Incoherent Play, Bucket Seats, Aliens and Chainguns...

[Steven Stewart]

This is somewhat of a continuation of this actual play post-->http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=22317.0

I'd like to pick up from there with the next game we tried, which was a D20 Modern/Future adaptation of the Aliens V. Predator world. Focus on these discussions is the incoherency of the group to start. From there we will see where the discussion goes. I would really recommend reading the link above before commenting.


Background and Intro
Well sometime after the Eberron game, we took a break with Steve as GM. I think it was around session 3 or 4, and the players had just finished the "adventure" I had cooked up, and I was a bit burned out. That game is described in the above mentioned thread. So we switch off.

One thing to keep in mind is that from my background, the last 5 years of gaming or so had involved "switching off" to different games for various reasons or another so this didn't send off alarm bells in my head, in fact I was actually the one suggesting we break, and Dennis was chompin' at the bit to try out his Aliens adaptation. I commented on this before, but I always thought it was to give the GM's a break or give opportunity to play something new. What I think breaks down that hypothesis now, is that never once once did we go back and revist that same game, in the same SIS.

The players were the same as the Previous Thread – Gene, Pete, Steve, and Dennis. This time Dennis is the GM. For info on the players see the previous thread.

When I first sat down to write the first draft this game today, I thought, this one is more coherent than the Eberron game. After writing the first draft, I realized that I don't actually remember that much of all the game, particularly the mission objectives details, just the general stuff. Now this game did take place 2 years ago, so some of that might just be my memory, but I am also open to the idea that maybe we as a group didn't click with solid SIS either, or I might have more detailed memory. Rather instead what I remember is the stuff I got jazzed about, and "the mission objective" isn't really high up on the list, rather the inbetween stuff and slow spiral of paranoia of my character is the part I remember the most. I will state though I do remember being very aware of the mission during the game, all the details and specifics. Its just two years later I don't.

The Game and the Set-up
Dennis did a lot of prep, good prep. He knew the movies well, and a lot of the backstory.  I think this is a case of bringing the setting to life such that we players all at some level or another were engaged with it.

This game was actually two parts.

Part one -The McGuffin

I honestly don't remember session 1 that well. I played a company many (Walen Utani) and Pete and Gene played marines. I remember being pissed off that we couldn't bring our guns into the space station, and generally being a superprick to the station manager for not helping us figure out where the guys who had the biological weapons had gone to. There was some authority / credibility issues as well over the fiction, mostly between Dennis and Myself, and to some extent Pete getting pissed at my character's actions.

It would probably be really good to analyze this game, I just don't remember that much of it, other than my playing style being nearly dysfunctional. Without Dennis' input, I don't think we spend that much time on this part of the game. The details are just too fuzzy.

In retrospect, when I talk about being jazzed about Dennis' aliens game I forget that this even happened, its like in my game history memory it didn't happen. I went through the first draft of this account without even mentioning it. Only through going back and thinking on it do I remember that it even occurred. In hindsight (and in my mental history of our gaming) I wish we had just started with part 2. But Part 2 was a hell of a good time, with the exception of the very last scene, probably one of my top 3 games.

Part two – The Infestation

After getting the McGuffin of where the aliens are, we proceed to part 2. I specifically say it that way, since that is what I was thinking at the time, now we get to see some aliens. I think the actual mission was something like bring Bishop to justice, but Maddog sort of developed his own mission objectives by the end of the game. There were no aliens in part 1. 

The Situtation – We are a marine strikeforce sent to a planet to find Bishop's lab, and bring him to justice. Bishop had taken off with some Walen Utani (phonetic spelling sorry I don't have the sheet in front of me) tech. This happened to be the Aliens from the famous movie.

The Characters – Now by this point we had played a session in the universe. Pete and Gene stuck with their characters and I switched mine out. I can't remember if company man died or not, or just was pulled off the case and sent to jail for his asshattery that he did on the station. Also for this mission the Company man wasn't required. I seem to recall that for the first session one of us had to play the company man, and I volunteered. It was understood when we started the second mission that marines were called for!

