[3:16] These players are crazy
Marshall Burns:
I played 3:16 last weekend on a camping trip. The players were:
> my cousin James, with whom I’ve roleplayed often, and with whom I’ve played 3:16 once before.
> my friend Steve, who I hadn’t seen since, like, high school, and who created the game nothing that I’ve mentioned before. Years back, he used to roleplay with me and James.
> James’ and Stephen’s friend Coy, who I’d met once before. Coy, James, and Steve used to roleplay years before.
> James’ friend Heath, who I had only briefly met before, and who had never roleplayed before.
> Heath’s friend Brandon, who none of us had met (except Heath, of course). He’s an ex-Marine, and used to play D&D back in the Corps. He expressed a preference for OD&D over the newer editions, and I knew then that we’d get along. (Because so much of OD&D is strategy centering around Positioning with a side order of Resource, not so much emphasis on Effectiveness – a fact that Brandon grasped when I ran it past him in non-jargon – and I’m really really interested in Positioning-heavy play).
Originally, we were going to play Poison’d, but I opted for 3:16 because we had an ex-military guy, and all of us excepting Heath are interested in guns. I pitched them 3:16, and they decided it was fucked-up in a very intriguing way, so we played.
I GMed. James reprised TPR Shorty (rep: Gung-Ho, but really more like psycho) from our earlier game. Steve had CPL Nicotine (rep: neat), Coy had SGT Lucius (rep: reluctant, which turned out to be true), Brandon had TPR Bad (don’t remember his rep), and Heath had TPR Max Hammer (rep: awesome, which was mostly true).
The first planet, Holbein, was a pretty weak one. I rolled an AA of 3, a low-gravity world, reptiles/amphibians, with Force Weakness (which never worked, because of the low AA). I decided the aliens were toads the size of Volkswagen Beetles.
To start with, I had everyone in the canteen on-ship, to give everyone a chance to get into character, and get everyone associated, since not all of the players knew each other. I arbitrarily declared that Lucius and Nicotine went way back, and asked Steve and Coy to elaborate on it, which they did. Brandon’s roleplaying was very low-key, and, while it was appropriate for his character, I guessed (correctly) that he was in it mainly for the hack-n-slash and strategy. Heath was reluctant to jump in on the roleplaying at first; he wanted to watch us do it before he got into it. But he quickly started talking and interacting in-character, and was visibly enjoying himself. James had Shorty bet cancer sticks with Nicotine over who would get the most kills.
I had Captain Fix give them a very disinterested and vague brief, and they were shipped off to the planet. I should note that I totally flubbed NPCs in this game. I’m very bad at NPCs without prep time.
I explained the mechanics in-play as we went along, which went rather smoothly. I used the term “bust” to describe failure, which made the roll-high-but-under thing easier to understand; everyone was familiar with blackjack. I didn’t introduce Flashbacks until someone started getting in a tight spot where I thought they might want to use them.
Let me back up on that. What had happened was, they came across a cave that contained a nest of frogs, with lots of eggs stacked up. At one point, Max Hammer and Shorty were inside the cave, while everyone else was outside. Nicotine decided to try to collapse the cave entrance with hand grenades. Max didn’t even try to get out, and Shorty busted his NFA roll to escape, so they both were trapped in the cave when Nicotine succeeded his NFA roll.
This is when I realized that these players were crazy. In the aftermath, it was clear to everyone that closing up the cave while people were inside it was a dumb idea. But it seemed like such a good idea at the time.
This was when Shorty and Max started to take a beating, so I explained Flashbacks.
Heath opted to use a Strength. Max Hammer remembered when, as a child, his drunken father would beat his mother, while young Max hid in the closet. The cramped space of the cave reminded him of the closet, and his latent rage exploded on the frogs. I asked Heath, “So, as you’re blasting these frogs, do you, like, call them ‘Daddy’ or anything?” And he just gave a big grin, and we all took it as a yes. My favorite Flashback ever.
While the others looked for other entrances to the cave, Shorty and Max ran across a larger group of frogs. I had more frogs simultaneously attack the others, and ran the encounters simultaneously with a common pool of Threat Tokens; it worked quite nicely.
At some point, Steve wanted Nicotine to scout for something in the cave. He rolled NFA, succeeded, and asked me, “Okay, what do I find?”
And I’m all, “Uhh… what do you want to find?”
“Like, a tactical nuke, in a small box about the size of a suitcase.”
“Okay, sure, why not?”
We later decided that the nuke was old Corps technology, outmoded by decades, and left behind on some old mission. Which was odd, because CPT Fix had claimed that no one had been on Planet Holbein yet. A conspiracy?
They made short work of the rest of the frogs, including the Toad Queen Mother, and then I took them through the post-mission stuff, which was a big hit. Heath’s eyes lit up when I told him he could get an electric katana (Heath trains in a form of ninjitsu, and is very interested in contact weapons). Furthermore, everyone cared about the medals. I was very pleased by that.
At this point, James wasn’t feeling very well, so he bowed out of play to go lie down in his tent. We decided Shorty was in the sickbay with some weird toad-alien disease.
The next planet, Bosch, was much tougher. AA 7, poisonous atmosphere, artificial beings, Impair (which I used every fight). I decided that the aliens were Terminator-esque robot soldiers with cowboy hats, which went over well. Their Impair was through the use of a smoke screen.
The mission this time was search-and-destroy: find the factory that the cowboys were using to build themselves and eliminate it.
I should note that, between missions, Nicotine bribed his way into the tech lab and hooked his smuggled tactical nuke up to himself on a deadman’s switch: if he died, the nuke would go off. Again, this seemed like such a good idea at the time, but soon proved to be a dumb idea. With an AA of 7, he almost died in every encounter.
