Advice requested
So I’ve been quietly working on a hack for some time called “They Come”. The premise is aliens are invading and you have a finite amount of time to gather resources and intel to be able to upgrade your operations agency before the alien endgame (parallels to XCOM are fair). I wanted to up the strategy side on the downtime – making how you invest your resources critical, and have a fixed endpoint before it’s game over. Been crunching a lot on how to make the mechanics work and I’ve hit a major stumbling block: the missions themselves.
The missions keep boiling down to: go to place, defeat aliens, try not to damage their stuff too much.
There seems to be little to no need for social skills. It’s a major stumbling block and I haven’t managed to get my head around making the mission segment fun and interesting.
Have you had any similar experiences with combat heavy games?
Stras Acimovic how does your Band of Blades handle the military missions aspect (I am making clueless assumptions on what it is).
Running with the Xcom parallels: you could have conspirator/semi brainwashed human factions to deal with on a more diplomatic/espionage level perhaps..?
Rescue innocents
Do something as a favour to people you want to join you
Investigation of mysterious alien things the aliens have been doing
Escorting high profile targets out of a danger zone, not only will your players have to deal with Alien ambushers but also the VIP’s Bullshit or abject terror
In XCOM2 you make connection to different parts of the resistance network. Opportunity for social scores?
Will there by different types of crews? (Just to make it even more a challenge 😉 )
Is it an overt or covert invasion? If covert, are you trying to keep it under wraps for as long as possible or reveal the aliens to the world? Take EXALT as inspiration and consider rival human factions; some trying to profit from alien tech, wannabe quislings and collaborators, outright terrorists who don’t care about human casualties in the face of alien conquerors, diplomatic corps trying to broker peace, governments with their own agendas. You may need to convince factions to team up, recruit new soldiers, rescue your captured operatives (this works with alien enemies too), steal or smuggle intel or experimental tech, try to reveal truth to the world or hide it… Are the aliens a united front? Are some amenable to cooperation? Do their leaders have subtly divergent goals (rule and subjugate earth vs harvest it for resources)? That could lead to interesting alliances or broaden the faction game. You can also vary the alien fights hugely. A base/landed UFO might be the setting for several missions (recon followed by a surgical strike to lower defenses followed by a full scale attack). Fighting alien soldiers in a crowded city is different to preventing them poisoning reservoirs, freeing their captives or sabotaging their comm towers.
Will the players be an elite and well-organized group of soldiers like in XCOM or is this more of a rag tag Falling Skies kind of deal?
In the case of the latter, there should be scope for all 6 plan types from Blades and the Deception, Transport and Social types could certainly make use of social skills.
Initially it was different crews but I broke it down to one agency and a lot of option on how to customise it. Playbook moves and Claims turned into Facilities, you buy/build them and they give you more options in certain areas, so if you want a more research driven group you can set your tasks there.
In between missions there is a reverse engagement roll called encroachment, which fills in clocks on the progression of the threat. There are four waves of enemies, you’d start with your general scouts and light troops and these get tougher, larger and more numerous as the waves get higher. If you haven’t hit an endgame move (blow up the mothership/infect alien species/so on) then you lose. I wanted it to be a game you can replay and try different options – I set the average game time to 45hrs or so.
Social missions would be your cover-ups, yeah? A wounded alien gets away and you have to find it in a sleepy seaside town where Weird Stuff is now happening without revealing the covert war, that kind of thing?
Stargate SG-1 would be a good resource for non-shooty missions undertaken by shooty-types. Lots of stuff goes wrong when dealing with tech, civilians who know too much, weird mysteries, other dark organizations, and so on.
It’s more overt. Right now it’s just “the world is reacting to this in different ways, you have this supra-national mandate to solve this crises, though nobody believes your agency is anything more than a diplomatic concession”. I figure you can’t intervene with every threat around the globe. Part of the strategy is balancing your fear/terror levels and gaining trust from the nations so that you’d get more funding and resources. Otherwise you’re just a spec-ops team with a plane and permission to cross into most borders.
The mission troubles are easily solved if the GM is scripting the whole campaign, but I wanted the Gm to have as little prep as possible, potentially rolling on a table of alien missions (the severity based on how far along the alien waves are) and improvising from there. The prep would be all at the game start to custom make the aliens, their weapons and powers etc.