Pete – Playing the Squad Commander – Fast Hero with pistols

Gene – The Doctor and Scientist – as usual Gene really got into aspects of his character, apparently this one it was the find scientificy stuff out during the mission, which ultimately was the groups downfall and got in the way equally as much as my character's decent into madness.

Me – Maddog Throckmorton – An unstable marine, with a water cooled chain gun (think the first predator movie but with smartgun features and compensating harness). He was the heavy gunner in the group. Tough Hero (why would anyone play anything other than that in this *type* of game? (Tough Hero = more hitpoints + better saves = lives longer in the aliens world). It didn't help that I had just watched full-metal jacket before we played.

So basically, yeah!, we have a coherent group of characters. Basically we were all in the leadership postion or special skills positions of the squad, the other squadies were NPCs with rifles. We have a pacifist android NPC, and Dennis did a sweet job of giving us the skinny on the universe, including the weapon choices, squad structure, any questions what so ever on being a marine in the Aliens Universe. I really don't do him enough credit with this play report, he really had his shit down.

Another interesting point is that there was no need to have equality among the characters, I believe Pete had some Pistols, Gene standard rifle, but I had 4d10 spitting death chain-gun. Pete was the squad leader, and Maddog just some grunt, but I was more than happy with that. 

Now at a social contract level I told everyone that Maddog would be unstable, that is a given from his name (one giganctic flag I think). No one at this point seemed to mind, but I think perhaps there was some unspoken assumptions.

A) They probably assumed that his instability wouldn't impact the mission
B) They probably assumed that I would respect don't turn on another player code

I got the idea for Maddog from Dennis backstory that he explained to us, which was that Walen Utani had basically been working with the Marines to get back Bishop before he did something stupid with the techonology (i.e. aliens) that he had. None of the characters were told exactly what the threat was. Just some sort of biological weapon. Now I could be completely screwing up the plot, that is how I remember it. It would be interesting to see if I got it right when Dennis comes back from Holiday.

So based on this I get the idea that the Marines aren't going to send their "best of best that they want to save for promotions. Rather they are going to send the 7th Squad in, the group that gets shit done but is pretty embarrassing regarding the fallout of their actions, and stuffed with marines they wouldn't actually mind being rid of including two marines that somehow found out the real nature of the menace during the first mission." I think I even started off in the drop ship with Maddog telling everyone that this was it, that they had put him in this shit to get rid of him, and that it must be some bad shit they were sending the 7th into. Once he found out that the other guys knew what was down there, he definitely thought they were being sent on a suicide mission to get rid of them all. There some discussion over how the 7th was under new leaderships since the incident of the space station.

Also I had picked up on Gene's character for this description. I do remember in the first session Gene whipped up some "truth drugs" to give the gun-runners/smuggler types to tell us where they dropped the crates (containing aliens!) to Bishop. Much as Dennis didn't like the critical fumble rules in Eberron, he didn't have any problem as GM screwing up Gene when he failed his doctoring rolls. Basically the truth serum killed you, in a horrible, horrible way. Gene got the info we needed from the 2nd smuggler after injecting the serum into the first*. So this event that happened also contributed to the shared image of the 7th.

So before we even start the second mission, we have some collaboration going on. I quite enjoyed this part of it and thought that we are all on the same page of having a misfit band of disposable marines. To me this game was like a CoC game, its not if you complete the mission, rather its how and when you die during the mission that is the interesting bits. This may have been a reaction to mission 1, I don't know. But I kind of thought we were all the same page. Certainly it seemed like it for a bit. 

Finally, before pausing here at the game start, it might be worth mentioning, that for all intensive purposes this was supposed to be a one shot game. We had done one McGuffin mission (already mentioned above that I don't remember that much of it), and this was going to be the go after aliens mission. It actually went one more than that just do to the length of the mission, but I want to point out that I thought the other players were with me on what this game was about - the ragtag group of the 7th going after some horrible biological weapon and probably wouldn't make it out alive. I know that Dennis (the GM) was on the same page, and I thought that Pete and Gene were. But in retrospect, I know now they weren't. Although that didn't show up until end-game.

So before talking about what actually happened in the game, the cool thing that Dennis did to establish real tension among the players, and the final shoot-out that broke the game, is there any questions on the above?

