[3:16] Home is for the hating
Ron Edwards:
Hello,
For previous threads, see [3:16] Way Too Easy Or Just Got the Rules Wrong? and [3:16] Semi-Captain, Lt.-Captain, almost-Captain on deck, sir!
A few weeks ago, we played a mission to planet Whistler. I rolled up AA = 8, high gravity, humanoids (pigs of course), and reduced visibility. I decided that this planet was actually part of the Terran empire, and they were civilized, technological, and generally a lot like humans. I also decided the entire planet was paved, with various rolling and sloping surfaces, which then inspired me to come up with big-balloon tires on the open-to-the-air vehicles. And yeah, pig-people - who, thinking this was an ordinary visit from the Terran troops, sent out the ambassador with a brass band to welcome them.
'Cept the brass on the ship was pulling a false-flag attack on an ally (subject, really) to make it look as though the enemy bugs did it.
This was the mission in which the players totally abandoned any interest in kill-count. It was vastly more like a more general role-playing scenario. Chris, playing Deet, encountered pure moral agony as the commander of the mission. He'd so looked forward to being in charge, too! Tim K thought this was pretty funny. His character, Viper, had some cool beginning scenes involving being awoken from a freeze-tank and padding naked around the ship for a while. Viper is quite weird apparently, but it turns out that Tim K is playing the guy as a hair away from "Hatred for home" from the get-go. He frequently leaves or avoids combat, contrary to his FA of 10, and he's highly-entertainingly good at covering his ass about it.
Oh, the scenes, the scenes. Viper goes AWOL and runs around like Frodo and Sam in Mordor. Kowalski determines to alert the Terran media to the war crime taking place and sabotages the media blackout which was one of the squad's top priorities in the mission. I made their lives hell - Kowalski even got waterboarded by a pig militia at one point. Deet was driven to distraction by trying to keep these rebel reprobates under his control while personally hating the mission himself.
Ultimately, it all yielded a fantastic outcome - Kowalski literally sabotaged the intent of the mission while fulfilling it to the letter; such that the planet was destroyed, but lots of pig-people escape and Terra's media is made aware of what happened.
Then, the next week, we played again, and this time, many things had changed. Deet is now a Major (geez!), and the other two are lowly grunt Troopers.
I rolled. AA = 10, Holbein, asteroid belt, sharks/rays/eels, and enrage. Shoot! At AA 10, Enrage is meaningless. I'm starting to see the point about not always rolling every detail for each mission. Anyway, I decided that the ship was not really on a mission, but actually hiding out from the Terran forces while the brass tried to spin the news about the disastrous previous mission to its advantage. So the asteroid belt is where it's hiding ... and it's attacked! Cool! A "mission" defending your own ship!
I started it off with some boring routine and a new Sergeant Hutton, who at first seemed like a starched tenor non-entity until he showed up at the barracks to carry out Deet's orders with a cattle-prod. At a later point, he used it to goose Kowalski out of where he was shirking work. The team had to go and clean out a section of the ship that hadn't been used for a long time, and at one point they open the blinds to a magnificent vista of space ... to see the squadron of space-swimming sharks with frickin' turret-guns on their heads attacking.
What? They were pretty cool space-sharks, including the little remoras clinging to them, which turn out to be the techies who can work the machinery in the 3:16 ship once they got to the bridge. They swim through vacuum ("vacuum gills") - so how do they survive once in the air of the ship? Air-suit harnesses, of course! We wear space-suits, they wear air-suits. Now shut up.
My narrations emphasized that this attack was a huge disaster for the whole ship, including a total command meltdown. When Deet radioed the bridge to report and receive instructions, all he got back was explosions and screams. Everyone split up again, and this time, both Viper and Kowalski pretty much said "fuck you" to Deet's leadership. The various combat scenes were carnage, carnage, and more of it. The players had zero sympathy for the sharks, but entertainingly, also, zero sympathy whatsoever for their fellow troops or the ship, both personally and generally. Deet had a couple of really gory combat moments and Viper lurked around being kind of weird. At one point I indulged myself in glorious geekery and had Sergeant Hutton's severed head float past in the zero-G ...
