Like that wide-open cosmic environment? Kreegor, CCW, and all that? Head off to a Redbox and rent Guardians of the Galaxy. That's the best example going of a RIFTS Space Opera campaign as it's usually played. Rag-tag crew, often on the wrong side of the law, and yet able to do what the law fails to do because reasons.
Don't say it's not an example of how the game actually plays. It does, just like D&D's accurately shown in Knights of the Dinner Table. Go see it if you haven't, take notes, and enjoy.
Showing posts with label setting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label setting. Show all posts
Saturday, April 4, 2015
Sunday, March 22, 2015
Putting It Together: Crossing The Streams
RIFTS is a tabletop role-playing game that professes the capacity to play whatever you can imagine. While the reality of this is less than the imagery created by the advertising copy, this is not false; it just takes some work to make it viable at the able. With that in mind, let us take a moment to talk about doing that.
There is a difference between "crossing the streams" (a campaign that melds two or more archetypical campaign models together) and a kitchen sink game where anything goes no matter the sensibility of it. We want the former, and not the latter, so we are not sloughing off the necessary work that running a campaign entails. Instead, we are changing what the workload is and the order of operations.
No, no handy media example this week. Now I'm making you do your own research. Hop to it, and get used to doing it; that's what it takes to make the pre-game work of a GM into something useful at the table.
There is a difference between "crossing the streams" (a campaign that melds two or more archetypical campaign models together) and a kitchen sink game where anything goes no matter the sensibility of it. We want the former, and not the latter, so we are not sloughing off the necessary work that running a campaign entails. Instead, we are changing what the workload is and the order of operations.
No, no handy media example this week. Now I'm making you do your own research. Hop to it, and get used to doing it; that's what it takes to make the pre-game work of a GM into something useful at the table.
Saturday, March 14, 2015
Putting It Together: The Space Campaign
As I noted previously, campaigns in space require a bit of additional focus to make them sufficient in scope and scale to handle at the table. This is why I'm using Knights of Sidonia as an example. In this case, you have a space-faring campaign centered around a generation ship and the militia tasked with guarding it against the ship's alien opposition. (You want more? Watch the series.)
In RIFTS, this is easily done. One focusing on the solar system can work from Mutants In Orbit (you can do the orbital end of Mobile Suit Gundam and its successors easily) or Scrapers, and elsewhere using the Phase World books (selectively, of course). If you decide to use the Aliens Unlimited sourcebooks for Heroes Unlimited for additional material, you will go far. Yes, you will have to brew your own content, but there is so much archetypical examples to work with that doing it won't be hard.
In RIFTS, this is easily done. One focusing on the solar system can work from Mutants In Orbit (you can do the orbital end of Mobile Suit Gundam and its successors easily) or Scrapers, and elsewhere using the Phase World books (selectively, of course). If you decide to use the Aliens Unlimited sourcebooks for Heroes Unlimited for additional material, you will go far. Yes, you will have to brew your own content, but there is so much archetypical examples to work with that doing it won't be hard.
Saturday, March 7, 2015
Putting It Together: The Wild West Campaign
Like last week, I'm embedding a video that popularly displays one way to show folks what RIFTS means. This week, it's the New West, and we're using Muse's "Knights of Cydonia" as the video example. It has martial arts, cowboys, gunslinging, The Frontier, The Code of the West, and anachronistic technology- just like the New West. Just missing obvious super-powers or equal technology. As with last week, I'm asking you to take it in and start to think of how you would make this into a RIFTS campaign at your table.
Nope, no hand-holding. No conversions. Nothing but me serving up the materials. Make your own entertainment.
(As for the anime Knights of Sidonia, next week.)
Nope, no hand-holding. No conversions. Nothing but me serving up the materials. Make your own entertainment.
(As for the anime Knights of Sidonia, next week.)
Saturday, February 28, 2015
Putting It Together: The Vampire Hunting Campaign
As I said last week, RIFTS has plenty of inspiration out there. One of the best, post-RIFTS, is Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust.
Vampires, mutants, high-tech, specialized anti-undead techniques and tools, silver-as-anti-vampire, cross-as-universal-repellent, post-apocalypse w/ space travel. This is regarded as a RIFTS movie for very obvious reasons.
Go on, watch the film. Here, or elsewhere, or whatever, just watch it. Now imagine this occurring as a campaign in Vampire territory in North America. You can see clearly how this would work in RIFTS, can't you?
No, no rules or mechanics conversion will be done here; you're on your own, and by now you should be able to handle that task without me holding your hand.
Vampires, mutants, high-tech, specialized anti-undead techniques and tools, silver-as-anti-vampire, cross-as-universal-repellent, post-apocalypse w/ space travel. This is regarded as a RIFTS movie for very obvious reasons.
Go on, watch the film. Here, or elsewhere, or whatever, just watch it. Now imagine this occurring as a campaign in Vampire territory in North America. You can see clearly how this would work in RIFTS, can't you?
No, no rules or mechanics conversion will be done here; you're on your own, and by now you should be able to handle that task without me holding your hand.
Saturday, February 21, 2015
RIFTS and Your Game: Use the Sources as Guides for House Ruling
As I said previously, RIFTS uses geographic separation as the primary means to contain different genres--and different forms of gameplay--in a single line of products. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that RIFTS draws on a lot of source material for inspiration; as much of RIFTS comes from freelance writers' submissions, many writers draw from a lot of media sources for their work (which Uncle Kevin filters in turn when he rewrites the manuscript). Being able to recognize those sources, and them to use those sources for your own purposes, is a useful way to make this trend in Palladium's publishing practices work in your favor.
The most blatant example comes from the first Triax book, where there is a rather obvious lifting from the Mobile Suit Gundam franchise, and many of the other mecha and cyborgs in the book are likewise only a step or two away from their source inspirations in Appleseed, Ghost in the Shell, and similar science fiction works out of Japan originating in the mid-to-late 1980s or so. Another is the Burster from the core rulebook (Stephen King's Firestarter and Pyro of Marvel's "X-Men"). Once you know the sources, you can--and should--investigate them to see how the original material executes the concept and compare it both to what the as-written game version executes it as well as how you want it to work (assuming that it differs).
Digging into this will involve engaging with the mechanics of Palladium's game engine at various points, and that means dealing with math. Have your calculator handy.
Say, for example, you're a big Gundam fan and you want to play this up. Using the Triax Devastator (the not-Gundam), you want to know in playable terms things like (a) how far can it move per round (involves converting real-world measurements into game-playable ones), getting in and powering up (vital for ambush scenarios), speed of reloading/refueling (matters in long engagements w/ nearby resupply, especially if not using an engine w/ practically unlimited fuel), and other concerns that real (para)military pilots should (and do) concern themselves with. Converting all this into a set of data that players (who are NOT pilots, and often lack (para)military experience, and so would not readily think of such thing) can use at the table is necessary tedium. Some similar process is necessary for every other source material analysis you want to make, even if the material is about something so unreal that you're going off game mechanics and hunches.
The purpose for this is simple: by generating the data, you're testing to see if the claim (explicit or implicit) has the evidence needed to back it up. If your robot doesn't perform the way you think it does, then having the data on hand is a good thing. First, you have evidence on hand to disprove the claim. Second, you have a start point from which you can make useful changes to get the result that you want in a manner that will work in actual play and be supportable when (not if) it's disputed. Being the Game Master means mastering the game, and that means mastering the rules; making the rules work to support what results you want out of the game comes easily once you achieve rules mastery. It's worth the effort.
The most blatant example comes from the first Triax book, where there is a rather obvious lifting from the Mobile Suit Gundam franchise, and many of the other mecha and cyborgs in the book are likewise only a step or two away from their source inspirations in Appleseed, Ghost in the Shell, and similar science fiction works out of Japan originating in the mid-to-late 1980s or so. Another is the Burster from the core rulebook (Stephen King's Firestarter and Pyro of Marvel's "X-Men"). Once you know the sources, you can--and should--investigate them to see how the original material executes the concept and compare it both to what the as-written game version executes it as well as how you want it to work (assuming that it differs).
Digging into this will involve engaging with the mechanics of Palladium's game engine at various points, and that means dealing with math. Have your calculator handy.
Say, for example, you're a big Gundam fan and you want to play this up. Using the Triax Devastator (the not-Gundam), you want to know in playable terms things like (a) how far can it move per round (involves converting real-world measurements into game-playable ones), getting in and powering up (vital for ambush scenarios), speed of reloading/refueling (matters in long engagements w/ nearby resupply, especially if not using an engine w/ practically unlimited fuel), and other concerns that real (para)military pilots should (and do) concern themselves with. Converting all this into a set of data that players (who are NOT pilots, and often lack (para)military experience, and so would not readily think of such thing) can use at the table is necessary tedium. Some similar process is necessary for every other source material analysis you want to make, even if the material is about something so unreal that you're going off game mechanics and hunches.
