn't escalated to a chase yet. If the followed is oblivious, 'it is up to the GM to decide whether any Skill Checks are needed at all' but the game suggests simply comparing rolls, making sure to give the followed a chance to notice. The guidance is once again clear and helpful, only slightly confused by the fact that 'shadowing' is also the name of one of the skills you might roll when you are not, uhh, shadowing. Its big issue is that it'd seem to confine this subsystems's use to a situation which I cannot imagine comprising 6% of total play time.

Both types of scene are played using a deck of playing cards. Each suit has a specific type of effect it generates when played - clubs let you set up attacks, diamonds are info-gathering cards when shadowing or defensive in a chase, hearts allow you to observe and move through the external environment and spades are a generic progress tracker. In mildly-distorted summary: Each round, the GM generates random background events and PCs and NPCs roll Skill Checks to generate Initiative and Control values, (well, Control is fixed for NPCs). The lower-Initiative draws cards equal to their Control, then the higher-Initiative one does (allowing them to react), then they play them in the same order. The cards are compared in a matrix and a narrative outcome with some special effects is generated, favouring the card with the higher value played. Non-Progress cards are discarded, and play continues until the value needed to escape or catch up is generated. Rules are given for chases with multiple participants, either co-operating or in a chain, and once again the book is very clear about how many you can add before the system stops functioning smoothly!

I was skeptical when I saw that this otherwise fairly mechanically clean and unified game was introducing a card-based mechanic, but if it generates the play-feel it appears to then it's entirely justified. The cinematic inspiration is clear: characters always have limited options, constrained by a chaotic and dynamic environment, but if they want to rush ahead (i.e. act first) then their options are even more limited. No scene is ever just a chase, you will inevitably end up fighting, negotiating with NPCs in your way, making moral decisions etc. My biggest criticism here is that some of the random events prescribe the possible approaches to them in extremely limiting fashion; it might make sense that the only way to deal with Rough Terrain is to tough it out and hope you do a bit better on your check to make up for the penalty (though you'd think there'd at least be an option to trade speed for caution), but does it make sense that one's always assumed to be avoiding the citizen crossing the road in Cart/Small Vehicle Gets In The Way? I can think of a few classic James Bond villains who might say 'full speed ahead' there - and given that fact, shouldn't there also be some way for the other participants in the chase to try to save them? This could be improvised, but the rules don't say much about improvising within the chase structure. Still, overall a very solid emulationist subsystem.

Bang Bang Into the Room

Combat is similarly true to the game's design philosophy. Movement is very minimal - melee range, shooting range and 'in a different scene,' which is normally inaccessible without moving between the scenes. Terrain exists as a series of tags which can be mobilized to aid rolls by expending Focus Points. Factors like light quality, weapon ranges and so forth are largely ignored, with a simple modifier for darkness if the PCs are using it tactically. Characters are always assumed to be seeking cover unless they specifically use a Combat Mode to not do that. I have been known to read academic papers on shot accuracy in deer culling when designing games, and even I have to concede - this is neat, in both senses of the world.

Within this framework, characters interact by primarily selecting a 'combat mode' - basically an action to take on a given round - from a list  they selected during character creation and subsequent levelling. To a greater extent than I've seen with any other games outside the D&D 4e lineage, character generation defines how not just what your char's optimal combat tactics will be, but what their options will be. A character will start by picking 8 Modes, split between a list of 9 melee/unarmed and 8 firearms ones, in addition to a couple of basic fight/shoot ones, and the game notes that it's rare to end up learning all of them. As such, you'll be reasonably flexible, starting with access to 50% of all the options and going up slowly from there (some traits also grant Modes), but a character with Aid, Diversion, Hold, Reload, Cripple, Outfox, and Aimed will feel very different from one whose options are Burst Fire, Bold, Diversion, Aggressive, Grappling, Cripple and Run, for example. Each Mode calls for a particular roll with specific effects.[5] Attacks deal damage to an Agent's Combat Training (sort of 'hp') based on weapon, and when Combat Training hits zero future attacks, but not the one that took them to 0, will force the agent to make a Plot Armour save. Failed Plot Armour saves leave an agent 'injured', which in true action-hero tradition has no mechanical effects, and then Taken Out - but not dead unless they specifically choose to be.  As the intro promises, therefore, agents will pretty much never drop in one shot unless already depleted - though it does make allowance for instant kills in cases where a tied-up character has a gun pressed to their head, for example. The only time an Agent can involuntarily die is in the climactic fight of a mission, and even then allowances are made for a lone survivor merely being Taken Out to prevent a full TPK if desired. This wouldn't feel especially fun to me, and might well make me feel like every fight leading up to that climactic one was a bit of a waste of time, but once again if you like the genre the game is replicating then this is unlikely to be the case for you.[6]

Sidebar: I haven't talked specifically about character creation, beyond this and the benefits of the explicit design of Skill Sets. This is because there's nothing very remarkable about it. It's good, but it's exactly what you'd expect from a big-book game, and went fairly smoothly. I found it a bit hard to cross-reference between bits from the PDF, but this would be easier with the physical copy I'm sure and is far from a unique issue.

