Longtime Dakkanaut
|
I actually got a session of this in last night so I suppose I might as well get around to posting it up as a new thread instead of pulling a necromancer on the old one I posted last month. Due to some low attendance I only got to have 2 players. Surprisingly enough the game ran perfectly fine with 2, although I think it could have been more fun with 4.
We got our character sheets filled out in record time for an RPG. One of the players was kind of tired of Pathfinder and how much rules bloat there was, so getting through character creation in 5 minutes made him smile. I enjoyed role-playing the bored couldn’t care less lieutenant filling out paperwork while explaining how their sheets worked. That really helped set the atmosphere I was going for. I kept it light. Starship Troopers the Movie style. To be honest I don’t think I could have done serious with this group…we just finished a game of Cards Against Humanity for heaven’s sake. Besides the game looks like it plays best when you keep it light for the first few missions.
The two characters we ended up with were Trooper Nill with 6/4 FA/NFA(kind of a sneaky backstabby type. Never did find out why he joined the Brigade. Maybe he got kicked off Terra?) and Sergeant Hardass (an extreme sports junky who eventually got bored and decided to sign up and kill some bugs). This guy actually took the plunge and went 2/8. That terrified me but it actually worked out rather well. Ranking officers have all kinds of nasty tricks they can pull with NFA to make them do well in most situations.
I am afraid I can not remember equipment too well. I think the sergeant took an energy rifle and the trooper took a slug rifle. They didn’t really understand about threat tokens and they thought kills were important for more than individual bragging rights, so they tried to have a good spread of kills over all ranges.
We got in 2 missions over about 2-3 hours while I was fumbling to look up rules and generate planets, so the game does play very quickly.
The first planet I rolled up was an ice world. The aliens were artificial lifeforms with the Rapid Movement trait. I decided to go with scientists and engineers instead of artists for planet names and made my own table for that in advance. This was planet Einstein. The Alien Ability came out to be 7 (lowest FA + highest NFA + 2). Pretty meaty AA, but the trait wasn't particularly scary so it should be a reasonable intro to the game. I know that 3:16 struggles with balance for one shots because characters can just dump flashbacks to auto-win encounters and I was kind of afraid that would happen, but the players were good enough sports about it that they didn’t do so (although on the second mission…I designed that one to put them through hell on purpose. You will see).
I started it out with the classic "you are in your ship the Righteous Vengeance. You just dropped out of hyperspace. what are you doing?" and proceeded to introduce Trooper Timmy, who was pretty much the squad's designated butt-monkey. Trooper Nill was not at all a fan of this guy and he described how he was putting up with Timmy while the sergeant was called off to briefing.
The act of separating the sergeant for briefing really helped to start the split between trooper and NCO. I picked that up from some advice on another forum and it worked great. Between Trooper Timmy, the split for briefing, and my portrayal of their lieutenant (Allister Caine, too bad neither player plays Warmachine. It went over their heads.) as a total self obsessed desk jockey who likes to think he’s a big hero, the players were already in a “trust nobody but myself” mindset before they even hit planetside. I’m not going to call this the result of my great GM skills or anything, having players that buy into the game is basically essential I think. Fortunately this was the case for me.
I kept things simple. “We don’t know much about this planet. Apparently the bugs here are a real pain in the butt. We lost all contact with our previous landing force. We are supposed to try again, since we’re the best there is. Get a landing zone then take your squad south to the last LZ. Figure out what happened then come back. The rest of the platoon will have a base of operations established and you can relay the data to me back in orbit.” I then showed a “planetary map” I had hastily prepared in Paint that was basically a blue circle with a red ‘X’ marked “landing zone”. The sergeant’s player completely broke down laughing at that one. He decided not to show it to the Trooper’s player.
The soldiers then got suited up and reported to the shuttle room. There was an equipment inspection before drop. Lieutenant Caine made sure everybody packed their survival tents since it was an Ice world. Both players failed their NFA checks so they forgot theirs, Caine didn’t want to delay the drop so he figured they would just huddle together for warmth. Sergeant Hardass used his NFA to make Trooper Timmy give him his tent.
The drop down was pretty uneventful. I made the standard NFA roll not to throw up, and Trooper Nill failed it. That gave him a +2 penalty in combat for the first round. As soon as they were about 100 ft above the deck the hatch opened and they jumped out, using their grav-chutes to fall the rest of the way in. Surprisingly they got an ambush on the first encounter. I had piled in 4 threat tokens because I wanted to make the first encounter pretty brutal.
This is the point where 2 players kind of is awkward. Since you get threat tokins proportional to the number of players I think I would have had a more fun time with more players. I could have had bigger encounters and more encounters. I don’t know if that’s just my imagination, but all the combats really went by fast.
