Yesterday, we had a guest player at my 3:16 Carnage Amongst The Stars campaign. Naturally, people tried to bring him up to speed with what had happened in previous sessions. The resulting summary was unbelievably bizarre.
There's next to zero planning going in to these sessions, which is a big part of it. 10 to 15 minutes GM prep per session tops, and at least once it didn't even get that (as a player once showed up half an hour early and arrived before I'd put any thought into the session at all). Week after week, it's all almost entirely improvised.
Plus, I've made a few attempts to emulate bits out of Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato. Cacciato has served as my primary inspiration. Like 60% Cacciato, 30% Band of Brothers, and 10% all other war movies I've seen. Going After Cacciato, for those unfamiliar with it, is sort of a surrealist take on the Vietnam War, told from the point of view of an unreliable imagination-prone narrator.
So when a crazy idea pops into my head mid-session, I make a point of just going with it, instead of suppressing it (or even asking myself if it's a good idea or not).
It all pretty much made sense while we were playing it, and seemed only a little over-the-top at the time each element was being introduced. I had suspected that the ridiculousness was beginning to accumulate, but trying to summarize all that went before for the benefit of a new player made me kind of cringe. What seemed "a little out there" when take by degrees, ends up being completely bonkers and really hard to swallow when dumped on you all at once.
Showing posts with label Going After Cacciato. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Going After Cacciato. Show all posts
Monday, January 10, 2011
Monday, November 8, 2010
Planet Matisse
This is a summary of my second session of 3:16 Carnage Amongst The Stars, which I ran just over a week ago. I would have written this sooner, but I've been really sick.
The PC's platoon set down in a hot LZ on an agricultural terrace just outside a fairly primitive alien mining city. The aliens tech was mostly about WWII level, except that had various digging and tunneling machines that greatly exceeded that - though with sort a pulp idiom, big screws and drills. The aliens they were fighting weren't an organized force, but rather more militia-like with very irregular armament.
There were tunnels, so I figured I'd hit the Viet Nam trope of the by-the-books Lt who insists all tunnels must be searched. I got clever with this, splitting the party into 3 sections, and running a simultaneous battle amongst them all with three piles of 2 Alien Tokens each. It was a nice idea, and allowed me to split the party without making anyone sit out for long. Given the free and abstract mechanics of the game, though, I'm not convinced 3 piles of tokens was actually a better choice than just 1 pile of 6 tokens. It worked well, but I think I could have accomplished the same thing via narration without the mechanical twist. That's an important lesson for next time the party splits up.
After that diversion, the PCs were supposed to fight there way into town and meet up with Bravo Company, which had been deployed by drop-ships into the heart of the town to capture the hospital. An ambush stalled out the platoons advance, so an NPC runner (Trooper Watkins, who'd been clowning around and served as comic relief on the previous planet) was sent to communicate with Bravo and tell them of the delay.
Watkins comes back with several dozen alien children - whom he'd said Bravo company had been killing for fun at the Children's Hospital. I was trying to create an opportunity for a moral quagmire, something akin to the burned village that defines the characters and allegiances in the movie Platoon. Instead, my players found it really easy to kill children as long as doing so seemed to be in line with their orders. Not nearly so much pathos and agony as I'd been hoping for.
In the midst of it all, Watkins goes AWOL, and the incompetent Lt gets shot up pretty bad by another alien ambush. The PCs give chase to Watkins, who leads them into the bowels of the planet. As the session progressed, it was revealed that the surface culture was actually the alien's slums, that the wealthy lived below the surface, and may have more or better tech than was encountered up topside. They found some "F"s shaped out of tape on tunnel walls. The PCs are in Foxtrot company, and there was a scene earlier were Watkins was taping a weapon to his armor - so they concluded that this meant Watkins wanted them to follow him. This was an attempt to riff on "Going After Cacciato", where the platoon's goof-of leads the main characters on a chase that takes them away from the war.