Kowalski realized a life-long dream and hacked into the ship's computer when everyone was distracted ... to learn my single major prep-setup for the game - that the "rogue trooper" leader Callahan back on the second planet had actually been the Brigadier of the 3:16, and the leaders that the player-characters have been following from the start of play were actually the ringleaders of the coup that took over the ship. The thing is, these NPCs don't have "hatred for home" and are uber-patriots with few brains and an exaggerated sense of their importance. (Deet had discovered this a while back but had had his memory erased.)
So Kowalski finds this out, and the very next scene is Deet using his Strength to save that very command-community from capture and destruction by the space-sharks in the bridge of the ship, including blowing out a significant section of said bridge into space. Oh, and Deet also used a Weakness, and finally checked off Hatred for Home. Ahhhhh ... the smell of a reward system in the morning, it smells like ... victory!
As I've said before, my current thinking about 3:16 is that the game doesn't really begin until Hatred for Home is claimed by someone, and thus becomes available for everyone. Who takes it? Anyone? Everyone? Given this non-deterministic yet narratively significant exposure of one's character, what do you do with him now? Given that twelve missions isn't merely twelve missions in a non-consequential linear sequence, but rather a twelve-step process of illuminating exactly what the 3:16 is in policy terms, and that has actually become more of the "environment" of play than the planets (or includes the planets), what do the players do about that?
Best, Ron
edited to fix a mistaken initial
agony:
So I have to ask: With the vast rank difference between character's, do you foresee some problems in future play? Particularly if there is a mission on the ground, how do you plan to handle this.
It seems like this is the first actual play where someone made it that far into play and it's quite difficult to picture how play evolves given the rather small initial scale.
Ron Edwards:
Hi Charles,
It's a work in progress. I'm using the book's section "It's not about the missions" for my guide.
So far, I've relied on certain our-game-specific details and nudges to get higher-ranking officers into danger. Sometimes it's easy: when Deet was a Captain and attacked the pig-people planet, he was in charge of quite a few different squads or brigades or battalions or whatever they're called, and the troopers happened to be in one of those. Granted, they weren't all bunched up together, but that wasn't a big deal anyway because Kowalski and Viper went AWOL anyway. It's always easy to annihilate the NPC soldiers to bring the PCs together, if I want them to have that option.
Other times it's sneaky and nasty, as when Gunther was physically forced to go on a mission when he wasn't scheduled to. Or in the last session, when Deet's task as a Major was to oversee the cleaning and overhaul of this whole part of the ship, he wasn't there at first - the Sergeant NPC took care of running it. I think they found something-or-other that demanded his presence, though, right before the sharks attacked (this worked really well in play and didn't feel contrived, but I swear I've forgotten what it was. Guys?)
And now ... well, things are now in a really interesting zone. I think missions, from now on, are going to emerge only through Major Deet's interactions with the NPC higher-ups. In other words, mandating the missions as part of play is no longer up to me in any way, and arguably, maybe there won't be any more of them! (Although that's unlikely considering what I have available via framing and setting and such.) Characters with higher rank mean that play basically turns into more generalized, standard role-playing with the ship and its current location as immediate setting. Missions become options within that context, so if one does arise via play, then we swing into the "make a mission" rules and rolls as usual. But it's no longer a given.
As far as having the PCs interact directly, that won't be a problem. These three men are bound by so much blood, hatred, confusion, special knowledge, and trauma, that they will certainly find ways.
Best, Ron
GreatWolf:
Ron,
Two things.
1) Since I don't have my book in front of me, let me confirm something. When any player gets "Hatred of Home", all players get access to it?
2) You successfully incorporated lasersharks into an actual roleplaying session! Sir, I salute you.
Ron Edwards:
Hi Seth,
For the first character who gets Hatred for Home, that character sheet had to have filled up all the other Weakness slots and made the last available via leveling up.
Once that happens, any character may identify a newly-acquired Weakness as Hatred for Home, regardless of where they are along the sequence of Weaknesses so far. It doesn't become "available" in the game-rules sense that the box receives a single diagonal slash. It becomes available in the conceptual sense that you may call the new Weakness you've just taken (i.e. placed the second diagonal slash to make an X) Hatred for Home.
The sharks did not have lasers! They had rotating 270-degree turrets on their heads which fired space-bullets. Everyone knows lasersharks are stupid, you silly person
Best, Ron
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