Anyway, I now had to figure out what the aliens looked like and why they got ambushed. My first thought was “rogue zambonis” I kind of elaborated this into car sized metallic centipedes that skimmed along the snow at unnatural speed while piling the snow layer down to the permafrost into their gaping maws. Since they had no ranged weapons the troopers were able to shoot at them all the way in, thus justifying the ambush.
This first encounter went pretty easily for the players. They both took a kill but nobody used any other resources, so they healed up between encounters. I am kind of locked into a “describe what happens” form of game running, and so are the players, so I ended up describing lots of what happened. That’s not really a bad thing and everybody enjoyed it but it’s not really how the game should be run I don’t think.
The 7 remaining squad members (including Timmy) started hiking south and eventually got to the crashed shuttle. The Sergeant managed to get information off the shuttle’s black box recorder that basically showed it plowed headfirst into the ground. All the troopers onboard were dead in their restraints and there was no signs of weapon fire on the ship or the troopers. The data immediately classified itself before he could analyze it anymore.
I ran another 2 threat token encounter. The centipedes were back but they weren’t doing much except circling around the shuttle at a distance and sometimes having one dart in to attack. This fight was also pretty easy, but again both soldiers suffered a kill. After it was done they had a split second to realize the centipedes were digging before the shuttle collapsed through the ice layer down into a system of ice caves. (at some point during this fight the sergeant failed his FA roll and described the kill he suffered as Timmy shooting him in the back on accident because he thought the PC was an alien. That was fun)
After some exploration and getting oriented they started heading north. Trooper Timmy and the 2 PCs were the only living members of the squad now. They noticed that some centipedes were traversing the ice tunnels, but didn’t seem to take notice of the troopers. They followed the bugs into a giant chamber. Basically after some fiddling around looking down and dropping flairs into the depths of the planet (expecting the ice cavern pit to be full of bugs) they realized the entire ceiling was actually covered with metallic centipedes. I used my last 4 threat tokens here. Plus I actually got an alien ambush. The sergeant used his strength “pyrotechnics expert” here to “borrow” a grenade from a trooper under his command and used it to collapse the cavern. They then had to run out through the collapsing tunnels and slid down an ice spire to land safely outside within sight of the original drop zone. Poor Timmy got buried under an avalanche at the last moment and both PCs agreed “there was nothing we could do” and didn’t bother to tell anybody about him.
Turned out they killed the brain bug at some point, because the entire LZ was surrounded with a wall of destroyed centipedes. The attack suddenly stopped at about the time the grenade went off. At this point Lieutenant Caine came down in his personal dropship and held a medal ceremony where all the usual stuff happens (he awarded the sergeant the crimson sword, then immediately turned around and awarded himself the crimson skull for “brilliant leadership leading to the pacification of an alien planet”.)
Overall this planet was pretty easy. The only things expended was one flashback, Trooper Nill’s combat drugs (he rolled a 10 on the re-roll so he took a kill) and Nill’s armor. Somehow the sergeant rolled amazingly because he managed to get a few kills even with a 2 in FA.
Both players automatically level up (another quirk of a 2 player game). Trooper Nill failed his advancement roll so only got the automatic weapon upgrade and added a point of NFA to make him 6/5. The Sergeant boosted his FA by a point (8/3 now). He passed his advancement roll and elected to requisition a power claw. I am afraid I can not remember what weapons or range bands they upgraded with their free advancement. Both troopers (unsurprisingly) chose to receive an additional strength.
At this point the players were really enjoying themselves, and when I mentioned I actually had a mission planned out in advance they jumped on it. This one took place on their spaceship a couple hours after they got back from the first mission. I picked the alien ability to be 10, and used a special ability called “solitary” I found online (strongly designed to emulate the original Alien movie or other movies with one super strong terrifying enemy). Basically all the threat tokens represented one alien. The person to remove the last threat token gets 1 kill, the only kill for that planet. You could spend a threat token at the start of an encounter to give the alien any one of about 5 really nasty traits for the duration of that encounter. This was going to be a bloodbath.
There was a crash, all the lights went out, and then the red emergency lighting went on. Both PCs (still the only surviving squad members since there wasn’t enough time to reallocate personnel) immediately made a mad sprint for the armory down the hall. Halfway down the hall something started shooting at them and other random troopers from the ventilation shafts in the ceiling. All kinds of NPC cannon fodder got mowed down as the PCs dramatically rolled through the armory door and sealed it behind them.
They managed to get suited up before whatever it was broke the door down. Then I decided to be a real dick. I gave the alien “stops technology” and started the fight at far range. Since he had AA 10 and I was rolling hot for that encounter the PCs basically could not close range to remove threat tokens since I kept pushing them back and putting kills on them. There were lots of descriptions of the lights going out and their armor’s HUD crashing to blue screen as they franticly ran around between rows of lockers with whatever this thing was unerringly shooting at them through the darkness.