The purpose for this is simple: by generating the data, you're testing to see if the claim (explicit or implicit) has the evidence needed to back it up. If your robot doesn't perform the way you think it does, then having the data on hand is a good thing. First, you have evidence on hand to disprove the claim. Second, you have a start point from which you can make useful changes to get the result that you want in a manner that will work in actual play and be supportable when (not if) it's disputed. Being the Game Master means mastering the game, and that means mastering the rules; making the rules work to support what results you want out of the game comes easily once you achieve rules mastery. It's worth the effort.
Saturday, February 14, 2015
Educate Yourself to Better Your Game
Today, we have the Internet. Self-education today is easier than it has every been. Time to talk about making use of this power.
All tabletop RPGs are dependent upon the quality of the individuals playing and running them- especially the quality of those running them. Just as works of fictions are better when the writer expands upon the base of knowledge employed in creating the artifacts of his craft, so it is that the hobbyist plays and runs better when he does that same expansion of knowledge and brings that to the table. We experience, first-hand, just how this manifests when someone who's too used to thinking in terms of manipulating the rules as if they were the controls of a car sits down as your table and begins to say and do things that no one with such training or knowledge would dare conceive.
Like it or not, this is an element of the medium that cannot be removed without killing it; it is as fundamental as breathing, and we see this in the discourse of forums such as The Gaming Den and its insistence upon making the playing of characters (and the running of games) no different in practice than coding and playing a console or PC RPG. What the regulars at that forum demonstrate by their behavior to be a flaw is, in fact, both a great strength and a limiting factor: tabletop RPGs are, quite frankly, limited in their potential only by the ignorance of their users. This is not so with competing RPG media.
So, how to fix this? Encourage one-another to seek out and rectify gaps in one's knowledge base as said stoppages become relevant.
Now, how many of you play characters that use firearms? How many of you have actually used one? I would be willing to suppose that a great many of you believe a number of wrong things regarding firearms--starting with the error that "clip" means "the detachable thing I use to load the gun" (Nope.)--simply because you don't know any better. Well, thanks to this thing you're using to read my blog, you too can rectify this error and many others.
"But my guy's using a laser rifle!"
That's nice. How about learning how the real ones work? Same goes for railguns; we have real ones now, and they are massive. Competent speculative fiction will extrapolate from real technologies or current developments; we can all do this now, and you are not exempt. Those mini-missiles? Been around for millenia in some form or another, starting with Chinese rockets using blackpowder to deliver arrowheads in massed volleys further than the bows of the day could reach.
"But my guy's using (unreal thing)!"
Your guy's fictional magic? Based upon, to some degree or another, real world systems of magic. You need not believe that the real world stuff is true; you just need to grok how it's supposed to work, and why, and that assumes that the magic system isn't actually (following Asimov) just the Sufficiently Advanced Technology sort of "magic" (as, alas, The Force turned out to be).
Your guy is illiterate? How illiterate? Functionally so, or totally so? This matters--something that even Uncle Kevin fails to recognize, and therefore follow through with--a great deal in how someone thinks, interacts with the world, relates to those with greater power, etc.; this is also true for those who are illnumerate.
Your guy knows multiple languages? Great. How similar are they? When and how did he learn these languages? These questions directly affect how your character perceives knowledge; languages are systematic symbol systems meant to make regular certain concepts that a culture needs to pass efficiently between its members, and different languages symbolize both different knowledges as well as use different schemes of symbolism. You likely has no idea that this is what's going on, did you? Linguists do, and they study the hell out of this now in conjunction with other specialists from other fields using an inter-disciplinary approach.
If you, the player, cannot conceive of something that your character would then you CANNOT play him properly. If you, the player, cannot comprehend why your character CANNOT conceive of a given thing, then you CANNOT play him properly. You are robbing yourself, your fellows, and the game of the fullest possible play experience by maintaining willful ignorance of things that rightly affect how your character thinks, feels, and acts. Embrace that challenge, embrace the suck that will come from realizing just how important what you're learning is to your man, and come out better on the other side for it.
Alone in gaming media, and matched by few others, the tabletop role-playing game offers such opportunities for life-long improvement and transformation by those willing and able to step up to the challenge. This is a medium of virtual experience, almost as powerful as life itself (and compensating for that by allowing you to experience things otherwise impossible), so seize that for yourself, and bring your A-game.
All tabletop RPGs are dependent upon the quality of the individuals playing and running them- especially the quality of those running them. Just as works of fictions are better when the writer expands upon the base of knowledge employed in creating the artifacts of his craft, so it is that the hobbyist plays and runs better when he does that same expansion of knowledge and brings that to the table. We experience, first-hand, just how this manifests when someone who's too used to thinking in terms of manipulating the rules as if they were the controls of a car sits down as your table and begins to say and do things that no one with such training or knowledge would dare conceive.
Like it or not, this is an element of the medium that cannot be removed without killing it; it is as fundamental as breathing, and we see this in the discourse of forums such as The Gaming Den and its insistence upon making the playing of characters (and the running of games) no different in practice than coding and playing a console or PC RPG. What the regulars at that forum demonstrate by their behavior to be a flaw is, in fact, both a great strength and a limiting factor: tabletop RPGs are, quite frankly, limited in their potential only by the ignorance of their users. This is not so with competing RPG media.
So, how to fix this? Encourage one-another to seek out and rectify gaps in one's knowledge base as said stoppages become relevant.
Now, how many of you play characters that use firearms? How many of you have actually used one? I would be willing to suppose that a great many of you believe a number of wrong things regarding firearms--starting with the error that "clip" means "the detachable thing I use to load the gun" (Nope.)--simply because you don't know any better. Well, thanks to this thing you're using to read my blog, you too can rectify this error and many others.
"But my guy's using a laser rifle!"
That's nice. How about learning how the real ones work? Same goes for railguns; we have real ones now, and they are massive. Competent speculative fiction will extrapolate from real technologies or current developments; we can all do this now, and you are not exempt. Those mini-missiles? Been around for millenia in some form or another, starting with Chinese rockets using blackpowder to deliver arrowheads in massed volleys further than the bows of the day could reach.
"But my guy's using (unreal thing)!"
Your guy's fictional magic? Based upon, to some degree or another, real world systems of magic. You need not believe that the real world stuff is true; you just need to grok how it's supposed to work, and why, and that assumes that the magic system isn't actually (following Asimov) just the Sufficiently Advanced Technology sort of "magic" (as, alas, The Force turned out to be).
Your guy is illiterate? How illiterate? Functionally so, or totally so? This matters--something that even Uncle Kevin fails to recognize, and therefore follow through with--a great deal in how someone thinks, interacts with the world, relates to those with greater power, etc.; this is also true for those who are illnumerate.
Your guy knows multiple languages? Great. How similar are they? When and how did he learn these languages? These questions directly affect how your character perceives knowledge; languages are systematic symbol systems meant to make regular certain concepts that a culture needs to pass efficiently between its members, and different languages symbolize both different knowledges as well as use different schemes of symbolism. You likely has no idea that this is what's going on, did you? Linguists do, and they study the hell out of this now in conjunction with other specialists from other fields using an inter-disciplinary approach.
If you, the player, cannot conceive of something that your character would then you CANNOT play him properly. If you, the player, cannot comprehend why your character CANNOT conceive of a given thing, then you CANNOT play him properly. You are robbing yourself, your fellows, and the game of the fullest possible play experience by maintaining willful ignorance of things that rightly affect how your character thinks, feels, and acts. Embrace that challenge, embrace the suck that will come from realizing just how important what you're learning is to your man, and come out better on the other side for it.
Alone in gaming media, and matched by few others, the tabletop role-playing game offers such opportunities for life-long improvement and transformation by those willing and able to step up to the challenge. This is a medium of virtual experience, almost as powerful as life itself (and compensating for that by allowing you to experience things otherwise impossible), so seize that for yourself, and bring your A-game.
Saturday, February 7, 2015
This Coalition Worship Has Gone Full Retard
So, today I received the weekly email from Palladium Books updating subscribers on what's out and what's coming. I cannot make this shit up.
QUOTE!
Rifts® Sourcebook – The Coalition States: Heroes of Humanity The events unfolding in World Book 35: Megaverse® in Flames threaten to change the entire landscape of Rifts® Earth, as the demonic minions of Hades and Dyval seek to bring Hell on Earth and turn the planet into a dimensional gateway to Armageddon!
The Coalition States, along with Northern Gun and Lazlo, take the lead in the defense of North America. Heroes of Humanity explores the good and bad in the Coalition’s efforts to save humanity and send this new threat back to the pits of Hell.
