After Action Report: Frozen War: Downfall

See? That wasn’t so bad.

As a game master, I think I can tell when a session goes well, and when it does not. A poor session has distracted players, slow responses, and quick goodbyes at the end. A good session has eager players talking over one another, and babbling commentary at the end. Last nights game had all the signs of the latter, oh boy did it.

The tricky part with a war game, particularly a futuristic one, is the lethality of the weapons. While futuristic soldiers get great armor, their opponents get even better weapons. However, Dr. Kromm had some great advice on how to run a cinematic war: use lots of suppressive, have grenades and such hit some distance away, and keep most actual gun fights with pistols and other light weapons. I also used “goon” rules for most of the enemy soldiers (and allied goon-soldiers too, to be fair), where they didn’t bother to defend, and only had 1 HP before they passed out. The result had the contradictory “scary but cinematic” feeling I was hoping for: I managed to take an arm from a player, badly wound one, knock out another, and scare the holy hell out of the last one, but I didn’t actually kill off any PC. The players wanted it to be a mark of honor that they survived, and I wanted them to actually survive, so walking the line between cake walk and slaughter-fest wasn’t easy, but I pulled it off, thanks to Kromm’s advice, and the surprising versatility and realism of GURPS.

Story-wise, I managed to keep the pace up. It took nearly 7 hours to play out (with interruptions), but nobody actually complained (Tony had to “leave” early, but instead kept coming back to play his character when we needed him. Kudos!), we managed to get alot done (I didn’t have to shortcut through anything), and they did all three final missions. And won. Crazy. I also introduced, uh, 18 NPCs, and the players actually kept them all straight, and cared about everyone they were supposed to care about.

I don’t think I could possibly run this game more tightly. Swift pacing, sweet action, great player response, rich characterizations all around, I’d have to rate this session a rare, golden 10. I bet I’ll have my players beating down my door for this. My only complaints so far: Tony seems weak on the RP front, but that’s to be expected with his lack of experience, and I failed at several rules, forgetting encumbrance, not specifically targetting players when I really should have, and gravity, and finally, I need to stat up my hardcore NPC bad guys. That will come, I think.

All in all, a success. I am pleased.

Stage Fright

I haven’t run a game in several months, not since WoD: Witchcraft ended (with a whimper rather than a bang, alas), and so this will be the first to break the drought. And then it sweeps back in: stage fright.

I always get nervous before a game. I’m probably the most well-prepared GM I know, but there’s always that point before I’ve really put pencil to paper, where I don’t really know beyond the general idea of what I want, and all I can see are the gaping holes, the flaws. It’s alot of work to get past that initial barrier, and so I give myself plenty of time, and invariably, it turns out ok. But it still turns my stomach, everytime.

The first session is always the worst.

I’ll have a new player joining us. The pressure should be low, but it doesn’t feel that way. Still, I’m sure when I’m in my seat, describing everything for the group, it’ll all come together.

Just gotta make sure to review the rules (Simplified suppression fire! Grenades!), make sure the NPCs are ok, and I have the proper sequence of events. Everything else has already been taken care of. Wish me luck!

Aliens

Of course, writing space opera material requires aliens. I used to hate rubber-forehead aliens until Mass Effect helped me realize that the problem with starfish aliens is that they’re awfully hard to relate to. You can’t fall in love with a floating jellyfish from a triple-gendered species that thinks in a language of colors and tones. You can’t punch a giant stone-monolith-brain that controls fungal-worm minions in the face with any kind of satisfaction. Real aliens force us to think more abstractly. And, you know, that’s cool, but when it comes to the rule of cool, the rule of fun, we want beautiful space princesses to romance and evil space warlords to defeat.

Of course, the easiest way to do this is to have genetically engineered humans. After all, in the sorts of pulpy swashbuckling tales that space opera often stand in for, stalwart British sailors made French or Spanish (or Japanese or African) princesses swoon and punched evil German, Chinese, Russian or, I dunno, American Warlords in the face. Now, the warlord of Mars is just another human, removed from his ancestry via some genetic modifications to make mars more hospitable, and that waifish sweetheart on the run is a genetically engineered cat-girl pleasure-slave who just wants to live a free life.

