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 Pollock

Yesterday's session of 3:16 Carnage Amongst The Stars went rather well, despite some big interruptions (relatives calling in the middle of the game), and a patently absurd Alien Power.

Planet Name: Pollock
Planet Description: Forest
Alien Description: Sentient Planet
Alien Power: Stop Technology

Some tough choices on the planet description, based on what little is left to me on the charts. Pretty much all that's left are the things I'd intentionally put off.

Sentient Planet was avoided until now because it didn't particularly mesh well with the kills system, and what they represent in game. Since PCs gain medals and level-ups based on number of kills, exactly what counts as an "alien" and what counts as a "kill" is important. If literally the whole planet is out to get you, then every tree, blade of grass, or songbird could be a kill. That was a can of worms I didn't want to mess with when the campaign was just getting going. At this stage in the game, though, we have no illusions about the mechanics. They don't particularly represent any sort of reality you can apply logic too, and we all know it. As a result, I didn't have to worry much. Everybody took it in stride that they were getting the normal kill counts despite such a target-rich environment. Man, this game is weird.

Stop Technology is an alien special ability that I specifically held off using till late in the campaign. I figured the ability to shut-down TPK Bombs, Kinetic Energy Fields and Drop Ships used by high-rank late-game PCs was a lot better than just knocking out the meager arms of early-campaign Troopers. In retrospect, I'm not sure that was the right decision. For one thing, the point of going up in rank is that it unlocks all these cool "toys", so taking them away (even for a session) is more frustrating than fun. Plus, it wasn't as effective as I'd imagined it to be. This deep into the campaign, the PCs have really high FA and NFA stats. So, taking their guns away didn't do much. The PCs won the dominance rolls, and would set the fights at Close where they could use Hand-To-Hand. They then succeeded with nearly every attack roll, so the fights were short and favored the PCs just as much as normal.  Had I sprung "Stop Technology" back when the PCs stats were lower, they would have had to retreat or expend a lot of flashbacks. Using it late in the campaign, the only real impact was on the kill-count.

 Like "Sentient Planet", "Stop Technology" also reminds us clearly how the game rules don't represent reality well. There's dozens of questions that one needs the answers to in regards to this ability, but the game doesn't offer any answers. If my power-armor is shut down, am I immobilized? If a drop ship is "stopped", does it crash and kill everyone?  If our technology is stopped, can we still call an Evac or Orbital Bombardment? It gets even weirder when you try to apply logic to how or what is stopping the tech. EMP effects seem likely to shut down computers and vehicles, but probably wouldn't stop a slug-rifle (we decided it must have an electrochemical solenoid trigger). Some sort of air pollution or environmental effect shouldn't stop air-tight items that worked just fine on atmosphere-less asteroid belt or beneath the surface of the water planet a few sessions back. There's a lot of hand-waving in your typical 3:16 session, and this power just amplifies that. Suspension of disbelief takes some effort.

Which is why I've been putting in sub-threads and hints (sometimes really overt hints) that the PCs are actually insane. This session was tied for the most overt and unsubtle I've ever been. The PCs now have reason to believe they might actually be in an mental institution. Various "PTSD hallucinations" they've been having suggest they are actually being interrogated by FBI and DHS heavies. I gave them the Jack Bauer treatment, as a gaggle of officials at the insane asylum tried electroshock therapy, drugs, and torture to get the PCs to reveal where they put the dirty bomb that endangers 10 million residents of LA. At this point, I slide back and forth between these two realities, with the PCs either fighting aliens on a distant planet, or being interrogated in the looney bin. The clock is ticking in both realities. At the institution, the Homeland Security guys worry that the bomb will irradiate the city if they can't get some useful info out of these insane terrorists. Out in space, two PCs are now Colonels, and have access to Starkillers.

For example, while fighting the wildlife of the Sentient Planet, one of the PCs climbed out of his disabled power-armor, and went hand-to-hand with a flock of birds. Meanwhile, another PC was talking to the Brigadier. But then the brigadier was replaced by an FBI special agent, who grilled her about the bomb. An orderly entered the room (wasn't this a forest a moment ago?) and interrupted the interrogation with the news that one of the other inmates was naked in the courtyard attacking the pigeons again.

Bad Habits in the Vineyard

Last night I ran Dogs In The Vineyard for the weekly one-shot group. Actually, this was part two of what looks to be a three-shot. I'm finding I really like the system, but it has some awkwardness. There's specifically three bad habits I'd like to "break" my players (and myself) of, if I were to run something longer than a single scenario.

