Military Campaigns and Multiple Characters

[Username17]

So we were talking about CthulhuTech and how generally bad it is. But I got hung up on thinking about a specific problem it has that is by no means unique to the game: the inability of one character who is a technician to meaningfully act at the same time as another character who is a mech pilot. This comes up again and again in games like MechWarrior: a character whose job is conceptually to fix a giant robot does not have the opportunity to shine at the same general time as a character whose job it is to pilot that same giant robot.

This is in abstract somewhat similar to the medics and fighters problem that fantasy faces, but the solution that is generally settled upon in that arena (having the clerics run around hitting things with warhammers during the battle segment) is unsatisfying for modern/future warfare scenarios because modern (and presumably future) armies do not work that way. Specialization is key, and specialization works, and people with valuable technical skills are by and large not put on the front lines to exchange bullet volleys with enemies. But the virtues and realities of specialization aren't limited to modern/future scenarios, they happen whenever the number of people involved is large. It is totally possible to set Predator or something like it in the near (or far) future and keep the same D&D style party together: as long as you're dealing with a small team of elites who are far from possible backup and have to rely on each other's skills to complete the mission - the D&D setup holds. Shadowrun offers a model of this, and it works to an extent.

But the whole "elite team" model really collapses as soon as you ask for the inclusion of anything that requires a large amount of personnel. Whether that be a plane that needs a crew to service it, a front line with dozens (or thousands) of soldiers on it, or an organization like a smuggling ring or intelligence agency that simply is a collection of manpower. And that has historically been a major thorn in the side of attempts to make "military" RPGs work - as soon as someone wants to drive a tank the whole "elite team of specialists" thing is off the table. And if two people wan't to be incompatible specialists (say, a SEAL and an intelligence operative), then getting the "party together" so that shared experience Roleplaying can happen at all is difficult enough that it strains credibility.

The Larger Cast

So if you want to ride around in a vehicle that has a maintenance crew, obviously someone is going to need to control multiple characters. To a first approximation, that person can be you - the act of adding a siege engine that is manned by eight orcs involves you having to keep track of the siege engine and the eight orcs. But of course, that only solves the problem of the "one Player, one PC" system falling apart as soon as the story needs more actors to play out than there are people at the table. It doesn't solve the problem that while the orcish artillery is doing stuff to shoot at the walls, it is almost inconceivable that other characters who are like swordsmen and merchants and shit would have something to do. The alternative is to force everyone to make artillery teams (or members of artillery teams) if you're going to have anyone do it. But of course that involves sacrificing a whole day (or more) to chargen and arguments about which elements of the military organization "ought" to be important in the story.

But we can, in effect, do both. So the basic answer to the problem is that by demanding that something optional (like a mech repair team) exist and get screen time, that you should equally share some of that screen time with the other players - by giving them control of one or more of the characters in that mech repair team. And that anything which is necessarily going to exist (like the mech pilots themselves), everyone should come to the table with a character that can compete in that field.

Learning From Ars Magica

Ars Magica was one of the most innovative games of the late 80s. Which is saying a lot, because there were a lot of really innovative games from then (Shadowrun and GURPS spring immediately to mind). And the key innovation in that game was the idea of rotating characters. Each person would contribute characters to an overall cast of characters, but they would only play either one Main Character (a Magi or Companion), or a small group of low-level warriors or artisans called Grogs. And you'd rotate through the players at the table who was doing what. And you'd assign the characters who weren't being played to off-screen tasks that they were doing. Together you'd play and advance the organization as a whole.

This actually works fairly well for what it is - which is the running of a feudal barony run by secret wizards. It doesn't handle fast paced campaigns well and doesn't really address the issue where characters have no real reason to interact - the conceit is that you're a cabal of wizards in medieval times and you have a bunch of minions that you direct to do things. So whatever wizard or wizards are currently being played get to boss around whatever ragtag bunch of mooks they happen to have on hand. But in a modern/future setting with actual labor specialization, that isn't going to cut it.

