Tracking XP

Tracking the XP of my various players has proven to be something of a challenge, as they typically are not prepared to spend it immediately, and several of them do not, as yet, have particularly good record sheets to record them on. So let me explain how I'm tracking it now.

Have a spreadsheet set up to track XP. There are two sheets -- one for XP earned, one for XP spent. The XP earned spreadsheet has a column for each character, and a row for each event that generates XP (sessions, months of downtime, after action reports, etc.) I enter the total XP earned by each player into the appropriate cell, with notes on any player who earned a special amount of XP for that event. By doing this, I have a traceable account of who has how much XP and why.

The second sheet tracks each session, and how much XP was spent on which session. I find it easiest to have players spend their XP first thing on a new session, since it then allows them time to think about what they're going to spend it on, as well as know the full amount they have to spend (any revisions to assigned XP, such as from turning in After-action reports, will affect their earnings.) The result is that I can track both earned XP and spent XP and ensure that every point earned is spent in the proper time, and also check the math on my PC's character sheets.

This tracking, however, is messy and error-prone. I am seeking a better method. I'll keep you updated on that quest.

Discovery In The Wilds

I've put up a lot of chatter over the past few days about the complication for the next mission, but very little about the primary plot advancement: what do the players find out in the wilds of Montana that reveals more of the narrative of the campaign. Given that this part of the story is Clark's plot, it is particularly important for him to be engaged in what we find. Fortunately, Cameron gave me a fail-safe way to interest him in particular: Branths.

I have yet to decide exactly how to bring up the existence of Branths in Montana. My first thought is to have the very astute Dr. Clark Cameron find solid clues as to the existence of Branths at the lost campsite, but stop short of actually having such a creature appear in the session. His find, again, would likely be interrupted by the aforementioned arrest attempt. That will allow me to stretch the Bioweapons arc one session as the party tries to track the particular Branth they now know to be on the loose in Montana.

The other option is to have them find the remains of a Branth in the wild. This might carry more direct emotional payload, but would have rather less tension before the actual reveal, and that makes me less favorable to this option.

Now that I'm thinking it through, I could parry the hunt for the Branth with dealing with an outbreak of the Alarion plague in the Montanan or Albertan outbacks, either directly involving the players or as a backdrop to a session. That might be very exciting. I should go watch Outbreak again...

Executing the Prisoners

Further notifications have come in from my players indicating we'll be falling below quorum again this week. Most unfortunate, but it takes some of the time pressure of preparation. Speaking of preparation, where were we? Oh, yes, provoking a firefight.

The real trick here is that I have to communicate that being taken alive is tantamount to death for the PC's, and quick death at that. It has been common for my players in the past to allow themselves to be taken, confident that they'll find a way to escape jail in the past. I'll need to prologue the session with something that drives home the danger of being taken in, something that will put it fresh in their minds. For demonstrating action and consequence, nothing beats an example.

Last session I laid some groundwork by mentioning a group of ComGuard who were taken prisoner in Connecticut after fleeing the destruction of the 394th. I can leverage that story and the other notes regarding David Alsace's (Precentor TerraSec) increasing rage by having them swiftly and publicly executed for treason against Earth and the Word of Blake (metaphorically if not literally.) This provides two major benefits in the upcoming session: first, the consequences of being captured by TerraSec are spelled out explicitly: you don't sit out the war in prison, you die. Second, it helps pain Alsace as the bad guy, whom the players are feeling somewhat sympathetic towards at this point since they got news of his wife and child's demise.

The practical upshot of this is that when TerraSec surrounds them in the Montana countryside, they'll have no choice but to stand and fight, because to surrender would mean the certain death of at least David, Alex, and Shin, and possibly Clark and Simon as well for collaboration.

NPCs for Montana

As discussed yesterday, I need to come up with a handful of NPC's for Sunday's session. Unlike previous sessions, these characters need to be combat-ready, as I intend for them to serious attempt to take the party into custody, even if I don't expect them to succeed. Unfortunately, there isn't a lot written on how to construct a reasonable combat challenge in A Time of War. Let's do a quick review of what is written.

