This thread is to congratulate both players and the GMs making the game of 1/3/2016 an exemplar role-playing game. This is not to pat backs, inflate egos, or rest on laurels. Rather this post is to outline the elements of what made that game so rewarding. I write this from the point of view of a writer. Having written one fantasy and three sci-fi books plus quite a few short stories, I feel compelled to bring to light what made that game so invigorating to be part of. People who have played in my games have in the past asked how I do what I do. This post is an attempt to example, in detail, how I made that happen with the generous help from players and fellow GMs. i. Bob's help with getting all the maps into the game set me up to populate them with objects to investigate, play with or utilize in the tactical battle(s) I felt were coming in the story plot. Thanks to him. ii. Crunching the time to decorate the map and fill in the blanks with the derelict vessel's pirates, surviving captain, traps and loots made the map a dungeon crawl that was due to be worth the risk in responding. x. The early game tension and conversations between the current employees and their new hires, the elderly Darrian Envoy and the Sword Worlder troubleshooter , were on par for any novel's main characters. They had the elderly and venerable sage, the hottie-badass, the heroic and loyal dog, the hot-shot console cowboy, the crack-shot spacer, the face-man, the fortune-teller and the know-it-all magazine reporter. In short, the cast covers many famous archetypes that have social tensions as well as compatibilities. Some of these trust levels were right off the bat, others as TT said were earned over time. xx. The characters maintained a professional and safe distance from each other while probing each other for backgrounds. Each had their motives. For example, Gevaudan's questions were centered around the Ares and what the new hires could bring to the table. Others had questions of political nature. It made for some very intense role-play and that sets the stage and character development for when the actual plot or episode begins. I. The game featured an S.O.S. with a deceptive plot by pirates to lure in a responding ship. The Darrian pirates had numbers. They did not count on a 'mercenary', combat-capable unit such as the Artemis Group to come to the rescue. The deadman's tumble was a term I found in MegaTraveller: Hard Times as was Gevaudan's shipwide order for suit-and-tie which means everyone on board involved in Starship Operations has to be Vaccsuited up with their helmets tied to their belt, "suit and tie" style. I felt that using the lingo of onboard lifestyle might grant more atmosphere onboard the Ares . II. Starship Operations is by now normal to us and we have a routine down. It's when an uncertainty occurs that things now become interesting. How many of us CT, MT and Tx players have wanted to be part of a bridge crew or greater starship crew? It's when a detail gets out of place that story occurs. In this example, it was the character on the Comms board that forwarded and began the plot. Had the Signal GK/Mayday/SOS/MaxEmerg message not been detected by that station, the Ares could well have missed the signal and jumped from Stern-Stern. III. When the crew looks at the Captain of the vessel for an arbitrary decision, there occurs a bit of soul-searching for a split second. Then come morals, patterns of thought, habits built up from experience, knee-jerk emotional reactions, secondary and intense emotions, and finally the character has to open his mouth to answer his or her crew. That has never been my experience as a player of a character, especially in a science-fiction. Always, I have played the paladin or healer in the party. (See "Priests: Resurrecting stupid people since 1972." for further safety barriers from bad judgement calls.) So, having played the socially-safe characters in the past, having Gevaudan give the order to respond was a special and new experience. He did tap for advice from the available bridge crew and made the call. That was a small but significant jewel for me during the game. A. Note that once the order was given to respond, the entire crew went on Yellow Alert and everyone jumped to a station board or ran to a turret or change a Cutter's module out. It furthers the atmosphere of the ship's readiness and willingness to respond to the distress call. Motivations can be listed, but need not be. What happened was that the Ares turned from pre-jump to follow the derelict spacecraft seemingly on fire. B. Skills rolls from everybody seemed to keep the adventure rolling, insistant and characters engaged in the action. Mechanics to open an airlock. Engineering to analyze the ship class and current variant configuration. Comms to detect EM communications inside the ship. And so many others that lent to the urgency and uncertainty of the impromptu rescue mission. To me, the many skills rolls seemed to keep everybody in the Now, locked on what was happing in the next moments rather than focusing on the future or trying to debunk the past of the derelict vessel. A sense of urgency was called for. IV. Once inside the ship after a trap (placed by who?) was overcome, the away team seemed to be on full alert. That lent more to the atmosphere surrounding a 3-axis tumbling ship in distress as well as the Extra-Vehicular Activity (EVA) that it took to approach