This is all fine and well, but sometimes we want to explore truly alien ideas. What would it be like to be from a triple-gendered species? Or intelligent water-breathers? Or from a hive-minded “pack-individual” species? We enjoy Starfish aliens because they explore fascinating biologies and psychologies, but we can’t relate to them. Thus, the ideal Rubber Forehead alien is a melding between genetically engineered human (someone we can relate to and fight and deal with in a heroic, adventurous manner) and a starfish alien (something creepy-awesome and totally different).

Robert Sawyer has some interesting things to say about alien design, that I agree with a great deal. If anything bothers me more than the Rubber Forehead alien, it’s the Planet of Hats. Star Trek is probably the worst offender when it comes to aliens: Klingons (for example) are Space Vikings. They think and act just like a human does (they have males and females, they get married, they fight duels over honor, they fight over territory, they eat meat and vegetables), except they’re all warriors. All of them. Every last one of them. Try really hard to picture a klingon scientist? What do you get? A raging gorilla space-viking with a test-tube and a labcoat. A klingon diplomat? A raging gorilla space-viking who sits in your embassy speaking a crazy, growly language and babbling about honor all the time. Because the klingons have nothing to make them distinctive from humans, they have to have a hat, and sliding beyond that hat violates their alienness: a klingon who does not act like a warrior is just a human with funny looking brow.

So how do you avoid this?

Whenever I’ve written setting material, I’ve always used what I call the “rule of threes:” I must be able to see whatever I’m writing about from three different perspectives, and be able to name at least three different cool things about it/them.

For aliens, my core three “things” are mechanics, biology and psychology. Mechanics is hard to explain outside of RPG terms and isn’t particularly useful if you’re, say, reading this post because you’re curious about writing up aliens for a book or something. Basically, mechanics asks how an alien plays differently from a human. This can be simple: My Quetzali (whom I will be using as an example in this post) run very quickly, have lots of innate weaponry, and tend to be very strong. Of those three, speed is probably the most important in an ultra-tech GURPS game, as ST doesn’t matter for much beyond big guns and encumbrance. Other races might be stranger: I’m toying with giving a silicon race “Cannot Learn” and Modular Skills, so where a human learns from experience, this race readjusts where it has applied its limited mental facilities, giving them a very different experience curve. Another race (those monolithic minds above) might have 5 bodies per character, and the player simply decides which body he wants to bring into battle today. Each alien plays differently.

Biology boils down to interesting chemistries and biological notions. The Quetzali above have very large gender dimorphism: the males are huge, impressive, loud and colorful, where the females are bland, smaller (human sized) and more intelligent. I was inspired by lions. The silicon critters mentioned above are, of course, silicon, so they do things like exhale sand and start to freeze to death below 50° F (and that’s only because they’re “arctic” silicon life). These can be anything as long as its one thing that makes the alien broadly different from humans when it comes to form and function.

Finally, psychology should include at least one thing that makes the aliens different from humans when it comes to thinking. This must be deeper than a hat, and typically follows from their biology. The Quetzali, coming from a harem-based predator species, have little conception of fear (if you were a 9-foot tall, 500 pound meat-eater, not much would scare you either, even if it should, like a gun), and they’re very status conscious. The silicon life might be mostly solitary, until they come together for an occassional meet/greet/breeding session (say, once a year), much like many arctic species do, and they must rely a great deal on reputation to ensure they can earn mates, making them very “honorable” and conscious of reputation and face (not status, like the Quetzali above: they don’t care whether you think they are badass, they care whether you think they are honest and not going to kill you).

When you’re done, stop and look back at what you’ve created, and make sure you can see it from three different perspectives. I like to try to picture them from a combat/investigation/negotiation perspective. Can a Quetzali fit all three? A female might behave alot like a human, being a soldier, a scientist or a bureaucrat. Her “drabness” encourages her to take “drab” jobs. But the male, bright, status-concious, lazy and impressive, chooses more fun, glorious jobs, like warrior, philosopher and politician/dictator.

There’s nothing wrong with basing your species on an earth-based culture and animal, but make sure you file the serial numbers off. It can’t look exactly like the species in question, or the players will quickly dismiss your critters as “like dogs” or “like cats.” The best fantasy races, for example, tend to be quite different from anything else on earth: You can’t tell me what animal an orc is based on (A pig? A boar? A wolf?). The same should be true of aliens. Using my Quetzali as an example again: I’ve always liked how different an unusual lions are, with their harems and their predatory hijacking and their broad gender dimorphism, with the women doing all the work and the men sitting around looking pretty. However, “Proud, warrior cat-people” has been done to death. So I needed to make them different: I started with scales, and then started slapping on the traits of other, applicable animals: feathers from dinosaurs (a friend of mine pointed out that they reminded him of peacocks, because of the brilliantly colored masculine “manes” resembling peacock tails), the venemous bite of a dragon or a komodo dragon, the chromatic colors of dragons, and I retained some of the lesser known lion traits, such as the females going into heat when one male defeats another, or males who take over a harem eating/killing the children of the previous male. With sufficient work, your creation looks creative, rather than stolen. Always cover your tracks.