Other Elements

There's a chapter on spy gadgets and gear which I don't have much to say about - it gives quite a limited range of vague examples, but this is forgivable given the focus of the system is more on the interesting questions posed by the acquisition of this gear, which are better-detailed. Where they're strong, the equipment picks' strength is the strength of the other systems they interact with. For example, you normally can't attack a character in a different scene, but equipment like a sniper rifle might let you! This is such a fun interaction that I will forgive the fact that it is only mentioned in the combat chapter and pulls the old 'GM discretion' again. This chapter probably needed to be longer. Back to the positive.

Pretty sure this is how you do it?

As I hope I've established, almost the entire book feels like effective GM advice. I feel like I'm underselling this because of just how pervasive it is - truly, barely a page goes by without the kind of detailed explanation of why a choice was made or what options you might use to modify a scene that I'd normally expect from a later interview with a designer rather than their main output. There is, however, also a chapter specifically for GM advice. 

It's good! There's advice on thinking of your game as a movie series or TV franchise, and how this might affect the structure of play. Genre and tone are discussed at some length in the section on session 0 by way of telling you to consult with your group about them. The most interesting bit of this is the observation that to truly be 'cinematic espionage action', there needs to be a source of paranoia which means the agents can't be comfortable in some secure home base even if they have one; I'd never have thought of this, but letting the players get too comfortable would definitely be a great way to shift the genre away from one that SO makes sense in. Again, you're advised to 'discuss whether the agents should have a chance to get in, accomplish their goals, and get out without anyone knowing, even if that means a less "exciting" game'; clearly player expectations might clash there. Advice is given on techniques which experienced GMs will recognize and have their own opinions on but slightly newer ones may not have heard of, such as stealing player concerns to use as actual setbacks or keeping the plot moving forward with regular injections of action. Whilst the game claims to be aimed at experienced TTRPGers, so long as somebody knows the very basic flow of conversation in play I'd be happier giving them this chapter than one from any other big-book TTRPG I own. I didn't see anything entirely reasonable, but it's very clear that Peter is au fait with TTRPG best practices and has thought carefully about how they apply in his game.

Finally, an appendix lists inspirational media. The selection methodology is of course explained, and bears quoting: 'As stated in the introduction to this book, many good spy movies and TV shows are not perfect fits for this particular RPG. So rather than make an unnecessarily long list, I tried to focus on the media I watched that either directly inspired the idea to develop this game or that gave me scenes that made me say, "I want the players to be able to do that in this game."' Good approach, I'd say. Of the things on the list, I've seen fractions of two - one James Bond movie (Skyfall) and a couple of A-Team episodes - which is yet another comment on my fitness to write this review, I guess. In addition to the RPG mechanical inspirations I've already noted, an honourable mention is given to Night's Black Agents.

The rest of the book is handy reference material, and a nice list of all of the game's backers with thanks to them. There's less than a page of them, and a quick look on the Kickstarter reveals only $2518 raised which makes the quality of the book frankly quite impressive. Let's talk about that.

Art & Design

If you're going to decide if you like this game enough to buy a copy, you'll obviously need to know how the value for money is. I can't comment on the physical book, but I'm broadly pleased with the PDF. The clean design, with block-colour slightly muted borders marked with smooth icons and nary a serif in sight, made me think pretty much immediately of Eclipse Phase, which should be taken as a compliment to Craig Judd who handled it here. Every image except the striking photographic cover art (a TTRPG novelty, by Michiel van den Heuvel) is a stock photo, but a well-chosen one fitting the tone of 'implausibly attractive people doing implausible things with guns'. Most are presented carefully as photos sitting atop the page with a slight shadow beneath them, as if they were protruding from a case file. The chapter reference markers on the sides of the page give much the same impression; my one slight issue with them is that the 'file' style means they overlap, so lower ones have the first part of each chapter inconveniently concealed.

An example two-page spread showcasing the above

This difficulty for quick navigation is somewhat compensated for by the reminders of key points from earlier chapters scattered through the text. These had an eerie habit of showing up just when I was feeling I needed them, though I do wish that more of them had included page references. 

The style of the text is fluent and readable. The exception is the blurb fiction, which has an oddly stilted style - 'Suddenly, up ahead, an RPG launched from a rooftop produced a massive fireball in Gerard's path./He hit the accelerator.' Thankfully, this is not repeated - I wouldn't have minded some short well-written bits of scene-setting to start chapters, but the lack thereof isn't strongly felt. Another lack, that of typos, missed sections etc., is impressive from a book with only one author and one editor listed. 

Conclusion: But You Already Knew That, Didn't You?

Should you buy this? Not for my christmas present, but otherwise quite possibly. The game's a littttle dear by the standards of the indie market, even given its two-hundred-plus pages, but that's not unreasonable given it represents a decade of effort and is sadly unlikely to reach a wide audience.