What is this I don't even.
But wait, there's more!
Rifts® Secrets of the Coalition States: The Disavowed
“Desperate times require desperate measures. War has nothing to do with morality or justice. It’s all about winning or dying. We cannot bind our hands with high ideals, even our own, or worry about the laws of renegade nations or the rights of alien people. We must fight fire with fire. And you are the match.” – Colonel Lyboc, addressing a Disavowed team.
The Disavowed are so Top Secret that their existence is known only to a handful of the Coalition States’ most elite, top echelon, with Joseph Prosek II the mastermind behind the Disavowed operation, and Colonel Lyboc its shadowy face. Find out who these men and women are. How the Disavowed get away with using magic, traveling to other parts of Rifts Earth and even to other dimensions in pursuit of enemies and strategic information that cannot be had through conventional means. Learn about the secret parameters in which these hard-boiled warriors, secretly hand-picked by Joseph Prosek II, operate, why almost every mission is considered a suicide mission, and why they must forever be the Disavowed.
Full. Retard.
We can stop fapping over these techno-Nazis any time now. They're Nazis. Stop trying to make Good Guys out of them, Uncle Kevin. Yes, I do blame you and not the "co-author" whose manuscript you--if you hold to your pattern, and you usually do--suckered out of the guy and then hacked up to suite your sophomoric sensibilities (which haven't matured since the 1970s). Christ, folks! This is just the sort of crap-tastic content that I spent so many posts trying to clean up and make sensible. Bother.
QUOTE!
Rifts® Sourcebook – The Coalition States: Heroes of Humanity The events unfolding in World Book 35: Megaverse® in Flames threaten to change the entire landscape of Rifts® Earth, as the demonic minions of Hades and Dyval seek to bring Hell on Earth and turn the planet into a dimensional gateway to Armageddon!
The Coalition States, along with Northern Gun and Lazlo, take the lead in the defense of North America. Heroes of Humanity explores the good and bad in the Coalition’s efforts to save humanity and send this new threat back to the pits of Hell.
- New Coalition weapons, armor and war machines.
- The Coalition States: Are they heroes or villains? Or does it depend on whether you are human or not?
- Can the CS fight alongside mages and D-Bees if it means saving the world?
- How is the CS dealing with the Minion War on Earth?
- One plan to battle the Xiticix and who really pays the price.
- Adventure ideas and more.
- Written by Kevin Siembieda, Matthew Clements and other contributors.
- Final page count and cost yet to be determined but probably 96 pages – $16.95 retail – Cat. No. 889.
What is this I don't even.
But wait, there's more!
Rifts® Secrets of the Coalition States: The Disavowed
“Desperate times require desperate measures. War has nothing to do with morality or justice. It’s all about winning or dying. We cannot bind our hands with high ideals, even our own, or worry about the laws of renegade nations or the rights of alien people. We must fight fire with fire. And you are the match.” – Colonel Lyboc, addressing a Disavowed team.
The Disavowed are so Top Secret that their existence is known only to a handful of the Coalition States’ most elite, top echelon, with Joseph Prosek II the mastermind behind the Disavowed operation, and Colonel Lyboc its shadowy face. Find out who these men and women are. How the Disavowed get away with using magic, traveling to other parts of Rifts Earth and even to other dimensions in pursuit of enemies and strategic information that cannot be had through conventional means. Learn about the secret parameters in which these hard-boiled warriors, secretly hand-picked by Joseph Prosek II, operate, why almost every mission is considered a suicide mission, and why they must forever be the Disavowed.
- CS operatives so secret that even the top military and political leaders right up to Emperor Prosek know nothing about them. And if they did know, would they condone their activity or condemn it?
- Are the Disavowed heroes or renegades? Assassins or soldiers? Madmen or super-patriots? Or a little of them all?
- Unsung heroes who keep the CS safe, or thugs and pawns of a shadow agency within the Coalition government?
- What role does the Vanguard play in this group?
- How do they reward their D-Bee “teammates” when the mission is over?
- What happens to the Disavowed when they have seen or learned too much? Adventure ideas galore and so much more.
- Written by Kevin Siembieda and Matthew Clements.
- Final page count and cost yet to be determined, but probably 96 pages – $16.95 retail – Cat. No. 892.
Full. Retard.
We can stop fapping over these techno-Nazis any time now. They're Nazis. Stop trying to make Good Guys out of them, Uncle Kevin. Yes, I do blame you and not the "co-author" whose manuscript you--if you hold to your pattern, and you usually do--suckered out of the guy and then hacked up to suite your sophomoric sensibilities (which haven't matured since the 1970s). Christ, folks! This is just the sort of crap-tastic content that I spent so many posts trying to clean up and make sensible. Bother.
Saturday, January 31, 2015
RIFTS and Your Game: Shaping the Setting as Customization
An easy way for a Game Master to take what is written and make it yours is to curate and shape the setting material to your liking. This is a liminal conceptual space where rules and setting blend, so you might as well think of this as an aspect to making House Rules.
To illustrate the point, I'll go with the Coalition States and its primary socio-economic institution: the Army. The Army is where the Coalition puts the able-bodied men within its reach. By putting all adult men into the Army, it subjects them to a single comprehensive authority with total control over their lives, so we'll do that and remove all civilian life from the Coalition States: the Coalition doesn't have an Army, it IS the Army. The rules effect? All Coalition characters are Male and Military. (With two exceptions, as noted below.) This culls the playable options down to a handful of Occupations (which, really, are military specializations) and exactly one race/sex combination; it also narrows the range of playable spaces down to those specific to military operations- something that an expansionist, manaphobic, xenophobic, racist, sexist, authoritarian, and totalitarian military dictatorship operating in a milieu that justifies its propaganda on an hourly basis would be.
(Exceptions: Dog Boys and Honeypots. The former are still male-only, but male Canine; the latter is where the very few women allowed outside the home operate, both in counter-intelligence and in foreign intelligence. You expected post-apocalyptic Nazis to do otherwise? Learn your history; they would, because in many respects they did.)
Let's get more specific now.
A Coalition man, regardless of his specialization, must complete Basic Training. This includes, since the technology exists, the mandatory implantation of certain cybertechnologies. Ear modifications that act exactly as real-world electronic ear protection headphones, eye modifications that guarantee 20/20 vision as well as instant polarization (making eye glasses/sunglasses pointless), lung modifications to ensure endurance in the field, and a datajack in the base of the neck- all imposed to get any given recruit up to baseline functionality at best possible speed. (Yes, the datajack is that important; it's easier to have a unit jack into a cybernetic network to get trained/briefed/etc. than to talk it out (since all Coalition personnel are totally illiterate, so written stuff is out).
So, rules: instead of a Coalition character having a choice, they get a set package of cybernetics as a standard feature of that Occupation, to be considered part of Basic Training and not Specialization training.
Now, let's do some variation thinking.
Abolish man-sized energy weapons and instead replace them with latter-day (but otherwise conventional) firearms. As our Coalition is based in North America, they will use foreseeable iterations of U.S. Army small arms or rivals thereof. Instead of the M9 (i.e. a Beretta 92 model), we'll grant the Coalition officers a latter-generation Glock 17 or 19. (Pilots or similar personnel will be issues a Glock 26, while Technicians will instead be issued a hypothetical Glock carbine--as a real one does not exist as of this post; other manufacturers do this--chambered for the same handgun cartridge, and thus uses the same magazines; we can base this on the Keltec Sub-2000, the Kriss Vector, or some other real-world model but I think just imagining an up-sized Glock filling out the same profile as the venerable M1 Carbine would do.) This will have some cascading effects, but I think those to be desirable ones that are beneficial to the game experience anyway.
Likewise, the standard rifle will be iterations and variations on the AR-15 platform (currently the M4 variation in the U.S. Army). Maybe the standard cartridge will shift to the now-new .300 Blackout cartridge, instead of the current standard 5.56x45mm NATO cartridge. Upgunned versions chambered for the .308 Winchester cartridge ("AR-10" sorts) may be the standard issue instead, depending upon the commonly-encountered opposition of the Coalition. Specialized operators will still use bolt-action rifles, often chambered for that Winchester cartridge by default; far bigger and more powerful cartridges (such as the .50 BMG) will be employed as required (and yes, for those not paying attention, such rifle platforms exist and have for some time).
The game's "Mega-Damage" conceit, when confined to its original scope of use (i.e. tanks and similar objects), works fine; the vast majority of entities in a RIFTS campaign do not qualify for such a status and therefore should be handled accordingly. (You can achieve much of what is implied by using Mega-Damage by other means, especially for super-natural entities, such as Immunities and Resistances or some other concept that other tabletop RPG engines handle very well.)
