The Black Campbell

From the Ron Swanson Pyramid of Greatness, we get the following advice: “Intensity: Give 100% 110% is impossible. Only idiots recommend that.” or as a motorcycle buddy of mine likes to say, “Twist the throttle and send it…” (Of course, I don’t think he has a single joint that isn’t mechanical now.) Certain types of people don’t just do; they do with abandon, with our day’s word: intensity.

There are a bunch of these characters in fiction, people who feel too much, who are constantly restless or reckless, perfectionists, who have trouble setting boundaries or dangerously self-sacrificing. They are the extreme opposite of yesterday’s “composure.” We tend to see a lot of the adrenaline junkies in the movies and a bunch of them are played by Tom Cruise. Be it CPT Pete “Maverick” Mitchel, who pushes himself and his aircraft to the edge; or Ethan Hunt, who’s idea of relaxation is free climbing mesas in Arizona and can’t move from place to place except at a full-out sprint — these are characters that typify on-screen intensity. There’s Pitch Black’s Riddick, where Vin Diesel managed to combine intensity and composure (intensely), at the time. Kinda like Batman — a barrage of violence wrapped in quiet, growly menace.

There’s the ones looking for the “big life” — Jay Gatsby looking to live life to the fullest, no matter the cost; James Bond’s caviar and fine wines, martinis and beautiful women for dinner and death for breakfast.

There’s the intense empaths — the people who can’t help but empathize with even the worst life has to offer, in the case of Will Graham — the FBI profiler from Thomas Harris’ Red Dragon. The same book that gave us another extreme personality, Hannibal Lektor, the cannibal psychologist and killer who preyed on victims that offended his highly honed sense of aesthetics. He is the antithesis to Graham — intellectual but unempathetic. Like the android David in Prometheus, he understands human emotions, although he does not feel them himself. (Lektor becomes much more nuanced over the course of Harris’ works and the movies based on him.)

The actress Gene Tierney once quipped, “I approached everything, my job, my family, my romances, with intensity.” A good example of what this looks like is a character from our Star Trek Adventures game: LT Stephen Archer is a descendent of the famed Starfleet captain and former Federation president. (We posited he married late.) His uncles, father, grandfather, aunt, brother — all of them were Starfleet, and Archer feels a real weight of this legacy. He was also brought up by his mother who indulged him in a lot. As a result, he is a big personality in almost every way. He takes to people quickly, wins them over with his enthusiasm, and takes ridiculous chance not just to prove he’s the best at whatever — but for the sheer thrill of living. He’s got the Han Solo/Maverick reckless pilot thing down pat. He volunteers for missions that he’s not really suited to. He has intense romances with women, but when they’re over — they’re done. Everything on the boy is turned up to 110%.

Famously, there was a scene cut from Office Space, the dark comedy abut office life in the mid-1990s, where after having his Porsche 911 towed from a handicap spot, the seemingly emotionless manager Bill Lumberg had a full-on raging melt down. Apparently, the outburst was so convincingly played by Gary Cole (a massively under-rated actor), that the cast and crew were “uncomfortable” watching it play out. Cole and director/writer Mike Judge (Beavis & Butthead, King of the Hill) agreed to cut it because it undercut the rest of Lumberg’s scenes by humanizing him. The best villain don’t lose their temper in a fit of childish rage (Kylo Ren, for instance), but are superbly calm, confident, in control. Even when the chips are down and the hero has them boxed in, they keep their cool. 

Think of the best screen villains — they often fit this mould. Hans Gruber in Die Hard, Darth Vader in Star Wars, Michael Myers in Halloween, Anton Chigur in No Country for Old Men, Agent Smith in The Matrix all were the epitome of composed menace. While Myers and Vader had the added benefit of a mask to hide facial expressions, their physical actions were also unhurried and controlled. An exception might be the superbly unstable Stansfield from Leon or The Professional, again played by Gary Oldman with glacial calm that would flip to explosive outbursts that just as swiftly disappeared. This is the reason why the Terminators were so terrifying, that inhuman lack of emotion; it was the same with the cold logic of HA

L-9000 — there’s nothing there to empathize with, to negotiate with. I would suggest that one of the undersung villains in film history is Michael Fassbender’s David from Prometheus. Like the other mechanical menaces, he’s not a person, although his can emulate one. His emotional facsimile is, in some ways, even worse — he seems to have emotions, however subdued or nascent, but if you look at the character’s actions throughout the movie (and ignore Covenant) he’s still following the directives set down for him.

