Noob GM here looking for advice. Scum and Villainy will be the second game I have ever run and I am excited to get going. I’m happy with the starting situation for the Stardancer and running from there for our first session but I’m getting a little worried about after. I know the PCs have lots of freedom to pick a direction for the next job and I won’t be able to plan for those but does anybody have advice on making good obstacles for the crew? How do you flesh out the scores from Random Job table to something ready?
Noob GM here looking for advice.
Noob GM here looking for advice.
I am running S&V, and I used the starting scenario, but immediately my players started to incorporate their backgrounds. This isn’t normal – especially for a more traditional gaming group.
Always think like a director. My bounty hunters wanted to not bounty hunt for mission #2. They wanted to steal something called Ice-9 (instantly freezes huge amounts of water), because a player had read a book synopsis on this.
I rolled on the random faction chart and the random twists chart. I got The Agony (weirdo force cult), and the Counter’s Guild (corrupt Imperial bankers). So far so good – the Counter Guild has a spaceport they use to mine gas (SB-176) in the starting system. They are selling this Ice-9 to the Agony, and we made a few information rolls to get this mission set up so far.
The group helped, but I started with these obstacles based on a desperate engagement roll position for their Infiltration mission.
1 – Landing unseen on the heavily monitored space station
2 – Sneaking into the base via ventilation ducts. I thought it good to show them just how big a tier 4 target it – they get to the refinery lab and see a ton of heavy material, scientists and swat team style guards. They didn’t know much about Ice-9, so we flashed back to learn some things
3 – They told me they wanted to reroute the incoming agony ship to a remote part of the spaceport in an unused doc. They cleared out the few folks in that doc, and updated the landing codes/instructions.
4 – They jumped the landing Agony ship, and effectively took it over (using lots of gambits – this was our big fight for the night.)
5 – Dressed as agony, with agony clearance, they moved to purchase the Ice-9 from the counter’s guild. Greed took over, and bad rolls started happening – but they got both the Ice-9, and the Agony’s payment as they stole the crate and fled.
Note – they left their Cerebus starting ship, and their personal vehicles on the mining spaceport. This new ship was heavily damaged (the scoundrel flubbed a gun turret attack on the spaceport workers to help them get away, which made him have to rig the guns to work, which he flubbed that roll as well.)
Lots of new adventure points here. But as you can see, just say (out loud to your players) “what would be the coolest scene if this were an HBO series?
Well, it’s not really intended that you flesh it out (per se). If you plot too strictly, then the players use an approach or invoke a flashback that invalidates what you have planned, you have planned for noting. You do really need to be on your improv game.
But it does help if you have a list (in your head or on paper) of obstacles and things that can go wrong. I’ve been thinking I need a method for this myself. This is what I have come up with:
For each of the following questions, consider 3-6 answers and jot them down, and use them for inspirations for complications during the game.
1) Consider the complication you have selected. How can it present obstacles for the players?
2) Consider the Job (from Work tables) you have selected or rolled. What makes this difficult?
3) Consider the approach the players have chosen. What do they NOT want to happen for that approach to be successful?
For instance, lets say I roll (I did, TBH) a “Locate or Hide” job invovling the Lost Legion and the Janus Syndicate, on Holt, with the complication “An element is a cover for a Hegemonic Cult”.
My quick take on what the job is: The Janus Syndicate was to deliver a high end armored “yacht” to a discerning customer, but the Lost Legion use a Yaru provided clone to replace the actual buyer and fled to the Holt system with it. The crew is hired by the sullied Janus Syndicate to find and recover the ship. Janus provides some keys and a hidden transponder key to track the ship. Since this is in the Holt system, I have decided that this ship is secretly a key to the puzzle to the Hantu gate and the Cult of the Seekers is involved.
To the questions:
1) How can this complication present problems?
a) The players may gather intel that the Lost Legion intends to take the ship to one place, but the cult of the seekers uses powers or artifacts to “re-hijack” the ship and take it somewhere else
b) A neutral they have come to rely upon is secretly in the pocket of the Cult of the Seekers
c) After the players get the ship from the lost legion, Cult agents show up to take it for themselves.