Page 336 of A Time of War starts the section on NPCs and Random Encounters, which is as close as we're like to get to what we're trying to assess. This section contains four "templates" for NPC's: Thug, Soldier, Savant, and Boss. Each of these templates are designed to be filled as modifications of your party's capabilities. I think this is a neat way of handling A Time of War's level-less mechanics, but it puts an awful lot of work into designing a new NPC, not the least of which is compiling the average stats for the party. I'm tempting to compute NPC's as a function of the party's XP, but that seems even more work. This is a busy week for me, so let's talk shortcuts.

Fortunately, A Time of War is kind enough to provide a set of example stats for a basic combat character for each category (except Savant, which is intentionally a non-combat character.) In this circumstance, I can cheat and get away with ripping off the templates whole-sale: they're designed for starting-level characters, and although two of my characters started around 7,000 XP due to aging, two are also very much non-combat characters. Thus, I feel I can probably balance the engagement with four thugs and a soldier (the head officer charged with apprehending the party), but to reduce the risk of accidentally wiping the party before I have real run-time experience with the combat rules, I'll downgrade the engagement by one thug. That should provide a solid challenge without too much actual risk.

One worrisome thing about the combat rules is how lethal they are, and how much getting the first shot in counts. When you look at the weapons tables, anything lower than a rifle looks positively harmless, but in actuality, I'm a bit worried. Let's run through a quick example.

For the moment, I'll assume our thug-level TerraSec officers are carrying revolvers -- your basic slug-thrower, suitable for law enforcement duties. Light, concealable, portable, and low-maintenance. Its damage code is 4B/4, easy to remember. What will this gun do if we shoot, say, Clark?

Clark's BOD is 4. He wears no armor to speak of, unless he upgrades suddenly and unexpectedly in the near future. The 4B armor penetration tears through what clothes he might be wearing like tin foil. The bullet does 4 damage plus 1 point for every four points above the to-hit number the officer in question rolls (Standard Damage Table, p. 182). Let's imagine it does 1 extra point of damage (the Thug having +4 in Small Arms.) We're playing with hit locations (Page 190), so let us also presume a straight 7 gets rolled there -- the most likely result. Clark is shot in the leg. A leg hit multiplies the damage by 0.75, round up, for a base damage of 4. That applies a -2 to every check Clark makes from that moment forward, including the Knockdown check a shot in the leg triggers.

The Knockdown effect is a flat RFL Attribute check. Clark's RFL is 4, minus two for the injury, means he needs to roll a 10 or better to avoid falling down. Reasonable, I suppose -- I would likely decide falling to the ground screaming was the appropriate response to being shot in the leg as well. This is actually the kindest of the rolls Clark needs to make. Next up is the Consciousness roll (page 184.) The Consciousness roll is a flat TN of 7, but is modified by Clark's WIL linked attribute modifier, as well as his injuries, including this one. Clark's WIL linked attribute is 0, but he still take the -2 to his roll, meaning he needs to roll a 9 to retain consciousness. He likely falls down. Fortunately, the 4 damage falls just shy of forcing Clark to make a bleeding roll, which could easily kill him. (REVISION: This last sentence is in correct. See the August 1st entry for correction.)

The point here is that the first shot from these NPC's will likely take anybody not wearing armor out of the fight. To make matters work, under the hit location rules, those revolvers are potentially fatal -- rolling snake eyes on the To-Hit table would mean a head hit, 10 damage, and a dead PC. Unlikely, and as long as a point of Edge remains, avoidable, but still a disquieting probable instant-death scenario. The problem, of course, is that there are no slug-throwers of the type you'd expect a law enforcement officer to be carrying that do less damage than that -- the only 3-damage pistols are either Burst Fire (which would make them more hazardous to the party) or FedSuns affiliation -- reasonable for a PC to get with some effort, but not standard issue to Terra's Finest.

The point here is that the party is going to be in real danger tomorrow if shooting starts. Tomorrow, I'll talk a little bit about how to make sure shooting starts.

Spin Back Up

It is now six days to the next session of Ten Years on Terra. I really have to start assembling real, specific materials for the coming session. Time to sketch out how I expect this session to proceed. First, I'll figure out locations I need to know. Second, NPCs that need to be developed. Third, plot points need to get prepared and written. Finally, I need to put together an idea of how the party is going to proceed.

