Mid-Game Outcome Choices in Remember Tomorrow

This is my third post on Remember Tomorrow, a light cyberpunk RPG I played recently. This post analyzes some mid-game strategic choices you'll have to make, and concludes they aren't nearly as well balanced as the options at character creation.

Previous Posts on Remember Tomorrow:

• Overview and initial impressions of Remember Tomorrow.
• The math behind character creation in Remember Tomorrow.

Effectively, Remember Tomorrow has a very aggressive Experience Point system. Someone levels up at the end of every single scene. Fights, arguments, and mental challenges all use the same simple and abstract mechanic, and at the end of every conflict someone's stats improve. The number of successes rolled determines how many upgrades you get.

I was curious as to what things are worth spending Outcomes on when you win a scene during the game. Luckily, this analysis is a faster and simpler bit of math than my previous post. Unfortunately, while there's little math, there's a lot of conceptual ground to cover, and it's likely to be a lengthy and verbose discussion.

Your options for every success (some restrictions apply) you roll are:

1. Gain +1 in an attribute
2. Gain +1 in Influence (Factions only)
3. Gain a P-Con
4. Tick a goal box
5. Remove your own N-Con
6. Reduce another PCs attribute by -1
7. Reduce a Factions Influence by -1
8. Inflict an N-Con on another PC or Faction
9. Untick another PC's goal box
10. Kill a character that already has Injured and Dying N-Cons

Let's address that list option-by-option:

1. We'll use the first option (+1 to your own Ready, Willing, or Able) as the benchmark by which to measure the other options. Each point you add to an attribute increases your average number of successes by 0.1. So a starting character will score a mean of 1.2 averages on their introductory roll, but a character whose had any one attribute raised previously will instead score 1.3 successes. Is a noticeable, measurable bonus, but not huge.

2. Immediately it becomes obvious that +1 Influence compares very favorably to +1 to R W or A. Influence is the only attribute Factions have, and it functions for them in the same way that all three attributes work for PCs. Since it affects all three dice in a roll, +1 Influence is three times as powerful for a Faction as +1 in an attribute is for a PC. If you really want a Faction to improve or degrade, adjust their Influence accordingly. When a Faction goes from Influence 4 to Influence 5, their average roll goes up from 1.2 to 1.5, and their chance of scoring a triple-success nearly doubles (from 6.4% to 12.5%).

3. Next we compare +1 R W or A to gaining a P-Con. On the plus side, P-Cons can reliably give +1 to a roll, where as attributes and Influence rely on random chance. That is to say, gaining +1 to an attribute increases your average roll from 1.2 to 1.3, but invoking a P-Con increases it from 1.2 to 2.2. That is, in a word, huge. Even more so when you consider that a P-Con also raises your maximum roll from a 3 to 4.

To balance the advantage of a P-Con, there's the disadvantage that you only get to use it once. On first glance, I thought this would keep P-Cons and attributes fairly balanced. But in actual play, it doesn't. P-Cons are absolutely better. You just don't roll often enough in a session of play for the difference to compensate. You may get to use the attribute boost three or four times as often as the P-Con in a session, but it's worth only a tenth the value on each use, so the attribute falls behind. Plus, if the P-Con gives you the win, you can spend one of your newly earned outcomes restoring it. This ability to "roll P-Cons forward" is a huge strategic advantage in the game, and a little shocking the first time you see it in practice (if you weren't expecting it). If you don't have a P-Con, it's always worth getting one.


As a further wrinkle, you can only spend 1 P-Con per roll, so there's not a lot to be gained by stacking them up excessively (but keep reading). P-Cons have a few other uses, though.

They can also be used after the roll, to reroll your whole set of dice. This is always worth doing if you failed to roll any successes. As we mentioned, there's typically a better than 70% chance that the reroll will improve your position. Adding this in to the mix further increases the value of P-Cons. A second P-Con is probably always worth it, too, then, since that protects you from a bad roll. If you already have two P-Cons, though, the attributes start looking more attractive.

P-Cons can also be burned for various minor benefits. They can turn a +1 attribute bonus into a +2 attribute bonus, but it's hard to see why you'd want to since the P-Con on its own is more potent than the extra +1 to an attribute. Lastly, you can burn a P-Con to tick a goal box even if you failed a roll... but as we're about to see, that's rarely going to be in your best interests.

4. Here's where we start to get into weird territory. In the game, every PC has a goal. When playing that PC, you naturally want to pursue the goal, get them closer to it. However, if you ever achieve the goal, your character is written out of the story, so there's a minor conflict of interests. If you're enjoying playing a particular character, you're not terribly motivated to score them their third and final goal tick.

In addition, in order to achieve the goal, you need to spend outcomes (or burn P-Cons) to get the ticks. Which means that every time you gain a tick, you're doing it at the cost of being slightly less competent in the future than you otherwise could be. There's a trade-off here that provides some of the tension of the system, but I could also see it rubbing some people wrong. I kinda like it, but then I'm a big fan of tragedy in films and novels, and I don't mind watching my characters get run through the wringer a little.

Regardless of what you think of it from a dramatic perspective, it's hard to conclude that there's any reason to score goal ticks in the early game. If you use those outcomes and P-Cons for other purposes early on, you'll find it much easier to get the goal ticks late in the story when the plot seems to be winding down anyway.

5. The fifth option when spending an outcome is that you can get rid of your own N-Cons. My initial reaction to this is that it's never worth it, at least not mechanically.

N-Cons don't do much. They only get invoked rarely, just on those scenes where you win by a large margin and someone fears you really zapping them with outcomes.  Even then, as long as your Scene Goal was a good one, you're still getting something solid out of the exchange. So really, N-Cons only impact you if you're winning, and then all they do is make you win a little less. That's not to say there aren't times where you'll want to buy off a specific N-Con because it's thematically inconvenient. But this should be low on your priority list.

The exception would be for Injured and Dying, which have additional rules baggage that could result in character fatality if ignored for long. Getting ether of those fixed up / removed is a decent option if you're invested in your character, and could be critical if you expect that any of your fellow players are the murderin' type.



Now we're into the half of the list where things turn aggressive and negative. From here on out, all the options are things you can do to someone else.

6. When is it a good idea to lower another PCs attribute? Actually, I think the answer is "almost never". Remember how we decided that gaining a P-Con or an Influence was much more potent than gaining one Attribute point? Well, the same math applies here, and perhaps more strongly. If I'm expecting further conflict with the party in question, I'll get better results by pumping up my own characters than by hindering theirs. 

There's one obvious exception: If someone has a 1 in an Attribute, reducing it to 0 kills them off and writes them out of the story. That's pretty huge. Of course, if it's rarely worth knocking attributes down in the first place, you won't see these sorts of weaknesses come up very often.  When you do, you should always ask yourself if killing that PC off is dramatically appropriate at that junction. You should never kill off a PC "just because you can". If it fits the storyline and enhances game play, great, go for the throat. If all it's going to do is ruin the night for someone whose been rolling poorly, then consider the noble route of just boosting your own characters instead.

Another argument against impairing someone's stats is that it's flavorless. The various attributes just aren't defined well enough for most of us to really grok what it means when your Able is reduced from 6 to 5, for example. The game doesn't even really establish what human average is (4 because that's what most stats start at? Or 3 because PCs are exceptional? I dunno.) Your changing the math (-0.1 successes per roll), but not the shared reality.  If you're looking to make things hard on someone else, there's more thematic and flavorful ways to do so (namely, by giving them N-Cons).

7. There's slightly more cause to reduce the Influence of a Faction, however. For one thing, as we established earlier, Influence is about three times as potent as R W or A. The shared nature of Factions make them more likely to attack you in the future: a high-Influence faction is a threat to all PCs. If a Faction's Influence gets too high, it will exit the game victoriously, possibly speeding up the end of a session. Lastly, since they're not held by a single player you don't have to worry about a destroyed faction putting a damper on someone's fun the way a dead PC might (though it does count as an Exit and could end the session suddenly).