Just as I was starting to explore that, though, I realized I had less than 45 minutes left to the session, and was on my last pile of Tokens for the Aliens. I didn't know how to really wrap up the conquest of the planet in that time, but I didn't want to stop to think. The point of an improvised game like this is to keep the plot movie. If you start to stall out, start the shooting instead. It is a War game, after all. So I threw the final battle at them... without really thinking that this made the F's now seem like the bait of a trap, like Watkins had turned traitor. So much for Cacciato...
It was all just happening too fast, the need to wrap up a planet per session seems to conflict with the otherwise totally loose and improvisational nature of the game. I think it's intended to be a framework to hang your improvisations off of, the type of limitation that breeds creativity. For me, though, it's actually the biggest sticking point with 3:16. The system plays very fluid and intuitive, and the action is certainly rapid-fire enough, but trying to cram an entire alien world into just 4 hours and 25 tokens is really hard. The final battle resolved, which meant the last PC to take out a Token gets a medal, and the planet is supposed to be pacified. Narratively speaking, though, we weren't really at a point where the enemies surrender would make any sense.
So I blew up the planet.
I sounded a retreat, and reported that High Command was going to use a star killer missile. Due to the PCs driving so deep into the undercity, they'd uncovered that the enemies were more technologically advanced than initial reports had indicated. Those above them decided that exploring the subterranean expanses of the planet would produce unacceptable casualties, and long-term occupation was unfeasible. Imploding the enemy star was the best option. Or at least the best way, off the top of my head, to end that adventure right there.
I really like 3:16, but it's gonna take some getting used to this whole "each session is a new planet" concept. The mechanics of the game are really built around it, so I don't want to just toss the idea, I'd like to figure out how to get the most out of it as a GM. I'm choosing to step up to this challenge. I'll let you know how it goes.
- Planet Name: Matisse
- Planet Description: Mountainous Terrain
- Basic Creature Form: I think they were supposed to be "Mineral-based forms" but somehow I made them humanoids with weird ears. It made sense at the time, but I can't put my finger on the logic just now. Not sure which I should cross off the list.
- Alien Special Ability: Swarm (After each alien attack, the range is set to Close)
The PC's platoon set down in a hot LZ on an agricultural terrace just outside a fairly primitive alien mining city. The aliens tech was mostly about WWII level, except that had various digging and tunneling machines that greatly exceeded that - though with sort a pulp idiom, big screws and drills. The aliens they were fighting weren't an organized force, but rather more militia-like with very irregular armament.
There were tunnels, so I figured I'd hit the Viet Nam trope of the by-the-books Lt who insists all tunnels must be searched. I got clever with this, splitting the party into 3 sections, and running a simultaneous battle amongst them all with three piles of 2 Alien Tokens each. It was a nice idea, and allowed me to split the party without making anyone sit out for long. Given the free and abstract mechanics of the game, though, I'm not convinced 3 piles of tokens was actually a better choice than just 1 pile of 6 tokens. It worked well, but I think I could have accomplished the same thing via narration without the mechanical twist. That's an important lesson for next time the party splits up.
After that diversion, the PCs were supposed to fight there way into town and meet up with Bravo Company, which had been deployed by drop-ships into the heart of the town to capture the hospital. An ambush stalled out the platoons advance, so an NPC runner (Trooper Watkins, who'd been clowning around and served as comic relief on the previous planet) was sent to communicate with Bravo and tell them of the delay.
Watkins comes back with several dozen alien children - whom he'd said Bravo company had been killing for fun at the Children's Hospital. I was trying to create an opportunity for a moral quagmire, something akin to the burned village that defines the characters and allegiances in the movie Platoon. Instead, my players found it really easy to kill children as long as doing so seemed to be in line with their orders. Not nearly so much pathos and agony as I'd been hoping for.