The rules effect? To eliminiate needless redundancy in conceptual spaces, as well as conceptual confusion, by keeping the baseline of Coalition campaigns as close to that of "The Army vs. The Monsters" as possible- and thus making buy-in very easy for new and returning players, since the unrealities they need to deal with are confined to a few Gee-Whiz widgets and the inhuman presences that they confront on a regular basis.
There, a set of examples of how you can make the body of RIFTS into the game you want- all at varying degrees of emphasis (rules vs. setting), degrees of player-vs.-GM engagement, degrees of in-play vs. away-from-table engagement, etc. so you can see what I intended to do to achieve the desired effect- and thereby do this sort of thing for yourself. This is one of the many reasons for why being as skilled and as knowledgeable of things beyond gaming matters; you can't do this well, if at all, if you refuse to improve yourselves as individuals.
To illustrate the point, I'll go with the Coalition States and its primary socio-economic institution: the Army. The Army is where the Coalition puts the able-bodied men within its reach. By putting all adult men into the Army, it subjects them to a single comprehensive authority with total control over their lives, so we'll do that and remove all civilian life from the Coalition States: the Coalition doesn't have an Army, it IS the Army. The rules effect? All Coalition characters are Male and Military. (With two exceptions, as noted below.) This culls the playable options down to a handful of Occupations (which, really, are military specializations) and exactly one race/sex combination; it also narrows the range of playable spaces down to those specific to military operations- something that an expansionist, manaphobic, xenophobic, racist, sexist, authoritarian, and totalitarian military dictatorship operating in a milieu that justifies its propaganda on an hourly basis would be.
(Exceptions: Dog Boys and Honeypots. The former are still male-only, but male Canine; the latter is where the very few women allowed outside the home operate, both in counter-intelligence and in foreign intelligence. You expected post-apocalyptic Nazis to do otherwise? Learn your history; they would, because in many respects they did.)
Let's get more specific now.
A Coalition man, regardless of his specialization, must complete Basic Training. This includes, since the technology exists, the mandatory implantation of certain cybertechnologies. Ear modifications that act exactly as real-world electronic ear protection headphones, eye modifications that guarantee 20/20 vision as well as instant polarization (making eye glasses/sunglasses pointless), lung modifications to ensure endurance in the field, and a datajack in the base of the neck- all imposed to get any given recruit up to baseline functionality at best possible speed. (Yes, the datajack is that important; it's easier to have a unit jack into a cybernetic network to get trained/briefed/etc. than to talk it out (since all Coalition personnel are totally illiterate, so written stuff is out).
So, rules: instead of a Coalition character having a choice, they get a set package of cybernetics as a standard feature of that Occupation, to be considered part of Basic Training and not Specialization training.
Now, let's do some variation thinking.
Abolish man-sized energy weapons and instead replace them with latter-day (but otherwise conventional) firearms. As our Coalition is based in North America, they will use foreseeable iterations of U.S. Army small arms or rivals thereof. Instead of the M9 (i.e. a Beretta 92 model), we'll grant the Coalition officers a latter-generation Glock 17 or 19. (Pilots or similar personnel will be issues a Glock 26, while Technicians will instead be issued a hypothetical Glock carbine--as a real one does not exist as of this post; other manufacturers do this--chambered for the same handgun cartridge, and thus uses the same magazines; we can base this on the Keltec Sub-2000, the Kriss Vector, or some other real-world model but I think just imagining an up-sized Glock filling out the same profile as the venerable M1 Carbine would do.) This will have some cascading effects, but I think those to be desirable ones that are beneficial to the game experience anyway.
Likewise, the standard rifle will be iterations and variations on the AR-15 platform (currently the M4 variation in the U.S. Army). Maybe the standard cartridge will shift to the now-new .300 Blackout cartridge, instead of the current standard 5.56x45mm NATO cartridge. Upgunned versions chambered for the .308 Winchester cartridge ("AR-10" sorts) may be the standard issue instead, depending upon the commonly-encountered opposition of the Coalition. Specialized operators will still use bolt-action rifles, often chambered for that Winchester cartridge by default; far bigger and more powerful cartridges (such as the .50 BMG) will be employed as required (and yes, for those not paying attention, such rifle platforms exist and have for some time).
The game's "Mega-Damage" conceit, when confined to its original scope of use (i.e. tanks and similar objects), works fine; the vast majority of entities in a RIFTS campaign do not qualify for such a status and therefore should be handled accordingly. (You can achieve much of what is implied by using Mega-Damage by other means, especially for super-natural entities, such as Immunities and Resistances or some other concept that other tabletop RPG engines handle very well.)
The rules effect? To eliminiate needless redundancy in conceptual spaces, as well as conceptual confusion, by keeping the baseline of Coalition campaigns as close to that of "The Army vs. The Monsters" as possible- and thus making buy-in very easy for new and returning players, since the unrealities they need to deal with are confined to a few Gee-Whiz widgets and the inhuman presences that they confront on a regular basis.
There, a set of examples of how you can make the body of RIFTS into the game you want- all at varying degrees of emphasis (rules vs. setting), degrees of player-vs.-GM engagement, degrees of in-play vs. away-from-table engagement, etc. so you can see what I intended to do to achieve the desired effect- and thereby do this sort of thing for yourself. This is one of the many reasons for why being as skilled and as knowledgeable of things beyond gaming matters; you can't do this well, if at all, if you refuse to improve yourselves as individuals.
Saturday, January 24, 2015
The Community Trend of Willful Stupidity Hurts the Game
One thing I noticed when discussing RIFTS with others, online and in-person, was the distressing tendency to avoid anything that would make the game as-published (especially setting material) unusable right out of the box (as it were)- to not question or analyze either the rules of the setting as presented at all, but take it as-given and go no matter how ridiculous or unworkable it may be.
There is no kind way to put it: this is the thinking of a child barely able to reason at all. It's a combination of naivety and willful ignorance that appalls me. It assumes that things "just work" with tabletop RPGs, when they rarely do, and eschews the need to engage with the game to get the result out of it that you want. I also find the appalling gaps in the knowledge of others, often willfully so, contributes to this problem; a lack of education on what religion is, how it works, and why it is not the same as faith or belief in one or more gods is ably demonstrated in the game's treatment of gods and demons. (The comic book trappings betray Siembieda's background in the comic book world of his youth.) Ignorance of how physics works (ballistics and energy), how injury and medicine work, how militaries work, etc. run rampant throughout the game's corpus and too many follow that lead in a blind-leading-the-blind that is now inexcusable.
You're reading this. You have Internet access. Rectifying gaps in useful knowledge is now easier than has ever been before! Failing to make the most of this opportunity, and then using that knowledge to fix fundamental load-bearing pillars of one's mechanics and setting premises, is a grave error that demonstrates the terrible quality of character for far too many people. It's neither tedious (you can break it up into chunks you can digest over a coffee break), nor difficult (arrange chunks in an easy-to-hard progression) to do this about anything. YouTube alone is so great a treasure that I cannot comprehend the refusal to make the most of this resource.
While I can, and do, put some effort into fixing what's broken here I am unable to be as Atlas and shoulder this alone. I expect you people to do likewise, to expand your knowledge, in order to make this game as good as it could be had it been made by a sufficiently knowledgeable individual.
There is no kind way to put it: this is the thinking of a child barely able to reason at all. It's a combination of naivety and willful ignorance that appalls me. It assumes that things "just work" with tabletop RPGs, when they rarely do, and eschews the need to engage with the game to get the result out of it that you want. I also find the appalling gaps in the knowledge of others, often willfully so, contributes to this problem; a lack of education on what religion is, how it works, and why it is not the same as faith or belief in one or more gods is ably demonstrated in the game's treatment of gods and demons. (The comic book trappings betray Siembieda's background in the comic book world of his youth.) Ignorance of how physics works (ballistics and energy), how injury and medicine work, how militaries work, etc. run rampant throughout the game's corpus and too many follow that lead in a blind-leading-the-blind that is now inexcusable.
You're reading this. You have Internet access. Rectifying gaps in useful knowledge is now easier than has ever been before! Failing to make the most of this opportunity, and then using that knowledge to fix fundamental load-bearing pillars of one's mechanics and setting premises, is a grave error that demonstrates the terrible quality of character for far too many people. It's neither tedious (you can break it up into chunks you can digest over a coffee break), nor difficult (arrange chunks in an easy-to-hard progression) to do this about anything. YouTube alone is so great a treasure that I cannot comprehend the refusal to make the most of this resource.
While I can, and do, put some effort into fixing what's broken here I am unable to be as Atlas and shoulder this alone. I expect you people to do likewise, to expand your knowledge, in order to make this game as good as it could be had it been made by a sufficiently knowledgeable individual.