While still not generally as good as getting yourself a P-Con, burning a Faction's Influence is something you'll be happy to do from time to time.


8. Often the most flavorful option for antagonizing someone is to give them an N-Con. "-1 to Ready" is a lot less imaginative and meaningful than making your target "Confused" or "Destitute". N-Cons are easier to role-play, as they create great hooks and focus for the narrative fiction.

Sadly, N-Cons are mechanically very weak. As mentioned in the section on getting rid of your own N-Cons, giving them to someone isn't worth it from purely mathematical point of view. All they do is make the winner of a conflict win a little less, and since they are expended when used, they're a very temporary set back. You can sometimes trade them in to double the hit to an attribute or Influence, but that's a lot of set up for minimal impact. N-Cons may be flavorful, but they don't do much.

And that's perfectly fine, by the way. As is often the case in competitive RPGs, you often want some way to mess with another player that isn't a horribly huge setback for them. You want to rain on their in-character parade, without doing the same out-of-character to the player. Flavorful but trivial N-Cons are perfect for this.

As above, Injured and Dying are exceptions to the rest of the guidelines concerning N-Cons. A character with Injured eventually has to do something about it, or it will become Dying. A character with both can be killed as an outcome. Which means Injured and Dying have a bit more punch to them, and are reasonable choices to inflict on characters that you want to hinder.


9. Unticking goal boxes is an interesting and potentially flavorful option, but one that's hard to rate in terms of power and math. Yes, if you do it, that's at least one more scene the target has to spend pursuing their goals before they can successful Exit. Its just hard to predict how much longer you'll be adding to the game. Someone else may target them in the very next scene and inadvertently undo your result, or hours may go by without them getting a success in the right area.

As mentioned earlier, ticking a goal box in the first place is something of a sacrifice. That means undoing it is likewise both a sacrifice and a serious blow. It does nothing to advance your own cause, but it can potentially undo someone else's entirely. I wouldn't do so lightly, but would keep an eye open for times and situations where it's worth it.

Another thing worth keeping an eye open for is player enjoyment. Goal boxes aren't likely to get ticked until characters have spent some serious time building up strengths and pursuing plotlines. Which means that someone ticking a second box may be looking to retire the character. It may be a sign that they're just done with that character. If you make achieving the goal too difficult, they may just respond by
dumping that PC in the pool and running an Introduction scene for a new PC. While such disruption is certainly an effective and powerful use of your outcome, it's not particularly fun.

10. The final option for spending an outcome is to kill an Injured and Dying character (ie: one with the Injured and Dying N-Cons). As with anytime you kill someone else's PC, you'll want to consider whether or not it's dramatically (or politically) appropriate at the moment.

There's a school of thought that says it's important that PC death be a real possibility in gaming. That if you never grease a PC, your players will have a diminished sense of concern about their characters, and take stupid risks or goofy actions they wouldn't otherwise, and emotional impact (or suspension of disbelief) will be undermined. I, for one, tend to subscribe to this train of thought. You can't play a horror game (for example) for long with a GM that's never really going to challenge or threaten your PCs.

However, it's very easy to go too far in the opposite direction, killing PCs without warning and despite their players never making the sort of mistakes that might "justify" it. Even hardnose GMs need to take care not to be capricious or unfair about it, or they'll eventually lose all their players (not just the characters).  I mention this because I think it's one potential "problem" with RT's system. It's possible, though unlikely, to score one big lucky die roll that inflicts Injured, inflicts Dying, and kills off the PC in a single roll, without the player being able to do anything about it. More-likely, a couple of targeted scenes and bad rolls will conspire to inflict the special P-Cons on someone before they can do anything about it, and leave them vulnerable.

Sometimes the sudden plot-twist of character death will enhance the story, other times it'll ruin somebody's fun. Make sure you know which before you do it. And before you strike that death blow, remind yourself that the narrative structure and scene-framing rules of RT make it very difficult for someone to take simple precautions like getting their character to a hospital.

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In Conclusion: (The following advice is assuming that accomplishing your Goals and "winning" is important at all. If you're not playing to win, disregard this advice and make whatever decisions seem most narratively interesting. It is an RPG, afterall.)

When playing your own character, the most useful option for spending your outcomes in game is to give yourself a P-Con. Spend P-Cons aggressively at every opportunity, and use the extra success to rebuy the same P-Con (or any other) whenever it's appropriate. Once you've got two P-Cons on your PC, your priorities should shift. Reduce the Influence of the Faction that is most directly in conflict with your PC to defend yourself from future attacks. Only raise your own attributes when you score a third (or further) outcome on a roll, or when the conflict didn't involve a Faction that's likely to be an issue in the future. Don't worry about your own N-Cons unless they are Injured, Dying, or really hampering your narrative style. Don't worry about goal ticks at all until you've got your character well established with 2 P-Cons and significantly boosted stats. Boosting your weakest stat is more important than raising your higher ones, as it will improve your chances of a double- or triple-success.

When being the Controller, strike a Deal early to shore up your PCs weaknesses. Once that's accomplished, look for opportunities to use your PC in a Face-Off you have a chance at winning. If that's a long shot (or even a 50-50 proposition), instead pick a favorite Faction and antagonize others to build the Faction up. Again, P-Cons are the means to long-term success, but keep an eye out for anyone burning off "your" Faction's P-Cons on their turns as Controller. If that happens, switch to just Influence boosts so you're not feeding someone else's efforts over your own. You want your favored Faction competitive, but not better than your own PC (so they won't be used against you). If another P-Con or Influence point on your favorite Faction would make them stronger than your PC, change your focus to inflicting N-Cons on the other players. N-Cons are great in that they're flavorful but won't ruin anyone's fun. The objective isn't to crush the other players, just to win slightly more rolls than you lose and provoke some fun as the soulless corporate (or homocidal ganger) badguys.


And remember, respect the narrative. "Winning" is less important than making a good game all around.

Remember Tomorrow

A couple sessions back, my weekly one-shot group gave a test run to Remember Tomorrow. It's a rules-light set of cyberpunk mechanics, with little to no setting and roundtable narration principles. The "hippy game" equivalent for Cyberpunk 2020 fans, Remember Tomorrow has a little bit in common with Universalis in that GMing duties are distributed across the table and you may end up playing several characters over the course of the night.

Remember Tomorrow was written by Gregor Hutton, who also wrote 3:16 Carnage Amongst The Stars, and it really shows. That's not really meant as the "diss" it may have sounded like, given how often I've vented about 3:16. While I eventually grew frustrated with 3:16, along the way it provided our group of about 6 people with entertainment for about 17 sessions. So I certainly got my money's worth, and then some. (Over 350 manhours of entertainment from a $10 PDF. That's a heck of a bargain!)

Remember Tomorrow (hereafter called RT) has many of the same strengths that 3:16 does - it's easy to learn and remember, distributes narrative power across the table, reduces the GMing prep burden to nil. In fact, you could argue that those strengths are actually amplified in RT. It's better at what 3:16 did well than 3:16 itself was. In our first session of RT, we told a wild, unpredictable story, and only once had to look anything up in a rulebook. Bravo!

However, RT has many of 3:16s flaws as well - limited differentiation between characters, mechanics that are so grainy you can't apply any modifiers, the occasional pacing and structural issues caused by unrestricted narrative rights, rules that encourage Player-Vs-Player conflict but don't really reward it enough to make anyone comfortable getting aggressive - and these flaws too are amplified beyond their presence in 3:16. RT is definitely drawn from the same well as 3:16, but then adapted to a less-structured genre. It's everything you loved or hated about 3:16, dialed up to 11.

The lack of setting can be a source of confusion, such as when two different people disagree about what it means to be a "rogue AI", and how they can interact with the world. The lack of solid GMing advice or definitive guidelines, the competitive elements, and the scene-by-scene narration rights rotation can combine to make for a very uneven pacing and sometimes a lack of fairness. The conflicts caused by setting vagueness are not insurmountable, especially if you're just using it for a one-shot or short-run mini-campaign. Just the same, they render it probably a better game for use with friends you have an established rapport with, than for dumping on a group of strangers at a convention.