1. Bad Habit #1: Spending too long agonizing over how to total up your See.
   I'm guilty of this one as well, and I figure if I'm going to be hypocritical, I might as well put it up front and label it as such. I had one See in particular that I really just should have Gave on, because I was taking too long to calculate all my strategic options.
   I think this one would sort itself out over time. As you become more familiar with the system, the decisions will become more intuitive.
   Seriously, if you're agonizing over whether to take the blow on four dice, or take it on five dice but leave a higher die for your Raise, you've already failed to assess the situation properly. Unless the stakes are "do I die?" (or maybe if the conflict hasn't escalated beyond talking) you should really be Giving in once it tips past the third die on your See.
   
   
2. Bad Habit #2: Trying to use all your available stats and items in every conflict. 
   For example, one player wanted to call on his d6 in "Exorcist" during a conflict with just a shady character trying to talk them out of poking around in his silver mine. I told him he could roll it, but only if he publicly declared that the man was clearly possessed. 
   There's a strong impetus to call on everything to get the extra dice every conflict, but it's often not appropriate to do so. I imagine that over a long campaign, always calling on everything would make conflicts repetitive.
   It also makes conflicts much longer, where Giving more often would speed things up. The problem is that no one wants to Give because it means you sit around with nothing to do while the conflict rages on. Given the choice between sitting around idle, or grasping and stretching to invoke the trait that will score you another die, people will almost always make the "non-boring" choice even if it drags out the fight. After the fact you might realize that you were sacrificing the group's enjoyment for the sake of your own, but in the heat of the moment such clarity is unlikely.
   
   
3. Bad Habit #3: Picking the same fallout again and again.
   The game tries to counter this by letting anyone veto a proposed fall-out effect, but the issue I keep seeing isn't about people choosing something narratively lame.
   The problem is mechanical, not conceptual. Most bad things that could happen to you could be represented in several different ways (adding d4, downgrading to d4, subtracting other dice, reducing a stat, losing an item, etc), but one of those options is clearly better than the others.
   The rule system's insistence that +d4 is actually a bad thing is a little odd. I've seen how it can be bad, because a big pile of dice fools you into getting cocky and taking the blow when you shouldn't. But from the point-of-view of a player who's new to the game, adding a die looks like it's always a good thing. Perception becomes reality.  Mathematically, it's certainly better to add +1d4 to your sheet than to downgrade an existing 2d8 down to 2d4 or 1d8. The fallout system treats them like they're identical, but clearly they aren't. Plus 1d4 is just better than  minus 1d8, anyone can see that. Even losing just a d6 is arguably more than twice as bad as gaining a d4.
   Let's face it, you'd rather add "Blind as a Bat" at d4 than downgrade "I'm a handy with a rifle" from d6 to d4. Ironically, being blind would make you a better shot. The system is a little weird.

None of these three problems with the system (or players) are insurmountable.  Bad habit #1 will work itself out naturally over time, and #2 will be easy to solve over the same stretch of time with just a tiny bit of intentional effort.  I could see myself running this game system as a campaign, and it'd be a lot of fun.

Issue #3 is the only one that presents a real long-term problem, worthy of a house-rule.

UPDATE: My first proposed house-rules to "fix" issue #3 were far too draconian, and as was pointed out in the comments to this post, would result in a spiral of death over the course of a few sessions as PCs were forced to burn through their good traits. A better rule would b: The first time in any session that you get a fall-out total of 12+, you're required to pick something other than +d4 for at least one of the two long-term effects. 

Invoking this just once per session per player will prevent abuse, mandate some variation in results, and most likely not result in an undesirable death-spiral. Plus, by linking it to taking Injury, you further motivate players to sometimes Give in challenges instead of taking the blow.

Such a rule may also help address another problem I've noticed with system, namely that since Body is used for the "Do I die?" roll, it's more important than the other three stats. With this house-rule in place, having a really high Body score doesn't take all the danger out of being injured.

Marine to Bug Ratio

A bit of a follow-up to my post a few weeks ago on the Space Hulk: Death Angel cooperative card game. Upon getting the rules right*, the game has indeed proven to be a little more difficult than our first impression had it. However, we still haven't found it to be nearly as tough as some reviews made it out to be. Since I've been over the rules repeatedly to make sure we aren't still doing something wrong, I can probably rule out user error. In the process of double-checking everything, I think I figured out why some folks are so much trouble winning the game.

Death Angel is MUCH harder for 3 players than for 2 or 4. If the majority of your plays have been with 3 or 6 players, you're bound to walk away thinking the game is pretty nasty. The one time I played it 3-player, we got our shiny armored butts handed to us.

