[3:16] the betrayal of planet Girlfriend
agony:
This is kind of re-iterating what others have said but I've found 3:16 most enjoyable when Command dicks with the grunts. Piss them off and then stick your ass out in the wind and let them blow it off if they dare. The conflicting orders is good advice, I really like the combat drugs idea. Stuff like John Harper's Alpha Protocol where he had Command order the troopers to open up their air vents and expose their lungs to the planet's atmoshpere are brilliant and where this game really shines.
Oh, and have the senior ranking Player deliver the shitty orders and be responsible for enforcing them.
Graham W:
Paul,
My feeling is that the problem isn't mechanical. When I've played, the best bit is the player-vs-player stuff.
For example: I leave a fight early, landing everyone else in shit, and then everyone else turns on me. The mechanics are used there, of course, but what really counts is the stuff we injected: I chose to land everyone else in shit, everyone else chose to turn on me.
The question is how to foster that as a GM.
I think Simon's right. It's things like making one of them the Lieutenant's pet; giving difficult orders ("kill the civilians!") that some will follow and some won't; telling one soldier to spy on another; bribing one of the soldiers with a bigger gun. As GM, you want to provoke them into that player-vs-player stuff, not using the mechanics, but by adding things into the fiction.
In that sense, I think there's something very old-school about 3:16. The GM can lead the game and provoke the players.
Graham
greyorm:
Ron stated in a previous 3:16 thread -- "You can't tell me you guys don't know what to do with this when you used to sit around writing eighty pages of setting material" -- regarding complaints from Seth and myself that we didn't quite know what to do with the game, particularly the later stages of the game.
I wasn't sure what to make of that response, or how precisely to put it to work as a solution--though I did see value in the statement--so I let it drop. But then Paul and Eero made a couple of statements here that clarified why I was finding that advice both difficult to implement as a solution despite agreeing with its principle, that I think might have a bearing on the overall discussion here regarding "ok, how do I make this work?"
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The game is quite vanilla in its mechanical approach, so much so that I could characterize it as "doing nothing" when it comes to structuring and provoking interesting character interaction. All interactive color and character development I've witnessed in my 3:16 play has, without exception, happened because the players (GM included) have started and encouraged a cycle of character-full banter on top of the rather character-neutral mission structure.
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I'm thinking maybe NFA rolls between missions should have some mechanical footprint. As it stands, they're just color; they felt frivolous, and I never managed to do anything interesting with them.
Still recognizing that that populating and detailing the setting so story and event arises and flows naturally from it, I'm going back to Ron's response and realizing "detail a setting" actually isn't the issue with "what do we do now?" The issue isn't creating or populating or imagining the setting, but specifically using the rules of this game to play in and interact with such a setting.
That's the issue I'm running headfirst into while trying to prep/understand the rules for 3:16, which leads to, "Well, ok, and...what does that do? Why would the players care to do that? How do we accomplish that?"
Paul's and Eero's experience clicked this issue together more coherently for me, leading me to describe the problem as:
Reading the text was like having a bunch of pieces of a sports car engine dumped in my lap, being told what they all did in the engine, but without being told where they all went or how they interacted or should interact (except based on what could be logically guessed and inferred from what I'm told each does).
So I have this awesome car engine sitting in my lap. This thing will make a car go! I have no clue how, but it will if I get all the pieces where they should "naturally" be. Problem being, I'm not a mechanic. I have no idea where they should naturally be, even with information like "the spark plugs drive the pistons" I end up at a loss, because: what do those things look like? And how are they supposed to do that?
It feels to me as though 3:16 is put together the same way Ron has stated Sorcerer is: it works great out-of-the-box for people who can see how this particular engine is supposed to be put together to make it go, but it doesn't seem to work or doesn't seem to make sense if you don't have that insight into the pieces and what to do with them.
So, when the cry went up: "I can't figure out what to do with the sparkplug!" And the response was: "Come on, I know you guys know sparkplugs should ignite the vaporized gas!" It was true, but it didn't show where the sparkplug went in this particular engine block configuration, how to actually set the timings, etc.