We encountered these lack-of-guidance stumbling blocks in our group when one person kept starting all his scenes with one of the other PCs (the rogue AI mentioned above) yet again trapped inside another unfamiliar super-computer. Eventually, those sorts of issues would sort themselves out, but it was definitely frustrating in the short term. We approached the game from a point of view of generic cyberpunk future, and so some of us narrated things as gritty and dark, while others went for sufficiently advanced tech and a more lighthearted cinematic approach. In hindsight, I think the game would play much better if the group agreed up front to use a setting they are all familiar with, such as CP2020, Max Headroom, a specific series of novels, or The Matrix. That way everyone's on the same page about what you're after thematically, and you have a reference point for what the tech in the setting can do. The other half of it, learning how to play fair in a game with no GM, is just a trial-and-error issue. (And though it bugged me to see the same "trap" again and again, what else can you do to challenge a rogue AI?)

A few other minor issues were caused by the non-traditional structure. Most notably, there was a particular type of scene that was conspicuously absent from RT. When one PC wants to talk to another PC, that's generally trivially easy to arrange in any RPG. Unless it's the middle of a fight scene, or one PC has been taken captive, the players have it entirely in their power to start up a conversational scene between their characters, often even in campaigns where GMs keep a tight reign on the narration rights around you. In RT, surprisingly, this paradigm is inverted. Though the rules really don't draw attention to it, it is in fact nigh impossible for two PCs to even communicate, let alone work together in RT. I can easily start a scene where one PC attacks another, or where a Faction attacks a PC, or where a Faction contacts a PC and strikes a deal with them, but I am implicitly forbidden to stage a scene where my PC contacts another PC and tries to help or team up with them. There are color narration scenes, but as written those must begin with the intention of turning into conflict, and only become peaceful scenes by means of a happy accident when no one escalates. Which means that only those players most inclined to abuse rules-systems or metagame are even capable of teaming up. Of course, if the other player misunderstands you attempt to subvert the system, you could easily end up in a combat between your PCs, which makes people not want to risk trying to interact with the others.

As a result, one of the players at our group compared the game to multiple solitaire, and that wasn't an entirely unfair comparison. Indeed, the momentum always lies with the Factions within the game, not the PCs, which is a bit awkward. PCs feel less like protagonists and heroes, and more like the poor dumb schlob that everything happens to. Even when the PCs win the die rolls, they still have a somewhat passive role in the game, since their scene goals are usually something along the lines of "don't get shot". Worse yet, the structure feels terribly counter-intuitive, as though you aren't actually playing the character you're holding, instead you're just waiting for the next threat to rear its head. The rules as written render the PCs incapable of actually pursuing anything, and they instead just have to roll with the punches. That seems like a house-rule might be in order:

A Very Simple House Rule:  This rule adds an additional scene type: Dialog Scenes. You may choose your PC and any other PCs or Factions, played by the appropriate other players. You play this scene out as a conversation and light interactions. Unlike normal Deal or Face-Off scenes, Dialog scenes give no mechanical rewards or penalties, and involve no die rolls. They exist solely to facilitate the interactions between PCs, to allow for a bit of flavorful characterization, to illustrate (but not advance upon) your goals, or to function as a "pass" if you're stuck for a better idea when it's your turn to frame the scene. Color | No Conflict scenes may still be initiated in the normal way, by having a Face-Off scene peter out. Face-Off scenes that result in no conflict still get their usual rewards, as the risk of conflict was present.

That simple house rule (and a clearer discussion up front about the setting) would solve most of my objections to the game, and allow it to run a lot more smoothly and intuitively.  It would then function as the quick-to-pick-up, easily improvised alternative to CP2020 or Shadowrun, a role at which it would excel. If I wanted to run CP2020 next week, I'd have a lot of reading and planning to do between now and then, but if I wanted to run RT in the next 5 minutes I'd have a one page summary to read and the other 3 minutes of my prep would be breaking open a pack of blank index cards. In this hectic world where we don't always have as much time for gaming as we'd like, light-weight games like RT are a real boon.

Burying 3:16

Friends, Terrans, Troopers... I come not to praise 3:16, but to bury it... and I say that with slightly less irony than Marc Antony.  Our campaign of 3:16 Carnage Amongst The Stars has come to an end this past Sunday. It was a good game, it was a crazy game. I'm a little sad to see it go, but also very happy to have played it through to a logical conclusion and gotten clear without the rules collapsing too badly. In retrospect, it went about as well as anyone could hope for.

For the first few sessions, the weirdness of the rules were a huge source of delight. The narrative freedom granted by the combat system was a nice change of pace from more crunchy systems, and the gung-ho military setting was sufficiently unlike anything any of us had played recently. It took just half a session to get the hang of it, and then everyone was having fun. I'd planned to run a short campaign of 6 to 8 sessions, but we enjoyed it enough to play 17 sessions.

Ultimately, though, the weirdness of the rules was exactly why the campaign could not be sustained any further. I find myself very skeptical of the notion that the later stages of the campaign-game had ever been playtested, as I found numerous problems that needed attention. Here's a few specific nits to pick:

• When PCs are 90% likely to succeed at anything, kill hundreds of aliens per action, and never take any damage, the game gets a little weird.  And since you roll so few dice per session or combat, there's often 1 player that gets punished by the randomness while everyone else flies uninhibited. You just don't roll enough dice for "the Law of Averages" to ever kick in.
• The game has just two attributes, and they are completely unbalanced. For a one-shot, FA is the be-all-end-all bomb. In campaign play, however, FA is a far distant second-place to the NFA that gets you promoted and keeps you equipped. Early gaps in stats or firepower can make someone feel useless until they fix it... which takes about 10 sessions' efforts to level the playing field.
• Since stats can be so low at the start, you're inclined to keep the modifiers small and sparse. (-2 is pretty hefty nerfing when your stat is 3.) Due to the competitive nature of the game (kill count gets you levels and promotions), the GM has to be very careful with applying such modifiers fairly and evenly. My wife was playing, which makes fairness (and appearance of fairness) trickier, so my solution was to almost never called for modified rolls. But late in the game, that lack of modifiers means the PCs can shoot for the moon and hit it 90% of the time. 
• The jump from 3d10 kills to d100 kills is huge. Once one player has it, everyone else will rush to catch up, but for some characters (ironically, those with the highest initial Fighting Ability) bridging that gap can take nearly a dozen frustrating sessions.
• Most alien abilities are useless, but the few that aren't are positively devastating; Most sessions have an utter lack of tension, but then a killer power comes up in the next session and you have a pressing imminent threat of TPK in scene after scene. 
• Planets can have raging volcanoes, toxic environments, and electrical storms that provide plenty of flavor but no mechanical effect. And they have to have no mechanical effect, because some of them would otherwise be instant killers if the PC's armor got a single crack.
• Speaking of armor, the health levels are wonky too. Power armor protects you just once per planet, while the flesh of your body can take 2 or 3 times as much damage as the armor did and heals between fights even if you're captured or isolated. 
• The APC and the Dropship do basically the same thing, but use none of the same rules to accomplish it. Ultimately the preference between them comes down to flavor text for everyone but the one PC who's driving, and that PC would much rather be firing their own heavy weapon.
• Kill counts are hard to grok when the aliens are swarms, incorporeal, giants, sentient planets, etc, all of which come up pretty often. Just as bad is when the alien power is "Stop Technology" so the gun-cams and computers you'd been narrating for 15 sessions suddenly stop working, but the mechanics and medals still need an ongoing count. Down on the planet, I'm killing as many as 4d100 aliens per turn, but if I collapse a star with a missile and wipe out a civilization it only nets d10,000 kills? 
• The math works well enough to sustain the game elements, but not to suspend the disbelief.