But as a proof of concept, I think it works rather well. The organizational play and body swapping amongst the cast of characters both function just fine. Being handed different minor characters on short notice is actually quite entertaining as a "role playing" exercise. It's just that when arranging things for a modern or futuristic military structure, the different arrangements of PCs would have to be structured so that each configuration was itself a team of people who could plausibly be working together at a given time.

-Username17

[Taishan]

I would like to subscribe to this newsletter and learn more. I have just asked my SR group if they want to make a decker group to address the side-bar-experience of decking in the game.

[ModelCitizen]

We did something like this for a game awhile back. Two of the PCs led a goblin horde. When the goblins needed to do something, everyone rolled up a 1 HD goblin and played it for a few hours.

Note: I do mean "rolled up," as in 3d6 down the line. By default your class was Warrior. The real classes (at least the ones that were present in this tribe of goblins - fighter / rogue / ranger / druid / wizard) all got stat prereqs AD&D-style. Then you generated equipment by rolling on a chart. Chart items ranged from "pointy stick (1d6-1), shirt, no pants" to actual adventurer kits and worg puppies and shit. The players really enjoyed these sessions. They thought it was awesome that someone rolling a goblin wizard caused a couple 1st-level spells to disappear out of the wizard PCs' spellbooks. (The only way the goblins had access to magical texts was by stealing it from the PCs. It helped that the PCs had ridiculous unmanageable piles of looted spellbooks with multiple copies of the really important spells, so losing a random 1st-level spell wasn't going to hurt them even if it was Prot vs Alignment.)

Essentially we were playing AD&D-style ironman sessions for lulz. Comedy elements aside, the key here is fast, randomized char gen with no illusions of being balanced. I'm not a fan of that for major characters in campaign play, but it's a lot of fun for some random asshole you're only going to play during a short interlude before returning to your main character.

Really we've got two separate concerns here.

• Scientists and Engineers in Tech-Heavy Games. In a space opera game we want scientist and helmsman characters, and we want them to be protagonists in the same sense as the ground team. Same with the mechanic in a mech game. We can do this by making them full PCs in the same sense that a ground team character or mech pilot would be, but giving everyone 2-3 characters.
• Grogs (in the Ars Magica sense, not AD&D Neckbeards). Members of a PC-led army or crime syndicate or security team or whatever. We don't want these guys to all be full PCs, because there are a lot of them and each PC may have his own little crew of NPCs who act when he's not around. This one I think is more suited for fast, random, and deliberately unbalanced character generation.

We have two different cases where it's useful to give each player multiple characters and each case has different requirements.

[sabs]

You also need a system where the grogs are
a) fun to play
b) not nearly as powerful as the pc's
c) still feel like they are capable of doing their jobs.

Ars Magica had:
Everyone has a Wizard, a Companion, and some slew of grogs that are coop created/ For a scifi game, you want to do something like
Everyone has 2-3 characters they play in different parts of the game.
So for star trek.
Everyone has a bridge officer
Everyone has some flavor of science or engineering guy. (Think Lt Barclay, Wesley Crusher, Chief, etc... )
There is a wide array of red shirts, and orange shirts to play who are minor stat blocks and some personality quirks.

[Emerald]

We did something like this for a game awhile back. Two of the PCs led a goblin horde. When the goblins needed to do something, everyone rolled up a 1 HD goblin and played it for a few hours.

[...]

Scientists and Engineers in Tech-Heavy Games. In a space opera game we want scientist and helmsman characters, and we want them to be protagonists in the same sense as the ground team. Same with the mechanic in a mech game. We can do this by making them full PCs in the same sense that a ground team character or mech pilot would be, but giving everyone 2-3 characters.