The ice-cold villain is a great foil for characters, especially the “face” — the charisma guy or gal that manipulated the mooks and henchmen with ease. Not beign able to get under someone’s skin tends to…well, get under your skin. It makes them seem like they have the upper hand, even when they don’t. You might even use that composure to do a “counterattack” on the characters, shaking them up.

What might this look like for a character? Using the speedy character creation of Outgunned Adventure, I put together Archibald “Nakuru” Steele. I envision him for the late 1920s — a young run-away who took to the sea, only to get conscripted into the British army in Africa to fight the Germans on the lakes along Kenya and Tanzania, he probably served in the Gallipoli campaign and possibly toward the end in France. He’s since returned to Africa as a big game guide and hunter.

Being pulled into the Great War in his mid-teens, he’s seen a lot of death and horrors. Hunting big game means keeping your wits and composure about you; animals can sense fear. Between hunts, he finds things to do with his time — if this were a Call of Chthulu game, he would most likely get drawn into the search for eldritch horrors, maybe he leads an expedition that finds the Hollow Earth, or he helps solve crimes in European capitals. Whatever the challenge, however, Steele brings a cold resolve, an implacable demeanor, and a steady mind that puts him in a position of leadership. He is the calm in the storm and can use that to steady his companions. He’s an attractive man, but ultimately, one meant to be alone, as the same emotional reserve eventually becomes emotional detachment that breaks relationships. But when you need him, he’s there.

Sometimes, the threat an adventurer faces isn’t just injury — it’s fatigue, it’s disease, it’s mental trauma, or something more spiritual. Game systems have been trying to model this since the start of roleplaying games, sometimes badly, sometimes well. So which ones do the best job from a standpoint of game mechanics and/or narrative play?

Dungeons & Dragons first dealt with this in the form of the “constitution check”. Did you drink too much? Was the forced march tiring? How about that climb up the wall to the castle? Constitution check: you pass, you’re all good; you fail, you suffer a penalty to your ability or in later editions, skill check, later still the disadvantage.

In the rules-lite Outgunned!, a character who is trekking through the jungle muck, bitten by mosquitos would do an Brawn+Endure test. Set the difficulty — let’s say a “basic” requiring a single match. Our scoundrel, John McCray, from earlier in the RPGaDay, has a Brawn 2 and Endure 1 — he’s a city boy, not an action archeologist. He rolls no successes! He takes a point of Grit (all characters have 12), but the GM decides that the heat, humidity, the muck, the stings add up to the condition “You Look Tired”, which takes a die off for the next tests until he can camp down and get some rest. The condition wasn’t necessary. He could just have lost Grit, the equivalent of hit points, but it’s not so much he’s hurt, as everything had just come together to wear him down.

This use of damage in point form and/or some kind of injury is something we see in Star Trek Adventures. Here, the main damage track is “stress”, which can be physical, social, mental, etc. In physical combat, stress is used to avoid injury. Example: Lt. Idrani is in a knock-down fight with a Nausicaan thug. The Nausicaan throws a punch at Idrani with his Daring of 11+ his Security 5 (focus in hand-to-hand) and needs two successes. He needs under 16 and gets a 5 and a 10 on 2d20 — the 10 is a success, but the 5 is under his security and due to the focus, he gets two successes, gaining a threat he throws to increase his punch severity. The fight’s been going on for a while and Idrani’s stress track of 13 is already at 8 — this would make it 10. Instead of taking the stress, he decides to take the injury trait Battered 2. The trait counts against his fighting tests, but he’ll be able to stay in the fight longer.

It’s similar for a mental attack. The monster of the week attempts to invade Captain Kerr’s mind. It’s an opposed test, with Kerr’s Control of 9+ her Command 4, a 13 is needed. The creature rolls two successes to control her mind. Kerr rolls a 14 and 8: one success. The creature can take her over, or she can take 2 stress to resist.

In Blade Runner, characters have health for physical injuries, and resolve for mental ones that are based on their physical and mental attributes. Detective Tomas D’Angelo has a health of 7, a resolve of 5. In a struggle with a perp, D’Angelo gets stabbed — ordinarily, that’s 1 off his health for the weapon, but BR uses a success-based system and the bad guys got two successes on his attack: that 2 health gone, but it allows a critical injury at a d8. The baddie rolls a 2 on the critical piercing table: he’s been stabbed through the hand and has disadvantage to hand-to-hand and firearms tests. Similarly, experiencing the trauma of the injury does him a 1 resolve. If he’s already suffered trauma — say, the loss of another cop — he might have to roll on the critical stress effect table.