The locations are actually two fold, at least in terms of sites the PCs might go to: the site of a few campers that were reported missing and likely dead in Montana, and the town nearby. The site is fairly easy to make -- I can derive from today's terrain at that location. The town will require some actual development, buildings, layout, and other useful bits. Part of the consideration might be what items I want to be available there, and how I want to lay out other plot bits that might connect to this session. Connecting to the Sarna plot line or the Wyrm plotline is going to be very difficult, so I think the natural complication for this adventure is for them to be recognized while out in the town.

Having them recognized as ComStar personnel has two major goals: First, I want them to feel like it really is dangerous for the ComStar party to go out in public. Second, it will increase their feeling of being under siege on this world. As an added bonus, it might provoke a combat engagement that the could lay the party up for a few weeks as they recuperate. I therefore need to make sure I have adequate maps for a battle.

It makes some sense for the arc of the story for them to go to the town, be recognized, and then intercepted when they go out to the field to investigate. A set of TerraSec officers, this time. Possibly a significant formation, since they know they're dealing with somebody "armed and dangerous." I need to put a few minutes of thought into exactly what TerraSec's procedure will be, then draw up the specifics.

More on that tomorrow.

Support Vehicles

One of the most exciting developments for me in the past few years has been the advent of the Support Vehicles rules for BattleTech. Although it seems ludicrous to have so complete a set of rules for essentially non-combat vehicles in a wargame, I think they are fantastic. Vehicles not built for military use, or even just not built for front-line combat, are ubiquitous, and as such regularly should be stumbling into the often very creative and impromptu battlefields of the BattleTech universe. In addition, the Support Vehicle rules give me an opportunity to flesh out the minutiae of players' more mundane travels without having to pull combat statistics for them out of the clear blue sky.

For instance, Technical Readout Vehicle Annex contains at least two fixed-wing airliners that you'd expect to see on a planet with significant population -- having those aircraft available gives great detail for things I'd need to know about what the average civilian aircraft is built like, and if my players try to use one, either for its intended purpose or any of the many and varied alternate uses that players are oh-so-very good at coming up with, I can tell how it will interact with the other key pieces of the game. Frankly, almost every vehicle the players are likely to come in contact with for the foreseeable future, from Clark's pickup truck to the TerraSec search helicopters, are best handled by the Support Vehicles rules. For games on the A Time of War level, I find almost everything I want is easily constructable with these rules.

The one major complaint about these rules is that I have to construct so many vehicles to get what I want, because the published library of vehicles is so small. Perhaps I'll start putting together standard record sheets of some of my more commonly used Support Vehicles. Right now they are largely key statistics written on notebook paper. The record sheets are varied and exciting enough that writing a simple program to fill them out is likely impractical, but perhaps I'll take a swing at it for the most commonly used vehicle types. Although I find satellites fascinating, I rarely find a use for them in my campaigns.

I guess the point of this post-cum-love-song-for-Support-Vehicles is that if you're running A Time of War, I strongly recommend going over the Support Vehicle construction rules. They can really help you in quickly putting together statistics for the various civilian-grade gear your players will drive and ride in, and as we all know, giving a party a record sheet for a vehicle suddenly makes them much more interested and involved in what happens to it. Conversion from a line in an inventory list to a mechanical element of the game adds a great deal of attachment, and I hope you find the same results by fleshing out these kinds of vehicles that I have.

Taking In The Countryside

One of the plotlines for Ten Years on Terra takes place in California, so I've been thinking about that a bit as I spend time here. The Sarna HPG station plotline has not done a terribly good job of capturing the players' interest, but it is something I have hanging in the background, and something I need to figure out exactly how David's backstory connects in there, but that can wait until the rest of the party finishes their adventures in Montana.

The parts of California the game will take place in are quite hilly, even mountainous as the short runs up to the base of the Sierra-Nevada Mountains. Ideal BattleMech terrain. It makes me think I should try to put off this plot line until the part has vehicles again. There's a worry that doing so will make destroying the HPG station too easy, but perhaps by that point the party will be ready for an easy win. We'll see as we get closer to the event.