Eventually trooper Nill had to use one of his strengths “bar room ninja” and described sliding a random table across the ground to slam this creature and pin it against a wall. This ended the current encounter so I described him making contact with something, getting thrown backwards, then the lights came back on and whatever it was vanished leaving only a hole torn into the ventilation duct.
The PCs got on the radio and managed to cut through the constant wall of “WTF is going on” to get in contact with their Lieutenant, who happened to be in the shower washing his hair when the power went out and as such was mightily displeased. After some interesting RP I described a burst of static over the comms followed by a priority override from the ship’s colonel (I decided that each colonel was in charge of one of the ships in the brigade). Colonel Schaffer (none of the players do 40k either. That one went over their heads too sad to say) ordered all operational troops to converge on the landing bay and form a defensive perimeter. He didn’t know what in Terra’s name was going on, but something nasty was on that ship.
The PCs got to the landing bay without incident and joined a massive herd of troopers in various states of readiness all packed together. Then I launched the second encounter. I gave the creature lasting wounds and described it bursting up from the floor in the middle of all the troopers. It was also an artificial life form, basically described by me as “halfway between General Grievous and one of those mechanical centipedes you fought on the last planet” (if that’s not a terrifying mental picture I don’t know what is). The threat did indeed have 4 arms. One of them had a massive power claw and he started going all Freddy Kruger on the giant mob of troopers who mostly started shooting each other because it popped out of the middle of them.
This fight was just as brutal as the last one, but at least the PCs could remove threat tokens this time. The Sergeant ended up in a chokehold by a power claw with his armor rapidly being shredded away and had to use a weakness “overcompensation” where his spirit was completely crushed by the fact the enemy had a bigger power claw than he did. He ended up passing out and the terminator threw his body away, ripping the entire front off his armor in the process. Trooper Nill managed to finish up the fight, at which point the alien dove back down through the deck plates, but at this point both PCs were at “crippled” and they had used their armor… and I still had 3 threat tokens left.
At that point the colonel decided that the only way to be sure the ship was secure was to disable the magnetic deck plating and vent it all to space. Since the entire trooper population of the ship was in the landing bay this caused the majority of them to asphyxiate and/or get blown out into the vastness of hyperspace. The PCs both managed to get their armor’s grappling hooks tangled in some pipework on the inside of the ship so they got blown out of the ship but remained attached.
They looked back at the ship and saw the alien clinging to the outside with its power claw waving at them while taking aim with its built in minigun. I burned a counter to give it “ambush” (which was wasted since I actually rolled an ambush anyway). The players did not die though because they had healed one kill from the first non-lasting wounds encounter. The Sergeant immediately used his last strength “one shot one kill” to end the encounter, describing how his experience hunting exotic game across various planets allowed him to always find a weak point and bring a beast down if he gets a clean shot. He put a slug straight through its head .
The PCs then started reeling themselves back into the ship. At this point trooper Nill decided to go into PVP mode and claim the last kill for this mission as his own. Both PCs were on crippled with no armor again. The Seargent elected to roll NFA and do emotional damage. He rolled a 7 and passed first, giving Nill a very interesting speech about obeying his superiors in which profanity flowed like water so I won’t repeat it here. This crossed off Nill’s last box and he suffered a nervous breakdown from the combined stress of what happened plus trying to betray his sergeant. Viewpoint immediately snapped to another random trooper in the landing bay (I love that feature).
At that point Colonel Shaffer showed up personally to decorate Hardass and explain how, now that 75% of the ship’s population was dead (including Lieutenant Caine, in his shower no less) the remainder of their population would be integrated into another ship of the Brigade.
Both players leveled up again. Nill’s new character (8/3) actually rolled a 3 and managed to get two weapon kill upgrades. Hardass chose to rank up and commission as a lieutenant. Too bad he already had the power claw… but the look on the player's face when I described the "orbital bombardment" rules more than made up for that I think.
Hope you all enjoyed reading that. The 2 people already loved the system and are hooked on it. They enjoyed how quickly the missions go and also how the combat system is so intuitive. They want to meet next week and continue the adventure, as well as maybe pulling some new players. I already have plans to pitch an easy slowball at them for the next planet. Some kind of non-robot force with an AA of 6 or so and a not particularly threatening trait. They need it after that 2nd mission, and it could give me a chance to add in some more moral layers as they kill a species that is obviously not all that threatening. It will also give some time for the players to stew a little about where the robot centipedes came from and how this human/centipede hybrid got on their ship... I still haven't fully decided on this one, but a "Beta testing program" for the next expeditionary brigade of AI constructs sounds like a promising idea (although I don't really want to go that over the top obvious anti-Terra. Maybe a human self replicating WMD from a previous interstellar war that the brigade has to clean up?)
|