In Alien, as stress builds up, the character gets an additional die to their roll (of a different color or rolled separately) — a 1 on any of the stress die can lead to panic effects.

In Legend in the Mist, conditions are tracked based on what they do. Trogdor is faced with his first real challenge, a troll! The giant creature roars at the party with its booming voice, and it is big and strong — +2 to its roll. Trogdor’s soldier and fiery disposition seem to fit the bill, knocking that back to 0. Trogdor rolls a 7: he does not flee, but does take a intimidated 2, which will work against him in the fight. During the fray, he biffs one of his rolls against the troll swinging a small tree at him and takes battered 4. Heroes can only take 5 before they are taken out…if this fight doesn’t get done soon, Trogdor is mince meat.

There are a lot of ways to model endurance — be it physically pushing through cold and damp, or resisting mental stressors like interrogation. Most are some form of mechanical disadvantage to any tests the hero tries, or a form of damage that might take them out of action. Some model this a bit better than others — having some kind of detriment given to the character that isn’t necessarily life threatening (you’re out of hit points!), but do make their lot harder to push through.

Drifting off the character orientation of RPGaDay this year for day 14’s prompt of regard. Here I’m going to go with the transitive verb form of “to show respect or consideration for; to hold in high esteem”. There’s a plethora of games out there, and much more so now that Backerkit/Kickstarter is a thing. So, here’s a few game systems or settings that I hold in high regard.

The first and oldest of the bunch is a game that we played the hell out of from its introduction in 1983 up until about 2008. I suspect I lost the taste for it after my former career: James Bond: 007 by Victory Games. Gerard Klug and tam developed a game that was unlike anything else at the time. You had d20 (in this case Top Secret), you had a few oddballs like Traveller and Universe, but JB:007 was different — d100 with difficulty levels on a 1/2 to 10 scale that tied into the combo of your attributes and skill. It had a unique quality result system that meant when you rolled well, you saw it in terms of escaping in a chase, damage in a fight. The gear was different in stats in a way that would probably seem overly specific to folks these days, but really leaned into the product placement flavor of the movies. It was a huge success, only killed off by the licensing fights that happened after License to Kill. 

It was flexible enough I was able to tack on cybernetic rules for cyberpunk campaigns, aliens for a Stargate campaign, and it was the intro game for several gamers I played with in the ‘90s. By far, the game I still think the most fondly of, even though I think a few do it better, now.

A good example of doing it better is Outgunned!, the “sequel” game, if you will, to Broken Compass. Very rules-lite, it works on a Yahtzee like system where to do matches, with the number of dice based on your attribute and skill. Gear is a bit less generic than it was in Broken Compass, with some attempt to get some of the uniqueness to weapons and vehicles that JB:007 had. I did an expansion on some of those rules here. Very quick and easy to play, it’s an excellent pick-up system, and works fine for longer campaigns. I used it to teach a bunch of students at high school this past year roleplaying games. It is easily customizable for any genre, and they do “Action Flick” books that let you do just that. There’s Outgunned Adventure, which returns to the Broken Compass pulp-action. It’s definitely worth checking out.

Another oldie that has just as fond memories is Space: 1889 by GDW. I got this on a whim back at its launch in 1989 and was hooked. It’s probably the reason I took a degree in history (with a specialty in British and Italian Imperialism). The setting was innovative and fun, and spawned a host of copycats like Castle Falkenstein, and keeps being resurrected by different companies. (There was/is a recent Kickstarter that added unnecessary fantasy races — pass!) The rules system, however, was a hot mess — essentially bolted onto the wargame companion Cloudships & Gunboats.

The era is perfect for all sorts of play: Westerns, Meija Japanese samurai, space travel on Mars, zeppelins, dinosaurs on Venus. We played the hell out of this one for over a decade, and even ported it over to Castle Falkenstein (with heavily modified combat rules.) It got displaced for a while by Hollow Earth Expedition, but I ran a short campaign using Broken Compass rules for the daughter and hooked her on the steampunk. There’s a reason this one is held in high regard by many; it’s the grand-daddy of Victorian sci-fi games.