The factory was fortified, with automated turrets all along the wall. Everyone managed to run past the turrets with an NFA check, and, once inside, they managed to hack into the network and take control of a turret before the aliens swarmed out to attack them. So, hey, all you people out there that think NFA rolls don’t really matter? You’re dead wrong.
I decided that the turret had the same stats as a maxed-out rocketpod. Max Hammer took charge of it, and, on the first round, managed to get 100 kills from it, I shit you not.
Some people were about to die, including CPL “I’ve got a nuke strapped to my back” Nicotine, so Lucius used a Strength and saved everyone’s asses.
At this point, the scheming began. You should remember that the squad’s faith in the Corps was shaken by the fact that CPT Fix had clearly lied to them about Planet Holbein. Nicotine realized that, in this factory, they had the means to create an army. With enough planning, and the proper timing, they could throw a coup and take over the Expeditionary Force. Everyone went for it; they disabled the factory without destroying it, caused a large explosion in the wasteland outside it to fool the orbital sensors, and swore each other to secrecy.
Like I said, these players were crazy.
After the post-mission stuff, I was feeling kind of worn out from the demands of GMing without prep. So Steve offered to GM. Why not? I sketched up a quick character (about whom I remember nothing), and served as rules-expert, and Steve gave us a really fucked-up mission: the cat people of planet Durer wanted to welcome their new Terran overlords with a ceremony, and our squad was picked for the detail. We were to go through the ceremony, accept their gifts, then kill all the cat-people in their sleep. (AA 5, temperate planet, felines, Boost Ability)
It all went wrong when Max Hammer failed to sneak his powerblade into the ceremony. From there, it was a fiasco, including:
> killing an ambassador and hiding his body behind some curtains
> my character and Bad being sealed in a room and forced to escape with a sticky bomb improvised from radium gum and grenades
> Max trying to get some cat-people poontang, which went horribly wrong and ended with the roof blown off of a singles bar
> LT Lucius (he got promoted) killing the new sarge in the sewers because he wasn’t down with the cabal, and then almost getting killed by giant rats (I loved Steve’s Color here: “Imagine how big rats would have to be to survive on a planet of cat-people. That’s how big these are.” And then later, “You know those giant rats you killed a second ago? Yeah, those were babies. Here comes their mother”) after planting the nuke under the city hall cum temple where all the cat-people of the world had gathered for the ceremony.
After a bloody, scrambling encounter consisting of three engagements run simultaneously, everyone managed to regroup and get off-world, then detonate the nuke, netting Lucius some 800-odd kills. (I had decided a tactical nuke was as devastating as orbital bombardment.)
We’ll have a hard time explaining that one to the captain.
“You used a tactical nuclear weapon that hasn’t been approved for use in decades? You got it how? You didn’t turn it in why?”
Callan S.:
Boring question, but did they have access to a orbital bombardment via the rules at that time, or indeed are there rules along those lines? My emotional responce isn't all that relevant, but if the answer is yes and yes, I'll go 'Heh, that's cool!', but otherwise it's 'Uegh'.
Marshall Burns:
Yeah, once Lucius hit LT (right before that mission), he had access to orbital bombardment.
I'm not sure what you mean by "rules along those lines." Do you mean rules for arbitrating the damage ratings of weapons that aren't in the rulebook? In that case, no, that was an arbitration.
3:16 has very few rules, but they're loose and easy to apply to a wide range of stuff. Whatever they don't cover is in the realm of common-sense fictional positioning, similarly to Poison'd or OD&D. It would be my guess that 3:16 is, like Poison'd and OD&D, designed for a great deal of play to occur on that metagame layer, just above the "game layer," as it were (meaning, mechanics and math).
(Yeah, I can guess that you'll probably recoil at "common sense," but you probably know by now that I think the argument against it is worthless. Human brains aren't computers, and don't suffer from the same limitations as computers.)
JoyWriter:
Quote from: Marshall Burns on November 20, 2009, 08:00:42 AM
I used the term “bust” to describe failure, which made the roll-high-but-under thing easier to understand; everyone was familiar with blackjack.
That's the kind of metaphor I like, clumps up a mechanic very rapidly into a single object; my own mental model of "high but under limit" is a coordinate reversal on margin of success, so this should allow me to explain it to my friend who doesn't do maths. At the moment his response is pretty much "I'd take your word on it, but as I'm running this game I'd rather work with things I fully comprehend" (translated from non-verbal).
Quote from: Marshall Burns on November 20, 2009, 08:00:42 AM
At this point, James wasn’t feeling very well, so he bowed out of play to go lie down in his tent. We decided Shorty was in the sickbay with some weird toad-alien disease.
Some good old memories there, I love it when the arbitrary forces outside the game fiction can be transformed into arbitrary forces within it. You could utilise that in future, but I think it's good as background detail.
Callan S.:
Hi Marshall,
It's a bit off topic of me, but I find I already own 'loose and easy to apply to a range of stuff' rule sets. And I find the looseness makes them much of a muchness, since I or whoever else uses them uses the looseness to do pretty much what weve always done. For myself I actually want rules that throw a wrench in how we usually do things, otherwise it's like I'm just pretending to myself I've left my comfort zone somehow. And 'loose and easy to apply' rules tend to throw a jello wrench in since the loose they are, the looser the wrench, which pretty much means sweet FA in terms changing what weve always done. This is hardly alien stuff - I don't go to movies or read books just to have everything pay yes man to how I want it to go. I don't know if anyone else matches this, but it's a note in case there are.
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