the darkened hull. Who knew what we were to find inside the ship? Partitioning a section of my mind for The Player, I found myself - as Gev - asking "What was so important or so dangerous so as to need a turret in the Airlock?" It's questions like these the audience subconsciously asks themselves and hoping for answers later on in the movie. V. The player-characters first showed true humanity when they first encountered the Space Pirates with their assumption that these two beyond the airlock might be the surviving crew. Trying to parley with them initially, it was when the shotguns and cutlasses appeared in-hand that the beginnings of the truth of being lured to the ship evidenced. To me, that shock or discovery is a benchmark in a story's rising action. The climax or story apex came later. A. In battling the first squad of four Space Pirates, many of us noted a discrepancy between a lack of orders concerning allowing opponents to surrender. Gevaudan in that first engagement was "chewing his tail" over and over in that he had not set up such a contingency beforehand. This shows the audience that even leader-types are after all 'human' and have quirks and flaws brought on by character, reputation or - in this case - inexperience in command positions to lay down the parameters of the mission. a. Now to Charoux' credit, he did, as CEO ask for "1. Preserve Life" on his agenda. Kudos to him and his character's personality and need for mercy or just save the derelict craft's survivors. b. Note that further 'humanity' in the sense of anti-heroism was shown in the $$$$$ in everyone's eyes when the initial value of a salvaged ship became estimated verbally. This shows that the characters are still in the human consciousness, the human condition and have other reasons to become involved, motivations beyond Good and Evil, Law and Chaos. It was Wofen who first appreciated verbally the lack of Alignment system in Traveller. VI. The rising action kept ascending when the player-characters first felt wounds. Captain Crow took a small bit of damage. Senior Scout Gevaudan got hit and injured twice. Knowing too that we could make tactical and instant mistakes showed the player-characters' ability for miscalculation in the thick of battle. There were away team members who were lesser armored and more squishy, (to use a gaming term). This liability made the away team slow its progress into the tumbling spacecraft. At one point, I - as Gev again - asked myself "Could this ship explode at any moment if the damage is severe and pushed too far by our weapons?" Only the GM side of me could answer that and did not because I was too busy moving Tokens about and revealing new cabins once iris valves and hatches opened. It was this uncertainty and not-knowing that adds mystique to the game's story and heightens tension in the moment, combat or dungeon-delving. VII. Wave after wave of squads of four Space Pirates came at us, some smart enough to surrender, (showing that not all antagonists are fanatics or suicidal zealots). Once the bad guys realized we had thinned their numbers, their superior numbers bravery dwindled significantly. There is the fact that more than two of us were in very heavy armor and chock-full of cyber- and biotech Augments. When the Terminator is staring down at you from the sights of his Laser Rifle, you tend to check your privilege. A. Did we accept the surrender of the smarter Space Pirates, especially when we weren't dodging or parrying attacks and trusting to Battle Dress or HEV armors? After a time, our hardened and mercenary souls began to flake and chaff and mercy began to show, (well except for Dagne the Hel-spawn, but we can't win everyone over, neh?) It shows further dimensions and varying levels of humanity. Most were able to demand surrender, accept surrender if offered, grudgingly allow surrender and finally hear a surrender and kill him anyways. Flavors of characters show brightest on the edge of survival situations to be sure. a. Crow was trying to use logic on the Space Pirates to get them to surrender. b. Most were astounded to learn of Dagne's draconian version of surrender. c. Gevaudan accepted surrender only if it was initialized by his opponent. "Good thing we thought to bring grenades!" d. As the Darrian Envoy, Galen was also logical and another voice of reason to both sides of the battles. e. Simone, with her signature Stunners, made surrender further possible with such non-lethal weaponry - a willingness to encourage surrender. f. Was Charoux missing with his lasers truly, or was he missing his shots to give his adversaries a chance to consider their options? We all know the gaming-based reasons, but to - say Gevaudan - a question of Charoux' mercy could be examples, his misses with twin laser pistols. g. And don't think, in hindsight, that Hane was not being merciful. His analysis of the Ship's Locker could have been falsified. Totally safe. Go ahead and open the door. The afterthought did cross Gevaudan's mind. The away team dies in a pocket nuke detonation. He scurries off in the Ares, a sad and tragic story and vastly rich enough to retire his adventuring (and the game's campaign). "Not lost on this one," thinks Gev. VIII. The climax in the story, for me at least was indeed the pocket nuke in the Ship's Locker. The behind-curtains story being that it was placed there in full knowledge of the Space Pirates to ensure loyalty