-----------------------------
*This is not like the interrogation scene that Ron mentions in another post in case anyone is wondering. I don't recall any tension among the players at all. Rather it was somewhat humorous dark comedy that all four players including the GM enjoyed. There wasn't any gross out or anything of the kind. In fact it was probably the closest thing we had to "stakes" during the game, failing the roll gave up the information just in a very different way than we thought than passing it. There were some GM/player clashes in the first game between me and Dennis but I don't recall the specifics so its not worth mentioning other than to say they were there, and that probably contributed to the creation of Maddog, not to piss him off, but rather as an attempt to "go with it".

[Dennis Laffey]

Hey Steve, and everyone else.  I'm back from Australia now. 

Steve's got the timeline a bit off (the space station with him playing the company man was the second adventure, after the Maddog incident). 

For anyone interested in the way the game played out in detail (over the I think 4 sessions we played it), I kept a log going in the d20 Future section of the Wizards.com boards http://boards1.wizards.com/showthread.php?t=372165 where I go by the handle of Lord Gwydion.  It shouldn't be necessary to read all of it to help us out, but anyone who's interested in the details might want to at least read through the stuff I and Steve wrote in it.

Basically, the game played out like Steve said, but in reverse order.  First mission was to send in the Marines and get Dr. Bishop (full of suspense-building, paranoia, a few tense battles, more or less completing the mission, and then a near TPK).  Second mission was to go to the space station and retrieve what DNA samples Bishop got away with during the first mission.  Third mission was to finally track down & capture/kill Bishop, and eliminate the aliens he'd created. 

During the first mission (2 sessions, or maybe 1.5) I tried hard to get everyone in the frame of mind for the game, and to prepare everyone for the fact that their characters could well die, as that's more or less the nature of the sci-fi/horror genre of the movies. So an unstable marine (Maddog) didn't upset my plans and I had no problem with the near TPK created by Gene and Steve's in-character confrontation.   In fact I still joke about the incident, saying how the only thing in the game that I wasn't happy with was that Steve managed to kill more PCs than my creatures did. 

In the second mission, Steve and I butted heads.  Partially, this was due to me as GM not being fully prepared for what Steve's character was trying to do, and also due to me being a bit slavish to the textual rules of d20 rather than letting the game take a potentially interesting story path.  I wasn't intending to railroad the other players into my plot, but it felt like Steve was trying to take all the challenge out of the game with an unexpected (and strategically smart) move that could well have left me with nothing prepared and about 5 more hours of game time left to play. 

So, although I felt like a jerk doing it, I made it nearly impossible for Steve to accomplish what he wanted to accomplish.  He kept at it, though, and instead of finally letting it work (or thinking of a clever way to make it work with what I'd planned) I just kept letting him try and fail again and again.  It was a bad way to play things out on my part, I admit. 

The third mission (last session) went fairly well, if I remember correctly.  We didn't have many player vs. player issues, partly  because I think we'd gotten more in line with the setting and our characters, and because I had designed the mission so that the other players could surprise me and I'd still have stuff left to pull out of the hat. 

[Dennis Laffey]

Does no one want to discuss this, or are Steve and I both a little too rambling in our posts?  I'd be happy to narrow down the discussion to one of the two main problem points (the Maddog TPK incident, and the Joker/Station Manager incident) if that will help.

[Simon C]

I think that the reason you're not getting the response you want to this post is that at the end of your last post, you ask "are there any questions before I go on?"  I would take the lack of response to be an invitation to continue, ending with some very specific questions.

I'm interested in this discussion, so don't take lack of response as lack of interest.

[Steven Stewart]

Hi all, I have been giving it a week, busy time of year type of thing before continuing. But yeah Simon, I took the silence as, no questions time to follow through.  I figured I would follow up soon, but this week I got a hell of a life change type of decision to go over. Now that's done, I will probably continue with some more of the actual play stuff in the near future.

Cheers,

Steve

[Ron Edwards]

Hi guys,

I for one am following and will respond in detail later, because my internet access is limited for a few more days yet. Please discuss stuff without me, though.

Best, Ron