In the midst of it all, Watkins goes AWOL, and the incompetent Lt gets shot up pretty bad by another alien ambush. The PCs give chase to Watkins, who leads them into the bowels of the planet. As the session progressed, it was revealed that the surface culture was actually the alien's slums, that the wealthy lived below the surface, and may have more or better tech than was encountered up topside. They found some "F"s shaped out of tape on tunnel walls. The PCs are in Foxtrot company, and there was a scene earlier were Watkins was taping a weapon to his armor - so they concluded that this meant Watkins wanted them to follow him. This was an attempt to riff on "Going After Cacciato", where the platoon's goof-of leads the main characters on a chase that takes them away from the war.
Just as I was starting to explore that, though, I realized I had less than 45 minutes left to the session, and was on my last pile of Tokens for the Aliens. I didn't know how to really wrap up the conquest of the planet in that time, but I didn't want to stop to think. The point of an improvised game like this is to keep the plot movie. If you start to stall out, start the shooting instead. It is a War game, after all. So I threw the final battle at them... without really thinking that this made the F's now seem like the bait of a trap, like Watkins had turned traitor. So much for Cacciato...
It was all just happening too fast, the need to wrap up a planet per session seems to conflict with the otherwise totally loose and improvisational nature of the game. I think it's intended to be a framework to hang your improvisations off of, the type of limitation that breeds creativity. For me, though, it's actually the biggest sticking point with 3:16. The system plays very fluid and intuitive, and the action is certainly rapid-fire enough, but trying to cram an entire alien world into just 4 hours and 25 tokens is really hard. The final battle resolved, which meant the last PC to take out a Token gets a medal, and the planet is supposed to be pacified. Narratively speaking, though, we weren't really at a point where the enemies surrender would make any sense.
So I blew up the planet.
I sounded a retreat, and reported that High Command was going to use a star killer missile. Due to the PCs driving so deep into the undercity, they'd uncovered that the enemies were more technologically advanced than initial reports had indicated. Those above them decided that exploring the subterranean expanses of the planet would produce unacceptable casualties, and long-term occupation was unfeasible. Imploding the enemy star was the best option. Or at least the best way, off the top of my head, to end that adventure right there.
I really like 3:16, but it's gonna take some getting used to this whole "each session is a new planet" concept. The mechanics of the game are really built around it, so I don't want to just toss the idea, I'd like to figure out how to get the most out of it as a GM. I'm choosing to step up to this challenge. I'll let you know how it goes.
Friday, February 20, 2009
Going After Caravaggio
Last night we played 3:16 Carnage Amongst The Stars. It's a rules-light RPG in the vein of military sci-fi most closely resembling Starship Troopers. To say it's rules-lite is an understatement. Starting characters are defined by 4 traits: 2 attributes named "Fighting Ability" and "Non-Fighting Ability", Rank (Private to Sergeant), and Primary Weapon (one of two choices per rank). Character gen was darned simple, taking 5 minutes the first time, and if I'd had to do it over again it'd take about 20 seconds.
I played "Trooper Novokov", whom I modeled as sort of a drugged-out parody of Paul Berlin, the main character in Tim O'Brien's Viet Nam War novel Going After Cacciato. All the planets in the game are named after artists, and we were invading Planet Caravaggio, which sounds kinda like Cacciato, which is what I think triggered the character concept. That novel is one of my faves, though, so I may well have gone the way of O'Brien even without that opening briefing.
Trooper Novokov was a daydreamer, a flaky artiste, and kinda inattentive. He was working on a novelization of his experiences in the 3:16th Infantry, and was focused on the what could happen if the war were a novel instead of reality. (I know, how post-modern of me.) So, all of Paul Berlin's negative traits, without their more positive upsides. I'd stop to contemplate my novel mid-battle, and during mission briefings I was busy sketching out what I'd paint on the side of the APC after this mission, thus missing crucial briefing intel. Head in the clouds despite boots on the ground. Sarge called me "Trooper Novacaine" cause I was always kinda sedated.