The source of the difference is the 3-player version of the Void Lock location. It's a distinction that's really easy to miss if you always sit down with the same number of players. Each Void Lock card has two triangles on the bottom that set how large of clusters the genestealers arrive for the duration of the game.

The 2- and 4- player Void Lock has a triangle with a "3" and a triangle with a "1". By contrast, the 3-player Void Lock has a triangle with a "5" and a triangle with a "3". Having exactly 3 players gives you 150% as many marines as you'd have in a 2- or 4-player game. However, when the red-and-yellow triangle is activated, you get 166% as many genestealers, and when the white triangle is activated, you get 300% as many.

Why the designers chose to make 3-player so much harder is unclear to me. Not only is the percentage increase huge on the white triangle, but the clusters of "5" on the other make it a double-whammy. If there's 5 or more genestealers in one swarm, that's generally an auto-kill on the nearest space marine. There's a few defensive cards that can let you squeak by it, but more often than not, they'll start killing marines before you can set up the sort of maneuver required to clean out a big cluster like that. Seems like a recipe for frustration and game loss.

Better numbers for the triangles on three-player would probably be "4" and "2" (133% and 200% of the numbers on 2-player). Your overall Marines-to-Bugs ratio would then be very similar to that of the 2-player game. Time to break out the sharpie.

P.S.: I just learned that FFG is releasing two micro-expansions for Death Angel via print-on-demand. Lightning-fast and much-needed support for an awesome game yearning to be expanded upon. I'll definitely be picking those up soon.



*: About the mistaken rule. That's my bad, I'd somehow missed it when reading, despite the rulebook being well-written and generally quite clear. What I'd missed was that each Terrain card can only be activated once per round. Since some terrain (such as the very common Doors) can eliminate genestealers with every activation, this was a huge advantage. It also made at least one of the mission objective cards ridiculously easy, as nearly every marine would try to activate the control panel in that final location. As mentioned previously, as soon as we figured out what we were doing wrong, our win ratio dropped noticeably. Still not as steep as it drops when you add a 3rd player...

Planets Whistler and Kandinsky

My 3:16 Carnage Amongst The Stars campaign continues full pace, but clearly working towards a conclusion. It's been a few weeks since I lasted posted about it, so I'll be condensing those sessions into a rather short summary.

I've been cranking up the zaniness as we go. The game is "meant" to be played straight - very much Band of Brothers or Platoon, but with aliens.  As we've gone, I've found it harder and harder to take seriously. Mostly this is my "fault", as I've had mad streaks of (what I imagined to be) inspirational genius that have created a convoluted and bizarre plotline (far more Going After Cacciato than Tour of Duty, but that's been on purpose). Some of it has to do with the rules of the game, though, which make some pretty hard "suspension of disbelief" demands upon the players. So what started as reasonably serious military sci-fi has become rather something else over time.

Given then that there's no choice but to go down the rabbit hole, I figured why not dive in head-first... and thus I've been cranking up the psychedelic references and "you might all be crazy" implications further with every session.

A few planets back, on Whistler, I actually asked the PCs the list of questions from Power Kill. There was a big explosion, and then for one brief scene, everyone was in straight jackets, taking part in a group therapy session. Psychiatrists who looked like former commanding officers were assuring them that no, they really weren't "in some space army", and that it was a junior high, not an alien world, that they'd assaulted. Major Sanguine strangled an orderly, and then they were magically all back on the alien planet they'd just cleansed.

A nerdly aside: Yesterday I saw a trailer for an upcoming movie called "Sucker Punch", and I blurted out "hey, that's my 3:16 campaign!" I guess next session I need to have them chase after a map, a fire, a knife, a key and something we can't reveal in the trailer...

As the sessions have passed, our PCs have pushed their way up the ranks (often into gaps left when NPC commanders were mysteriously fragged). As of the end of the most recent game, Sanguine was just promoted to Colonel... so, there's just one more NPC commander left for them to mysteriously frag. Potentially a couple good die rolls could wrap my campaign up at any moment. At this point the PCs have no love for Terra, have been threatened and mistreated as they rose through the ranks, and are half-convinced they're just psychotic sociopaths anyhow... so I expect them to turn the big guns on the homeworld at the first opportunity.

The details on Whistler and Kandinsky are immaterial at this point. We're just shy of 20 sessions, so I've got the dregs of the description and ability lists left - each week I pick between the remainder of things that didn't inspire me earlier. I may just jump ahead to the "recycling" phase of the game, where each planet gets two alien abilities and you revisit some races. Technically the rules don't let you do that till mission 21, but since the PC's will likely probably vaporize Earth by #19, I don't want to wait. I'm certainly not likely to ever run another vanilla 3:16 campaign for this long, so I'd like to see how that "doubled up" phase works while I've got the chance.