Despite all those complaints, we had a blast. Not just one blast, but 17 sessions of repeated blasting.  We ended on a high note, with everyone enjoying themselves (and all agreeing and intuiting this was where it had to wrap up).

So how'd I make it work in the face of all that? I just dialed the weirdness up to "11". Once it was clear that things were going to get hard to swallow, I started putting in little hints that things were not as they seemed. I made the game setting as surreal as the rules were unbalanced.  For a while, the PC's theories were that maybe they were being drugged or tested on VR by high command, or they'd been captured by aliens and put into a hallucinatory mindscape for brainwash or interrogation purposes. And then slowly they came to accept that maybe the PCs were just crazy. I structured a scene or two as if they were playing Power Kill instead / in addition to 3:16. I stole ideas from Shutter Island, Suckerpunch, and Lost Highway. I made overt references to 60's and 70's acid rock, and to the works of Lewis Carrol. That provided plenty of cover to hide the stranger properties of the game system.

Our final scenes were taking place on several different realities. They were simultaneously killing aliens, getting therapy in a 20th Century mental hospital, and being interrogated by a Jack Bauer type from the Department of Homeland Security who wanted to know where they'd hid the dirty bomb in downtown LA. The PCs faced off against the Brigadier (and each other) for a final confrontation in the launch bay of a Starkiller Missile. When one of them made an NFA roll to launch the missile into the nearby star, we all wordlessly knew this was the final combat of the game. The fight morphed into a car chase on the streets of LA with a mushroom cloud in the background.

At the end of that fight/chase (which ended with three players using Weaknesses, and one using a Strength), I let everyone narrate their own epilogue about how things resolved in whichever reality (or realities) they wanted.  A few of these epilogues strongly contradicted one-another, which we all decided was perfectly as it should be.

Planet Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni

Sunday's session of "3:16 Carnage Amongst The Stars" was our longest yet. We usually wrap up around 4 hours, but this ran 6. We're reaching the end stages of the campaign, as the charts are mostly crossed off, and one of the PCs will have to take the "Hatred for Home" Weakness the next time he levels up (it's the only flashback left for him). So,  I wanted to wrap up plot threads and reinforce themes. That meant more time in the ship. I nearly skipped the planet-side encounters entirely, but as a group we decided to play late instead.

I can't go into a lot of detail on the ship-side plots and themes. Mostly that's because there's so much back story it would go over most casual reader's heads ("you kinda had to be there", but for the past dozen sessions or so).  I'll hit the highlights as fast as I can:

The PCs killed yet another superior officer, Colonel Shook, this time because they caught him in the act of sabotaging their vessel to eliminate any "corruption" caused by their repeated interactions with the aliens. I let the players know that Einstein's Twin Paradox is in effect, despite the warp drive, and that more than 100 years had passed back on Terra. Shook, by the way, was the officer who'd threatened to kill their families back home. Now that they knew this was a hollow threat, they had no problems cutting off his arm and pushing him out an airlock (though I did get one hit away from killing a PC in the process).

After that encounter, they handed over Watkins (an NPC deserter and alien-lover who'd been trying to lead them away from the fleet) to High Command, but first used technology to drive him insane so he wouldn't be able to rat on them, and they didn't hand over his invisible alien spaceship, either.

A number of possible hallucinations and other surrealist stuff went down, as well. I was on thematic overdrive. We'll skip the rest of these sideline embellishments and move on to the planet...

Planet Name: Michelangelo
Planet Description: Volcanic World
Alien Description: Lizards or Reptiles
Alien Special Ability: Armor

The two PC Captains had orders to bring their green companies full of fresh-faced replacements to a lava planet, pacify a few villages, establish a landing zone and a forward command post. Later, they had to assault an alien palace, which mostly went down to Strength-fueled Lynch/Herbert "family atomics vs shield wall" montage.

I made the aliens primitive. Flame-resistant salamander-men wielding pointy sticks and lava globs. They made structures of volcanic glass and hardened lava rock, which they could safely mold and sculpt while it was still hot. Sadly, the game has no fire-proof special ability, so per the rules you could do them in equally well with a energy blaster or flamethrower as you could with a knife or slug-rifle. We tried not to dwell on it, and they did have a bit of armor to protect them so it more-or-less worked out without too many worries.

Armor is yet another 3:16 power that looks so simple, yet is tragically presented in a way that lacks critical clarifications and advice. Once per encounter, the GM gets to declare that all hits against the aliens for a round are invalid because they all have armor.  There's two mechanical grey areas with this, as I see it.

• First, there's a timing issue there. They don't clearly state when you declare it. Is it before the PCs declare FA or NFA? If so, it buys you one extra attack round for the NPCs, but all the PCs will use that round to NFA into better positions. If it's after they declare, or sometime even later in the round such as after everyone's rolled, it's significantly more powerful. I chose after declarations, but before rolling, as a good compromise.
• Does armor prevent Strengths? This didn't even occur to me during the game, but I wish it had. If all kills for the round are prevented, you probably shouldn't be able to use a Strength, either. By missing that, I probably let the players off way too easy - the last two battles were both won by Strengths. As general philosophy, I tend to assume "Strengths trump all", but in retrospect I think the point of the ability might be that it can stop them. Rules holes so big you could drive an APC through them.

Ultimately, the armor and the lack of fire-resistance both fall afoul of one of the game's flaws. Namely, the rules are so abstract, that you can't always apply common-sense to them. When one attack roll kills anywhere from d6 to d100 aliens, there's not a fine enough grain to apply logic. A party can include one PC who hits 40% of the time, and another who hits 90%, so you have to be very careful about ad hoc penalties, especially since the semi-competitive nature of the game already tends to mean who ever pulls out into the lead stays in the lead, and the GM can't target individual PCs.

Normally, in an RPG, I apply common sense as a higher authority than mechanics, but 3:16 actively encourages the opposite.

The armor ability, in particular, is an example of a mechanic that doesn't do a very good job of emulating or simulating anything. The PCs might well kill 200 or more NPCs in this battle, and presumably they all have armor, but mechanically that's represented by making all the PCs miss in a single round of combat? There's this single instant where everyone is foiled by the armor, but for the rest of the battle it has no effect? There's really no way to justify that mechanic, it follows no in-character logic. Hand-wave and move on.

While that logic hole could be a game-wrecker and disbelief-eroder in a more serious or "normal" campaign,  I've been running this one surreal enough that it was just one more spastic moment of weirdness. Like when a PC was given a pocketwatch by a rabbit, or when they set foot inside the invisible ship that invisible from the inside as well, or Poodagooluk saw his ex-girlfriend on the back of a dinosaur, or when the traitor Watkins was handed over to Lt. Colonel Schwimmer and then another tech-specialist Watkins got assigned to the same outfit 4 days earlier? Or that time when the PCs killed Colonel Shook, but then another NPC reported getting orders from him after he died. Anyhow, I'd go into detail about more of this, but I don't want to spoil the "big reveal" I have planned for a session or two down the road. I assure you, there is a method to my madness.

45 minutes on Planet Monet

My latest "3:16 Carnage Amongst The Stars" session was very light on actual combat. In fact, I didn't even send the PCs to the alien planet until the last hour of the session.

Planet Name: Monet
Planet Description: Heavy Atmosphere
Alien Description: Birds
Alien Special Ability: Impair

We're more than half way through the charts at this point, so if I roll up a planet or alien description that doesn't move me, there's not a lot to do about it. The same can be said about the alien's powers, many of which in the main game are terribly anemic.  Since I'd done flying aliens before, birds didn't really thrill me, and it didn't combine well conceptually with Impair. So I went with feathered jellyfish, which sounded weird enough to move me. I had the impair be represented as thick clouds of drifting flower-like lifeforms also native to the planet. Non-threatening flowery things, so the system didn't score them on the kill count, but still capable of blocking fire and vision, jamming up vents and joints on the armor, etc.

