Brian Rogers (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
subplotkudzu) wrote2006-12-10 09:11 pm
subplotkudzu) wrote2006-12-10 09:11 pm
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Pigs in spaaaaaaaaaccccccceeee!
No, not the Muppets. ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
netcurmudgeon ran session 4 of 6 in his Space Marshals game today, which spurred some game theory thoughts (not to mention being a crackin' good time).
To set the scene, we marshals are on our way to an abandoned space station that was the center of a failed edge of known space astrroid mining venture. This station is believed to be the point of origin for a new drug that's been hitting the spaceways over the last few years, and we have learned that each iteration of the drug makes the user slightly more suceptible to suggestion than the last. For some reason rather than make the drug more addictive, the makers are trying to get the users to be more pliable.
In sessions 1-2, we were called into a murder investigation that provided the break we needed to start rolling up that drugs distribution network. In session 3 we did the leg work of rolling up one distribution line and tracked the drug source to this station. We armed ourselves with a squad of marines and pointed our trusty spaceship into danger. This session - rather than exploring the asteroid system or fighting the drug makers we followed an emergency beacon from a drifting space ship. It turns out the whole crew (save 2 people in stasis) had been killed by an alien they'd pulled up from a planet bound wreck they'd found. We hustled on, got the lay of the land, rescued the people in stasis and hustled off. We then re-armed for combat, hustled on, changed the distress beacon to transmit 'crime scene do not approach', changed the drift to a stable solar orbit and prepared to hustle off. The alien attacked us and was chewed to pieces by the marines, so we did an autopsy.
It's pretty clear that this encounter was the initial impetus for the campaign: Netcurmudgeon had always likened the game to Aliens, and this was the bio-engineered killing machine (the thing was even found inside a space-to planet warhead, so whoever made it planned to launch the things down to the surface for it to chew people up). Which means that the game, rather than being an onion skin like the GM normally runs, has been a 'well, I want them to be here, but to get to there they first need to have done X, Y and Z'. I've run those before myself, and hats off to Netcurmudgeon for making it work - my 'x y z' list usually ends up starting around M and the game ends before the players even reach V. We - either as players or PCs - are not sure whether the alien killing machine is tied to the drugrunning plot. A Classic bug hunt would have us on a station or asteroid mine full of these things, but who knows?
The dice were working hard at getting the genre in place: once we hit the station (either time) not one of the 3 players could make a Notice, Listen or Spot roll. Our techie took three tires to open the infirmary door's electronic lock. My doctor flubbed the medical check to see if there was anything odd about the people in stasis, so we had to worry about potential Alien embryos as the monster still hadn't put in an appearance. The whole first trip was incredibly tense even though nothing moved to stop us - we were sure that something would, and that when it did the dice would continue to betray us.
Said dice continued to do just that as the techie proved incapable of getting any remote control over the ship. Missed roll after missed roll, with myself andevynrude hypothesizing that the derelict's external antenna had been damaged, and that once we managed to override that and get the back up working that that one had suffered wiring damage. (For the infirmary we determined it was just tension, sweat in her eyes, and that the lock had been coded to make it hard for the monster to get in.) These were better tension-adds than just saying that our techie had suddenly proved inept. In any event the bad connections meant we were going to have to go back over to shut off the beacon, keep the ship from drifting into a cometary orbit and we couldn't just vent it to space first.
This was all good: we had written ourselves a perfect reason to do what the space horror genre demanded - go back onto the ship with the mad killer alien - without the PCs becoming unaccountably stupid. Once there we did everything we could to minimize the risk, and still lost a marine and nearly a PC. If we hadn't dropped the thing at the end of the first combat round it's insanely high initiative score would have left half of us dead before we could move again (Netcurmudgeon uses a variant of the Feng Shui initiative system in place of the standard CoC one) - even with the marines it was still a tense few seconds.
All of this shows differences in how Netcurmudgeon and I GM: he knew a month ago we were bringing the marines with us, but the difficulty on the ship wasn't ramped up; He saw us taking minimal invasion/massive firepower precautions and didn't alter the beast's basic strategy. I would have. I'm such a genre fiend that I wouldn't have been able to resist killing the marines we left guarding the shuttle, with limited sound and camera footage showing the PCs the carnage. I would have had more than one of the warhead monsters awake. I would have had the thing jump back up once on reflect action or via a hind-brain after it had been taken down. He played it by the book (he even said he considered having the monster jump us on the first run despite his initial plans, but wanted to see if we were really going to just grab people and leave. Darn tootin' we were!).
