May 2011
Monthly Archive
9 May, 2011
4 May, 2011
The Military Based Campaign: Putting the Team Together
Posted by blackcampbell under Roleplaying GamesLeave a Comment
There are always challenges when putting together a group of characters for an RPG game, and a military game has special challenges. Like all groups there are the main issues:
1. Who does what? All groups specialize — Player A has a fighter, Player B a wizard and so on… In a military game, you have to decide what kind of group you need. Is it a special forces platoon or A-Team? A marine fire squad? Viper pilots on a battlestar? Various different positions on a starship?
First thing to remember for most military groups — and the US Marines stress this — you are a rifleman first. Are you an Arabic linguist? You probably handle radio work, translation or interrogation in a fire team, but you are still a rifleman. Skills will overlap, but your job in the squad might be different — for a squad, there’s usually one guy with the big radio, one with the SAW or M249, maybe one or two guys with an M203 (or if the war god’s smiling on you the new XM-25 25mm “Punisher” or six-shot 40mm grenade launcher.) Somebody might have a SMAW or Dragon for heavy targets…not everybody is carrying all this gear; weight is an important issue for the infantryman, even one that’s dropped off by a vehicle. Between your armor, MRE or two, your water Camelback, radio, ammunition, and weapon you are one hot and heavy sucker. Try running half a mile with 80 lbs of gear if you want to know why you don’t carry four weapons…I’ll wait.
For a special forces Alpha detachment there’s a 12 man team (often broken into 6 man squads) that are led by an officer or warrant officer. Everyone else is a sergeant (E5-E9) and specialize in something — communications, medical, demolitions, technical…everybody’s got a speciality, but most of the team cross-trains so that if your medic catches a 7.62mm projectile is a sensitive area, you can cover his skill set. When everyone is healthy and hale, you call for the specialist, even if your skill rating is higher than there’s for whatever reason. In real life, you don’t have a character to review — you’d call the “medic” for a first aid situation.
For games where the character do vastly different job — say you have four players for Battlestar Galactica: two want to play pilots (one a viper, one a raptor), another wants to be the chief, another the commander. Let them…it will require the GM to do a bit more work to make them work together, but — fraternization issues aside — officers and enlisted aren’t working completely separately.
2. The matter of ranks and chain of command: In a special forces team, most of the guys are going to be sergeants with maybe an officer. If the players have issues with being subordinate or superior to the other players, make the officer an NPC. Most of these teams went through hell to get selected; there’s a lot less of the military BS for the special forces, the men are much more likely to treat each other as equals, with rank being something they worry about when the brass is around.
For a military team where the players are enlisted, there’s a lot less worry about rank structure. If you’re not an NCO, you listen to the NCOs; if you’re any enlisted guy, you listen to the guys with the shiny stuff on their collars. (Caveat to this — most sergeant majors are given a lot of leeway by junior officers because 1) they have serious experience and 2) they work for company and higher level officers…they can put the hurt on you through that general, colonel, or major they work for.
If you have a mixed rank group — that being an enlisted guy, an officer, maybe a warrant officer — there are limitation to how they can interact. Most military have rules against fraternization between officers and other ranks. That will limit the “off-duty” interaction, and in the field there’s going to be a certain barrier. Simply put: the officer is your boss. But unlike a civilian boss, this guy can have you restricted to quarters, order more work on your schedule, or if they’re senior enough bring you up on charges. Sergeants and lower ranks aren’t supposed to fraternize, but they do. Warrant officers are the odd men out — you’ll see them in some services, not in others. These are technical specialists whose jobs require officer authority (say helicopter pilot in the US Army, or sailing master in the 18th Century British Navy), but because they aren’t commissioned by their government but warranted their position by command authority, they don’t often have the responsibility of commissioned officers. They’re part of the officer club, but no one looks too hard if they’re friendly with the NCOs, so long as it’s kept professional.
Next time: Some insights into military life they don’t tend to show in the movies and TV…
2 May, 2011
The Military-Based RPG Campaign: Some Initial Problems
Posted by blackcampbell under Roleplaying Games[2] Comments
The role playing game is the direct descendent of the wargame, so it’s no surprise that combat — personal, vehicular, or mass units — is often part and parcel of a game campaign. Often, an RPG setting is inherently militaristic, even when it pretends not to be, and sometimes it’s very overt: Dungeons & Dragons may be high fantasy about (essentially) murdering and robbing not-so-defenseless critters stuck in an underground maze, but better camapigns involves more than a string of dungeon crawls — with chivalric pursuits like saving a village/town from orc hordes, or warring on the local (and evil) magistrate. Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek, Babylon 5 — most sci-fi properties are intrinsically militaristic as the characters are often members of an armed force. Redcoats fighting Martians in Space: 1889 are commanding cloudships or commanding/fighting with military units. Espionage games are often tied to uncovering or stopping military dangers (at least during the Cold War), but special forces guys are usually the ones in the black turtlenecks backing you up in that raid on the secret subterranean base.