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Impair is a weird ability. Frankly, I don't like it at all, and if I were editing the 3:16 rulebook, I'd axe it and ask the writer to submit something else. Impair allows the GM to spend X threat tokens to reduce all the PCs FA and NFA by X for the rest of the encounter. The math on it is a little wonky. I rolled it up late in the campaign, when most PCs are sporting an FA of 7 or 8. So, taking one off the top means dropping their hit chance from 80% to 70%. It's not a huge decrease, and honestly, if the in-character alien goal is to do more damage to the PCs, you're better off keeping that one chip as one more threat token for the PCs to have to kill. Given that the typical 3:16 session has 5 fights, it's pretty weak. If you spend 1 token per fight in a 4-player session, you're gonna expend 25% of your threat tokens to reduce the PCs effectiveness by maybe as much as 14%. That's a losing proposition. However, if you spend multiple tokens in just one or two fights, it's a huge power. Taking -3 off the characters stats probably cuts their effectiveness by 40% or more. In fact, it's possible to hose players to the extent that some of them literally cannot succeed. Such characters will score zero kills, and have to invoke a Flashback to survive. If you then do the same in the following fight...

I just think this is a bad design for a power. So weak it's mostly a detriment to use it, unless you abuse it and sink every chip you can in to it. If you do abuse it, it mostly hoses the weakest PC, which the system already does plenty of by virtue of it's competitive nature. So now you've just dumped on the person who's been having the most frustrating experiences all campaign anyway. As a further side effect, the big threat-token investment and general mechanical impetus of it pushes you in the direction of having fewer encounters with larger stacks of chips. Large chip stacks are a more tempting target for the PCs to invoke strengths against, especially the PCs who got lucky early on in the campaign, leveled up the big guns and stats, and thus have strengths to burn. It's just a "dump on the little guy" power.

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The point of that rant about Impair is that I knew wasn't going to want to spend much time or energy on planet Monet. Conveniently, the platoon rosters were really low (most of the NPCs bought it on the last two planets) and the PCs troopship took some heavy hits from alien kill-satellites in the previous session. So it was a perfect time to pull the Company off the front line and give them some colony furloughs while the old ship was getting repaired and refitted. Significant role-playing followed...

All the actual play reports I've read on RPGnet and other parts of the internet have involved soldiers getting some sexual action, as soldiers deployed far from home are want to do. Sometimes it's hitting the brothels on colony worlds between deployments, and in other campaigns it's VR orgy-tanks aboard the troop ships to keep morale up.

Our game has been completely chaste and sexless by comparison. Possibly because 3 of our 6 participants are female, we early on settled on the notion that the characters must be chemically neutered or something. There's talk in the rulebook about extreme population control back on the crowded Terra, and about how Combat Drugs can wreck your libido, so it seemed perfectly in keeping with the setting.

So this session, I dumped the PCs on leave on a recently-settled colony world that they'd originally pacified several sessions back. Planet Titian, which had only a handful of dinosaurs left on it. There was a little opportunity for hunting with officer's sidearms (I put a total of three chips out across two scenes), but mainly I was waiting for the horomone suppressants to wear off and create some problems for the platoon. They handled it pretty well, and there was surprisingly little sex at all.

• Sergeant Harrington took efforts to make sure his Squad was still getting dosed with suppressants despite being on leave.
• Sergeant Hurr spent all her time out fishing in a local lake by herself. Her squad got into trouble, but since she was in her rights to be on vacation, she dodged any reprimands herself.
• Lt. Sanguine averted and shut down a potential romantic entanglement with a fellow officer. Trying to then push it the other way, I then painted that NPC (Lt. Viziario) as a serial killer. The PC kept it secret, and gave her implied approval while merely suggesting that there's more challenge and honor in hunting aliens. This series of interactions was probably the crux of the colony scenes, as the NPC tried to talk the PC into hunting a colonist or horny Trooper together. Sanguine is a bit of a psychopath, I really thought they were going to hunt someone.
• Lt Flowerdew dragged his feet, before finally allowing himself to be seduced off-camera by the 18-year-old colonist's daughter I had fawning over them. Flowerdew's player indicated she hadn't decided if he was gay or straight yet, and still really hasn't despite this short fling.
• Captain DeMolay's player was on a business-trip this week, so we assumed that due to his demotion at the end of last session, he was denied shore leave. Probably still attending his own Court Martial while the others were actively avoiding sex.

Really timid, tepid stuff, but I wasn't about to force anything on the PCs if the players weren't in to it. So I made sure one of the NPCs in the unit got arrested by the colony sheriff for sexual assault, and had two other NPC Troopers end up in a semi-secret relationship. Just enough background detail to sell the reality. A little buy-in would have been nice, but you can't force something like that. So I put the serial-killer-themed scenes front-and-center, and let the rest just be color. Not a great session, but not horrible either. What do you expect for a game where the GM prep is 10 minutes or less?

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At the end of the night, with less than an hour to go in the session, I had the PCs get emergency deployment orders to reinforce Alpha Company on planet Monet. Alpha was holding an alien temple. Some sort of taboo kept the aliens from approaching it except at sunrise. Every day there was a huge massed attack in the early hours, and then total safety the rest of the day. Alpha had been operating with low numbers (and was nearly rolled into the PC's Company in the previous session before Major DeMolay got himself demoted). The first morning assault on the temple took Alpha by ambush, and killed all their officers.

By the time the PCs got to their position, Alpha was down to 9 men, all of whom were drugged-out and completely messed up. Their platoon medic would get them in a chemical combat frenzy just before dawn for the daily ambush, then stone them out to keep morale from shattering in the long dull gaps between days. I put in a little flavorful subplot about Alpha's acting CO (merely a Sgt) having his tech specialists continually reprogram his kill counters so he could destroy the harmless floating flowers and have it register. In the final battle, his kill counter rolled over to a Million kills, which plays the Terran Planetary Anthem. He got so excited, he grew sloppy and got himself killed.

I gave the PCs just two fights. The first they arrived in drop pods, so the -2 Impair didn't really matter. The second fight, at -3 impair, was much nastier. PCs pulled through it, but just barely.

Lt. Sanguine amazed us all by managing to get promoted again during the post-mission rolls. So I gave her command of Alpha company, and let her bring over 1 officer and 1 non-com from her old unit. She chose a PC non-com (Sgt. Hurr) and an NPC officer (Serial-Killer Lt. Viziario). Haven't decided yet whether to bring in a troopship full of Replacements next session, or force a Alpha "Company" to go into battle with only 11 soldiers.

The later idea is highly amusing, but mechanically doesn't do anything. Which is rather a failing of the system, I feel. The fact that NPCs amount to nothing mechanically, whether individually or en masse, sort of erodes the suspension of disbelief. I find that I alternately love and hate this uber-lite abstract system. Perhaps when this campaign wraps up, I'll take a stab at making a fan supplement for 3:16 with optional rules and GMing advice for the later campaign.

Splitting Up The Party (in 3:16)

In most RPGs, if the party splits up, it's a detriment to the PCs. Resources are spread thin, they can be overwhelmed and ganged up on, etc. What's more, several players sit around twiddling their thumbs while 20 minutes (or more) of combat drag by. But that's just not the case in 3:16 Carnage Amongst The Stars. It's not like D&D where 6 ogres is a much biggger challenge for one player than for the whole party assembled. The fights are fast and really abstract, and if the isolated troopers have a Strength to spend, they can take out as large a pile of Threat Tokens as the GM deems to put before them. Splitting up, going out alone, etc, is all a huge benefit to the PCs that engage in such antics - as they'll get the most kills and rarely get punished for it.

As GM, you want to reward such behavior when the PC takes some big risk (night watch, recon patrol, searching a tunnel complex, or other situations of significant peril or isolation) or is enhancing the game in a meaningful way (figuring out a complicated situation, developing character by storming or goofing off, cleverly setting up a trap, etc), but not for just every-day "I go through the door first" antics.

Or so I think.

But I could see the other side of the argument. It's a competitive game, and thus anyone whose willing to take a risk (no matter how small) should be rewarded. I'd be in that other camp, if the scope and scale of the system were a little less expansive. "I'm first through the door of the hut, so I get to kill d100 baddies before anyone else follows me" is a bit extreme.