Truly, I think it'd be pretty hard to have got through the first quote of this review without knowing if you're interested! And that's the great thing - there are thousands of well-made games out there, you can never read all of them, and if more people were more intentional and explicit in how they approached their designs then more people might find the games they loved faster. Still, to sum up, let's jump back to the categories of review-reader I pitched at at the beginning.

For the Player: Whilst I haven't playtested it, the game's systems clearly aim at achieving the goals it sets for itself and a read-through hasn't revealed any obvious flaws. If you have or think you can locate a group interested in replicating the narrative of an action espionage story (not just any espionage story, mind!), this game may well be for you. For GMs specifically, the amount of clear guidance throughout on how to use it is likely to make it a lot easier to just dive straight in.

For the Reader: Depends a bit. The book's pretty enough, but nothing astounding, and it's very low on any kind of descriptive text. If you're the kind of reader who likes daydreaming about play scenarios and coming up with characters, it gives plenty of options, but not an exceptional amount for a big-book game.

For the Design Nerd: This game is incredibly solid, quality assured for any randomly sampled page outside maybe the equipment chapter, and the issue with this is that, absent many big flashy GAME-CHANGING INNOVATIONS TM to shout about, it's hard to convey quite the level of craftsmanship that's gone into it. As a whole, it may not shake up the design sphere - though I definitely think there's a lot of potential in the chase rules - but anything it lacks in originality it makes up for in execution. What I've been calling 'intentional design', the clear signposting of what the game's doing and how it wants you to engage, should be the industry standard, but as it is it isn't even the standard for indie games. Use this book as a yardstick to measure the clarity and user-friendliness of your own projects! I certainly will be, and keeping a close eye on the other outputs of Divine Madness Press to boot.

[1] Personal taste sidebar: Shadow Ops is trying for, in its own words, 'emulation' of a genre of espionage action movie over 'simulation' of real espionage. It's a truism that real espionage is boring but I am unconvinced this is true unless your definition of 'boring' is 'anything that doesn't explode'. Aiming to broaden my understanding of the Troubles beyond the Loyalist paramilitaries who are my primary subject of study, I recently read Peter Taylor's account of 'Operation Chiffon', in which MI5 and 6 operatives fresh out of the colonial service repeatedly ignored British government and agency authorities and negotiated with the IRA via a Derry businessman to try to bring the Troubles to an end. It covers about 20 years, none of the primary players get shot, there's only one time when their death seems possible, and it's more interesting than any James Bond movie I've ever watched. Intrigue and interpersonal intrigue are interesting, nuance and complexity make those things better, and it's hard to beat the real world for generating those things plausibly. I understand why a commercial publisher wouldn't want to risk alienating some audiences by describing and thereby inevitably opining on reality, but that's why it doesn't do it for me. As for my thoughts on simulation over emulation, I tend to think emulation closes off possibilities in the name of creating a particular type of story, whilst the branching mess of possibility-generation baked into every TTRPG is what appeals about them to me. RPGs, authored by multiple parties in limited co-operation filtered through the medium of mechanical implementation, can-will-must-and-should make stories which are weirder and less bounded than authors in most other media, on par with oulipo (which, yes, works through limiting, but in doing so essentially inserts a second 'agency' into the storytelling that refuses to fully co-operate with the main storyteller). If for some reason you care about my personal taste, there it is.

[2] Where games like Eclipse Phase or Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay give you a few pools of points you can spend to do different things, and actual Bennies give a re-roll, focus points can be spent to attempt harder checks or use the environment to your advantage or activate a special ability or do any one of a dozen or so more things. Too many things? Unsure, but it probably at least avoids the curse of Inspiration where you just never remember it.

[3] 'Hold on - you're pro-simulation but like a make-things-happen ability?' Sometimes PCs' in-world capabilities mean they should be able to do something very complicated with ease, and it's as anti-simulation as it is anti-emulation to force the players to perfectly perform a complicated task in order to have their characters do so. I might call that style of gameplay 'player-challenge play', indicating that it's intended to test not just the system mastery (as in regular 'challenge play') but the real-world abilities of the players. It's hard and probably unfun to excise it wholly from games, players will always bring their own skills along to intellectual exercises to some extent, but I don't enjoy running/playing games that cater completely to it. 

[4] Or exfiltration! 'The word "infiltration" is used below, but the same process could be used for an exfiltration.' 'Thanks, game,' I say with a sarcastic yet loving smirk.

[5]  I'm not entirely convinced they're all equally useful, but that's the kind of thing I'd be very reluctant to pronounce on without playing.

[6] I'm quite extreme on this, being that person who rather likes it when stories have a central character die suddenly because they were stupid or even just unlucky rather than just because plot demands. We all love Ned Stark being killed because of his character flaws, but there's a moment in the criminally underrated Legends of the Red Sun series by Mark Charan Newton where a multi-book main char walks incautiously round a corner during an urban conflict, gets riddled with crossbow bolts, and dies. I've learned to be cautious with this in games, but I still like to push the boundaries there, and when I'm playing would prefer the GM to be downright merciless. Most RPGs are actually quite good at facilitating this; even a low-lethality game like D&D 5e doesn't have any built-in way out of sheer bad luck or foolhardiness.