The Challenge

A thread of 3 messages, 16 November 1989 to 16 November 1989, in the order they were sent.

#710 The Challenge

Mark Gellis · 16 November 1989

I've been reading the responses to my initial question--Paul's is great,
except my players aren't quite that stupid...well, most of the time--and
I thought I would share some of my own techniques.

The two real obstacles are, I think, fairness and elegance.  Anyone can
make an arbitrary decision that the NPC gets the first shot, and gets a
hit.  I don't think anyone here does that to their players (with the
rare exception of a player who is REALLY asking for it), so that's not
too much of a problem.

The peace-through-superior-firepower solution is one that I generally
have to rely on.  You have to be careful, though; unless you simply want
to make certain things totally off limits to a group of characters, you
can only make your NPCs a little more powerful than they are.  (Yes,
you have a five hundred ton corvette with a particle beam...it can blow
the socks off any unarmed merchants...uh oh, is that a sixty thousand ton
battleship on your screens?  Oh no, Mr. Bill....!)  And even here, you
have to be careful to keep the situation from simply being one of who
gets the first three really good rolls.  Sometimes, of course, it can
work, if the aim of the adventure is to take out a larger opponent's
forces via guerilla tactics, identifying weak points and hitting those
and staying away from the ones you can't beat--the decision being left
to your players.  In short, the problem here is that it is easy to
hit your players with something that they simply cannot stop (even if
you have Fleet Tactics +5 and a couple of dreadnoughts, the GM can always
send twice as many ships at you under a guy with +8) but giving them
something that they have a good chance of beating, although they will
have to sweat to do it.

I've sometimes found, by the way, that the most enjoyable adventures
are ones where people have to figure something out, as opposed to simply
blowing it up (of course, sometimes they have to do this, too).  I
once had my players on their corvette being followed by a probe that
stayed at the borders of their sensor range so they could not get very
good information on it.  It was simply keeping tabs on them.  Didn't
do anything else.  Had them spooked, though, until they found out what
it was.

The trouble is that is it hard to come up with good mysteries.  Commando
missions are easy because they're really all the same; the only thing that
changes is the precise mission objectives and the skill levels and weapons
of the NPCs shooting at them.

Ho hum.  Take care all.

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#713 Re: The Challenge

Ronald Henry Daubel · 16 November 1989 · reply to #710

Maybe I'm a little slow, but doesn't anyone here ever watch Star Trek?

Both the old and the new programs give GM's amazing ideas on what they
can do to their players next.  True, your players probably watch ST also,
but if you can't modify an episode sufficiently to give your players a
decently complex situation, then you're not thinking hard enough.

My personal favorite is setting up parallel worlds with facist (sp?) govm'ts
and letting the players get tangled up dealing for arms, drugs, etc.

Ron
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"I don't know kid, I can imagine an awful lot."
                          -Han Solo

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#718 Re: THE CHALLENGE

Chris Bartlett · 16 November 1989 · reply to #713

     In regard to Mark's question, ( by the way, thanks for the kind
words, Mark ), I've never let my players get to the point where they
were so powerful as some of the PCs everybody's been describing, but
I suspect that I keep a tighter rein on my players' destructive impulses
than most referees.  I tend to run my games like Pete and Adrian described,
where the players can do pretty much what they want, as long as they
don't mess with the Imperial authorities.  My players tend to be very
pro-Imperial anyway, trying to stay on the good side of the law.
Remember The Traveller Adventure?  After discovering the meson gun plot,
their first impulse was to go to the Imperial authorities.  Loyal citizens,
all. Not that they aren't devious in their own ways, but they managed to
get on the good side of a certain naval intelligence officer and wanted
to stay that way.

     Enough digression.  One way I keep the PCs from getting too powerful
is to keep them relatively poor.  This works when they want to buy black
market arms and are charged many times the list price for them.  Making
high-tech weaponry hard to acquire ( ever try to find a high TL world
with a low enough law level to actually buy a laser rifle legally? )
is usually sufficient, and the PCs desire to advance themselves
financially proves to be an excellent incentive to take those risky
jobs that PCs always seem to get...   And, like Paul said, combat
skills aren't always the most useful.  "A Marine can do two things:
Kill, and wait around until he can kill some more." :-)

    Did anybody look at my fuel consumption idea?  It looks like it
will work for the 10 ton fighter, too. (Although the fighter needs a
bigger power plant )  Sigh.


Chris


All opinions and material above is the responsibility of the originator.
Submissions: [email removed], or [email removed]
Administrator: [email removed] (James Perkins)
The TML is made possible by facilities provided by Tektronix, Inc.