It would be really nice if the GM's section of 3:16 had covered in any way the notion of splitting the party. It seems to assume this will never come up, which strikes me as a little odd, given that it's relatively easy via the advancement system for a party of 4 PCs to be a Trooper, a Sergeant, a Lieutenant and a Captain. Four characters of such a diverse spread of ranks shouldn't necessarily always be at the same post. Late in the campaign, when all the PCs are likely to be Officers leading their own units, it becomes even harder to justify all the PCs being at the same battle. Not a major flaw, but more than a tiny bit annoying.

Planets Picass0 and Cezanne

It was pointed out to me at this week's 3:16 Carnage Amongst The Stars game that I didn't blog about last week's 3:16 game. So, here's two birds with one wordy stone...

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Last week, the platoon was sent to help the 3:15 out of a bind. Captain Schwimmer told them that their real goal should be to make the 15th look bad. "They need rescuing, and we don't want them to ever forget who had to haul their butts out of the fire."

Planet Name: Picass0
Planet Decription: Asteroid Belt
Basic Creature Form: Artificial Lifeforms
Alien Special Ability: Isolate

The asteroid belt was designated Picass0. The planets of the same system were Picass1 to Picass7. Perhaps I'm taking the mispronounciation bit a bridge too far. The Picass system was inhabited by Robots, who'd apparently detonated their own homeworld for better mining access. They had gravity-weapons, robo-factories, 7 different chassis types, and a cultural fetish for self-modification. Some of the encounter took place at the robot equivalent of tattoo parlors. At one point Lt. Demolay got pierced with a glowing neon bit... as long as it was stuck into his armor, his com channels were overloaded with a constant stream of "1100101001000111001010001001001011111010011010111...." which I shouted at a volume and rate that probably annoyed my neighbors. Because shouting a faux military briefing with a bad southern accent about a place called Pick Ass Zero wasn't annoying enough, apparently. Not sure what I was thinking...

In fact, I was in improvisational overdrive that session, managing to somehow merge every previous improvised plotpoint together as though it almost was an intentional plot. Except, had any of it been planned, it wouldn't have been quite so ridiculous. So AWOL Trooper Watkins really was hidden amongst the 3:16 fleet, in a cloaked alien vessel hanging off the side of one of the Troop Carriers, with his shape-changing alien girlfriend. Maybe when Trooper Pudaguluk saw Watkins riding on a dinosaur a few planets back that wasn't just space-madness. Maybe. Or, perhaps the one and only PC that had this talk with Watkins aboard the invisible spaceship was herself suffering from space-madness.

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I thought I'd just leave it there, to be mysterious, but of course no battle plan survives contact with the PCs. At the start of this session, they insisted on searching the ducts and crawlspaces of the ship, trying to track down whether or not Watkins and his alien sweetie were actually on board.  If my players wanted to pretend this was some sort of investigative game, and not just a campaign about firing overpowered weaponry at helpless hordes of aliens, who am I to disillusion them? So today I threw them a bone. There was a traumatized MP bound and gagged and tucked away inside the duct work. This satisfied their investigative streak enough. They raised the alarm, and then passed the mystery ball across the court to other NPC MPs to run it to the endzone.

Time for the action to go planetside again.

Planet Name: Cezanne
Planet Description: Temperate World
Basic Creature Form: Furred
Alien Special Ability: Unused

3:16 takes about 10, maybe 15 minutes of prep-work on the GM's part per session. Which is especially great for the month that includes X-mas, New Years, my wife's birthday and our wedding anniversary. However, that busy schedule lead to me being quite lazy and establish some bad GMing habits. I've been starting my prep work closer and closer to the actual session every week. Today, due to a bus scheduling snafu, one of my players ended up arriving over half and hour early to the session... and I hadn't yet done any prep. My bad.


As a result, the planetary portion of the adventure was largely incoherent, and largely a pastiche of Warner Brothers cartoons. I have no one to blame but myself. I went to describe the aliens. Since I hadn't done any prep, I just rolled with the sample in the rulebook for "Furred Creatures", being large fuzzy humanoids with ammo bandoliers and shotguns. Someone said "we're fighting wookies?" and I countered with "more like that big red furry monster that sometimes chased Bugs Bunny". It was downhill from there.

They were packing shotguns. As a long-time fan of Cyberpunk 2020, Logan's Run, and any setting or system with oddball alternative weapon load-outs, I mentioned in the first round of fighting that the aliens were using these large drum-fed shotguns with each shell being a different type. One guy got hit with flechettes, the next with a slug, then a proximity-detonating explosive round, then a compressed monowire round that ripped a man apart from inside (40k fans will recognize this as a variation off the "Harlequin's Kiss"). And then I foolishly said to the PCs that I'd let them narrate what sort of round hit them any time they took damage. They nobly started with taser rounds, but the ACME catalog kicked into high gear before the second turn of the fight was over. There were micro-drills and rocket nets, chemical tracer rounds that dyed your skin, shells that unpacked into tiny robots that sat on your head and hit you in the face with a hammer, and other patently absurd ideas. Again, it was all my fault. If I'd just done my homework before the game, instead of pushing it off to the last possible minute...


I think it was still enjoyed by everyone, but there wasn't the slightest pretense of suspension of disbelief this week.

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Enemy Artillery and other Big Guns
In both of these last two sessions,  I made the mistake of narrating enemy artillery. It was just for color, but both times it lead to the PCs capturing the enemies big guns, and attempting to turn it on the aliens. Good for them, but bad for the mechanics.

The first time I tried to make it hard on them, requiring several NFA rolls to load, aim and fire. As it played out, I realized this just further emphasized the existing problem that NFA is so much better than FA. So on the second planet, I just hand-waved it, and let a normal FA roll cover it. Less realistic, perhaps, but given that it was ACME artillery, I clearly wasn't letting realism get in our way.

For kills from the Artillery: on Picass0 they did 3d20. On Cezanne they did d100. I wasn't completely happy with either. Was I rewarding the players for thinking outside the box, or just reducing the earned bonuses of those who'd already invested in their own heavy weaponry? Here I am grousing one week that the d100 E-Cannon is too good, and the following weeks giving all the PCs special opportunities to roll something equivalent. Again, I blame my procrastination, if I'd put a little forethought into it, I could have at least avoided the problem in the second week (ie: today).

E-Cannon House-Rule, a related aside: For the E-Cannon and Rocket Pod we've settled on using the modified "low roll" d100. You roll two d10s and read them like percentile dice, but with the lower roll always being the 10s place. So a "7" and "1" is always "17" and never "71". 88, 89, 99, and 100 are still possible critical successes, but more reasonable rolls are going to come up more often. It's fast and easy, has memorable big power swings that encourage good stories, and yet mostly keeps these guns from completely dominating every firefight. We've used it in two sessions, and everyone loved the change.

So, of course, the PC who first got a d100 weapon again makes his Promotion roll, and becomes a Captain. Promotion to Captain rank includes the acquisition of the coveted "TPK Bomb" a nuclear hand grenade that could well do 5d100 kills in a single action. Apparently, the E-Cannon wasn't busted enough...

3:16 is a deeply unfair, highly competitive game. I must admit, that's part of the charm.

Planet Titian

I'm pleased to report that I had a much better session of "3:16 Carnage Amongst The Stars" this week. Not that the previous week's session was bad, per se, but it had left a weird aftertaste.

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Problem Solving, mafia-style
I solved the dilemma of how to "punish" the PCs for their recent failure (and repeated officer-icide) without punishing the players, without boringly locking them all up in the brig, without lining them up with blindfolds and cigarettes, without invalidating the promotion rules, and without making a Lieutenant scrub latrines beside the enlisted men. I simply reminded myself (and the players) that this is a setting with an implied Fascist government, great personal power and latitude to the upper military ranks, a high rate of battlefield promotion due to death of superior officers, and (most importantly) severe overpopulation back home. They have been warned that if any more high-ranking officers die in the vicinity of the PCs platoon, family back home will go missing. The awesomeness of this is that it shows the total corruption and evilness of high command, and if and when the PCs eventually kill another officer, all their loved ones can be abducted in the dead of night or possibly just executed... thereby contributing directly to the "Hatred of Home" Weakness that is guaranteed for your final level-up.

