[Kpachoapmee / Krasnoarmeets] Enemy at the Ronnies Gates

[contracycle]

Is there a way to tie the accumulation of experience and coping mechanisms into the moving forward of the mission/campaign timeline? Perhaps some mechanic where the death of characters with a certain total value (above starting values) moves the scenarios forward?

I think it could work thematically.

Now thats evil.  Thoroughly diabolical.  But I agree, it should work.

I've had some more thoughts on how a "rear area" might be experienced.  I wonder if something like the Inpsectres Fraqnchise might be borrowed, or the base-creation system from Con-X, in order to procure player buy-in to part of thre setting other than the front itself.  So perhaps there should be a group creation task of a bunker or command post or similar, to which the characters retire and where their vodka and ciggarettes are stored.  And you bring this part to life by some semi-ritualised interactions - they have to go to the command post before each mission to receive their orders, and retrun there afterward tpo be debriefed.  Also, the supplies in the bunker can then also become a subject or play: if you established a resourcing system that assumed a default state of shortage, then frex rolling for such supplies as have managed to make it through this week might itself be frought with tension.  It also generates more grist for the mission mill, because perhaps the vodka truck was strafed this week and "other arrangements" will have to be made.

I think there might be quite a bit to be made out of this sort of thing, and you appear to be familiar with the army's organisational structure so you might already be in a postion to do this in an informed manner.  It also provides from some human interactions, which will largely be lacking from a purely skirmish-based game.  Quite a lot of hijinks can go on this sort of context; in Chicken Hawk, Robert Mason mentions an incident in which a Huey disapeared and everyone used the opportunity to claim that stuff they had traded to other units had actually been on this chopper when it went down, and thats why the items in question could no longer be found - even though, as Mason pointed out, if you totalled up the mass of all the stuff it was alleged to have been carryinbg it would never have been able to take off.  I think these sorts of things are often an important part of the military experience, and more importantly, in the story telling of military experience.

[komradebob]

Now thats evil.  Thoroughly diabolical.  But I agree, it should work.

Wanna make it more diabolical?

The accumulated points that move the camapign forward are based on the survivors' attachments to the killed characters.

Everybody loved Piotr, the simple farmboy from the Caucausus who sang peasant songs back at camp to pass the time. It was a helluva blow when that Hitlerite sniper put one straight through his helmet. There wasn't enough vodka in camp to erase that loss.

OTOH, the platoon barely noticed when Ivan the FNG got torn apart taking out the machinegun nest. Ivan had only been in camp two days. His bags weren't even unpacked. He ends up just another faceless casuality in a meatgrinder war.

[Sydney Freedberg]

That's beautifully hideous. "Unrealistic," of course, but it drives the point home well.

So far, this is a cool, colorful personal-level wargame with roleplaying elements (which of course is where D&D came from, too), on an undeservedly neglected front of the war (nobody did more to save the world from Hitler than the Red Army grunts), but it's missing its heart:

Your tovarishti can lend you extra help in times of trouble, but when bad things happen to them you share some of the consequences. I have completely left out how your tovarishti help you, because I ran out of time.

If you can make a mechanic for this, it can be as central and powerful as Love in My Life With Master or Trust in The Mountain Witch, where players constantly face the trade-off of "investing emotionally in other people is the one thing that makes me effective enough to survive, but it makes me terribly vulnerable to them betraying me or dying."

[komradebob]

That's beautifully hideous. "Unrealistic," of course, but it drives the point home well.

Possibly, but it does follow a format found in war memoirs and films.

[contracycle]

The accumulated points that move the camapign forward are based on the survivors' attachments to the killed characters.

On further reflection I think this might backfire.

I suggest that if you effectively paying "closeness" for "progress", then you feel empowered.  Sure, you liked Bob and Bob got it, but Bob was worth a whole 6 points of plot progression - result!  However, if a warm body is a warm body, and you'll get just as much "benefit" for the FNG as for Bob, then keeping Bob alive and "expending" the FNG becomes part of your problem.  There's no return to losing Bob.

[komradebob]

The accumulated points that move the camapign forward are based on the survivors' attachments to the killed characters.

On further reflection I think this might backfire.

I suggest that if you effectively paying "closeness" for "progress", then you feel empowered.  Sure, you liked Bob and Bob got it, but Bob was worth a whole 6 points of plot progression - result!  However, if a warm body is a warm body, and you'll get just as much "benefit" for the FNG as for Bob, then keeping Bob alive and "expending" the FNG becomes part of your problem.  There's no return to losing Bob.

I'm a bit lost, but that may well bell my fault.

FNG Ivan would be mechanically a character that less characters have an attachment to. Comrade Bob is well beloved with several characters having an attachment to Comrade Bob ( as it should be ;) ).

ComradeBob is zotzed= 6 pts of Campaign adavance ( 3 other surviving characters with 2 poiint connection each to Comrade Bob).

FNG Ivan is zozted=2point campaign advance ( One other surviving character had a 2 point connection to Ivan).