2) Why is this difficult?
a) If the Lost Legion wants to steal a ship, they probably have highly trained fanatical heavies that will inflict bodily harm on those who try to take it back
b) The Lost Legion may have loyalists in any body the group is using for intel
c) It’s hard to hide a ship, unless it has some form of cloaking device…
d) They track the ship to an Oasis-station, and it gets lost in a jumble of ships in some sort of ship parking lot.
3) The approach they players take, what do they not want to happen?
Let’s say they choose an infiltration appoach and disguise themselves as highly specialized dock workers that handle Janus made ships
a) they might get questions or other undue notice from actual engineers
b) the Lost Legion already had a crew of tight lipped loyalists in place among the engineers
c) the Cult of the Seekers already have a brainwashed spy among the engineers
d) they forge their papers, but must be in place to do the work they are supposed to pretend to be doing by the time the ship gets there. What if they have to rush in and ambush the real engineers who are about to board?
Thanks for the help. I know my improv game will have to be strong and I can’t pre plan scores up so much as I don’t know their approach to the plan. I guess the nerves are about not having enough ideas ready when the time comes. I’ve got a good group of friends though who I think will get fully involved in the world.
I find having NPCs fleshed out with simple, direct motivations and loyalties very helpful.
Also, let the dice guide you.
In a traditional game, you’d plan a mission, with a series of challenges. Then throw the player at those challenges, and the dice tell us if they succeed.
In this game, you can roll dice before you decide what the challenges are. When the dice tell us that they succeed or fail, you can improvise a reason why. You can improvise the challenge differently, depending on what the dice say.
Don’t worry if it turns out really easy and not much challenge for the players. They’ll feel like badass experts, who made clever decisions.
Literally, I’ve had missions that were over after two dice rolls, because the players just rolled successes and did what they wanted to do. So it was over in ten minutes, I gave them their reward, and we continued playing because we still had plenty of time for another mission. It’s not a TV show where one “episode” has to take a specific amount of time.
We’ve also had the opposite, where what we expected to be a quick and easy job turned into a huge mess and took the entire session or longer. That’s also fine!
Planning less actually helps! Someone is sneaking into a house to grab the thing they need, then ducking out again? You don’t need to know how many guards, where they are, or the layout of the house. You don’t need to know what they’re carrying. You ONLY need to decide just enough for a little bit of flavour. “Yeah, there are a few people guarding it. They’re bored and talking about how they’re going to spend their money when they hand the package over.” – seriously, that’s enough.
If the engagement roll goes well, you can describe two bored guards who don’t notice them sneaking through. If it goes badly, you can describe multiple guards patrolling the building. If it goes REALLY badly, you can describe multiple guards patrolling and how they grab the PC as they enter, starting the mission with one PC already captured, and the guards closing in on the others.
And, unfair as that sounds, often these are the most fun missions! Because they give the players a chance to do awesome things in a high-stakes situation. That’s why we have flashbacks and whatnot. “Of course they captured that PC! We wanted that to happen, that’s why the PC was wearing ear protection. Give the signal to fire the flashbang grenade through the window, so the PC can grab the package while the guards are stunned.”
… plan less. Let the players guide you. Let the dice guide you.
Another great benefit of planning less and letting the dice guide you is that you can make the PCs seem more awesome. You can describe the PCs failures as something new that the players didn’t yet know about.
“I shoot him…. oh, I fail” is usually “you miss” and the PC seems less cool.
“I shoot him… oh, I fail” could be “Your sniper snaps off three perfect shots, and everyone hears the electric snap as the plasma bolts are absorbed by the target’s force shielding. He must have very impressive biomods to have a shield like that.”
Now, not only have we avoided the player being “a sniper that missed”, we’ve used the dice result to improvise a new part of the story. It doesn’t feel “unfair” because it was the result of dice (and other times the result would be “You blast him. Mission complete, well done!”) – and we haven’t stopped the sniper from doing cool stuff, we’ve given him the opportunity to do even cooler stuff. “Oh, I can’t shoot him directly? But I can aim for the support beam of the bridge!”