I'm a little worried about this plot line, frankly. Although it had a great character-story tie-in, actually working out the details and stretching it into a real story is proven difficult. I'm not sure why, but this particular part of the story is just resistant to my attempts to make it interesting. It is entirely possible my lack of creativity is due to mental fatigue (this is a very busy week), but I'm starting to seriously re-evaluate this arc. If it continues to be particularly troublesome, I may have an entry soon on how to punt a story.

Margins of Failure

In reference to yesterday's article on failure probability, I wanted to talk a bit about my interpretation of the Margin-of-Success rules on page 42 of A Time of War. As previously discussed, I think of this system as having an assumption of success -- most players taking on a basic task can expect to accomplish it on the first try if they have any bonuses at all in the relevant skill. How much they succeed by rarely matters to my mind -- generally they set out to do something, and making the check means they did it. Cut-and-dry.

Failures are different. I try to gauge the failure margin on a scale of how much the failure impacts the party. Using the delineations Catalyst provided us with:

Almost (-1 to -2): If a check falls into this range, it usually just doesn't work. Unless it was obviously a one-time thing, the player can try again next action.

Bad (-3 to -4): I often rule that a character has no idea how to do this particular thing on a check that fails by this much -- they need to either find another way around, or let somebody else take a crack at the problem, because their character is just out of ideas.

Terrible (-5 to -6): These can actually hurt the player attempting them -- hitting the character with a mild penalty (status effect, loss of equipment, etc.) is generally the level of pain of mete out for this poor a roll.

Disastrous (-7 and up): These are exceedingly rare, and the players normally have to decide to take a calculated risk to open themselves up to the possibility of this occurring. A failure by seven or more I consider a mission-jeopardizing failure. At the very least the problem cannot be solved by the party this way anymore, and possibly a new challenge emerges in the form of broken and now-dangerous equipment, additional bad guys showing up, or even severe injury to one of the PC's.

I hope that these guidelines that I use can be of some use when you're laying out your own.

P(Making Your Roll)

I'm off on assignment to Sacramento, a city on the West Coast of the United States, about 80 miles inland. If you're not from the United States, you probably have never heard of it, but if you've probably heard of California. Sacramento is the seat of government for the state of California. This lesson in US Geography has been brought to you because I have less time than usual to come up with good and productive things to write on this blog.

One thing I do want to talk about is the probability curve of A Time of War checks. There are really three kinds of checks; Skill, Attribute, and Double Attribute, but for the moment I just want to talk about Skill Checks. Let's start with the basic probability curve -- the chance of passing an unmodified skill check with no modifiers. As it turns out, a bonus of +4 for many skills is enough to guarantee success (no accounting for the Fumble Rule -- natural twos are always failures), and +6 in anything guarantees success. For context going forward, here's that laid out as a graph:

As you can see, your chances start pretty high and go up pretty fast as you pile on modifiers. The mitigating factor here, of course, is that A Time of War is a Margin-of-Success driven system -- you are generally rewarded for rolling well above what you need, and penalized based on how much you fail by. The interesting arc for us is the range between Success by 6 and Failure by 6, as below Failure by 6, you start getting into serious life-and-death consequences for the party even from relatively safe actions.

With Simple-Basic skills, failing by more than 5 is flat-out impossible without modifiers. Observe:

Complex-Advanced is marginally more interesting:

Again, we can see the familiar 2D6 probability curve, but here there's the tiniest chance of a Disastrous Failure if you only have a +0 in the skill. This suggests that under almost all circumstances, if your character has a fairly modest level of skill (+3) in whatever action they're taking, your chances of having major problems are quite low. In this sense, A Time of War can be thought of as a game with an assumption of success -- failures are things that can we weaved into additional challenges. More on that later this week.

Backlinking

There was no game yesterday, so there won't be any review this week. Instead, I want to talk a bit about fan continuity. Once you've run a fair number of games, you start to get a reasonable backlog of plot events, NPCs, and even artifacts. Sometimes these jive with canon storyline, sometimes less so. Either way, there is often a temptation to draw in elements of previous stories to the current one. There are a number of pros and cons to this.

