The Black Campbell

There’s already a slapdash set of mass combat rules here on the Black Campbell site, but here’s another take to make the character’s respective actions more synergistic.

During a combat round, play is broken into initiative, the actions of the players/NPCs, then a final combat action by the respective commanders for morale.

Initiative is as in the core rules: the commanding officers roll their Alertness+Tactics in an opposed test (Cylons would use the basestar’s Alertness and Perception ratings if there’s no specific commander.) Winner goes first.

The commander then rolls an Alertness+Administration to see how well managed the ship or squadron is — the CO can pass off elements of this to other players. For instance, CDR Adama is overseeing the battle as a whole: his test, if successful, lends a skill dice step to his subordinates. He’s had COL Tigh take over damage control — he rolls the same ALE+Administration to give a dice step to the men under his command for making repairs (a fumble gives a -2 step to the DC teams as they are now uncoordinated.) CPT Adama is given command of the fighters and makes a ALE+Tactics test to aid the fighter pilots in their work.

The players now get to take their actions — Tyrol (or if there’s no PC, the ship Intelligence+Mech Engineering or Tech Engineering vs. damage suffered.) Starbuck takes the step Apollo gave for a successful tactics and slays a few toasters. The gunnery crews under another PC fire using his INT+Heavy Weapons skill with the step from CDR Adama.

Damage to the enemy ships is calculated. The fighter squadrons can be rolled as a unit, if you want — for simplicity sake, say the lead pilot can roll his AGL+Pilot v. the Cylon raider with a die step going to the attack or defense of the side with numerical superiority. Attacks by fighters on capital ships could be resolved with using the lead pilot’s skill v. the capital ship Agility or an EASY difficulty if in skirmish range, roll the damage of the vehicle with a step for each squadron attacking, then divide by 10 for the scale.

Next (or if the won the initiative, they went first) the Cylons do their worst, as per the rules.

Say all three PCs’ tests were successful: now the old man tests his WIL+Discipline to maintain the morale of the crew with a +3 die step (one for each success of the PCs). A failure will result in a -1 die step on the attribute of the NPCs and PCs on the next round of action. A success and the ship continues to fight well, an extraordinary success lends a +1 step to their skills for the next action round.

Do Cylons have morale? Depends on whether they have a resurrection ship in the area, doesn’t it?

It’s quick and very spitball, but it should work to allow the characters to have an effect on each other’s actions. It should also be applicable to ground forces with a bit of tweaking.

1) STEAL! All the best authors and artists have done it — they either call it an homage (think the Great Machine or the even the Shadows v. Vorlons metaplot of Babylon 5 [Forbidden Planet and Lensman respectively]) or a re-envisioning (everything friggin’ thing Shakespeare or John Scalzi wrote)…

You want a terrifying monster on your spacecraft light years from help? Alien…doesn’t have to be that particular alien, but you get the notion. Maybe you want that particular beastie in one of your campaigns…they’d drop into a Mythos campaign rather nicely, I think. Want a slightly run-down but noble contract pilot with a one eyed dog for your pulp campaign? Nothing says he has to be called Jake Cutter (but he is in my pulp China campaign…) You want to do a 1980s cop show with hot cars and clothes? You know where to steal from…just do it.

Steal ship designs from games you like. If I ever get around to my homebrew sci-fi setting, I’m using the ships from Jovian Chronicles. Steal guns — the pulse rifle from Aliens or the BFG Deckard has in Blade Runner jump to mind for your sci-fi or cyberpunk campaign; I stole the Tachikomas from Ghost in the Shell for my Serenity campaign (minus the cheery voices, but after thinking about the Fruity Oaty Bars commercials…) Steal characters and modify them; rename them if you like. I’ve used a variant of Sam Elliot’s character from the not-great but fun Shakedown in Bond games for 20 years; more recently I used his character from Avenger wholesale. (’cause Sam Elliot can rescue almost any scene, if not a movie…)

The real gold mine for stuff to steal — especially if you have a square like me in your group that doesn’t do computer or console gaming: video games! Dead Space, Mass Effect, L.A. Noire (man, this one’s almost enough to get me to buy an XBox360…), etc. These are great for set pieces, alien races, characters, ship, etc.