I did a combination of the above in a Star Wars Saga game I ran. The PCs were a Wraith Squadron-style commando+starfighter team, and due to prior campaign events they failed to stop an Imperial attack on a shipyard and were going to get there two hours after the attack started. In the meantime, we shifted perspective to the shipyards to let the players try to hold off the invaders. I rolled up four kinds of level 5 nonheroic NPCs (the equivalent of level ~1.5 PCs) working at the shipyards--Scientist, Technician, Engineer, and Manager, corresponding to knowledge and communications guy, computer and droids guy, mechanics and explosives guy, and buffs and tactics guy, respectively--and assigned random quantities of each to one of the ships under construction.

The players each got to control one NPC of their choice to start while directing other NPCs as desired, and each time their chosen NPC died they took over another one (and yes, we did play that clip each time). If they managed to hold off the invaders--and it wasn't too difficult, it was roughly even odds, something like three dozen noncombatant NPCs on home territory with improvised explosive materials, plenty of droids, control over the local computer systems, etc. vs. a squad or two of stormtroopers--then they moved on to the next ship of random NPCs with a small bonus, like upgrading the emergency weapons from blaster pistols to blaster rifles or adding emergency blast doors; if they failed, they moved on to the next ship with a penalty like intermittent power failures or ionized cameras.

This repeated until they either held off three ships in a row (in which case they held the yards for the PCs) or lost three in a row (in which case they lost the yards), and they managed to win on the seventh ship. They liked actually finding individual stormtroopers to be a threat again and playing without the safety net of Force and Destiny points, and the fact that they were playing throwaway characters let them try some crazy stuff that a "real" 1st-level PC wouldn't dare to try.

So like sabs and ModelCitizen said, numerous mooks that are randomly generated, competent in different areas, and not at all attachment-forming for the players are a good way to go.

[Maxus]

Makes me think a bit of the Overlord games. Where you, personally, are badass, but you also have this feat:

Leader of Peons
You lead small men with short lives
Requirements: non-Kobold, non-Gnome and non-Goblin, character level 6
Benefit: You may control one squad of 4 Kobolds, Gnomes, or Goblins per hit die. It takes 2 weeks to summon your tiny army subsequent to their inevitable defeat.
In the event that they actual win a battle, they rebel and you lose your army until another can be summoned. In each squad, at least one must have one of the above feats. Additionally, you receive the following 'commanders':
- 1 level 3 wizard or level 3 trapsmith per 4 squads (16 guys + 1 leader)

And control your goblin horde as well as kick some ass yourself.

[Username17]

We did something like this for a game awhile back. Two of the PCs led a goblin horde. When the goblins needed to do something, everyone rolled up a 1 HD goblin and played it for a few hours.

Note: I do mean "rolled up," as in 3d6 down the line.

This represents a couple of very important revelations about larger casts versus having a single alter ego.

• Characters have to be able to work together. Unlike in Ars Magica, which suggests that a given party should include a powerful mage and a bunch of mooks, the correct table (in most instances) for when the goblins hit the field is to have everyone play goblins and move all of the powerful leaders to background positions.
• Transient characters do not have to be fair. D&D actually pioneered this back in the day. Characters died all the time, and "rolling them up" was part of the fun. But it doesn't have to be limited to characters who are going to die, it can be for characters that you are not going to play very long (at a time). So in the large cast scenario, you're only going to play the Quartermaster for a brief period before he gets handed off to someone else or you simply move on to the part of the game where you're actually playing the heroes. And it can be just as fun if the Quartermaster is a drunken fool as if he is a logistical genius.

• Scientists and Engineers in Tech-Heavy Games. In a space opera game we want scientist and helmsman characters, and we want them to be protagonists in the same sense as the ground team. Same with the mechanic in a mech game. We can do this by making them full PCs in the same sense that a ground team character or mech pilot would be, but giving everyone 2-3 characters.
• Grogs (in the Ars Magica sense, not AD&D Neckbeards). Members of a PC-led army or crime syndicate or security team or whatever. We don't want these guys to all be full PCs, because there are a lot of them and each PC may have his own little crew of NPCs who act when he's not around. This one I think is more suited for fast, random, and deliberately unbalanced character generation.

We have two different cases where it's useful to give each player multiple characters and each case has different requirements.