One of the game systems that knocked off my old favorites was Margaret Weiss Productions’ Cortex. Original crafted for an RPG based on her novels, it caught me when it came out after the release of Serenity. I liked the system — just enough crunch to be interesting, just lite enough to learn and play quickly. The next iteration for Battlestar Galactica is still one of the best pay and GM experiences I’ve had for a system. They also used it for Supernatural, then it got “Fate-ified” by folks for Leverage and the tragically short-lived Marvel Superheroes. I hated the way it worked for the former; loved the way it worked for the latter…but it still wasn’t Cortex. Later attempts to revive the game leaned into the last version of the game system. I’m still considering it for the engine of my white elephant camapign — the one that continues to elude me — Jovian Chronicles, by Dream Pod 9: an absolutely rich universe that reminds me of the Expanse, before The Expanse was a thing.

My latest acquisition that has made an impression is Legend in the Mist. From the excellent artwork, to the innovative craft-your-own-story comic to teach the rules, to the very rules-lite system, LitM is very easy to run, quick to play for, and is extremely flexible. You could use it, with almost no work, to run any time of fantasy game. They even did a small booklet showing how to port D&D 5e characters and creatures over. I’m using this for our current 800s Viking campaign, and so far the flexibility has made the way-too-rules-heavy magic system of D&D look positively antiquated. It’s a simple system: 2d6, plus however many relevant tag you or the scene have add or subtract 1 from the roll. Success and the number of positive tags give you the “power” of your action, attack, spell, whatever… you can succeed with a complication on 7-9, so you do what you wanted, but something that wasn’t positive happens.

It just works. I’m looking forward to seeing how City in Mist, Son of Oak’s noir detective/mythic heroes/superhero-ish game runs. I’ve an idea for a Streets of Fire-like 50s meets the 80s setting in “the City”. Maybe we’ll get a sledgehammer fight.

I was looking at the other prompts for RPGaDay, and realized that some of the ideas I had for this post would be covered in others…so what to do? Runeslinger had an alternate series of suggestions for the prompts, including “what was the heaviest set of RPG things you’ve had to carry?” for strain. That one’s pretty easy — way back in high school, I’d walk the half mile or so to my friend’s place to GM most evenings. After a few years of collection minis, maps, dice, folders of characters, books, etc., a trek to his place had a 20 pound case of minis in hand, a backpack full of the other crap (probably another 10-15, easy).

The other strain, over almost a half century of gaming, has always been finding players and keeping a game going. Back in the bad ol’ days of the “Satanic Panic”, you didn’t just go advertising for players; you had to suss out the geeks. It was like a senator tapping your foot under the bathroom stall for an illicit hookup — except you’d roll a d20 under the stall wall and hope to hit “critical hit!” Everytime a game group blew apart — either because I moved away, or a bunch of folks all moved out within six months of each other — you were back to square one. By the ‘90s, gaming was getting pretty accepted, and finding players was probably the easiest it had been. A lot of the groups from that point usually had at least one player from the last, and often they brought someone into the group with them. Even in the military, changing posts, I usually had someone I knew about. The last real blow for finding players was in 2010, when a divorce lost me half the group, then others having divorces or moving away left us with one to two players, and a bunch that cycled in and out irregularly until the current group.

Once you have players, keeping them is the hard part. It’s easy when you’re kids. You have time, often disposable cash, and your schedules usually allow a normal meet-up. College, it’s often similar. It’s the working world and real responsibility that gets in the way. I’ve noted that to keep a gaming group intact you need actual commitment. Sometimes, it’s a pain (or strain) to keep that weekly nerd night; I’d suggest it’s worth it. The hard part is simply consistency. Even with a very regular group in play, right now, I’ve got one player who got bumped to management at a national lab; he has to travel a lot to beg for money. I’ve got another guy that goes on vacation seemingly every few months, though with the new live GF, I suspect that’ll get curtailed. Another travels for business quite a bit.

The trick is that Nerd Night happens every week. Period. If you’re not there, we play something else that doesn’t need you. Or there’s a movie night, or board games night; but if you lose the momentum, it’s done within a few weeks. Everyone has something else vying for the time. If it’s not regular, it’s not happening. Having Nerd Night be other things is also important. Movie night, board games, something — because if you’re not friends outside the group, there’s less connection to keep it going.

I’d point out that it’s often worth it. Mental health, alone — the ability to have friends outside the marital group, the ability to walk away from the real world for a few hours, the camaraderie in an era where people complain that “loneliness” is on the rise is a good reason to put in the time. 