All-For-One or death to all in a pocket nuke fireball made for a story-backed trap that could have slain everyone in the away team starting with the Old Man and ending with Crow in his glow-in-the-dark Battle Dress. Charoux' ability to read Darrian on the taped door to the Ship's Locker "Do Not Open" was taken to heart over and above the curiosity to seek out loots or satisfy curiosity in general. As the GM, I could have arbitrarily called that the pocket nuke had enough yield to vaporize the entire ship. But the rules of the game allow for mercy in dice throws, number of bulkheads and ship's armor between each character, armor ratings, rad shielding, the list goes on. The Cutter #1, dented and previously bruised, would have tumbled fast and away from the derelict starship, making return in time to catch it before dying of radiation poisoning problematic. The ice and rock Oort Cloud was another sharp obstacle course to consider. This was a Pandora's Box scenario that saved the away team. By not getting greedy for loots or too ahead of the team, the Artemis Group avoided catastrophic disaster, (and possibly the end of the game campaign). But Total Party Kills (TPKs) can and do happen. It is not, in my book, a thing to gloat about or share and exchange TPKs with other GMs. Taking advantage of a character's human condition and consciousness is what a GM is supposed to do. It is no special notch on a belt or outside on the fusilage to brag about. But we managed to allow this one door to be passed over and it saved our lives. IX. Then came the moral quandry of the night. This was the biggest show of human condition of the game and one of the bigger ones of the campaign since I cycled in as the current GM. When the away team neutralized all Space Pirate threats and the remaining turret-drones, they discovered via Sensors and scouting the rest of the ship, that there was one original survivor of the crew. The female, Darrian (there now doesn't that tug your heart-strings a lil?), captain of the converted liner was found in the forward observation lounge in a slave's cage (twanging the heart-strings again to learn that the Space Pirates were also going into the slave trade). This put the whole operation's Credit value down the tubes if she lived to tell the tale of her liberation. The ship had to be returned to the captain and its owning shipping company (Tharnita Denus, our previous ticket's Patron by the way), and the Artemis Group would lose all the salvage rights to the vessel and its remaining, unspoiled (we did shoot up the cargo in Room 6) loots. Oh how my heart sang to hear those little gears tumble as moral compasses were checked. Should the crew of the Ares truly rescue the captain of the ship? A. The ship alone was worth, once repaired 289+MCr and had more than 3MCr in legal and illegal cargo lots. B. It would have been easy to coup de gras the caged, female captain with a Space Pirate's shotgun. C. The Ares had just enough cargo to take the most valuable lots and sell them at Zamine, the next jump over. D. The characters did receive a modest reward for the liberation of the captain, the ship, its cargo and return of the deceased victims left in Engineering. E. The company did receive a guaranteed Special future Ticket in which Ticket Adjustments would be on the table. X. But morality of the company, even in each other's eyes, won out. We returned the captain, the ship and the legal cargo to Tharnita Denus at Stern-Stern's Highport. The captain, knowing full well that an investigation would be undertaken, was all too happy to off-load the illegal Biochemicals to the Ares and tout us as heroes, (scoring us another base-700KCr later). In this light as a writer, this allowed the gamers to portray Good Guys on the surface and allow them to be Anti-Heroes underneath. This is a common archetype we see in movies and television today. It makes for more believable characters and motivations to have in place such Stick-And-Carrots. Much like Firefly , we see the crew being paid a nice sum of valuables, that cannot be immediately be liquidated, and the story goes on pretty much in a financial holding pattern, even if the characters did have to endure an adventure, (danger). For me, it was a nice story to tell, be told from the players and their individual points of view and to get to see each person's boundaries and how hard those boundaries were given the situation, setting, and lures born of passions such as anger, greed, undue material attachment, vanity and even a lil lust (for light seasoning). In Conclusion: All the above elements, many inserted on purpose - some not so much, lent to an excellent story of heroism, adventure, soul-searching and apex-to-denouement seat's edge that I myself have been searching for in gaming and missing out. You see, I have this GM's flaw of: Why Can't You Trip Like I Do? The above means that ideally, I want the players to see what I see, feel what I feel as if we were all telepathically linked. This is of course impossible because of individual perception, conception and realization and I have to work on this issue. But coming close as we did on 1/3/2016's game, it was a spike in enjoyment in playing Mongoose Traveller: The Fifth Frontier War. (I invite discussion on this thread as well as constructive criticism. I want to know if we could have pushed the envelope even further in one night's play. But Kudos is due to all.)