2) REUSE…or steal from yourself or other campaigns you’ve been in. I reuse plot lines all the time — some without modification, some with heavy alteration. I and other reuse characters. My ex-wife played a variant of her first character from an old Bond campaign in subsequent campaigns, in a Stargate campaign, in a superheroes campaign. Others have used the same general character tweaked and renamed — Jed Callahan is always the acrophobic, wise-talking inventor/ gunsmith/mechanic who likes guns way to much, and manages to get himself into trouble at every turn (and the rest of the players with him.) He started out as a Car Wars character, became a superhero character whose only power was he couldn’t die and healed very quickly…otherwise, normal. He was in an espionage campaign or two. He showed up in a sci-fi game.

3) [Insert name of series here] RE IMAGINED! They did it with Batman, James Bond, Battlestar Galactica  and you can do it, too. Have an old campaign that died on the vine with one group? Revitalize it with the new group. Or have a look at how you want to change the tone — the new espionage campaign I’m running, The Professionals, is similar to the last Bond campaign — a super-elite group that fights bad guys around the world. Last time, the characters were CIA, and were the honest and true guardians of America fighting bad political decisions and getting slapped around for it. They couldn’t operate legally in the US, but sometimes had to. It was more Sandbaggers than James Bond.

This time, the group is a test program — an interdepartmental task force that has sworn Secret Service agents and CIA special action team members on it, and is co-operated by the National Clandestine Service and Department of Homeland Security. Are they legal? Well, Eric Holder says so, but it remains to be seen…they have a short time to prove their worth to the law enforcement and intelligence communities, and to make the various directors look good. It’s one part The Shield, one part 24, and one part The Unit…they’re not always right, they’re rarely pretty, and the piss a lot of people off. But they get the job done (so far…)

I’m thinking about firing up a version of the Gorilla Ace! campaign that had so much potential before that gaming group blew up. Maybe it’ll fly, maybe it won’t — bu the idea was too good to let die & I need a filler pulp game for the time being, as my wife is out of rotation for the next few months due to baby and work scheduling.

(…and that title’s what happens when a 40-something Celtic guy tries to be hip.)

One of my players is getting ready to fire up a pulp campaign where I will actually get to play! (Whoo!) We had also discussed a superhero campaign where we could trade off GM responsibilities, similar to what I had done with a former gaming buddy in the late 1980s. That got us to discussing the merits of various RPG rules sets — a discussion that spread to the other gaming group.

It’s easy to forget how primitive RPGs were in the early days. They were an extension of war-games, and the heritage showed in things like Dungeons & Dragons, Gamma World, and other early settings. The rules were almost completely given up to combat simulation and movement, and roleplaying was really an afterthought.

Traveler, James Bond: 007, and other non-TSR systems tried to break this battle sim feel with more fleshed out character simulations — skills, weaknesses, etc. — and while there might be rules for seducing the femme fatale or car chases, in the end, the fists, blades, or guns came out.

The one thing that was central to these rules sets was the position of dungeon master or gamester…the DM/GM was the one that came up with the general world setting (or managed it, if it was a licensed setting), the players ran the characters and worked their way through scenarios of that person’s devising. Ultimately, the GM was the arbiter (although plenty thought of themselves as “god” at the table) of what happened, and tried to set up the adventures so that the players would be entertained, surprised, etc… It’s a position for a storyteller, but also someone who can juggle lots of tidbits of background material, flesh out NPCs on the fly, and otherwise manage a group of people.

In the 1990s there was a strong push to get away from combat as the raison d’être for characters to do things: romance was played up in the White Wolf line and in Victorian “steampunk” settings. Characters’ flaws, motivations, and allegiances became more important than their +2 sword of impressing girls. I, as a storyteller, loved this trend and it fit well with my notion of GMing — combat was not always the point. (In fact, for some settings, it’s to be avoided at all costs! Dead people attract attention…not good for thieves or spies, or pretty much anyone looking to avoid a trip to the local prison.)