I don't think those are different cases. There is simply a sliding scale, where the more important a character in the cast is (that is, the more often they are liable to be played), the more sense it makes to spend longer times on their generation - and also the less sense it makes for them to be "unfairly" generated.

In the space ship example, you might have characters like the Doctor or the head of the repair crew who really didn't show up every episode, and characters like the Captain and the Chief Engineer who definitely did. Minor characters might be made more quickly, and possibly more unfairly, while major characters could be made slowly out of a point system that endeavored to be "fair". But I could definitely see there being "in between" characters who were only potentially important. They might be made on the same point system as the captain, but start with a bunch of their points unspent (to be filled in later if they turn out to be important), or rolled up on a chart that didn't output extreme results.

-Username17

[hogarth]

I haven't ever played in a game like Ars Magica, but I have played in D&D games where some of the PCs have peons at their command.

So take my comments with a big grain of salt, but here goes: In my experience, some players LOVE having multiple sock-puppets to play around with and some players (like me) HATE it. I can't stand sitting around doing nothing while Master Thespian describes in great detail what his entire smurf village is doing, having entire conversations with himself, etc. So make sure everyone is on the same page before you start a game like that.

[sabs]

Also, what will happen over time is that.. some characters will become 'fan favorites' and graduate from being randomrolled npcs to having their stats redesigned to reflect their accumulated coolness in game. A character that through roleplaying nad some lucky rolling in certain instances, turns out to just be a better character. When they get upgraded from red shirt 5, to Ensign Soo.

[Username17]

I haven't ever played in a game like Ars Magica, but I have played in D&D games where some of the PCs have peons at their command.

So take my comments with a big grain of salt, but here goes: In my experience, some players LOVE having multiple sock-puppets to play around with and some players (like me) HATE it. I can't stand sitting around doing nothing while Master Thespian describes in great detail what his entire smurf village is doing, having entire conversations with himself, etc. So make sure everyone is on the same page before you start a game like that.

The idea is that no player would ever be having a sock puppet discussion with themselves. It would be more like Wraith: where when it comes time to have a discussion between two characters they brought to the table, one of those characters would be handled by another player. In the Smurf Village example, when one player switched over to a Smurfy View, you'd get to play Angry Smurf while they got to be Hungry Smurf. Or whatever.

Still not everyone's cup of tea obviously. But I think it has a lot more promise than the MechWarrior/CthulhuTech suggestion of having one player play a single technician and then wait around with their thumb up their ass while another player engages in mech combat for forty five minutes.

-Username17

[K]

I think that playing a pure technician should probably just be a non-starter.

In Star Trek, Data and Riker sometimes do shifts in Engineering, but they also get to go on all missions while Jordi does not.

Background character don't need lines. Their job is to be in the background and the few times when they need a perspective, the DM can play that.

[hyzmarca]

I think that playing a pure technician should probably just be a non-starter.

In Star Trek, Data and Riker sometimes do shifts in Engineering, but they also get to go on all missions while Jordi does not.

Background character don't need lines. Their job is to be in the background and the few times when they need a perspective, the DM can play that.

Data and Riker do shifts in engineering because it's easier an cheaper to have the main characters do work that they realistically shouldn't be qualified qualified for than it is to bring in a guest star.

Having omnidisciplinarian soldier-scientists lets you save on the cast budget.

Paging Colonel Carter.

This can be done in a game, if you're willing to suspend disbelief. It doesn't work as well if you've got a realistic military organization.

That being said, Jack O'Neill is both a hot-shot special forces operator with many years of ground combat experience and a hot shot Fighter Jock with many years of air combat experience and a Colonel despite mostly working unacknowledgable black ops that wouldn't make him promotion-worthy, in the Air Force, an organization known for it's preference for specialization.

If people can suspend disbelief for that then they can suspend disbelief for a great deal.