In all other regards, the alien should be human were possible. Quetzali stand upright, speak with their mouths, use their hands to grasp things, get married (sort of), romance, have sex the way humans might, and even the wierder stuff is done in a fashion a human can relate to. The silicons should have an obvious “face,” and hands and legs, and they should think more or less the way a human does, and so on. Because these aliens will be played by humans, or interact with human players, they should only be as different as is necessary to establish them as alien, and in all other regards be something a human can handle.

If you’ve got all that, you should have an alien race your players can enjoy, that they’ll find unique and interesting, and that can be characterized beyond a mere hat.

Insomniac Soldiers

My wife is looking at me (at 11:35 am) and asking why I’m not in bed yet. I hate it when my schedule is like this.

My Space Opera Military mini-project goes apace, with my load-outs nearly complete. This little project is doing just what I hoped it would do: motivating me to work on something (for my players) in such a way that will benefit my long-term project, namely to create enemy templates. Already, I’m getting a picture of what a (human) TL 10 fighting force will look like. Now I just need to create some “player” templates for these lesser soldiers (not the be confused with the Soldier, who I should probably rename the Space Marine, since he’s even on tvtropes), and those will serve as the prototypes for my NPC soldier stats.

Interesting tidbit: I hate power cells. I don’t mind the concept of them, but I hate the fact that your space opera hero has like 50 different gadgets with 50 different power cells that run out at 50 different paces. It’s too much to track! So, I’ve been coming around to the idea of unifying multi-gadgets (such as complete armor systems), and one idea that popped out was a single power-cell pack that powers all the gadgets.

Ultra tech discusses how best to do this, by simply noting all the power-cells and then bundling them all under the next higher power-cell-category. If you have 10 different gadgets all with B/10 hours, for example, you can just have 1 C cell power them for 10 hours. Easy! Until you have an A/1 hour gadget and a 2B/2 day gadget, and so on.

So here’s what I did: assume that an AA cell has 1 “power point,” an A cell has 10 “power points” and so on. Determine the power/hour ratio for all gadgets (for example, an A/5 hour gadget uses 2 power points per hour), add these all up, and you’ll know how much power every gadget uses per hour, and then you simply apply whatever new power cells you want, and determine how long those power cells will last (assuming continuous usage). For my soldiers, I found that all their gadgets used 46 power points per hour, so I replaced all those power cells with 3 C cells (providing 3,000 power points), which gives the soldier 65 hours of power, just shy of 3 days.

Nice, huh? ^_^

Creating Worlds

I must confess I’ve actually been working on my little Space Opera project for ages now. In an effort to keep it all generic and “purely GURPS,” I’ve poked around at tvtropes.com and ripped things straight from the books. Even so, it’s been slow going, and I’m beginning to tire. I must face cold hard facts: I haven’t run a game in months, and it’s wearing on me. Writing in the abstract is not nearly as much fun as writing for people. I have some thoughts on why I’ve avoided running recently, but I’ll discuss those at some other time.

So, I have a new project for myself: Design a quick-run military sci-fi scenario for the infant setting that’s still growing in my head. Creating a scenario will give me something to work towards, so I won’t need to design such abstract rules. Instead, I’ll have actual situations in mind. Plus I have Dawn of War 2 on the brain.