Putting in an EXALT like third party still turns into a shoot ’em up.
Alfred Rudzki – I figure cover ups are a sort of “reduce heat” move in a way. Optional to play them out or hand-wave them.
Yannick Massa – preferred the elite troops option because I wanted this “finite” war to happen and have a triggered end game after a [somewhat] fixed session count. Resistance campaigns are very thematically different.
(Cheers for the feedback everyone btw)
Social skills would still be relevant intra-team, yes? You need a CO who can rally troops, a sergeant who can break rookies out of a freeze. You could probably cut the list down from 2 social skills (Consort, Sway) to 1 (Rally).
John Perich yeah I figured command would cover that. How would you go about instituting a fear mechanic that isn’t a straight resistance roll (as per dealing with ghosts in BITD)
Spitballing: maybe a separate track on the sheet, like Stress or Load? Call it “Nerve” or something. You can sneak around, take potshots, or do other stealthy stuff with low Nerve. You need high Nerve to charge into gunfire, grapple with a weird alien, or other direct conflict.
(In BitD terms, Nerve determines your position when taking certain high-risk actions. Taking a quiet action with low Nerve is never worse than risky; ditto taking a dangerous action with high Nerve)
A consequence on a roll can be losing one’s Nerve, flipping it from low to high. Something startles you and you spaz out (forced from low to high Nerve), or something frightens you and you freeze up (forced from high to low Nerve).
Aid and encouragement from an ally can help you regain your Nerve. Otherwise, just play with where your new energy takes you!
Burning Empires has an explicit alien infiltration/invasion mechanic built into it, which could be useful to look at for inspiration. Much like other conflicts in Burning Wheel-based games (Mouse Guard, Torchbearer), the infiltration mechanics used secret selection of operation type from both sides. At the end of the session, the two types of maneuvers are revealed, and rolled against each other based on an interaction table, with advantages based on stuff that happened in session.
In addition to the “directly fight the enemy” type operations, you could try hunker down to buy downtime, sacrifice your resources to inflict damage, scout out information on the aliens for future advantage, try to recover from previous assaults, etc. The important thing was the scale; namely, that the characters and there allies represent a dozen or so people trying to navigate a planetary threat. Arguing with governors for funding, greasing palms for illegal arms, working to design new tech to discover aliens, and assassinating traitorous public figures was just as much part of the game as huge firefights against alien infantry.
The game also has a sort of “scenes as currency/resource” that maps nicely to the stress and flashback mechanics of BitD.
Maybe in addition to having Resistances on Characters, you could have them on the Crew sheet (planet? country? unit?) with resists based on Military, Tech, and Politics instead of the ones characters have, and use that as a way to resolve some of the larger arcs, ticking threat clocks for each as time goes on.
John Perich – I like the nerve approach. Maybe merging it with the stress track in some way, so there isn’t so much added to what is already a clean and elegant system. Food for thought!
Jon Wagner – will look into it, had not heard of it before. Sounds like someone beat me to the punch there!
Assuming that Earth has already been hit pretty hard by the first wave, a brain dump on mission/downtown considerations in an alien resistance scenario:
– Players need to invest [resources] to prop up other cells to help fight. Military will be stretched thin and can’t be everywhere at once. This includes training, safe houses, weapons, surveillance equipment, etc. This also applies to military that has been weakened by attrition and need reinforcements.
– Shitty humans will be trying to take advantage of the chaos and will inadvertently be helping the aliens by fulfilling their own greedy needs. Every thing from human traitors to organized crime will need to be dealt with.
– Rescuing VIPs (Scientists, etc.) from hot zones
– Guerrilla tactics: Setting traps in Earth’s “alien terrain”.
– Capturing live aliens for study/interrogation
– Covertly stealing alien tech from forward bases (to be adapted into human tech)
– Keeping supply lines open when infrastructure start failing (which might include escorting resources to their destination, etc)
A lot of great juice guys, thanks.
Adam Brimmer – There’s a story and a flow to Band. We have 4 different broad mission types (Assault, Scout, Supply and Religious) and special missions at all locations. Many of these aren’t engagements (just grinding fights will leave you with bloody troops, and low on resources).
