[3:16] Does It Encourage "We didn't roll the dice for three sessions!" Behavior?
Gregor Hutton:
No problem, Raven. I'm looking forward to it.
Thinking about it, I think my intention was that the game should encourage you to roll the dice and abide by the result. NFA or FA checks when we don't know which way it'll go. If you didn't like the outcome you have limited Flashbacks to change that.
While further in a campaign characters might be getting their own ideas on which directions to go, I envisaged it would still have Missions as backdrops. I also wanted it to be really easy for a GM to run, without caring for setting up an elaborate back story or campaign a priori, and that does involve handing the GM tools to lean on (dice, tokens, abilities) that need dice rolling going on.
Ron Edwards:
Hi Raven,
I have run a couple of in-the-ship missions. I roll or choose stuff for the situation very much like a planet and it works fine. I'm confident that if you sit down and try it without saying "it can't work, I can't do it, the rules won't do it," you'll be surprised.
Think in terms of conditions in space that could be like a planet's conditions. For instance, the heavy-gravity one - OK, the ship is in some kind of nebula or weird black hole type anomaly that inflicts heavy gravity conditions upon every single independent body in the immediate area. Or if you don't mind, you could even say the ship's own gravity mechanisms are screwed up.
In our game, I had the ship attacked by space-sharks. It's very easy to use the aliens rules for such problems. Or if you wanted to go more out-there, you could use the aliens rules to characterize the technical problems on the ship itself, although I haven't done it that way.
To keep it in "the mission" framework, that's easy as pie. The characters' superiors order them into the damaged sector of the ship to fix it, or to provide support for the guys who are fixing it given that the conditions are dangerous. Or if your command structure is as cynical and stupid as it is in my game, they send in the combat guys because they (i) don't care, (ii) want to pad their resumes with "successful missions," and (iii) actually sort of like getting their soldiers killed, so when a player says, "This is stupid, why do we have to stand around with guns while the techies fix things," they are indeed correct.
Best, Ron
greyorm:
Sorry it took so long to get back to this, had some serious computer issues this week (ie: "What do you mean the drive died? Fuuuuuuuu...").
Gregor: one of the "problems" I've been having, is that the missions haven't been very dangerous. Only a couple Strengths have been used overall, and no one has yet used a Weakness. No one has really HAD to because things have never gotten "bad enough" -- a combination of poor die rolls on my part and a failure to use the Abilities when I should. And they keep leveling up, so their scores are pretty high.
Your advice about just doing whatever the group is finding fun is a good reminder. I know I keep second-guessing myself and thinking I need to add "more" to play, which is probably not the case given that my players seem pretty content with it being all about the missions and shooting weird alien bug-things while geeking out on the whole "crazy hard-ass military" schtick.
So I go with it until they start showing they're bored with that, or they clearly show interest pursuing something that isn't a mission. Or at least I need to remind myself of that, as it seems the best course of action.
Paul: those are fascinating observations, and I think quite valid.
Having been in an AD&D campaign where soap opera drama was a big part of play, I was bored out of my skull. However, that may have been because it was completely empty in terms of players being able to act on or resolve those thematic premises in play. That is, there was plenty of character interaction and purple artsy-fartsy role-playing, but it was pointless: it never moved the game anywhere, let alone resolved the character issues it hi-lit. It was just lah-ti-dah pseudo-thespianism, dramatic posturing, or whatever. And then we rolled dice and killed shit when the DM told us to, which was likewise empty because we were only doing so to get through his story arc.
But that was 90's-style AD&D, not OD&D. Though, interestingly, if I look at our group's current 3E game, it is rather a bit like this. Mainly, we've done the "go here, kill that, find this" type missions with some pretty "silhouette" characters (generalities, no significant personal details -- like "This is the elven archer, you can tell because he has pointy ears and a bow." but nothing that sets THAT elven archer really and truly apart from every other elven archer ever, not in terms of uniqueness, but in terms of who the character IS and what he WANTS and what he's done that says something about those things). But recently some events have happened that, I noticed, have started shaping my character's personality, drives, and desires beyond his being "the party's wizard", beyond just a kind-of cut-out of that concept, who I can just have "go here, go there".
I think that's what you're talking about.
I mention this specifically because normally I start out strong on concept and character motivations/desires/history when I make a character, but didn't this time. (Probably because that doesn't really work with my current group, and I've generally been left wanting as the GMs don't pick up on it or use any of that. So I made a drop-in character I didn't need to care about as a person/character.) So it is rather at the forefront of my brain right now: I'm wondering where that will lead, or if that personality stuff will be of any use in our play at all.
But, to the subject, I'm not sure if I believe 3:16 can't deliver this. Because, to me, 3:16 is very D&Dish: D&D is just about killing shit and taking its stuff. You don't really do other stuff. You can, yes, but it isn't part of the rules per se, and you wing all that as you go along. In my mind, 3:16 has the very same vibe.
Ron: (and this goes for anyone else reading this, too) I'd be interested in seeing any "not about the mission" AP so I can see how folks have done it. Because it isn't that I think it can't be done, it's more that I'm flailing about trying to figure out HOW. Do I use the mechanics for stuff? Is it all freeform drama instead, or just NFA rolls? Etc. Can I use tokens for non-alien/monster situations, or situations involving other squads, commanding officers, etc, and how? Or do I stat them out? And that sort of thing.
Ron Edwards:
Hi Raven,
I'm seeing that I wasn't entirely clear. We didn't use mission-type rules in order to resolve events outside of missions. I treated events such as the repair scenario as missions, in full. My suggestion is sort of the opposite of what you may have perceived.
When we play outside of a mission, and we did that a lot too - in fact, constantly - I called for NFA rolls to resolve any conflicts of interest that cropped up. And that happened a lot too, including such things as avoiding being zapped by a memory-wiping device (which the player failed, incidentally), or anything to do with winkling any useful information out of the other crew members or the ship's files, or ... geez, anything.
So we were either playing a mission or not, and later in play, some of the missions were defined as on-ship. No matter what, if we were "in mission," we used the mission rules absolutely in full. Whereas if we weren't, then we played quite loosely/freely, with very intent scene-framing based on either GM or player statements (so that we always knew what 'the screen' showed and where every player-character was, if present), and with lots of plot-consequential NFA rolls as we went along, but with no mission-rules at all.
Let me know if that helps or makes sense.
Best, Ron
Number6intheVillage:
3:16 is D&D the way it should be. (And would be very easy to mod into D&D.)
It is about the missions - but the missions aren't about killing things - because that's a given (just like it is in any D&D game). You're going to kill everything (also just like you do in every D&D game). It's what interactions you create along the way where the story comes in.
3:16 just streamlines the system so that you're not wasting time on the things that don't really matter to the story.
Navigation
[0] Message Index
[#] Next page
[*] Previous page