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On to the planet:

    •    Planet Name: Titian
    •    Planet Type: Low Gravity
    •    Alien Type: Dinosaurs
    •    Alien Ability: Regeneration

Physics is not 3:16's friend, nor vice-versa. 40 foot dinosaur people in a giant jungle seem perfectly fine for a low-gravity world, but to have them exist in the large quantities that are needed for 3:16's kill counts would require a lot of surface area, which means large planet, which probably means high gravity is more realistic... and I shut down the science talk at that point, because a couple players were starting to debate whether the atmosphere could be breathable and whether it would be thicker or thinner than our own. It's military fantasy with ray guns, not science-fiction.

The dinosaurs had lots of peanut-sized nerve clusters instead of a centralized brain, and so you couldn't be certain that even blowing off their heads would keep the entirety of their body from getting back up and smashing you again... and that was how I explained Regeneration.

Kill counts were high, but would have been much higher if one of the PCs hadn't chose to pre-empt my big climactic final battle (which was going to be modeled on the Little Big Horn) with a Strength Flashback on the first action of the very first round. Bizarrely, the group had just spent 5 minutes debating whether or not to call in an orbital bombardment on the massed aliens they'd spotted in the distance. They decided unanimously not to do so, to give them all a chance to rack up some kills and only fall back on the bombardment solution if things got dire. One die roll later, someone decided to end the fight prematurely purely for their own benefit. Thankfully, said player did not end up with most kills, so his attempt to hog the glory was a little wasted.

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3:16 with 5 PCs
It appears the level-up mechanic in the rulebook is balanced for smaller parties. With 3 or 4 PCs, you get a level-up every session to the person with the most kills, and those with fewer kills have a 50% or 33% chance of getting the "bonus" level up. With five players, that chance of the extra level up drops to merely 25%, which seems a little low.

(When you think about it, the default rules seem to assume you're going to be leveling up at least half the sessions, but with 5 players that just wasn't happening. In fact, one PC had yet to level up as of the end of our 4th session. The dice just hate her. She started with FA 7, and yet has never gotten the most kills in a session.)

So, as I've decided that since I don't want this to be a really long campaign, I'm going to compensate for that extra player. I will now be handing out level-ups for the highest kill count, and the second highest kill count, and one random amongst the remaining players.

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More on the E-Cannon:
Hopefully this extra level-up will also help compensate somewhat for the lone E-Cannon at d100 in our group. He only fired three times last session, and got 163 kills. I'm tempted to house-rule that as well, down from d100 to 3d20 or 5d10 or something along those lines. Maybe keep it at d100 but you always read the percentile dice in their least favorable order (so a "2" and "7" could only be "27"), but I'd have to analyze what the curve on that is. For the moment, I'm going to leave it at the normal d100 and just see if the level-up for second-highest kills is compensation enough.

The jump from 3d10 kills to d100 kills on the E-Cannon and Rocket Pod is excessive, but at least I was able to mitigate it a bit this time by some clever NPC maneuvering. Aliens hit the PCs, and pulled back to Far Range. Nearly all the PCs closed the gap to get back to Near Range, some forgoing shooting at all to make that happen. So then the Aliens swung it the other way and rushed to Close range. This was all possible because I had my highest Alien Ability rating thus far (7) which made them far more likely to succeed in consecutive rounds and get to manipulate range after their attack. I imagine that as the campaign progresses and the Alien's ability rating continues to rise, this sort of thing will happen a lot more often.

There's this delicate balancing act where you try to keep the E-Cannon from totally dominating every fight, yet still leave it useful enough that the player who purchased it feels it was worth it. Seems like a lot of hoops to jump through. Definitely the most annoying part of an otherwise recommendable system.

Orthogenesis

Neat idea for a game just hit me while typing up a page on Arcana Wiki about Orthogenesis, a discredited alternative to Darwinian evolution. Orthogenesis proposes linear evolution, instead of branching, so that no two species share a common ancestor. It's kinda silly.

But let's, for the sake of gaming, take it as true. You could run a game with a very limited gene pool, just a few dozen species fighting for survival. Player Characters might be reincarnated, or you just might play an entire species at a time. Point being, each PC is a different species. After every major plot point, the time line is advanced by 30,000 to a million years. When this happens, you spend your experience points evolving your species. I suspect this is going to need a competitive structure - defeating other players in the short term gets you the points to evolve in the future. Eventually, though, the divide between PCs would get pretty big, at which point the GM invokes an external threat to even the playing field (or just hide the difference). Or, perhaps as you evolve to fill niches, your xp awards change. Yes, Mr T-Rex gets points for eating me, but as an r-Strategist herbivore, I get points for hiding, eating plants, and having sex.

At the beginning of the campaign, there's no culture, or language, or tool-use. Those are things you can choose to evolve, along with gills, limbs, venom, camouflage, psychic powers, etc. Obviously, the game system would need to be pretty flexible, yet at the same time have defined options for adaptation.

Ooh, adaptation! How about, at the end of the story arc, you get to propose one evolution for each way you died. He keeps eating me, so I evolve poison and bright coloration in his visual range.

Hypothetical LOST RPG

Talking with my wife the other day, the topic came up the other day of what mechanics I would use if I were to adapt the TV show LOST into an RPG. There was no existing system that I felt would work especially well for it, so I'd probably start from the ground up making something new. The brainstorm of a hypothetical system has gone pretty far...

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Attributes :
I'd start with an attribute auction, kinda like in Amber. The auction system in that game does a great job of establishing rivalries right out of the gates, and that sort of "uneasy truce" feeling, that tension where the characters alternately cooperate and backstab, is something you really want for LOST.

However, LOST should not be diceless. Characters on the show can and do fail on a regular basis, and the mechanics need to simulate that. There's no guaranteed competence - Jack can lose a patient, and John can get tusked by a boar. So, you'd start with a 100 points to bid in the auction, and after the auction was finished, there'd be a chart/scale that the GM would use to convert bids into dice pools. Exactly how the conversion chart works... I'm still workin' on that. Thinking out loud, I'd aim for ranking determines average/maximum roll, but number of points invested determines whether it's one big unreliable die or multiple small dice.

As to the nature of the Attributes & Skills... I'm leaning towards things that feel more Skill-based than Attribute-based, as far as theme. Watching the show, it's hard to rate the Strength and Endurance of the various characters, but you know who's got the most survival training, who's the best liar, who can administer first aid better, etc. Off the top of my head, I'd be tempted to use 6 Attributes - probably named Hunter, Caregiver, Charmer, Interrogator, Scientist, and Shaman.

Hunter is used for tracking, hunting, fishing, setting booby traps, and attempts to injure another character via ranged combat or ambush.
Caregiver is used for surgery, herbalism, foraging, and providing care or comfort.
Charmer is used for persuasion, leadership, lying, confidence games, and efforts to be social or friendly.
Interrogator is used as a lie-detector, and to coerce or force behavior against someone's better judgment. It is also valuable during point-blank stand-offs, and attempts to injure a character via close combat.
Scientist is used to diagnose illness, handle sweaty dynamite, jury-rig a radio transmitter, or determine where the Others camp is based on an electrical diagram or the crazy map painted on the blast doors of a hatch.
Shaman is used for interpreting visions, building sweat lodges, and fending off the smoke monster. On this island, anyone might see a ghost, but it takes a good Shaman roll to compell the ghost into revealing something meaningful.

There's a certain amount of flexibility and overlap between those 6 attributes. This is intentional. Often there will be more than 1 trait applicable to a task, but the trait the GM deems most appropriate will get a bonus. See also "flashbacks", below.