Military-oriented campaigns, or even police procedurals where there’s a rank structure to adhere to, have certain challenges for the player and GM alike.
The most obvious to someone who has been in service is that not all players are likely to be equal. In the military — be it the Napoleonic-era Royal Navy, the forces of some fantasy army, the Colonial Fleet, or Starfleet, not all the characters are going to be the same rank unless that is specifically how the players and GM want them to begin play. That’s just a fact of military life — someone’s always your superior, often someone is your subordinate. There’s always an idiot in the chain of command — the sort of congenital moron that’s going to get someone dead when the action starts. Sometimes, that’s going to be a player character.
So how to handle the rank situation. There’s the standard approach — everybody starts out the same rank or in similar positions: you’re all starting as Starfleet ensigns, you’re all midshipmen in HMS Victory, you’re sergeants in the Roundheads, you’re detectives or special agents in whatever police department or secret service. It’s easy, it’s fair, and if you’re group tends toward power players, or tends to run to the slightly immature, this is a great choice. All the players work up through the ranks at — they hope — the same pace.
Problem 1: That’s not how it works. In real life, you’ll get promoted at different rates simply because not everyone is going to shine all the time. Player A might be the guy that saves the platoon with a mad rush across the field, Tommy gun blazing. Player B might have been just as important to the success of the mission, flanking the Nazis while A is trying to get himself sent on to his maker…who gets mentioned int he dispatches, really? Now A’s a sergeant and B’s still a corporal.
A and B are still comrades and friends, and maybe Sergeant A listens to Corporal B’s suggestions, but in the end, unless there’s an officer in the area, A’s in charge. He makes the final decisions, and it’s on his head if it goes sideways.
Officers tend to have a bit more friendly relationship with each other, but there’s usually rules against fraternization between enlisted and officer for good reason…as Trevor Howard’s Captain Bligh puts it in Mutiny on the Bounty “You can’t expect unquestioning obedience from a partner in last night’s debauch…” So Captain C and Lieutenant D are friends and often will listen to each other’s consul, but in the end, if C gets an order from his superior, he tasks his people (including D) as he sees fit. D might ask for enhancement or clarification on an instruction; the player of D might try to convince C on another course of action but in the end, C’s the man on the spot.
Some players will have trouble with the rank structure and the notions of military order. Role playing for most of us is about getting outside the strictures of our normal lives and being the hero…so in games like this it’s important to point out early that there are consequences to too much insubordination. Even Starbuck in Battlestar Galactica can’t escape punishment for her actions, even though she’s far too valuable to the ship to just lock in the brig or cashier from the service. Even Apollo, who actively mutinied on multiple occasions was held to task for his breaking good order.
Another problem the GM will encounter at the character creation stage: one of your players is determined to crap all over the campaign from the start and wants to play that character who’s great at what they do to the point that the command structure puts up with their crazy antics. I had one player in a recent Star Trek campaign that wanted to play that engineer that’s too too good for discipline, and isn’t really a fan of Starfleet. Well, there’s no press ganging in the Roddenberry universe, so why would they put up with this crank; it’s not like everyone in Starfleet (even Dwight Schultz’s character) is super-talented…no one with shiny stuff on their collar going to put up with a prima donna for too long.
Make sure, before you even go to pre-production — as it were — that every one is on board.
A related problem to those above: while a lot of role playing gamers join the military, not all are veterans or servicepeople…those with no experience of the service often are nervous about playing characters from a culture they really don’t understand — especially if there’s a vet in the group.
Well, you probably aren’t a half-elf warrior princess, either, but that doesn’t stop a lot of players…being an army sergeant shouldn’t either. If you have a vet in the group, they’ll be happy to throw you hints as to how to act like a soldier: what you can get away with, what you can’t, how your life is structured, how the justice system works for troops. You don’t have to be proficient in tactics, orders of battle…just have fun.
The intimidation factor is often higher for GMs without military experience running a military-based campaign for people who were in service. Don’t sweat it — use their experience to enhance the game. Ask about how UCMJ works, how rules of engagement are structured and decided upon, etc. The internet can get you a lot of the basic stuff, but it doesn’t explain that most of your day in the motor pool pretending to fix that vehicle you’ve signed for, or that all operations might stop for a day of remedial training on how not to be stupid driving after somebody in a completely different country rolls their water truck.
Like any other setting you might jump into playing verisimilitude is essential to really capturing the flavor of a campaign — if the military is involved, you should strive to capture the life, even if you have to exaggerate a few things here and there to do it. There are plenty of good movies, novels, stories that detail the life of soldiers in or out of the combat zone — read up or watch them. For franchise settings like Babylon 5, which does a better job than Star Trek at catching the military life (and honestly, what sci-fi show didn’t do a better job?), but it pales in comparison to the Battlestar Galactica miniseries, or the early seasons of Stargate SG-1.
As with anything game-oriented — first and foremost, have fun. Everything else is icing on the cake.
The Black Campbell 