Saturday, January 3, 2015
House Rules & RIFTS: Managing the Game - Verisimlitude, Pt.3
There is a term, usually seen in online discussions of games such as Dragon Age or World of Warcraft, known as "character progression". This concerns the development of a character's personal might, be it through the acquisition of more or improved powers (whatever they are), or from the refinement of that character's attributes and skills, as a direct result of gameplay. (This is why level-based systems are dominant; they play directly into the long-established preference for character progression as a central element of game design and play.) For the tabletop role-playing game medium, this cannot be ignored (indeed, it began here), but it can be handled.
The way to address verisimilitude with regard to character progression is to require that the character acquire the new or improved power as a reward for successful pursuit of the character's goals. In other words: progression is treasure, not a leveling-up benefit. A magician must either successfully perform spell research, successfully convince someone with the power to teach/imbue/etc. it unto him, or take it as Spoils of War from an enemy magician. A cyborg must find the bionic component and either trade or steal it, and then find someone or some thing to install it. You get the idea. By this means, the GM can constrain progression to a rate he finds acceptable and he controls what powers a character may acquire. (You can't rebuild your Cyborg into a man-sized Transformer if the technology to do so is not available.)
This also applies to more mundane aspects. The GM controls what skills are available to acquire, and what it takes to learn those skills from said sources. It applies to raw attribute development (usually physical) also; such progression methods requires that the character commit to and devote time to a program of training and study (yes, even for physical development) that they may not be able to do for reasons of more pressing matters requiring their attention. (You can't pick up Electrical Engineering if you're a combatant in the middle of an active military campaign, and you'll not be able to master the Way of the Ennervating Fist if you're already consumed training to master the Strike From All Angles Sword Skill.)
In short, you--as the GM--can, and must, establish what the players can do to progress their characters and then to set what the costs for those improvements are at your table. That is not just one ruling, but a small handful of them that all work together to create the desired effect. A reasonable player will not have an issue with this approach.
The way to address verisimilitude with regard to character progression is to require that the character acquire the new or improved power as a reward for successful pursuit of the character's goals. In other words: progression is treasure, not a leveling-up benefit. A magician must either successfully perform spell research, successfully convince someone with the power to teach/imbue/etc. it unto him, or take it as Spoils of War from an enemy magician. A cyborg must find the bionic component and either trade or steal it, and then find someone or some thing to install it. You get the idea. By this means, the GM can constrain progression to a rate he finds acceptable and he controls what powers a character may acquire. (You can't rebuild your Cyborg into a man-sized Transformer if the technology to do so is not available.)
This also applies to more mundane aspects. The GM controls what skills are available to acquire, and what it takes to learn those skills from said sources. It applies to raw attribute development (usually physical) also; such progression methods requires that the character commit to and devote time to a program of training and study (yes, even for physical development) that they may not be able to do for reasons of more pressing matters requiring their attention. (You can't pick up Electrical Engineering if you're a combatant in the middle of an active military campaign, and you'll not be able to master the Way of the Ennervating Fist if you're already consumed training to master the Strike From All Angles Sword Skill.)
In short, you--as the GM--can, and must, establish what the players can do to progress their characters and then to set what the costs for those improvements are at your table. That is not just one ruling, but a small handful of them that all work together to create the desired effect. A reasonable player will not have an issue with this approach.
Saturday, November 22, 2014
House Rules & RIFTS: Managing the Game - Content Curation Pt. 2
The reason for the House Rule in last week's post will become increasingly clear as I go on about the curation process.
This week, we're going to look at what curation in RIFTS means. RIFTS is a game with a lot of sub-settings, much like HERO has its various genre books that sub-divide into major variations of those genres and then go on to address specific iterations and how the tropes and themes work. RIFTS deals with the same concept by marking out space in a given section of the setting and reserving it for that sort of genre or sub-genre. (E.g. "Cosmic Heroes" and "Space Opera" are the realm of the Three Galaxies sub-setting.)
Curation, therefore, must be done first to answer what sort of campaign you want to run. Take all that you own, and cut away every last bit that does not fit what you want. A campaign built around being Coalition Grunts slogging through yet another military campaign has no place for options and content that said Grunts will not encounter. Players should not access anything that doesn't fit that campaign's intention- not species or races, not Occupations, not gear, not powers, nothing at all.
So, the rule: "Players may not access options or content contrary to the campaign's premise."
This is, again, about pairing down all of the massive amount of stuff out there into something that you can easily and readily manage at the table; if you're playing the command crew of a specific starship, then you don't need to allow options to be or use anything else.
This week, we're going to look at what curation in RIFTS means. RIFTS is a game with a lot of sub-settings, much like HERO has its various genre books that sub-divide into major variations of those genres and then go on to address specific iterations and how the tropes and themes work. RIFTS deals with the same concept by marking out space in a given section of the setting and reserving it for that sort of genre or sub-genre. (E.g. "Cosmic Heroes" and "Space Opera" are the realm of the Three Galaxies sub-setting.)
Curation, therefore, must be done first to answer what sort of campaign you want to run. Take all that you own, and cut away every last bit that does not fit what you want. A campaign built around being Coalition Grunts slogging through yet another military campaign has no place for options and content that said Grunts will not encounter. Players should not access anything that doesn't fit that campaign's intention- not species or races, not Occupations, not gear, not powers, nothing at all.
So, the rule: "Players may not access options or content contrary to the campaign's premise."
This is, again, about pairing down all of the massive amount of stuff out there into something that you can easily and readily manage at the table; if you're playing the command crew of a specific starship, then you don't need to allow options to be or use anything else.
Saturday, November 15, 2014
House Rules & RIFTS: Managing the Game - Content Curation Pt. 1
Look, RIFTS is huge. Rifts Earth alone has, what, a dozen sub-settings spread throughout the post-apocalyptic globe? The Lunar Sphere (i.e. Orbit) and the Solar System add a few more, then there's the other dimensions and the cosmic sub-settings. Of all Palladium's games, this one truly is a kitchen-sink play-anything product line. That's a lot of stuff, and without care taken you can end up with an undesireable mess that's no fun.
You need to curate. That means sorting through the stuff and choosing what to allow and what to cut out, with the result of forming a collection of stuff that adheres to a theme or motif which binds the collection together into a greater whole.
In terms of house rules, it's this simple: "Players may not access any content that the Game Master does not own."
No races, no Occupations, no gear, no locations, no powers- not one damned thing can be had unless the Game Master owns the stuff that such a thing comes from. Loaned books and free PDFs do not count; only physical copies count. This makes the curation process easier; the GM only has to work with what he actually has on-hand, and not deal with requests from players to be whatever.
You need to curate. That means sorting through the stuff and choosing what to allow and what to cut out, with the result of forming a collection of stuff that adheres to a theme or motif which binds the collection together into a greater whole.
In terms of house rules, it's this simple: "Players may not access any content that the Game Master does not own."
No races, no Occupations, no gear, no locations, no powers- not one damned thing can be had unless the Game Master owns the stuff that such a thing comes from. Loaned books and free PDFs do not count; only physical copies count. This makes the curation process easier; the GM only has to work with what he actually has on-hand, and not deal with requests from players to be whatever.
Saturday, October 25, 2014
House Rules and RIFTS: The Fundamental Rolls - d20 & d%
RIFTS uses two options for most of its rolls. One of them is to roll 1d20, add all appropriate modifiers, sometimes compare against another roll or a static number, and then declare success or failure- always roll high. The other is to roll d%, do as with the 1d20 roll, but always roll low.
Let's work with this. You usually do the d20 High roll for combat/saves, and the d% Low for skills. That indicates a trend; when there is a known or bounded range of probability, you use the d% because Roll Low works for when there's a known boundary of probability and when there isn't you go with the Role High option. (Yes, you could convert the game to go entirely one way or the other, but if that's what you wanted you'd be using a d20 System or Basic Roleplay product and not Palladium.) Look, I'm not going to get into the math of that--experts in statistics are welcome to throw in their pair of pennies below in the Comments--but I think you get where I'm going with this.
We have Saving Throws and Horror Factor checks on the d20 Role High schedule. While the Target Numbers are static, what makes them unknown is what the character subject to them can add to the roll, and by putting them on the d20 schedule it also means that automatic success and failure no matter the odds is on the table at all times. We like these features when we want either that possibility of success or failure no matter what, or we have one side being partially or wholly unknown in their probability.
We have skill checks on the d% Roll Low schedule. Here we have a character operating within a specific realm of expertise, with a known degree of proficiency, and the checks are really checks to see if that character can properly apply their expertise to the situation before them. As is so common, this general principle is not applied uniformly, but it is still very much the case. We want to go this route whenever similar conditions arise.