There’s often a good mix of skills used on most missions. Even on assault missions you have to maintain discipline and engagements are often based on the highest marshal skill. Notably corruption and magic is resolve resist. So a lot of times the leaders soak when fear effects and stuff hit.
Notably last playtest the squad on the mission hit a stronger undead, and he screamed causing everyone to keel over clutching their ears. Obvs they resisted. Heavy: Trauma. Sniper: Trauma. Officer: 1 stress, then the officer resisted for her squad of rookies (slapping them, getting them in line etc), and led a charge down the hill.
Really depends on your group and imagination. XCOM has a very rigid structure to the missions which is of course limited by the code required to create the core game experience (there’s no dialogue trees, or trying to talk you way past stuff like in say Fallout). If you take a step back and think of it as a story you can find other possibilities.
If you WANT a fighting-mission-only game, it’s doable. You’d probably need to change some xp clocks and create more narrow specialized skills for that. But if you want to have a broad base with some varied chars – it’s totally doable.
I’ve worked on various versions of hacks trying similar. The current one is now so far afield from BitD there are few if any parallels. 😛
All in all, I love the BitD level of abstraction and personalization for an XCOM tabletop game.
Reduce heat seems strange for such a game, given the setup as a paramilitary organization. Heats equivalent for a game like this sounds like it should be terror level. I.e. Low terror entanglements would be low key alien actions (air confrontations and landings in low population areas a la early game Xcom), and high terror entanglement would be when countries start dropping funding to ally with the aliens (at their own peril), or the aliens pull terror missions in population centers, or (gasp) base invasion
Have you played the X-Com game set in a city, with the various factions having buildings and cars and stuff?
So you’d have a battle to shoot down an alien ship – but then the city would demand payment for the damage you caused (use machine guns, not missiles, while in the city!) – the various factions could sell you items or intel, but they’d like you more or less depending on whether you bribe them, whether you stand against their political goals, weather you raid them.
So you might know that a faction is hiding aliens – but you might decide not to raid them because you don’t want to upset them and you need to keep good relations. At least until you get what you need. Or you might just raid them and make them look bad and let everything go to hell. Or even bomb them to nothing, and just pay the city (and pay bribes to the city to make them friendly again)
And that’s just in a game that focuses on the missions. In a tabletop game, there are way more opportunities for social engagement.
Just add the various factions. Have a reason for why they’d work with aliens (and why they wouldn’t) and then you’ve got a setup for missions where you need to find out who’s working wtih the aliens, who isn’t. You can have organizations that are against the aliens that have been infiltrated by individuals in favour of the aliens, you can have mysteries (“Why are people going missing? Where do these new armored soldiers come from? I think there’s an experimental lab somewhere in the city, we need to find it!”) and so on.
Set up goals, then set up social obstacles. And give players tools to deal with those obstacles, both social tools and combat tools.
Make sure that all strategies have pros and cons. And no one strategy works in every situation. A group is bad? Fine, you can fight them. But some groups are too strong to fight directly, OR it’s too costly (bribes to the city etc.) so you need to decide when it’s worth fighting and when it’s worth negotiating. But negotiating shouldn’t always be the right solution, sometimes you need to kick down the door and catch them hiding aliens, and expose them, let them hate you but prove to the other groups that you’re doing your job.
Do that, and the rest should fall into place.
Again thanks for the feedback everyone.
Stras Acimovic I don’t want a fighting only game (that’s my problem right now). Thanks for the insight into BOB, very interested in how this one will turn out. Am using the distinction between BitD and S&V as a primer on how to mod this. #fan
Mark Cleveland Massengale It’s not quite a Reduce Heat as “Reassure the Bureaurats” [who are funding the project]. I’m using a Fear/Terror mechanic that will impact the groups resources if left unchecked. If the Terror level goes over the limit then the agency is shut down.
Tony Demetriou Buggy as it was, I lost many hours to that game (and to the original in the early ’90s). The city centric premise of XCOM3 was a bit banal to be honest, but it was still a blast. I’m less focussed on the setting itself right now and more on making the mechanics work, as I firmly believe that a robust engine can be plugged into anything with a similar theme (I have a bag of skins waiting, the alien one is my least favourite). The hurdle here is making the game missions fun, and not repetitive.