Thus, I must create a world to act as the theater to this war. This conjures up lots of immediate thoughts, like why would people go to war in space? Sure, it’s Space Opera, but “Because it’s cool!” doesn’t fly for alot of people anymore. I can come up with a few reasons:

  • Unique resources (real ones, like habitable worlds or Berrylium deposits, or fake ones, like alien technology or applied phlebtonium),
  • Infrastructure (Factories, jump gates and laboratories don’t build themselves)
  • Position (Assuming limitations on FTL, some points in space might behave like bottle-necks, or open up more territory for an attack),
  • Pride (some alien races just love war, while even in less aggressive species, a general needs some way to make a carreer)
  • Paranoia (if any of the above are true, you might be better off attacking before you get attacked)

GURPS Space, like most GURPS books, offers some interesting insight into how you might create a setting. Among them, it estimates approximately 5% of all stars will have worlds with complex life. That’s as good a number as any, and if we assume that means “One in 20 star systems is interesting enough to colonize and/or fight over,” we can reach some interesting numbers: There are 100 star systems within 20 light years of earth. That means, within 20 light years, there are approximately 5 interesting worlds. If we use generic GURPS FTL travel times, that’s about 1 day per parsec (about 3 light years), which means there’s 5 interesting worlds within a week’s travel of earth. If we assume interstellar government cannot exert real power a month away from its central worlds, we get a radius around earth of 80 light years. Poking around on the internet shows that within 75 light years, there are nearly 4,000 stars, which gives us 200 interesting worlds… plenty to fight over!

Among my infrastructural ideas, I like the idea of using Jump Gates, listed in GURPS Spaceships, as an alternative to normal space travel (which will probably be Warp, since it allows a ship to be detected coming in, and thus defended against in an awesome space battle, it allows ships to go to uncharted systems relatively easily, which is vital for space opera, and it lets the crew encounter Strange Space Phenomenon that are the bread and butter of most Captain and Crew type Space Opera). Interestingly, it costs approximately 150 times the cost of a star drive to create a jump gate, but this is fair as you’re creating infrastructure that will benefit many other ships. If this allows rapid transit, it becomes analagous to laying down rails between two cities, which makes our inner worlds more “connected” than the strange, rogue outerworlds, but all it takes to fix this is some serious industry on both sides. This also creates vital choke points, as navies will fight over jump gates, and possibly destroy them to prevent rapid enemy incursion.

Such meandering thoughts. Well, the whole point of this blog is to give me “someone to talk to” when nobody rational would like to listen to what I have to say. Well, except for you, whoever you are mysterious reader. I need to set aside some time and come up with a world for my scenario, and see how it shapes elements. I promise, it won’t be a one-biome world (no “Jungle worlds” for me, thanks), as the rest of this post should make clear how clarifying putting the abstract into practice can really be.

Space Opera

I’m a hard sci-fi fan. I have been ever since I dug into Asimov’s works as a kid, and even to this day, I have a soft spot for science fiction that details science that works, rather than hand-waved techno babble in a universe where space works like an ocean and the writers clearly have no sense of scale.

However, Mass Effect showed me I was wrong, that I actually liked Space Opera. My problem, in retrospect, was that I associated Space Opera with crappy tales like Star Wars and, especially, Star Trek. In Mass Effect, the writers did have a decent sense of scale (you have TWO different forms of FTL travel, and the galaxy-spanning one requires vast, forerunner artifacts), the aliens aren’t from a Planet of Hats (The Salarians make great soldiers AND great scientists AND great thieves), and so on. Mass Effect’s adventure was pure, thought-provoking fun!

I’ve begun to catalogue the Space Opera I do like. That includes Farscape, Firefly, Cowboy Bebop, Doctor Who, Revelation Space, Mass Effect and Warhammer 40k. Reluctantly, I even have to admit the recent Star Trek reboot was really great. The good stuff simplifies science, yes, but it does so in a way that people enjoy. The aliens of Mass Effect look and behave essentially like people, but that’s because humans find it hard to enjoy or envision talking to a sentient bush that speaks in radio waves and thinks in blossom-colors. Ships crash into ships in titanic space battles, but that’s because awesome space battles are awesome. The great space opera shows you the universe as it is, or as it might be, but through a lens of bright colors and vivid imagery that appeals to our human, animal minds. It’s a galaxy filled with sex and beautiful nebulae, where broad-jawed humans blast at evil, alien overlords with blaster bolts. Hard sci-fi is great, but settings like THS are hard to grasp, to run, to enjoy.

I’ve never really run a Space Opera game. Most of my games are either fantasy or, much more commonly, modern horror (World of Darkness). The last time I ran sci-fi was Traveller (which, in retrospect, was also Space Opera) in high school. Thus, I’m putting together a GURPS Space Opera game, similar in form and function to Dungeon Fantasy and Action, a book of templates and rules that focus GURPS’ broad toolkit down to what makes Space Opera fun. Expect to hear more about this little project over time, as it occupies my thoughts quite a bit.