So make the strain; show up.

The loss of something or someone, or the threat, is a powerful motivator for a character. The loss of a loved one, be it a friend or a family member has been a central theme for stories going back to the earliest days, complaints about “fridging” not withstanding. Hell, a puppy is worth 74 Russian gangsters’ lives according to John Wick — the audience never said “That might be a touch much…”

I’ve always liked to have a set of regular NPCs for the players to interact with when I’ve run games, but that took a sharp set up after I did a five year run of Battlestar Galactica. I loved the Moore version of the show, and thought it captured the desperation and the lack of time to heal that led to some bad decisions by some of the characters, but there was always something missing that I though would have elevated the show (and padded it out better than the “gangsters on this ship” episode of Season 3.) What is it they lost?

Yeah, your civilization is gone and billions died…but what did you lose? When I started the campaign, I realized that would be a central way to motivate and help the players define their characters. First was the idea that everyone would have a military character, and a civilian one. Our first “season” took place before the Cylon attacks. Normal life for the civilians — who were their families and friends? Where did they live? Where did they go to eat out? Normal duties for the military — boring shipping lane patrols, training exercises, law enforcement interdictions. And then, right in the middle of one of the adventures, when they were focused on that particular storyline — tracking some escaped fugitives that put them outside the blast radius of an attack; a missing ship leads to a Cylon fleet stealthing in toward the shipyards at Scorpion; the middle of a breakup with your wife at your favorite cafe — the Cylons strike.

It surprised the players as much as their characters. Suddenly places, things, people that were in their lives are gone, imperiled, or rescued. As the campaign upfolded, we had periodic “flashback episodes” to link to something happening in the rag-tag fleet that might inform a character’s decision-making while still trying to recover from the shock, loss, fear, boredom. Having them run out coffee, cigarettes, alcohol; clothing that was getting frayed and work to the point that uniforms might have a knee blown out on the pants. Not matter how much they made headway to finding Earth, they were losing bits and pieces of their old worlds. 

It was, easily, the best campaign I ever ran. Normally, I like to rotate through games on a semi-regular basis. Once we got into Galactica, it displaced all other games for nearly four years. When finally we wrapped it, I found myself missing the characters and the storyline. It’s been about ten years since that game; it’s still one I frequently think about, and the idea of creating real backstories and NPCs to fill them so that people have things to lose has informed many of the campaigns since. Characters in our Star Trek and Dune games have large NPCs networks of family, friends, contacts.

Creating well fleshed out NPCs for them to interact with also creates a sense of loss when they are either imperiled, die, get reassigned. After three seasons, the loss of a well-liked NPC, our bubbly “I’m French, not Vulcan” science officer (raised on Earth as her father was part of the Vulcan diplomatic mission there) actually did influence the characters and players. They missed her, especially after the relatively gruesome way she was lost. The opportunity to possibly save her two seasons later, felt like a real win, but things were never really the same afterward.

Loss — it’s a good frame for character motivation and development.

Back to the ol’ American Heritage Dictionary for tact /tăkt/, a noun describing the 1. Acute sensitivity to what is proper and appropriate in dealing with others, including the ability to speak or act without offending; 2. The sense of touch; feeling (as in tactile); 3. The stroke in beating time. (I did not know this one… BC)

Or a better definition by the great Winston Churchill: “Tact is the ability to tell someone to go to hell in such a way that they look forward to the trip.”

There are a few ways that tact turns up in roleplaying games — usually as some form of skill like etiquette, control, diplomacy (or even poise, our day 3 prompt.) and while it can have ties to charisma, this is really about the ability to choose your words to get an outcome in a social encounter that create the least friction with the person you are attempting to convince regarding something. It’s a very useful skill in an RPG, particularly ones where social conflict is a major theme, rather than just hack & slash.

A good example of the utility of tact is in the game Dune: Adventures in the Imperium by Mödiphiüs. The world of Frank Herbert’s Dune really finds its strength in the period before the events of the novel. While the focus is on Arakkis and the machinations between the Emperor, the Harkonnen, and the Atreides (with some side players here and there), the book sets up a fascinating 16-17th Century looking social structure dominated by competing royal houses. The effect is a late medieval/renaissance period political structure with the imperial house bolted on top. Trade groups like the Spacing Guild and the imperium-wide trade consortium CHOAM make sure that all houses have some kind of skin in the game regarding the economic health of the Imperium. Absolutists monarchies with fancy titles (weirdly divorced of their hierarchical status) rule the various worlds and court etiquette and a dueling culture brought about by shielding technology that limits the use of their directed energy weapons, gives the world the same war of words, wit, and steel that one might expect playing in a game revolving around the Three Musketeers.