So, here's the suggested House Rule: if your man can't act knowing all the variables at hand, then roll the d20 and go high and let the GM figure out if he passes or fails; if your man does, then have the GM declare the odds as a percentage, roll d% and go low.
Let's work with this. You usually do the d20 High roll for combat/saves, and the d% Low for skills. That indicates a trend; when there is a known or bounded range of probability, you use the d% because Roll Low works for when there's a known boundary of probability and when there isn't you go with the Role High option. (Yes, you could convert the game to go entirely one way or the other, but if that's what you wanted you'd be using a d20 System or Basic Roleplay product and not Palladium.) Look, I'm not going to get into the math of that--experts in statistics are welcome to throw in their pair of pennies below in the Comments--but I think you get where I'm going with this.
We have Saving Throws and Horror Factor checks on the d20 Role High schedule. While the Target Numbers are static, what makes them unknown is what the character subject to them can add to the roll, and by putting them on the d20 schedule it also means that automatic success and failure no matter the odds is on the table at all times. We like these features when we want either that possibility of success or failure no matter what, or we have one side being partially or wholly unknown in their probability.
We have skill checks on the d% Roll Low schedule. Here we have a character operating within a specific realm of expertise, with a known degree of proficiency, and the checks are really checks to see if that character can properly apply their expertise to the situation before them. As is so common, this general principle is not applied uniformly, but it is still very much the case. We want to go this route whenever similar conditions arise.
So, here's the suggested House Rule: if your man can't act knowing all the variables at hand, then roll the d20 and go high and let the GM figure out if he passes or fails; if your man does, then have the GM declare the odds as a percentage, roll d% and go low.
Saturday, October 18, 2014
House Rules and RIFTS: Introduction - Making This Your Game
Palladium Books, as a matter of publisher and editorial intent, is a strong advocate for taking the rules and content that they publish and making it into something that you are willing to run and your players be willing to play. In short, Palladium Books' policy is friendly towards using all the house rules that you desire. However, Palladium also has a history of being skittish about sharing the home-brewed stuff due to a fear of law suits over conversions of properties that they neither own nor have a license to use. There shall be no such things in this series of posts.
Instead, I will talk about something more fundamental, and that is making the rules of RIFTS conform to what results you and yours want them to produce. I will start with the most fundamental rule mechanics, and then I will slowly wind my way out from that core towards subsystems like Magic and Psionics. I will talk about making sense of the gear creation (lack of a) system, inter-system dependency (and when you should use it), and other things of this nature- all with an eye towards keeping the results of your home-brewing on target with your intended objectives.
In doing this, I will explore the whole of Palladium's published corpus of rules and content (with a focus on RIFTS, of course). We'll take a good look at what Palladium offers, and see how these things work when run as-written, so we have something to compare our house rules against- and I expect that we may find that some of you will be satisfied with what already exists in some respects (or even across the board). This should be a fun and useful series, and I hope that you get a great deal of value out of it.
Next week, we will take a look at the core mechanics--and there is more than one--at the heart of Palladium's games and how they are applied. This will prove to be illuminating. See you then.
Instead, I will talk about something more fundamental, and that is making the rules of RIFTS conform to what results you and yours want them to produce. I will start with the most fundamental rule mechanics, and then I will slowly wind my way out from that core towards subsystems like Magic and Psionics. I will talk about making sense of the gear creation (lack of a) system, inter-system dependency (and when you should use it), and other things of this nature- all with an eye towards keeping the results of your home-brewing on target with your intended objectives.
In doing this, I will explore the whole of Palladium's published corpus of rules and content (with a focus on RIFTS, of course). We'll take a good look at what Palladium offers, and see how these things work when run as-written, so we have something to compare our house rules against- and I expect that we may find that some of you will be satisfied with what already exists in some respects (or even across the board). This should be a fun and useful series, and I hope that you get a great deal of value out of it.
Next week, we will take a look at the core mechanics--and there is more than one--at the heart of Palladium's games and how they are applied. This will prove to be illuminating. See you then.
Saturday, October 11, 2014
Administration: Time To Shift Gears
I can only dance around Palladium's rules so long. I've run out of moves. Starting next week, I'm talking rules and rulings and how to make them do what you want them to do to get the results you want at your table. That is all.
Saturday, October 4, 2014
Common Campaigns in RIFTS: The Intrigue Campaign
Let me be clear and honest up front: Palladium Books' role-playing games are terrible choices for campaigns of political intrigue, and especially so with RIFTS. They are derivative of Dungeons & Dragons, and that is a game build around exploration and high adventure- political intrigue was the endgame, not the game's default mode of play. With that kept in mind, we can make it work- but it won't be easy.
Cloak & Dagger play allows for players to choose to play characters of less-powerful (or less obviously powerful) Occupations and have that mean something. It is a campaign paradigm that favors social skills, interpersonal networks, and other things that Palladium's game engine doesn't do very well. Whether you're taking inspiration from The Godfather, Homeland, Three Days of the Condor, or even Ghost in the Shell (which, for this game, should be the go-to example) you're talking less about payloads and MDC ratings and more about connections and clues. Hell, you might even bother with tools and weapons that don't do Mega-Damage at all.
Because Palladium's game engine is a D&D derivative, your intrigue campaign is best handled as a blend of tense character interaction punctuated by sudden, fierce, and brutal explosions of violence. (Sort of like being on a U-boat during wartime, so go watch Das Boat and you'll get the feel we're after here.) The GM will have to be careful to ensure that attacks vs. defenses are not balanced, but clearly in favor of attacks; the whole idea is that pulling a blaster means You Done Fucked Up up to the moment when shooting is actually a necessary and vital part of the plan (as this sort of campaign does include examples inspired by classics such as Where Eagles Dare and The Eagle Has Landed, as well as the James Bond series).
You will have to account for magic and psychic powers, in addition to real-world tradecraft as applied via speculative technologies. Finding ways to thwart or divert supernatural means to acquire intelligence and properly process it is a thing in a RIFTS campaign, and those who fail to do so lose--and hard--to those who do. (Which, of course, is Yet Another Reason for why the Coalition can't beat Tolkeen as-written.) Making this a major part of a campaign is a very viable initial objective, and should be the go-to option for institutions facing potent supernatural threats of any sort. Plundering real-world tradecraft manuals, existing spy games, and all of the spy fiction (however mundane or fantastic) is necessary for a GM with any serious intention of making this work.
There is another option. This is the Lame Bond Movie option, where you play your bog-standard action/adventure game and just add intrigue bits as plot coupons; add together enough and exchange them for a campaign-shifting event where the players go up against the targeted NPC. You may well be better off doing it this way instead.
Cloak & Dagger play allows for players to choose to play characters of less-powerful (or less obviously powerful) Occupations and have that mean something. It is a campaign paradigm that favors social skills, interpersonal networks, and other things that Palladium's game engine doesn't do very well. Whether you're taking inspiration from The Godfather, Homeland, Three Days of the Condor, or even Ghost in the Shell (which, for this game, should be the go-to example) you're talking less about payloads and MDC ratings and more about connections and clues. Hell, you might even bother with tools and weapons that don't do Mega-Damage at all.
Because Palladium's game engine is a D&D derivative, your intrigue campaign is best handled as a blend of tense character interaction punctuated by sudden, fierce, and brutal explosions of violence. (Sort of like being on a U-boat during wartime, so go watch Das Boat and you'll get the feel we're after here.) The GM will have to be careful to ensure that attacks vs. defenses are not balanced, but clearly in favor of attacks; the whole idea is that pulling a blaster means You Done Fucked Up up to the moment when shooting is actually a necessary and vital part of the plan (as this sort of campaign does include examples inspired by classics such as Where Eagles Dare and The Eagle Has Landed, as well as the James Bond series).
You will have to account for magic and psychic powers, in addition to real-world tradecraft as applied via speculative technologies. Finding ways to thwart or divert supernatural means to acquire intelligence and properly process it is a thing in a RIFTS campaign, and those who fail to do so lose--and hard--to those who do. (Which, of course, is Yet Another Reason for why the Coalition can't beat Tolkeen as-written.) Making this a major part of a campaign is a very viable initial objective, and should be the go-to option for institutions facing potent supernatural threats of any sort. Plundering real-world tradecraft manuals, existing spy games, and all of the spy fiction (however mundane or fantastic) is necessary for a GM with any serious intention of making this work.
There is another option. This is the Lame Bond Movie option, where you play your bog-standard action/adventure game and just add intrigue bits as plot coupons; add together enough and exchange them for a campaign-shifting event where the players go up against the targeted NPC. You may well be better off doing it this way instead.