Now it’s normal for the combat section of a game to be subsumed into the general task resolution rules (with some expansion for various combat specific mechanics.) Some systems have done away with damage — the new Cortex Plus for Smallville uses “stresses” from emotional to relational to physical. It’s a nifty idea and one that I’m intrigued by, other than the massive bit of book keeping it appears to make for the player to keep track of.

The other trend, and one that I’m not on board with the new hotness is the shift from a GM that acts as arbiter to a communal or troupe style of storytelling. Maybe it’s because I’m a control freak or I like to be the center of attention — this is all entirely possible. But having discussed it with my players, there seemed a consensus that the idea of everyone pitching in to create the environment and plotlines ala Primetime Adventures or Smallville was intriguing for the amount of input it gave the players, we all thought that it had a serious weakness — consistency and coherence.

Think of it this way: If every TV show, book, movie, etc. could have it’s universe tweaked to your liking, every plot could be crafted to what you wanted to see, every outcome was decided by the player should they succeed…there is going to be certain lack of coherence due to the “wouldn’t it be cool if?” factor. Even in the most interactive of media, computer RPGs, the player can alter the course of events but their decision tree is small and the outcomes they lead to smaller still — computer RPGs do exactly what critics of GMs who “railroad” complain of: they design the decision trees to provide a false sense of empowerment; ultimately, what you do will lead to one of a preset number of outcomes, unless your GM runs their games completely impromptu (and those that do, when they are good, are great!)

There is also a tendency to less cohesion in the plots, the story arc (if there’s one at all), and in the universe itself. Think of it this way: in the 1970s and 1980s, most TV shows were serial and their stories were contained in the events of the hour. Perhaps some characters might reoccur, some stories might resurface for another episode or two, but by and large, each episode was it’s own universe. The characters were general consistent, but might be completely miswritten to fit the story being presented (what I think of as the bad sort of railroading — the “it’s in the plot” railroading.) The shows that were consistent, where the characters remained true throughout, where the story arcs made sense, where the universe was consistent and coherent, relied on a smaller number of writers, more empowered producer or show runner input (think Babylon 5 or Hill Street Blues.)

Troupe style RPGs are Starsky & Hutch, or even Mork and Mindy; games where there’s no GM, rather than a new-agey facilitator, are more like Babylon 5. I’m a big fan of having a single central vision, altered and made the players’ own by their actions — nothing good comes of the GM that is playing to himself with the rest of the table as the audience.

So I guess that’s all I’ve got to say on that.

Discuss.

Here’s an idea that was suggested by a player a few months back near the end of our Battlestar Galactica campaign. He was suggesting that all the time he was giving to certain maneuvers (in this case, touch & gos to prepare for combat landings) for training his vipers should pay off with either a bonus to their skill die or a modification to the difficulty of a task.

Hard skills get easier for people — dirt bikers practice certain kinds of jumps over and over again ’til they get it right, but you still see them drop their motorcycles from time to time on the dead simplest maneuvers; freerunners do amazing stuff, and certain jumps or tricks they do so well they look effortless, but others they flub regularly; navy pilots practice landing and takeoffs on aircraft carriers over and over because they’re hard…yes, they get better overall, but some maneuvers have just been drilled into them; shooters on the firing range can drill sub 2″ groups with their pistol or rifle, but put them in a fluid, moving environment and they don’t do as well (and some people shoot action drills superbly, but can’t group standing still worth a crap.)

So how to reflect this? If your special ops team or spy does a lot of indoor range practice, they might gain a benefit when they have the time to take up the right stance, aim, and shoot. Your viper pilot might ace combat landings on their battlestar after months of practice while running from the Cylons or is particularly adept at a 180 roll or yaw that puts them flying backwards to fire at something in their six. Say your researcher is very good at combing through archives in a library, but they don’t do search engines too well… Maybe your archeologist/adventurer has practiced snagging objects and swinging over chasms with his whip multiple times, but snapping a cigarette out of someone’s mouth is a new trick…these characters might get a benefit for something they’ve repeatedly done in game, or that had been a stated part of their regimen of training. If it’s not something they practice, no benefit.