Etiquette, here, is just as important as diplomacy — and both overlap, and in many cases, it’s tact — the ability to ingratiate yourself into a group or with a person central to your goal that greases the wheels for diplomacy. Any game set in the Renaissance into Victorian period is prime territory for the courtier — the person that brings the fun to the party, but knows how to mind their place while mining their betters for position and wealth. Do you know how to dance, how to dress well, how to eat at the table properly, how to address people with titles? “Hey, Duke…” doesn’t cut it, but “Good evening, Your Grace” will get your farther.

Tact isn’t just a way of speaking; it is understanding the rules of the group you are in. 1920s New York? You might want to know the ins-and-outs of the speakeasy, how to properly approach a member of the “machine” running city hall, how to talk to your Italian or Irish mob boss in a way that they take counsel and not offense. There are rules — whether you’re a schmuck looking to get into illicit services in the 1980s, the hanger-on to a 1990s rap star, or a foreigner at an Meiji-period Japanese court. Tact is the skill that makes that happen.

To create a good example of this sort of character, I present John McCray — built for Outgunned Adventure.

McCray is from California and started off as a petty con man, before realizing that being a “proper gentleman” could get you much further than a two-bit huckster — you’ve got to be able to get where the money is, to get the money. And in the Roaring ‘20s, he’s the perfect gentleman scoundrel. He dresses well, can pick up accents with a few days exposure, and is particularly good at reading the unwritten rules in a particular group. He reads heavily, eavesdrops quietly, and learnsbefore putting himself into the circle where his mark is. He’s not always looking for a quick score, often he wan’t to create a rapport that can be exploited to both his and the mark’s unwitting advantage.

The skill set above speaks for itself — his style, mode of speech, and bearing get him by in any environment from the slummiest street to the sparkling-est court. Under the feats, I see “Disguise” as less the dress-up kind, and more the immediate character creation we saw from Axel Foley in Beverley Hills Cop — dropping into a character that is either wholly appropriate (or the opposite, in the case of “Ramon — the man he met at the club…”) He inhabits a role quickly and completely. 

Whether its to get financial gain, or a fancy seat on a hunting expedition in Africa, or a good table at that swanky Chicago speakeasy, or a meet with the Shanghai gang leader — it’s all the same to McCray.

One of the fun things when creating a character is holding a little something back from table for a bit. Especially if you’ve hinted at something, then with the cooperation of the GM, bring it into play as an element of a storyline. This works especially well in noir or espionage tales, but even in a Victorian setting (Victoriana, Space: 1889, etc…) your American of indeterminate but expansive means that is living London or on Mars, or what have you turns out to have made their fortune in a spectacular heist that they double crossed their compadres on — enter the aggrieved gunslinger, looking for payback.

In our Blade Runner campaign, the old man of the group — Jerzy Novak — has to hunt down a former cop that has been shielding replicants, and along the way “finds out” (allows himself to remember) that he is a Nexus 8. During the Blackout, he had been on route to the spaceport in a Spinner van when the EMP hits. The van crashes, and in the process smacks into a police car. He and a few that survive the crash. While the others flee, he checks on the dying cop and notes a strong resemblance between the two of them. In a panic, he swaps places with the cop — being Novak. With the chaos of the Blackout and records destroyed, he starts his new life first as a beat cop, then a member of Robbery-Homicide, before become a blade runner. He’s, so far, avoided suspicion, but a recent case has introduced him to one of the other survivors, the very attractive owner of a casino/brothel that might have ties to the underground.