Now, players could feasibly throw tons of low connection characters into meatgrinders to advance the plot, holding back the risk to high connection characters, but that would mean that the campaign advance is slooooww and the characters would be terribly ineffective, as well as picking up huge amounts of stress due to the multiple missions necessary to move things alone ( ie-sacrifice the Noobs).

So basically, it throws some decisions back on the play group as a whole:
How fast do we want to advance this campaign?
If the answer is "Fast", then the method becomes cruelly obvious...

[James Holloway]

This is all really good, guys. Keep it coming. It's going to be a while before pressure of work allows me to come out with Krasnoarmeets 0.2, but this is all going in my notes -- I agree with Sydney that the tovarisch thing is a big blank in the game. The idea is, yes, that the people you're buddies with are the ones who can help prevent Stress -- but their loss inflicts a huge amount of Stress on you.

[mutex]

The thing here is that you then create a situation where someone who has been often hurt by the loss of their tovarischi will try to game the system if they're close to Stressing out and going nuts.  I feel that makes sense from a psychological standpoint, as someone who has been emotionally hurt repeatedly is less likely to bond with someone (whose just going to get killed anyway).  So, you end up with the characters becoming emotionally hardened.

On a completely other tangent, you mentioned briefly the Axis soldiers.  An interesting campaign idea might be to play the Soviet soldiers until the end of the war, and then have them play the opposition with the grim certainty of defeat (as in all of the missions had been played out, and the results were already known).  For example, if an Axis soldier was killed in the first campaign, then when the players reach that mission, they would know that at least one of them *has* to die >:)

[contracycle]

So basically, it throws some decisions back on the play group as a whole:
How fast do we want to advance this campaign?
If the answer is "Fast", then the method becomes cruelly obvious...

Agreed.  However, I am suggesting that the play group should NOT have this power, or more precisely, that having this power will undermine the sense of randomness, waste and brutality in war that is alluded to in the rest of the game.  As I mentioned, the players may see the the "expenditure" of a "loved" NPC as a cost/benefit decision, rather than as an artifact of the inhumanity of war.

You see I might even go so far as to propose that the progress tracker would be simple body count, of both sides.  Because then I would think the players will be even more motivated to ensure that the bodies in question are "theirs" and not "ours".  If there is benefit to sustaining casualties on our side, than its just part of the game - not something to be concerned over.  If there is no benefit, it is to be avoided like the plague.

--

Another aspect of the casualty tracker occurred to me - its a form of progress that is totally unrelated to any measure of mission success.  Thats quite interesting.  So it would allow something that is quite rare in terms of RPG - people may decide to fight another day.  That is, if the fighting has gone badly and the body count is high, you-the-player may then know that you have - or probably have - achieved the threshold for the next developement.  So even if you are losing the skirmish here and now, you can still run the hell away and the game will continue - it does not depend on, or assume, either victory or defeat.

In fact I wonder if this will be the first design I have yet seen so robust as to survive a total party kill?

--

On the "rear areas".  One thing to point out is that I do not think that any significant quantity of play should be shifted to the rear areas.  But as mentioned previously, I think the players should have some kind of identification with a "home base" or sorta safe zone.  This then provides another axis of intervention and exposition, because then in the course of play this fairly nominal factlet can be used to signpost developments.  For example, in sessions one and two the platoon or whatever may be operating out of a factory basement, in session three they are moved elswhere and take up a spot in a railway tunnel, or similar.  Essentially, this provides a mechanism for introducing scene changes into what would otherwise be a fairly static environment.  Also, of course, you could then set a scene IN the safe zone as it suddenly becomes very unsafe due to an enemy thrust.

I think the CO should be used in the same way.  Like the setting, the CO can be changed from time to time to reflect casualties and transfers.  There is no real need for the CO to be an "important" NPC to the players, they can just as easily hate his guts as like him.  He is not a pathetic character, he is merely a device for exposition.  But he should be a realised NPC with some characteristics, and the GM should portray him as a person, in full RPG stylee.

--

On the pawn potential of figures.  This might also be an interesting angle, rather than a problem.  It strikes me that in all the combat games I play, I don't think about the dead at all while the action is still underway.  That is, the situation you find yourself in is comprised exclusivley of those elements that are still alive and kicking.  It is after the fighting, as they say, that the butchers bill is reckoned.  So from this perspective, the fact that there is a phase of play in which the adoption of pawn stance is tacitly encouraged is a fairly good representation of how it feels.  Under the pressure of enemy threat, I think dealing with the consequences of loss will be postponed.  And equally, under the pressure of enemy threat, the willingness to accept strategic losses is enhanced.  So I think that an adoption of pawn stance during the combat segments may be no bad thing, necessarily, as it will kind of replicate the thinking and behaviour that does actually occur, I think.  But you will also then have to deal with the consequences of your tactically sensible actions.

[Sydney Freedberg]

I find myself agreeing wholeheartedly with Contracycle (which is actually kinda rare): If the players have too much power to determine the course of events, you lose the helpless terror that is a large part of any war. Using "total body count, ours plus theirs" as your clock towards endgame is a fascinating idea.