The 3:16 RPG is pretty straight-forward. GM establishes a planet with aliens, the PCs rocket down in a Drop Ship and pacify said planet. Players have a lot of narrative control. Combat is very abstract, and yet it works really well even given how combat-heavy the game is. Our GM last night introduced some extra plot complexity, but I think it would have run just fine without it. Each session a new planet with a new alien menace, and the PCs slowly promoted up the chain of command getting bigger and better weapons and more control over mission objectives. In he words of Robin D. Laws, 3:16 "Out-Verhoeven's Verhoeven."
It's a very competitive RPG, keeping track of kills is a vital component of the game, and in a long-running campaign I think PCs will frequently do things that endanger others to edge out a couple of extra kills, with kill-stealing and showboating being part of the fun. Clearly, where the game shines is Campaign play - as a one-shot it was a little unbalanced. The post-session rewards of rank and medals were less important when you won't see that character again, so there was little motivation for glory hogging in a one-shot. At the same time, you have character resources that can only be expended X number of times over the entire campaign, but if playing for a single session there's no drawback to everyone using all their available flashbacks. As a one-shot those didn't ring as true (though the GMs houserules kept the game from breaking under it), though it is hard to say whether the game was richer or poorer for it. The experience definitely left me wanting to play the game some more, to see how it develops over time.
As they say in Starship Troopers: Want to learn more? Here's a pretty nice review of 3:16 that explains what it's all about, and a shorter review that's not as detailed but well written and still useful.
I played "Trooper Novokov", whom I modeled as sort of a drugged-out parody of Paul Berlin, the main character in Tim O'Brien's Viet Nam War novel Going After Cacciato. All the planets in the game are named after artists, and we were invading Planet Caravaggio, which sounds kinda like Cacciato, which is what I think triggered the character concept. That novel is one of my faves, though, so I may well have gone the way of O'Brien even without that opening briefing.
Trooper Novokov was a daydreamer, a flaky artiste, and kinda inattentive. He was working on a novelization of his experiences in the 3:16th Infantry, and was focused on the what could happen if the war were a novel instead of reality. (I know, how post-modern of me.) So, all of Paul Berlin's negative traits, without their more positive upsides. I'd stop to contemplate my novel mid-battle, and during mission briefings I was busy sketching out what I'd paint on the side of the APC after this mission, thus missing crucial briefing intel. Head in the clouds despite boots on the ground. Sarge called me "Trooper Novacaine" cause I was always kinda sedated.
The 3:16 RPG is pretty straight-forward. GM establishes a planet with aliens, the PCs rocket down in a Drop Ship and pacify said planet. Players have a lot of narrative control. Combat is very abstract, and yet it works really well even given how combat-heavy the game is. Our GM last night introduced some extra plot complexity, but I think it would have run just fine without it. Each session a new planet with a new alien menace, and the PCs slowly promoted up the chain of command getting bigger and better weapons and more control over mission objectives. In he words of Robin D. Laws, 3:16 "Out-Verhoeven's Verhoeven."
It's a very competitive RPG, keeping track of kills is a vital component of the game, and in a long-running campaign I think PCs will frequently do things that endanger others to edge out a couple of extra kills, with kill-stealing and showboating being part of the fun. Clearly, where the game shines is Campaign play - as a one-shot it was a little unbalanced. The post-session rewards of rank and medals were less important when you won't see that character again, so there was little motivation for glory hogging in a one-shot. At the same time, you have character resources that can only be expended X number of times over the entire campaign, but if playing for a single session there's no drawback to everyone using all their available flashbacks. As a one-shot those didn't ring as true (though the GMs houserules kept the game from breaking under it), though it is hard to say whether the game was richer or poorer for it. The experience definitely left me wanting to play the game some more, to see how it develops over time.
As they say in Starship Troopers: Want to learn more? Here's a pretty nice review of 3:16 that explains what it's all about, and a shorter review that's not as detailed but well written and still useful.
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