I'm not sure one is better than the other. I expect I would have left the players with a greater sense of skin-of-the-teeth survival, but he left us with a strong sense of well-earned victory because we out-smarted the killing machine in a clean fight. And I'm still not sure what's coming next, but am eager to find out - which is the sign of a good game.
netcurmudgeon ran session 4 of 6 in his Space Marshals game today, which spurred some game theory thoughts (not to mention being a crackin' good time). To set the scene, we marshals are on our way to an abandoned space station that was the center of a failed edge of known space astrroid mining venture. This station is believed to be the point of origin for a new drug that's been hitting the spaceways over the last few years, and we have learned that each iteration of the drug makes the user slightly more suceptible to suggestion than the last. For some reason rather than make the drug more addictive, the makers are trying to get the users to be more pliable.
In sessions 1-2, we were called into a murder investigation that provided the break we needed to start rolling up that drugs distribution network. In session 3 we did the leg work of rolling up one distribution line and tracked the drug source to this station. We armed ourselves with a squad of marines and pointed our trusty spaceship into danger. This session - rather than exploring the asteroid system or fighting the drug makers we followed an emergency beacon from a drifting space ship. It turns out the whole crew (save 2 people in stasis) had been killed by an alien they'd pulled up from a planet bound wreck they'd found. We hustled on, got the lay of the land, rescued the people in stasis and hustled off. We then re-armed for combat, hustled on, changed the distress beacon to transmit 'crime scene do not approach', changed the drift to a stable solar orbit and prepared to hustle off. The alien attacked us and was chewed to pieces by the marines, so we did an autopsy.
It's pretty clear that this encounter was the initial impetus for the campaign: Netcurmudgeon had always likened the game to Aliens, and this was the bio-engineered killing machine (the thing was even found inside a space-to planet warhead, so whoever made it planned to launch the things down to the surface for it to chew people up). Which means that the game, rather than being an onion skin like the GM normally runs, has been a 'well, I want them to be here, but to get to there they first need to have done X, Y and Z'. I've run those before myself, and hats off to Netcurmudgeon for making it work - my 'x y z' list usually ends up starting around M and the game ends before the players even reach V. We - either as players or PCs - are not sure whether the alien killing machine is tied to the drugrunning plot. A Classic bug hunt would have us on a station or asteroid mine full of these things, but who knows?
The dice were working hard at getting the genre in place: once we hit the station (either time) not one of the 3 players could make a Notice, Listen or Spot roll. Our techie took three tires to open the infirmary door's electronic lock. My doctor flubbed the medical check to see if there was anything odd about the people in stasis, so we had to worry about potential Alien embryos as the monster still hadn't put in an appearance. The whole first trip was incredibly tense even though nothing moved to stop us - we were sure that something would, and that when it did the dice would continue to betray us.
Said dice continued to do just that as the techie proved incapable of getting any remote control over the ship. Missed roll after missed roll, with myself and
evynrude hypothesizing that the derelict's external antenna had been damaged, and that once we managed to override that and get the back up working that that one had suffered wiring damage. (For the infirmary we determined it was just tension, sweat in her eyes, and that the lock had been coded to make it hard for the monster to get in.) These were better tension-adds than just saying that our techie had suddenly proved inept. In any event the bad connections meant we were going to have to go back over to shut off the beacon, keep the ship from drifting into a cometary orbit and we couldn't just vent it to space first. This was all good: we had written ourselves a perfect reason to do what the space horror genre demanded - go back onto the ship with the mad killer alien - without the PCs becoming unaccountably stupid. Once there we did everything we could to minimize the risk, and still lost a marine and nearly a PC. If we hadn't dropped the thing at the end of the first combat round it's insanely high initiative score would have left half of us dead before we could move again (Netcurmudgeon uses a variant of the Feng Shui initiative system in place of the standard CoC one) - even with the marines it was still a tense few seconds.
All of this shows differences in how Netcurmudgeon and I GM: he knew a month ago we were bringing the marines with us, but the difficulty on the ship wasn't ramped up; He saw us taking minimal invasion/massive firepower precautions and didn't alter the beast's basic strategy. I would have. I'm such a genre fiend that I wouldn't have been able to resist killing the marines we left guarding the shuttle, with limited sound and camera footage showing the PCs the carnage. I would have had more than one of the warhead monsters awake. I would have had the thing jump back up once on reflect action or via a hind-brain after it had been taken down. He played it by the book (he even said he considered having the monster jump us on the first run despite his initial plans, but wanted to see if we were really going to just grab people and leave. Darn tootin' we were!).
I'm not sure one is better than the other. I expect I would have left the players with a greater sense of skin-of-the-teeth survival, but he left us with a strong sense of well-earned victory because we out-smarted the killing machine in a clean fight. And I'm still not sure what's coming next, but am eager to find out - which is the sign of a good game.