In our Star Trek campaign, a constant sub-plot in the background has been the captain’s very slow career progression (until the war.) The first “season” saw her take command of Fearless, an aging Walker-class, from the famed Garth of Izar; but the brass won’t promote her to captain, despite similarly experienced people going through the ranks from attrition. She gets the center seat, but remains a commander for the first two seasons before the political clout of her ship’s doctor and operations officer (featured in Day 8) sees her start to gain more respect from Starfleet Command. The main antagonist to this seems to be Admiral Stenn — a Vulcan that is just being “Vulcan”. Hints of something else have surfaced from time to time, and finally one of the character’s investigation into the newly revealed Romulan connection to Vulcans led them to uncover the truth about Stenn…not that he is a Romulan, but worse, that his bigotry toward other, “lesser” races has led him to sexually harass and intimidate alien females (humans, especially). Their captain, as a cadet, had rebuffed the admiral and he had quietly been pulling strings to sideline her until Garth took her on as his tactical officer. Because of the Vulcan tendency to avoid uncomfortable data about themselves, Stenn was protected by some higher ups in the brass at her expense. His quick and quiet retirement and exile back to Vulcan wasn’t as satisfying an ending as they wished…but it did sort the situation. 

In the same campaign, the helmsman — built on the classic love ‘em and leave ‘em Kirk trope — managed to get himself addicted to, then married, an Orion woman working for Starfleet Intelligence. He’s been a bit more careful about his extracurricular activities, but his value Addicted to Love has frequently causes him heart-burn, including getting into an affair with his best friend’s sister. He’s hoping to navigate the complexities of the situation with a hopeful “what happens in space, stays in space” kind of attitude. That is coming to bite him on the ass, pretty soon.

Secrets don’t always have to move a storyline, and they don’t always have to lead to some grandiose betrayal. Sometimes, they can be as simple as finding our your friend had suffered abuse, and has been quietly living with it for over a decade.

Taking a break from the character and campaign-based commentary this month, let’s talk about something else. I started gaming with the early boxed set Dungeons & Dragons with the execrable dragon on a horde of gold artwork in what must have been 1979, based off of the lack of dice in the box. (It came with two cutout cardstock chits — hence the specific year.) So, doing the math, I’ve been gaming for 46-47 years! (F***, I’m getting old!)

I credit roleplaying games with a lot of the positives in my life. It taught me interpersonal skills when I desperately needed them. It taught me how to tell a story well — something used in several careers, not the least being a professor and historian. It taught me how to appreciate good storytelling, and how to build a character — something that was useful in government service. (Don’t ask.) But mostly, it brought a lot of good people into my life — including my wife.

It was a privilege to be able to play most of my life. To sit down with friends, have fun telling a story together on a regular basis. Like the religiously held-to poker night of the past, Nerd Night has rarely been preempted; it is a thing to be protected and cherished because it brings folks together and allows escape from the world in a way the movies and sports don’t. There are characters, storylines, group dynamics that are long gone, but still live in our memories.

Of those people — from my high school gaming friends, the Jims and Eric, whom I still miss decades later from time to time; to the two long-lived groups that have kept Thursday’s Nerd Night alive from the early 1990s to 2010, when people scattered and divorces happened; through the rapid changes of players to the most recent and stable iteration from 2016 to today, I’ve had the privilege of knowing and playing with some truly fine people — every race, men and women, gay and straight, what have you. (The 400 lb “ninja” was not one of them, but that’s a different story…) The current group are all professionals: historian, engineers (three!), an acupuncturist (and former fellow history grad student); but in the past there have been movie crew, writers and mathematicians, wannabe actors, scientists, military of every stripe, cops…and lovable losers. Most came and went in that two-four year window that most game groups that survive the first few months seem to exist for. To have had not one, but two, groups that hung together in some form for 10 and 18 years, respectively, is a near miracle — especially with having to move about for work.

When you consider that for a 100,000 years, most people were born, worked their asses off just to subsist, and died young, to be able to get through most than a half century with the luxury of play, to have the comfort of work that doesn’t kill you (although some of my careers that was a risk) and a place to meet up — that’s truly miraculous. i don’t think we realize how unbelievably lucky we all are to live at this time, and for me in the Western world, where sitting down for an evening a week (or more when I was younger) is something you can get away with. Hell, you can spend a 1930s fortune to go play games with strangers for a weekend at a convention!

It’s something I truly love sharing with people. Once my daughter was old enough to be interested, she would join us at the table and roll dice for me. She was the harbinger of doom; her ability to roll well for the bad guys led to many a near TPK. Eventually, I ran games for her Avatar, ‘30s pulp Broken Compass, most recently Dune. She now has an online Saturday game group playing Pathfinder — dad is no longer the cool GM, but the love of the game has been passed on. I miss being her GM.

I introduced students to RPGs at the high schools I taught at not just to have fun, but to help them deal with issues in their real life in a fantasy world where they could have agency. (Something one of my former group does as a counselor in Texas. He’s a truly fantastic guy that I miss.)