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Sidekicks, Wards, and Obligations:
Michael has Walt, Sun has Jin, and Boone has Shannon (or the other way around). In each case, there's a minor character attached to the major, primarily for the purpose of generating conflict. I'd like to incorporate this into game in some way without needing a ton of players, or swamping the GM with a ton of extra minor NPCs.

Having one of these attached characters doesn't seem to be a boon - the interactions mostly hose you, though they provide for fun secondary conflicts and subplots. It's not a flaw in the standard RPG sense, either, as you definitely don't get bonus points for having a sidekick. If anything, the characters who are saddled with sidekicks seem even weaker for it - Jack and Locke certainly have more character points than Michael, Sun, Boone, Nikki or Rose.

From your initial 100 points, you may reserve from 0 to 30 for a secondary character. Points reserved in this way are doubled when making the second character. If you set aside 30 points, you'd have a 70-point main character and a 60-point secondary. If you set aside only 5, you'd have a 95-point main character, and a 10-point sidekick. You get more points this way, but there's a couple drawbacks. First off, since each individual character has fewer points, you'll probably be better off making specialists instead of generalists - you just can't spread the points around as far per character. In addition, secondary characters are made after the first auction is done, and they must bid lower than 1st rank. So Jin may be focused on Hunter, but he's not going to eclipse Locke. And actually, there's a third wrinkle.

The third trick is, your secondary character isn't your sidekick. Instead, you pick another player, and your secondary character is the ward, significant other, sibling or obligation of the other player's (primary) character. You're all PCs, so some amount of working together is to be expected, but it's also understood that the person playing your sidekick is going to occassionally make life "interesting" for you. Probably by dissapearing into the woods with that bald guy who has all the knives. It's considered very bad form to just decide your character doesn't care what happens to the sidekick they were assigned. Doing so will result in penalties of some sort (details still to be worked out).

Example of character generation with sidekicks:

• Michael is created from 80 points in the auction, leaving 20 points unused. Those are doubled to 40 points, from which Michael's player creates a new character named "Shannon" - 40 points makes a well-rounded, but not powerful, character with just a little of everything. He thinks Shannon is just perfect to be someone else's spoiled kid sister.
• Sun is created from 95 points in the auction, leaving 5 points unused. Those are doubled to 10 points, from which Sun's player makes a new character named "Walt" - since he's only 10 points, Sun's player decides that Walt will be someone's estranged child, too young and weak to defend himself, and sinks the 10 points all into Shaman to give the kid just a touch of the mysterious.
• Boone is created from 75 points in the auction, leaving 25 points unused. Those are doubled to 50. For his new secondary character, named "Jin", he puts nearly all those points into Hunter. He wanted to put them all into Hunter, but was handicapped by not being able to surpass the highest bidder (Locke) in the primary character auction. He put the remaining couple of points into Charmer, but really didn't use them in the first season.
• One person is playing Michael and Shannon. One person is playing Sun and Walt. One person is playing Boone and Jin. They'll get involved in each others plots and scenes, and create a very lively social dynamic.
  
• Meanwhile, Locke's player and Jack's player did not set any points aside, and thus did not make Secondary Characters. This allowed their primary characters to be real bad-asses, but also deprived their players of an opportunity to influence the flashbacks and subplots pertaining to the other players. As a result, Locke became a bit of a loner, and Jack overcompensated by sticking his nose in everyone's business.
  
• Note, however, that not creating a sidekick in no way innoculates you from being saddled with one. If the players had so chosen, they could have made Walt be Locke's kid, or Shannon be Jack's half-sister. However, if two or more people try to attach their secondary characters to you, you may choose to deny all but one of them, and pick which one is connected to you, or you can choose to just have a big family. If you do so pick just one, the creators of the extra sidekicks must then choose someone else to attach their secondary character too.
  

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Combat System:
Seems like anyone can lick anyone in LOST. It's mostly about initiative and weaponry. Such unlikely warriors as Charlie and Shannon manage to get the drop on people. Even Hurley manages to be useful in a fight in a few episodes. To get the right feel, fight scenes should be short and bloody, and reward sneakiness and treachery. Gun fire needs to be deadly, and pointing a gun at someone needs to be a significant deterent.

However, wounds heal quickly on the island, and what does not kill you will only make you stronger. Provided they don't die, all PCs begin every session at full health.

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Flashbacks:
Obviously the game needs these to capture the feel of the show, but we don't want to spend too much time in the past, especially since flashbacks almost always focus on just one character at a time. We aim for short and sweet, but frequent.

I'm thinking flashbacks are linked to the experience system. You spend experience to initiate a flashback, and gain narrative control of some backstory element that relates to what you were about to do. You then gain bonus dice based on two factors: amount of experience spent, and how badly the flashback screws your character with secrets/shame/enemies. How we rate that second factor, I'm not sure yet, but making it work is vital. You shouldn't get bonus dice for just having been a surgeon - you get bonus dice for being a formerly-wheelchair-bound fugitive surgeon-turned-drug-smuggler with a price on your head.

The bonus dice do not alter your initial attributes - they're locked in at the end of the auction during character creation. Instead, the bonus dice become skills or modifiers which could concievably be used with several attributes. For example, if your flashback revealed you to be a surgeon for the mob, and it got you +d6 (just throwin' out a number) in a skill called "Surgery", there'd be times you'd roll that along with Caregiver (to ease someone's pain), with Scientist (to figure out what's wrong with them), or maybe even with Interrogator (to strike a pressure point and make someone beg for mercy).

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Island Economics: Luggage, Debris, Hatches, etc
I can see two ways of dealing with the economic system of The Island.

• One way would be via charts. You make a big chart for randomly determining the contents of a piece of luggage. A different chart tells you what you find amongst the fuselage and debris from a plane crash, and another for a ship wreck, and either of those charts can turn up luggage (which would then be rolled on the first chart when you open it. You make a bunch of rolls as people search and recover in the first couple sessions, and a fairly organic barter system should develop. Later, you make a "What's In The Hatch?" chart, and a "Dharma Supply Drop" chart. There's two downsides to this system. Prepping the charts will take a long time, and it'd be very easy for random charts to put all the real wealth in one player's hands. At the cost of those two flaws, however, you'd get a very detail-oriented system with a great deal of verisimilitude. People who enjoy the accumulation of treasures would get a good kick out of that, and it'd give the game an oldschool RPG flavor.
  

or

• Another way (and this is the way I think I'd end up doing it) would be to make resources behave more like Schroedinger's Cat. Instead of worrying about the specific inventory of your 3 suitcases, instead we just assume that 3 suitcases equals 30 clothing points, 12 entertainment points, and 6 medical points. Need a bandage? That's 2 clothing points or 1 medical point. Good running shoes? 15 clothing points, and they give you +1 to all movement rolls. A book to read is 1 entertainment point. An iPod costs 10 entertainment points - but you can break it apart into 5 Tech points. Need fuel for the signal fire? 10 points of entertainment or clothing will burn for a night, or you can forage for Nature points to burn. The hatch you just blew open has 600 tech points, 100 entertainment points, 2000 food points, and 500 points of guns. Improvise whatever you need out of those totals, and we'll just adjust them downward till the hatch has no more secrets.
  We'd need charts for this system too, but rather than being detailed charts, we mostly just need categories of resource points, and guidelines for how much various items cost.
  This version would also need some mechanical way to get a monopoly on things - since every couple episodes someone gets their hands on all the medicine or all the guns.

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Plot, Setting, NPCs, Etc:
Obviously, we're setting the game on The Island, and there's some familiar aspects to the backstory. That said, the GM is under no obligation to include any specific NPCs, and parts of the Dharma saga might be different. The players are under no obligation to play characters from the show, either. Personally, I'd probably have the PCs be Danielle's group, and set the game 16 years before the story depicted in the show. Thanks to Desmond and Faraday, you could work in time-shifted cameos if you like, or just make entirely new stories and characters. Heck, it might not even be the same Island - maybe there's more than one of them floating around out there.