Of course, if you don't want to, or can't, make omnidisciplinarian characters that can cover all possible adventure needs, then you end up with a situation where everyone plays Mario Party while the Decker plays his minigame. That's bad. Having spare characters for that is a good thing.

[Vebyast]

Having omnidisciplinarian soldier-scientists lets you save on the cast budget.

It's the dnd-cleric solution in space; as mentioned before, it just feels wrong that your super scientist has to be a part-time fighter to contribute in combat beyond cheerleading. Call it inability to suspend disbelief if you want, but it's annoying that what should be a large part of the setting (technology) is useless in combat.

[K]

You do know that Star Trek is a setting where regular ten-year-olds do Calculus and fifteen-year-olds sometimes pilot Galaxy class starships in battle? Basically, everyone is a genius and sometimes kids break the universe or create sentient races by accident (fucking Wesley!).

An army of geniuses can't be run in the same way as an army of high-school kids who can't get into college.

[Fuchs]

Isn't the market for "TV Show Style Military RPG" bigger than the market for "realistic style military RPG"? When I hear realistic I think "red tape" "waiting" "training" "drill" "SOP" and "orders", not "fun and exciting adventure".

[Prak]

Don't forget, PhDs in Omnidisciplinarianism includes a semester on robot drone control and sadistic science.

[K]

Isn't the market for "TV Show Style Military RPG" bigger than the market for "realistic style military RPG"? When I hear realistic I think "red tape" "waiting" "training" "drill" "SOP" and "orders", not "fun and exciting adventure".

Basically. Real soldiers and spies have no autonomy and very boring lives when people aren't shooting at them.

[Username17]

Isn't the market for "TV Show Style Military RPG" bigger than the market for "realistic style military RPG"? When I hear realistic I think "red tape" "waiting" "training" "drill" "SOP" and "orders", not "fun and exciting adventure".

Sure. But TV style Militaries have a lot of characters whose participation in major encounters is profoundly limited. Let's consider Gurren Lagann. Specifically, let's consider the character of Leeron. He's an important character. He is vital to the success of many missions. He has lots of dialog. He... doesn't have a fucking giant robot and has to sit out each and every battle sequence.

Now there are a couple of things you could do about that:

• You could put Leeron under MC control, and disallow any player from playing Leeron.
• You could change the Leeron character into one that hops into his own giant robot and fights alongside the rest of the team in giant robot battles.
• You could expand the cast and have the player who plays Leeron during the segments Leeron actually interacts with play someone else during the giant robot fights.

Obviously, the third one is the one that most accurately depicts what happens in the TV Show.

-Username17

[hogarth]

The idea is that no player would ever be having a sock puppet discussion with themselves. It would be more like Wraith: where when it comes time to have a discussion between two characters they brought to the table, one of those characters would be handled by another player.

So in a game session, Player Alice plays Captain Picard at one point and Ensign Soo (to use sabs's example) at another point. So suppose Alice wants to have Picard and Soo become best friends and solve mysteries together or some shit. Is the idea that I'm forced to play Ensign Soo in order to go along with Alice's idea even though I would rather play my own PCs (Data and Barclay) instead?

[Username17]

The idea is that no player would ever be having a sock puppet discussion with themselves. It would be more like Wraith: where when it comes time to have a discussion between two characters they brought to the table, one of those characters would be handled by another player.

So in a game session, Player Alice plays Captain Picard at one point and Ensign Soo (to use sabs's example) at another point. So suppose Alice wants to have Picard and Soo become best friends and solve mysteries together or some shit. Is the idea that I'm forced to play Ensign Soo in order to go along with Alice's idea even though I would rather play my own PCs (Data and Barclay) instead?

The idea is that if the characters split up Picard/Soo and Data/Barclay, that you would have to play Soo and Alice would have to play Barclay.

-Username17

[Whatever]

If it helps, you can think of everyone as having one "Bridge Team" character and one or more "Away Team" characters. At no point does "Bridge Team" go on surface exploration missions, and at no point does the "Away Team" run the ship. So whichever scene you're doing determines which of your characters you're using.