This hobby is a wonderful. Spread the wealth.

Mirriam-Wester Dictionary defines resolve /rĭ-zŏlv′/ in a multitude of ways — as an intransitive verb that means 1. to deal with successfully, 2. to reach a firm decision, 3. to declare or decide, 4. to reduce by analysis, separate into components (or in the past to melt), 5. to make progress from dissonance to consonance, or 6. to work out the resolution of something.

Often, people see this as “grit” or “determination”, but I’m going to go with a combo of all of these definitions. In this example, crew of USS Fearless has been trying to find the culprit in a series of attacks on Federation shipping that have been attributed to Starfleet vessels. Central to figuring out the mystery is a player character, Ooloofar (or “Olaf”) the former operations officer, now promoted executive officer. A long time staple of the ship’s crew and one of the first two Saurian officers in the fleet, he had come aboard a year or so before the Federation-Klingon War, and was under the mentorship of the former XO (killed in combat) and the current captain, Fiona Kerr (from RPGaDay, Day 1). 

Having managed to identify warp signatures and the voice of the ship’s captain from some of the aggrieved vessels, Fearless is able to finally locate their prey — a Starfleet surplus ship that had been lost in the war and is being used by the Orion Syndicate, and captained by a disgraced but talented Starfleet officer. During the ensuing fight between their Walker-class ship — an older and less powerful design, vs. the newer but somewhat cobbled together Constitution-class vessel, Ooloofar gets his first real taste of command. His skills and persistence have frequently helped with scientific or engineering challenges, and during other ship-to-ship battles he was often instrumental in keeping the vessel in the fight…now, as XO, he finds himself in the position of having to assist the captain in the tactical side of the fight. 

Their opponent is good, and Fearless is somewhat outmatched by her opposition. As the fight went on, Fearless takes a couple of heavy strikes and is running low on shields and has suffered several “breaches” — damage that lowers the effectiveness of the ship in combat under STA rules. They are in a hell of a place, and it looks like they might just lose. It is at this moment, his technical skills and intellect tell him to cut and run. In the middle of the fight, he advises Captain Kerr to disengage until they can conduct repairs, then try to reacquire the vessel.

All of this plays into Olaf’s value “Fearless is My Home” and his tendency to try and use engineering and science to fix problems. However, this runs afoul of Kerr’s “spite is a Powerful Motivator” and her “A Fair Fight is the Fight You Lose”. 

Instead of breaking and running, she tries a wildly risky gambit, feigning worse damage than they have to lure the Syndicate vessel in, then executing a tight pass with weapons fire targeting the engineering section. Kicking determination to the tactical officer, Kerr directed (allows the helmsman an immediate action with her adding a d20 on her Control+Command) to do a tight pass of the enemy vessel. The direct allowed her to combine her move with the helmsman, without having to pass to the enemy after her action. The helmsman rolled very well, creating the trait Fire en Passant which lowered the difficulty to hit for the tactical officer. Using her Decisive Leadership, they cut out the enemy and the tactical officer got to go immediately with no cost in momentum. Instead, Olaf’s player suggested a repeat of her move — directing the tactical officer which allowed under his Advisor trait, a free reroll. The captain’s determination spend allowed one die to be set to a double success, and with a success from Olaf, and a reroll that increased the total to 5 successes, they were able to immobilize the enemy ship and force their surrender.

After the fight was over and the adventure mostly resolved, Kerr and Olaf discussed the fight. His instinct to withdraw and repair was a good one, but Kerr assumed that with the upper hand, the Syndicate ship would have given chase and prevented them from escaping, lest their ruse — a Starfleet vessel rendering assistance or performing health & safety checks on merchant vessels — be exposed. His resolution of the situation might well have worked, and was certainly more in line with the more defensive position that Starfleet suggests, but Kerr’s spiteful aggression, borne out of a hardscrabble life and harsh war time experience led her to believe that to deal with the threat successfully, they needed to end it quickly and with “violence of action” — a swift and brutal attack.

During their conversation, she admitted his idea was a good one, and had she thought the Syndicate vessel would have fled after the engagement was over, she would have followed his advice. His instinct to save the ship, get help, limit the potential loss of life was perhaps even the right call; her instinct was to end the threat as decisively as possible, thus saving ship and preventing further los of life. She won — but that didn’t necessarily mean she was right.