Is the deadliness anything like x-com? Should the players be okay with seeing troops get slumped? If so I have a cool idea…
Perfectly happy to see a death count. Getting new agents and training them up fast would be part of the strategy.
Adam Brimmer Yeah, it was the only X-Com game I couldn’t get into, myself.
My intention was more about the way the different groups create a social situation in that game, which the other games didn’t happen, and less about the setting.
That same social situation can be created in the other X-Com settings just by having the multiple factions, with various social reasons to interact. And those varying reasons might be part of what keeps the missions from feeling repetitive.
Plus, of course, we can make players care more about NPCs and other situations in tabletop than in the computer games, by putting more effort into bringing them to life. The rescue missions in the games are pretty bland, but a rescue mission in a tabletop game will have impact if it’s one of the PCs daughter, or a senator they’ve been trying to appease, or some other NPC that has some emotional connection with the PCs or players.
Even using the XCOM fiction, theres going to be a lot of duties to go around. Give each player a role as department head, and each of those last say on their respective departments, and share the rest of the duties.
Commander: troops & intel projects
Head Scientist: scientists & research projects
Master Engineer: engineers & building projects
Stats for the crew in Blades are the personnel anyways. So one should be troops, another should be scientists, and another should be engineers.
If you add a social layer to this like you seem to want, then give someone the role, PR. They’d get last say about the company liasons, who are justifying higher funding, asking for more rookies from a country, boosting country leader morale, etc.
Treat the organization even more like a shared character sheet in other words, but with assigned duties, as we do. And give the players access to stat blocks for individual characters as needed. I.e. to avoid boredom while the commander is directing the ground troops during a recovery mission, the others might control some of those troops.
Mark Cleveland Massengale
I kind of imagine a game like this has the PCs as leaders of their own individual squads/individual specialists (cohorts). Some for field work and some for logistics back at the base. Then you have downtime activities for PC to replace/upgrade troops.
Every PC “leader” is already assumed to have high Command (might even be a superfluous stat…) and can lead from the front or control remotely; I’m sure there is a creative way to make leading from the back advantages in it’s own way.
Actually I think it would be an interesting experiment to have a game where only cohorts enter the “field” and the Players are all mini commanders working in partnership. The commanders “presence” is restricted to radio comms, surveillance cameras, satellite imagery, electronic communications, HUDs, etc. Even during downtime they stay at the home base and can interact with outside interests using technology or proxy…
Yea, exactly. Every player controls a special PC that doesn’t typically go on missions. Plus each of them can control the cohorts when they are on screen
^ We definitely do this sort of thing in Band.
I was tempted to have every pc act as a unit leader in a cohort, just thought it would upscale the small unit tactics into battlefields which isn’t the flavour I was going for. I thought to instead have the players ‘buy’ as many characters/playbooks as they could afford and have them send as many as they want on a mission. They only get to “wear” one of them and the rest get treated like cohorts that don’t get the full benefit of the playbooks but still can support and do their base function via something like tags (your heavy has an rpg for example). Spotlight characters can do the full gamut of stress, armor and resistance rolls, but cohorts can’t so they’re a little more likely to cop it. It adds other elements in the strategy of the game where you’d want to rotate your characters often to expose them to more xp opportunities.
Spotlight characters sounds neat.
I like that being a thing you cant do with rookies or something. Or some other kind of rookie-you-shoulda-brought-xp kind of thing (susceptible to panic, etc).
What is the usual size/transport limit at the start of the game?
Didn’t set one as yet, but I suppose (googles) could be as many as 60 if you see some military transports, though I guess speed is an issue so small jets could carry a [dirty] dozen?
It’s worth nothing that speed in flight as well as landing capability could be issues for response time. A plane trip would be fine if moving troops from one base to another, but needing a runway can really complicate a deployment – so I imagine these organizations would use some aircraft built for speed and stealth. One which operates on stealthed rotors or powered thrust for VTOL capability.
And sure – a capacity of about a dozen and their equipment sounds right realistically. Then it’s big enough that some of that space could be repurposed to transport some wheels too, but not enough to like.. deploy a huge army (which will also help ensure this keeps to small unit tactics).