[Red_Rob]

Actually, it's more that some of the bridge crew occasionally go on away team missions and some of the lower ranks turn up on the bridge now and again to lend their expertise to the current problem. When an away mission crops up you pick who's going to the surface and the people who's characters stayed on the ship play redshirts and get to wander into caves and poke strange flowers without worrying about risking their real characters. It gets away from the captain having to go on every away mission because he's a PC.

We played a campaign of Shadowrun kind of like this at school (it was 2nd edition, so that tells you how long ago we're talking!). The idea was that we were playing the agents attached to a shady Shadowrunner agency. We genned up around 10 Shadowrunners with their own specialisations and character traits, and each adventure would start with the client coming and laying out the details of the job, the known risks, pay etc. We would then choose which runners to assign to the mission, one per player, and take it from there. It worked really well and the campaign ended up being one of the most memorable I've played. The major benefit was you could have specialised team members like a heavy weapons and demolitions expert or a decker, and not have them wondering what to do during missions that didn't play to their skills.

[Username17]

Perhaps the key insight from Ars Magica is that an individual Grog is not "you" and isn't even "yours". You may have written up Ensign Ro, and you may have contributed her to the Grog Stack, and she may even be your favorite Grog. But she's still a Grog and the task of playing her goes to whoever happens to be convenient at the time.

Similarly, "main" characters actually are "You" and you keep that character sheet with you. You don't surrender Riker to a "main character stack" or anything. So if Riker is your main character, then in any scene with Riker in it, you play Riker. In scenes without Riker, you get whatever Grogs happen to be in those scenes.

It's entirely possible for a player to get attached to a specific Grog or Grogs and request playing them in any scenes they appear where their main character doesn't. But in those scenes with both their Main and their favorite Grog, they still have to surrender it to someone who wouldn't otherwise be participating in the scene.

-Username17

[hogarth]

Perhaps the key insight from Ars Magica is that an individual Grog is not "you" and isn't even "yours". You may have written up Ensign Ro, and you may have contributed her to the Grog Stack, and she may even be your favorite Grog. But she's still a Grog and the task of playing her goes to whoever happens to be convenient at the time.

Maybe it works better in practice (as I noted, I've never played Ars Magica). But in general I wouldn't always trust my fellow players to create PCs ("grog" or "non-grog") that I'm interested in playing, in terms of personality, motivation, etc. So that means I sometimes get stuck playing Ensign Ro according to someone else's idea of what an interesting PC is, even though I'd be happier if she just jumped off a cliff or ran away, never to be seen or heard from again.

[Username17]

Perhaps the key insight from Ars Magica is that an individual Grog is not "you" and isn't even "yours". You may have written up Ensign Ro, and you may have contributed her to the Grog Stack, and she may even be your favorite Grog. But she's still a Grog and the task of playing her goes to whoever happens to be convenient at the time.

Maybe it works better in practice (as I noted, I've never played Ars Magica). But in general I wouldn't always trust my fellow players to create PCs ("grog" or "non-grog") that I'm interested in playing, in terms of personality, motivation, etc. So that means I sometimes get stuck playing Ensign Ro according to someone else's idea of what an interesting PC is, even though I'd be happier if she just jumped off a cliff or ran away, never to be seen or heard from again.

It does work pretty well in Ars Magica (much better than the thrice bedamned magic system in that fucking game). I think the thing you're not getting is that the Grogs are in fact about as complicated as AD&D characters. They don't have pages of backstory provided for them or long lists of interests and skills. You get a short stat line and a couple proficiencies. It's a rather basic role playing prompt. Ensign Ro has a decent enough stat line, but her Discipline score is markedly bad. Also she's a Bajoran. And you can take that role playing prompt in whatever direction you want.

It's like playing an AD&D character with rolled stats. Features in the stat line can be role playing prompts, but the basic unfairness of it all doesn't weigh as heavily because you only play any particular Grog transiently, and often have a couple of Grogs to choose from.

-Username17