It seems to me the current rules, while mechanically complete, are not complete as a game manual, leading to repeat discussions of "How do we run the game so it does the stuff it talks about making happen in the text?" and the following stream of solutions offered of how to run play so it does work the described-outcome way, along with explanations of why the players need to behave this or that way or make certain choices or the game won't do that...none of which appear to be detailed in the book as necessary procedures of play (and should be?).
I'm not sure what recommendations might be made as a solution in the above case, or if the solution might still be argued as "just make a setting" and I am simply over-thinking the issues, or even missing some blindingly obvious resolution or explanation in the rules.
I know that isn't exactly an answer to Paul's question, but I'm throwing it up for discussion because I think it has a bearing on the primary source of the problem and various comments made about the game in this thread.
However, I do also offer Paul the following idea as concrete-and-immediate advice for making play go the intended direction: it occurred to me after a very weird dream about space-military earlier tonight, that one solution to the "players wouldn't screw with each other" problem would be to put each player's soldier in a separate attack group ("squad"?), surrounded by very different personalities you as GM can play up, and have each squad given different tasks to complete in the overall mission -- but near enough to one another to either help others' missions, or to fuck it up for everyone else.
You might get a sort of "Why can't you keep your squad under control?!" or just "Those idiots from Bravo squad really screwed everyone else over!" effect that will help drive player conflicts and competition. Especially given that it is only the choices and rolls and mechanical decisions of the player in that squad that actually matter to the combat's resolution, not the color/obstacles/choices provided by his squadmates.
The trick here is simply running combats as normal, where all players are involved (mechanically), but where each player has a soldier in a different squad in a different battle-zone of that combat. I'm thinking of something along the lines of the big fight on Coral at the end of "Old Man's War" by Scalzi, which is full of "squad A does this, but if they fuck it up, squad B is going to be screwed and their mission will fail, so squad C better make sure squad A doesn't get hosed" and various actions and attempts that are definitely non-trivial NFA rolls, etc.
Pelgrane:
Quote from: Paul Czege on December 17, 2008, 06:07:09 PM
I
What the hell should I do differently? I'm inclined to think much of the problem was the number of players, and argue the AA calculations should take the number of players into account. Also, I'm thinking maybe NFA rolls between missions should have some mechanical footprint. As it stands, they're just color; they felt frivolous, and I never managed to do anything interesting with them.
Paul
Well, the explicit mechanical effects of NFA rolls are that:
1 If you lose an NFA conflict against a superior rank, you have to follow a particular order. This can have major effects. For example, you can order them to go into combat first, not wear their armour, give their drugs to another trooper, or allow an alien to infect them.
2. NFA roles can mechanically affect the outcome of future FA rolls, giving a bonus.
3. You might be able to use them to steal items or sabotate stuff or interfere with comms.
Eero Tuovinen:
Am I the only one who thinks that recommending direct mechanically impactful stakes for NFA conflics, and ones outside mission no less, is against the rules are they appear in the book? I never got an inkling that the purpose would be to creatively redesign the resource environment in the interest of getting some characters killed off. One would imagine that if ordering troopers to leave their armor and drugs home were a standard GMing technique or even an option, then there'd be some hint of this in the rules.
When I've played the game we haven't required between-missions NFA rolls to have any meaningful impact on trooper success in missions (and therefore game mechanics in general - this game only has mechanics for in-mission activity). Those rolls have been purely an oracular method for inspiring some freeform character development. I asked about this at Story Games at one point, actually, when I got to wondering how one should deal with characters who refuse to follow orders. The prevailing truth seemed to be that the game's formal structure is followed by necessity, there are no "missing rules" for figuring out how many tokens you need to kill to blast your way to the bridge and sabotage the ship before escaping to live with aliens. I can only presume that the end-game events which the rules hint at are played out with a liberal amount of free narration. Using that star-killing doomsday weapon is not a mechanical challenge, for example, but just a matter of deciding to use it.
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