One other development worth noting... One of our players has moved across the country. It's not a permanent move, but she won't be back in Seattle till after the campaign has wrapped up. So, we lost Lt. Flowerdew. She will be missed. On her way out the door, she stole the invisible alien scout-ship the PCs had been hiding from high command, went AWOL, faked her own death, and framed another PC for it.

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.

The Orbital Bombardment of Planet Rubens

Yesterday's session of 3:16 Carnage Amongst The Stars was the biggest challenge the PCs have faced yet. They actually had to rely on orbital bombardment, whereas on all previous planets, mere Strengths and Weaknesses were enough to get out of the trouble.

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Now, before we could get to the planet in question, there were some amusing hijinks involving ol' Sarge Harrington (a PC) and the captured alien stealth ship. This was the ship that the deserter Watkins (an NPC) had been using to shadow the fleet. In the final scenes of the last session, two of the PCs had captured Watkins and his alien vessel. But no one could figure out how to turn off the ship's stealth tech. It was invisible, and cloaked, even from the inside, and self-cleaning. Poor sarge was sent aboard it to try to figure out how it worked, and had a heck of a time trying to get back out of it again. He was actually listed as MIA, and rescue teams sent back to his last known coordinates, a few lightyears behind the fleet. Very amusing, since he was never more than 20 feet from where they'd last seen him. Got him so nervous about that, though, he did a lot of damage to the interior and hatches of the stealth ship trying to get out of it.

After much hilarity, I eventually moved the plot along to the Company being deployed planet-side.

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Since Captain DeMolay (a PC) had last session been promoted to Major, I now had more Threat Tokens in play, and fluff-wise the PCs were sent on a more important mission. Their troop ship would approach the next system powered-down, and well in advance of the rest of the fleet. Their objective was to capture the alien tower complex that was believed to be the control site for the planetary defenses.

Planet Name: Rubens
Planet Description: Pleasure Planet
Alien Description: Advanced Humanoids
Alien Power: Ambush

I went with the old Star Trek trope of the super-advanced race or planet that looks primitive, and remains peaceful unless really provoked. The system was defended by kill-satellites that implied a powerful culture once resided here. However, aside from three very tall (I compared them to the Tower of Babel, but in triplicate) high-tech towers in a tight cluster at one location, there were no signs of industry or technology on the planet itself. Medieval agricultural communities, populated by peaceful and primitive people. The aliens stood 7 to 8 feet tall, but weighed only 90 to 120 lbs. Graceful, elfin, feminine, and dressed in quaint pre-industrial clothing.

The PCs arrive by drop ship, and just slaughter the alien village near the tower complex. No resistance, just chaos and xenocide. A few aliens flee inside the towers, and once the players figured out how to use the local door tech, they pursued them. But again, the "second wave" of aliens inside were likewise slaughtered without raising arms. The only weapons the PCs had seen was one farmer with a pitchfork, and he died before he could even threaten with it.

The Company starts moving up the tower. As they progress further, they see more and more signs that the towers just aren't used. Other than the bottom floor, the rooms are mostly empty, and most of the work stations and computers are covered with dust. The locals are just poor dumb peasant folk. The players all start talking about how it feels bad to slaughter aliens that have no defenses, even if it's exactly what their characters would do.

And do so they did. An alien appears in the room with the bulk of the PCs unit.  Arms out, he tries to talk to them in a musical voice, and they blow him apart with a Machine Gun at point-blank. Down at ground level, more aliens arrive on pack animals and with wagons. They too try to talk to the Troopers, and are mowed down.

The terrain around the towers changes color a few times. I was going for the "mood planet" approach to pleasure planet. I also threw in a couple subtle references to that episode of Star Trek where the planet manufactures everything you imagine. There was a rabbit (with a stop watch) sighting that hinted at it, and reinforced the surrealist elements I've been bringing into the campaign. It worked reasonably well, though I don't think any of my players caught the references overtly (other than to Alice in Wonderland, which was only one level of it). Real combat was about to break out, and when it did, all curiosity about the properties of the planet became secondary to just surviving.

Again, aliens appear in the room. They just "sparkle in" to the midst of the unit, touch one NPC, and "sparkle out" taking the unprepared Trooper with them.

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I gave the PCs a few moments to worry about it, and then came the next wave. I activated the Ambush power, and aliens teleported in. They're still dressed as peasants, but clearly possess powerful transporter tech, and a few of them have some sort of energy weapon seemingly built-in to the fingers. Just point and burn. The Ambush does 1 "kill" to each PC, and messes up the NPCs in the unit pretty good. Like aliens teleporting away with people's limbs. The PCs counter-attack in the second round wipes them out without further harm, but it was clearly unnerving.