Saturday, September 27, 2014
Common Campaigns in RIFTS: The Exploration Campaign
Five-year missions, expeditions into the unknown, seeking the Northwest Passage- these are stories of exploration and RIFTS has plenty of room for those who seek to make known what is unknown.
The core of a campaign focused upon exploration is that the players assume the roles of individuals who are either trained for exploration, or they are specialists of a different--but necessary--sort assigned to such a task. The specific venue varies widely--overland, oversea, undersea, space, planar, etc.--but the format is the same: a team of explorers forms to investigate what, if anything, lies beyond a given threshold. This can be a mountain range or other significant terrain feature, space itself- you get the idea. Adventures are built around penetrating this threshold and then seeing what is there; making first contact with locals, mapping the territory explored, and preserving this information long enough to report back to their patron(s) so follow-up expeditions can be made with the benefit of that knowledge.
Exploration campaigns, therefore, are mixtures of diplomacy and adventure on a dangerous and unknown frontier. Players should be working with low amounts of information, dealing with material scarcity due to being at the tail end of a long logistical train (so they can't operate at optimal efficiency or effectiveness most of the time; this is "count your rations and arrows" territory), and have to deal with constraints that players in other campaigns either don't have to worry about or never even realize exist. Figuring out how to compensate for these scarcity issues, often by interacting with the locals and learning their methods, is part-and-parcel of a properly-executed exploration campaign.
The other issue with an exploration campaign is that what often follows is either exploitation of natural resources, or population movements into colonial settlements, and either development not only strains extant relations with the locals but--unless reversed--inevitably pushes back the frontier as Civilization (i.e. whom the explorers represent) comes in to fill the void that a frontier represents. You can either end a campaign when this phase of exploration arrives, or you can roll with the punches and take the opportunity to shift the campaign in a different direction; each primary exploration expedition, each first contact situation, each push into the unknown presents an opportunity to find something heretofore unseen and unknown to the players. New mysteries to solve, new cultures to interact with, new lands to investigate- this is the feature that keeps it fresh for years on end. Exploit this feature whenever things start to flag.
Exploration campaigns are best done the old-fashioned way: the sandbox. The GM should decide on the region to explore, and set up initial sets of circumstances (including what Occupations, technologies, etc. are allowed to players), and then let them interact without any concern for narrative logic of any sort- the players will, without fail, fill in all such voids with their own notions and thereby succeed or fail without so much as a word out of the GM's mouth. (And that is the other side to all of this: expeditions fail, often disastrously. If they want to be the Donner Party, let them.)
This is a model where your Men-at-Arms will not be so heavily represented, and your Men-of-Magic/Psychics will be likewise reduced in prominence, in favor of Adventurers and Scholars. You need Wilderness Scouts, first and foremost, and then Scholars and Scientists (including medical experts and technicians) with focuses on field operations (which is done by skill selection and equipment choices; someone that needs a big-city lab is not the sort to send on such things, unless it's based out of something like a starship, and that likely means such an individual will be a NPC). Generalists will be more prized members, speaking of Armsmen and Magicians/Psychics, over specialists and time-limited augmented individuals like Juicers are bad choices- as are those tied to logistical trains (Cyborgs) or already unstable (Crazies). (This, again, is where the magical sorts have an advantage so long as magical power is in sufficient abundance.) Problems are better solved by talking or fixing than by fighting, most of the time, and running is not a bad idea- players cannot presume that whatever they face they can handle.
Exploration campaigns are also easily transitioned into and out of because the core of the campaign's paradigm is inherently unstable, and thus temporary, so you can use an exploration phase as a change-of-pace for another campaign when you see the need for such a thing. If you start as exploration, but the players are not interested anymore, it is not hard to let the frontier shift away from them and let them take up positions in the emerging post-exploration communities that arise in the wake of successful exploration expeditions. When devising what to do with a game of RIFTS, don't count exploration out; even as just a temporary phase, you can really get to the heart of what makes tabletop RPGs special by returning to the origin of the hobby- exploration of the unknown, be it for gold, for glory, or for getting away from where they came from.
The core of a campaign focused upon exploration is that the players assume the roles of individuals who are either trained for exploration, or they are specialists of a different--but necessary--sort assigned to such a task. The specific venue varies widely--overland, oversea, undersea, space, planar, etc.--but the format is the same: a team of explorers forms to investigate what, if anything, lies beyond a given threshold. This can be a mountain range or other significant terrain feature, space itself- you get the idea. Adventures are built around penetrating this threshold and then seeing what is there; making first contact with locals, mapping the territory explored, and preserving this information long enough to report back to their patron(s) so follow-up expeditions can be made with the benefit of that knowledge.
Exploration campaigns, therefore, are mixtures of diplomacy and adventure on a dangerous and unknown frontier. Players should be working with low amounts of information, dealing with material scarcity due to being at the tail end of a long logistical train (so they can't operate at optimal efficiency or effectiveness most of the time; this is "count your rations and arrows" territory), and have to deal with constraints that players in other campaigns either don't have to worry about or never even realize exist. Figuring out how to compensate for these scarcity issues, often by interacting with the locals and learning their methods, is part-and-parcel of a properly-executed exploration campaign.
The other issue with an exploration campaign is that what often follows is either exploitation of natural resources, or population movements into colonial settlements, and either development not only strains extant relations with the locals but--unless reversed--inevitably pushes back the frontier as Civilization (i.e. whom the explorers represent) comes in to fill the void that a frontier represents. You can either end a campaign when this phase of exploration arrives, or you can roll with the punches and take the opportunity to shift the campaign in a different direction; each primary exploration expedition, each first contact situation, each push into the unknown presents an opportunity to find something heretofore unseen and unknown to the players. New mysteries to solve, new cultures to interact with, new lands to investigate- this is the feature that keeps it fresh for years on end. Exploit this feature whenever things start to flag.
Exploration campaigns are best done the old-fashioned way: the sandbox. The GM should decide on the region to explore, and set up initial sets of circumstances (including what Occupations, technologies, etc. are allowed to players), and then let them interact without any concern for narrative logic of any sort- the players will, without fail, fill in all such voids with their own notions and thereby succeed or fail without so much as a word out of the GM's mouth. (And that is the other side to all of this: expeditions fail, often disastrously. If they want to be the Donner Party, let them.)
This is a model where your Men-at-Arms will not be so heavily represented, and your Men-of-Magic/Psychics will be likewise reduced in prominence, in favor of Adventurers and Scholars. You need Wilderness Scouts, first and foremost, and then Scholars and Scientists (including medical experts and technicians) with focuses on field operations (which is done by skill selection and equipment choices; someone that needs a big-city lab is not the sort to send on such things, unless it's based out of something like a starship, and that likely means such an individual will be a NPC). Generalists will be more prized members, speaking of Armsmen and Magicians/Psychics, over specialists and time-limited augmented individuals like Juicers are bad choices- as are those tied to logistical trains (Cyborgs) or already unstable (Crazies). (This, again, is where the magical sorts have an advantage so long as magical power is in sufficient abundance.) Problems are better solved by talking or fixing than by fighting, most of the time, and running is not a bad idea- players cannot presume that whatever they face they can handle.
Exploration campaigns are also easily transitioned into and out of because the core of the campaign's paradigm is inherently unstable, and thus temporary, so you can use an exploration phase as a change-of-pace for another campaign when you see the need for such a thing. If you start as exploration, but the players are not interested anymore, it is not hard to let the frontier shift away from them and let them take up positions in the emerging post-exploration communities that arise in the wake of successful exploration expeditions. When devising what to do with a game of RIFTS, don't count exploration out; even as just a temporary phase, you can really get to the heart of what makes tabletop RPGs special by returning to the origin of the hobby- exploration of the unknown, be it for gold, for glory, or for getting away from where they came from.
Saturday, September 20, 2014
Common Campaigns in RIFTS: The Starship Campaign
This is the sort of thing you'll see in a Three Galaxies setup, usually, though a Earth System version ("Spaceship" instead of "Starship" due to the lack of FTL technologies) does happen. You've seen this in other media in many variations--Firefly, Star Trek, Star Wars, Outlaw Star, Angel Links, Space Battleship Yamato, etc.--so it's not a hard one to figure out here. The players assume the role of a ship's captain and crew, and the campaign focuses upon their activities. Other tabletop RPGs, such as the venerable Traveller, are all about this sort of thing.
You've got three major variations of this campaign archetype.
You've got three major variations of this campaign archetype.