No way to track where the aliens teleported from, so there was little choice but to continue searching the towers. Room by room, level by level.

After several more floors of emptiness and dust, suddenly the first NPC trooper I'd abducted is returned via teleport. Except there's some sort of tattoo or tracery on his face now, like celtic knotwork in blue and green all over his skin.
He speaks: "People of Earth. Your aggression will not be tolerated. You do not wish to awaken a slumbering giant. You have four hours to vacate our planet peacefully, or your species will be eradicated from the galaxy." Immediate attempts a further parlay when south, and ended with most of the party being damaged by the grenade that killed the brainwashed/tattooed NPC trooper.

Clearly, medieval farmers these guys are not.

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So now the PCs are nervous, and start debating whether or not to call in an orbital bombardment and bug out off-world. They're almost out of Strengths, and I've still got a ton of Threat Tokens, enough to pull about 4 more ambushes easily. So, the last-ditch bombardment starts looking pretty good.

Problem is, orbital bombardment does 1 damage to each PC, and armor is useless against it. So if they call down the nastiness, a couple of them will have to either use Weaknesses or die. They call the ship, and tell it to risk coming closer to the kill-satellites so that it can bombard and/or extract, as needed.  They bring in the Platoon Medic (Doc Bubba, an NPC that has been in every session thus far), and line up for healing. I choose to hit them with the next ambush in the middle of it.

Given their wound status, and the recent out-of-character discussion about how armor can't stop an Orbital Bombardment, they all choose to take the Ambush wounds on their armor, and leave their health-boxes for the bombarment. So, aliens teleport in, touch people, and span off with large portions of their Mandelbrite Power Armor. Half the platoon is now half-naked.

Doc Bubba, sadly enough, loses not just her gloves and sleeves, but both hands and forearms. The PC she was treating grabs the stumps and tries to save her with an NFA roll (he had an 80% chance of success) but fails.

The Company returns fire, and gets a lot of successes, so the PCs narrate that they're figuring out how to predict the teleport targets by the shimmering just before the aliens arrive. The Major intends to call down the bombardment in the midst of this, but his player forgets its an NFA roll instead of FA, and declares the wrong skill at the start of the round. Too busy shooting, and dodging, he can't call in his coordinates. That leaves the aliens fighting long enough for one of the PCs to get hit for his last health box, and has to invoke a Weakness to live. Old Sarge Harrington has a weak ticker, and collapses from a heart attack. He survives, but is left for dead.

The next round, the Major gets the right skill selected, and rains down holy hell on the tower complex. This eliminates all the remaining threat tokens from the planet, and scores him d1000 kills. He rolls the d10s in sequence: 0, 1, and 3. So, massive destruction and terrain devastation, but only 13 enemies killed!

The teleporting aliens vanish. The kill-satellites all power down. Long range scanners reveal no life signs on the planet save what's left of the PCs company, most of who are buried under the collapsed towers. No clue where the enemy went.

In 3:16, if you use any of the really big weapons, such as the Orbital Bombardment or the Star-Killers, you have to make an NFA roll after the session to avoid being demoted. Early in the campaign, I made a point of this by giving them an NPC commander who was busted down from Colonel to Lieutenant for blowing up yet another habitable world.

DeMolay has NFA of 9 this late in the campaign. Even better odds for his NFA roll than Sarge had when he was trying to save Bubba. So, of course, DeMolay's die comes up a "10". The brass busts him down from Major to Captain for what they see as cowardice and a gross misappropriation of resources, as giving a plasma-bath to an entire continent only resulted in 13 confirmed kills.  Them's the breaks.

Huge Space Hulk, Tiny Rule

My wife and I have been playing a lot of Space Hulk: Death Angel in the past week or two. It's an awesome version of the classic Space Hulk board game / miniatures game, but in a portable semi-cardgame edition. (It's clearly a card game, but doesn't feel or play like one.) Best of all, it's cooperative. My wife and I play the Space Marines together, and the game itself controls the vile genestealers. Good times.

I was going to write a detailed review, but in the middle of writing it, I noticed a rule we were doing wrong. So, now I need to play a few more games with that rule correct before I can weigh in with my final thoughts. Normally, I'd just blame FFG, their rulebooks are always so poorly written. But in this case, the rulebook is actually really good and simple, I just somehow missed a critical sentence. A tiny little innocuous sentence, which no doubt completely skewed game balance. My bad.