- The Tramp Freighter: The ship is a working commercial vessel of some sort (usually a small-scale cargo or passenger vessel, working as a for-hire charter vessel or along adjunct lines tied to major commerce lanes). The scope of the campaign is often "local" (in space-faring terms; working within a solar system is the lowest end, within a small stellar region or zone the typical end, w/ greater scope being very rare). Common gameplay activities revolve around keeping the vessel operational, keeping themselves in good health, and keeping their difficulties away. Players assume the roles of characters with little or no augmentation, supernatural power, or out-of-the-ordinary technologies. (So, we're looking as the sort of table where being a City Rat is not out of line, and being a Vagabond is a viable option; ordinary military personnel in their ordinary capacities are a significant challenge, and better outwitted than outfought.)
- The Exploration Expedition: The ship is a public or private vessel configured for (if not purpose-built for) long-term, and often long-range, exploration. The scope of the campaign is often very far-ranging, and both the crew and the vessel will be trained and equipped to operate in a self-sufficient manner. First Contact is a common gameplay activity, and with it the potential to engaging in a wide variety of diplomatic and economic negotiations (and their intrigues) with heretofore unknown parties. While the nigh-platonic form is classic Star Trek and it's Five-Year Mission, taking inspiration from real-life histories of exploration expedition is a good idea. Players assume the role of key officers, and often take up alts of lower status who are more likely to engage in shore expeditions or otherwise do stuff that matters away from the ship. As with the Tramp Freighter, the characters are unlikely to be superhuman or super-powered (in relative terms, if not absolute ones) and the same will be--for the most part--true of the technology at their disposal at any time.
- The Warship Campaign: The ship is a warship, engaged in warfare operations. In this respect it's a shipborne variant of the Mercenary or Military Campaign, but as with the others the ship as both homebase and focal point is part of the paradigm. Campaigns of this sort take their cues from Space Battleship Yamato, various Age of Sail series, and the real-life accounts of ships such as the Enterprise in World War II. Their activities focus around military operations, so there is an overall objectives to keep in sight, and there is a determined opposition out to stop them by means of blowing them out of the sea of stars. Combat--fleet and personal--is a common occurrence, but this need not be a series of fights; real warfare is about objectives, not slugfests, so it's about getting yours before the other side gets theirs. Players also assume the roles of key officers, and should take up alts that do stuff the key officers wouldn't do.
- The Ship: Whatever form it takes, the ship is a character unto itself and should be treated like one. Even if the stats for it enter play as any other of its class, that specific vessel is specific to that captain and crew and should be individuated accordingly. ("There are many like it, but this one is ours.") Players should value the ship as the expensive, mission-critical thing that it is and not be cavalier about its welfare. The ship is homebase for the characters. It's the focus of their operations. It's the center of their lives, without which they're unable to carry on at all.
- The Travelling: It's not a starship campaign if you're not sailing the sea of stars. It's a naval game, so get out of port and out in space. You should be visiting new ports of call on a regular basis, with only a few locations being seen frequently; regular visits to a known friendly port is something that depends on the specific set up of your starfaring campaign (tramp freighters and exploration vessels will visit on very different rates of regularity and frequency). Being that this is RIFTS, it's going to be more Space Opera than Hard SF, so you've got that going for you; don't be shy about the planets and what's there.
- The Other Starfarers: Your opposition is very likely to be as spaceborne as your allies are. This means that you and your players need to figure out how your table wants to handle ship-to-ship interactions (combat and otherwise) to ensure that the players aren't bored when time comes for the crew to make the ship happen. This will differ depending upon the ship; tramp freighters with some guns attached are not the same as a naval dreadnaught in command of a squadron or even a massive fleet. (Yes, you can get your Legend of the Galactic Heroes on here, so go for it.)
Saturday, September 13, 2014
Common Campaigns in RIFTS: The Superhero Campaign
RIFTS, being a multi-genre campaign, can support entire genres if (and only if) your group buys into that voluntarily. Superheroes do work well enough, and you need not have Heroes Unlimited to make this work, but some commentary with regards to melding the usual superhero tropes with RIFTS is in order.
I am not talking about someone with superpowers in a colorful costume. That can, and does, cover plenty of Occupations in this game and therefore does not make one a superhero. (Or a supervillain for that matter.) I am talking about taking a campaign that would be normative for something like Champions or Mutants & Masterminds (or, of course, Heroes Unlimited) and using it in the environment of RIFTS. This is all about the tropes and not the numbers or the gameplay options.
A superhero game in RIFTS can handle the same range of power level--from the streets and backwoods of mostly-mundane characters to the cosmic levels of Lensmen and their inspirations (Green Lantern and Nova Corps)--so that is not the issue. The issue is that such a campaign will not be the Comics Code Authority sort of castrated content; this doesn't automatically make it an Iron Age (to use comic culture terminology) setting, but it does mean that you are not making the most of what's available in RIFTS if you sanitize things.
By necessity, you should be using some form of team as your campaign template. The trick is to pick the right team for your table's needs; if you have a group that can reliably fulfill a regular commitment to show up and play for four to six hours a week playing the same characters, then you want to use a group like The Fantastic Four or one of the many Japanese tokukatsu shows (or their animated counterparts, Magical Girls and Martial Boys). For a group with a rotating attendance, you want to use a larger organization where members come and go routinely for this or that reason, such as the Legion of Superheroes or the various Avengers lineups. This also means choosing team templates means choosing gameplay templates; committed single-character groups can better exploit serial drama tropes and premises than looser groups who either lack commitment or play multiple characters, who (in turn) can better exploit episode structures and tropes.
So, that said, here's a list of things you need to do to make it work in RIFTS:
I am not talking about someone with superpowers in a colorful costume. That can, and does, cover plenty of Occupations in this game and therefore does not make one a superhero. (Or a supervillain for that matter.) I am talking about taking a campaign that would be normative for something like Champions or Mutants & Masterminds (or, of course, Heroes Unlimited) and using it in the environment of RIFTS. This is all about the tropes and not the numbers or the gameplay options.
A superhero game in RIFTS can handle the same range of power level--from the streets and backwoods of mostly-mundane characters to the cosmic levels of Lensmen and their inspirations (Green Lantern and Nova Corps)--so that is not the issue. The issue is that such a campaign will not be the Comics Code Authority sort of castrated content; this doesn't automatically make it an Iron Age (to use comic culture terminology) setting, but it does mean that you are not making the most of what's available in RIFTS if you sanitize things.
By necessity, you should be using some form of team as your campaign template. The trick is to pick the right team for your table's needs; if you have a group that can reliably fulfill a regular commitment to show up and play for four to six hours a week playing the same characters, then you want to use a group like The Fantastic Four or one of the many Japanese tokukatsu shows (or their animated counterparts, Magical Girls and Martial Boys). For a group with a rotating attendance, you want to use a larger organization where members come and go routinely for this or that reason, such as the Legion of Superheroes or the various Avengers lineups. This also means choosing team templates means choosing gameplay templates; committed single-character groups can better exploit serial drama tropes and premises than looser groups who either lack commitment or play multiple characters, who (in turn) can better exploit episode structures and tropes.
So, that said, here's a list of things you need to do to make it work in RIFTS:
- Choose a Scope & Scale: On Earth, you're best being a City Defender sort of team, even if it's not strictly a city-centric team. Tolkeen is very good for a Magical Girl/Martial Boy team, using magical armors and powers with a common theme. The Coalition would do a super-elite team in the fashion of Suicide Squad or Doom Patrol, using some varieties of Juicer and Crazy that are otherwise ridiculously powerful but burns them out really fast- faster than what is the norm for Juicers. Smaller cities would work better for smaller groups, or even motivated solo players, but should also range somewhat afield to make up for the small city space.
Out in the Three Galaxies, go cosmic. Characters should have technology or magic equal to that of starships, if not star fleets. They should be concerned about large-scale threats; planet-specific parties should be irrelevant nuisances if they are not on planets of strategic importance, and those that are not irrelevant should make the power but lack the scope of operation for some reason or another in order to prevent "Why are they not major players themselves?"
- Cull Your Corpus: You, the GM, needs to sit down beforehand and sift through everything that is available and cut away everything that does not fit the specific superhero experience that you want. This means both what players can access as well as what the NPCs--friendly, neutral, and hostile alike--can access. By definition, a superhero is an individual whose capacities exceed the norm for his environment; if the standard soldiers or gendarmes are augmented in some fashion then being similarly augmented generally doesn't cut it- the superhero possesses an advantage of quality over the far superior quantity of the NPCs. This means that power differential is both relative and necessary to quality as "super"; Batman is super over most of what he deals with, but ordinary versus what Superman can and does contend with (which is why Batman has to rely on Writer Bias to prevail), so don't think that you can blindly employ what's in the books.
- : Get the players on the same page. You're playing a campaign that doesn't necessarily jive with RIFTS as-presented. Ensure that your players see things your way and agree with that before you start chucking dice. If this means house rules, do it. Square that away now, before any issues arise.
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