First, and most obviously, these characters and events are already documented; if you're like me and keep logbooks of old adventures, you may even have character sheets with the last known damage configuration of people or equipment on them. These are pretty easy to drop-in. Second, if you have players in the current game that played in the previous game, they already have some knowledge of, and attachment to, the prior material.

Each of these coins have an opposite side, of course. The old material may be built for a previous incarnation of the rules, making conversion non-trivial. There are no conversion rules in A Time of War for MechWarrior characters, and taking the skill bonuses over wholesale is a dangerous proposition -- a +4 means a lot more in A Time of War's 2D6 system than it did in Third Edition's 2D10 system. In addition, although players may have attachments to old NPC's, they might not be positive -- some NPC's, even popular ones in their time, become silly when taken out of their context. Finally, new players in your group won't have the same back-knowledge as the old players, resulting in a natural divide within the party. The results of such a divide vary wildly based on player group composition.

I have historically been a big fan of backlinking -- it gives my players a sense of continuity within the universe, and a feel that their actions will last beyond even the campaign and the group of players. Some of my adventures, though, have taken significant excursions from the canon plotline, making continuing them more difficult in the Jihad arc. The most significant of these changes was likely the destruction of CS Narbonne in September of 3063 in my timeline, after an attempted Word of Blake takeover of the ship. Given that the Narbonne would be plot-silent until Case White, that didn't seem such a huge problem to overcome. Given the largely new-party composition this time around, though, I decided to punt my previous plotline, for the most part -- Narbonne participated as destined in the Case White landings in Ten Years on Terra.

Even now, though, I haven't completely cut myself off from my previous universe. Dante-class frigates are rare, but not irreplaceable, and certainly not in the 3060's, the height of WarShip building in the 31st Century. If I chose to build in a convoluted scheme that involved a fourth Dante, either built after 3063, or somehow to reveal the Dante #4 was, in fact, standing in for Narbonne during the events of the previous game, I could retain continuity. Indeed, with clever plot placement, I could even cause player to re-evaluate the events of the previous game in the light of new revelations, making the earlier campaign seem like a side-arc in the current one.

It tickles me a bit to think of connecting the two campaigns, but I haven't come up with a reasonable way to link the events of the current game to the event, and even if I did, the point regarding having new players still stands. If I were to connect them, it is more likely that there would be subtle references to previous NPC's in Word of Blake documents discussing items actually pertinent to the plot of the game we're actually playing. These become more in-jokes than anything else, and kept to a certain level, they can contribute to the attachment of the older players without splitting the party into the knows and the knows-not.

Hiding a BattleMech

The last forty-five minutes of this most recent session was the party scrambling to hide Shin's Firestarter before the Word of Blake found it within spitting distance of Clark's Farm. Being at the base of the Rocky Mountains, they decided to stash the ComStar-white machine in the snowcaps about 80km west. This involved a number of issues, not the least of which was two of their personnel who had some technical skills had been out of commission for two weeks, healing from wounds earned in the attempt on Demi-Precentor Lecna. Simon's job left only David and Clark to maintain both the Firestarter and the Hawk Moth for the two weeks after the landing.

David took point, but started out of the gate by rolling snake-eyes twice on his Technician/Nuclear checks. He recovered quickly, but the damage to the Firestarter was pretty bad -- two engine crits and a number of quality downgrades. Once Alex was back on his feet, things got a bit better, but one they got the Firestarter into the mountains in early April of 3068, the real work began. It took two weeks for them to mothball the BattleMech in the harsh and frigid environment in the high Rockies, and in the process Shin managed to destroy two more flamers trying to prepare them for long-term storage. The whole endeavor gave the three of them much to do, and Clark and Simon used their survival skills on the opening weekend of the mothballing to ensure the trio had sufficient supplies laid in for the entire time they were there. The Word never sighted them, and they eventually covered the 'Mech in snow, hopefully ensuring even if some of it melted, it would be invisible from the air.

The rolls for this part of the adventure were particularly hard to calculate, for a number of reasons. First, the maintenance rules in Strategic Operations are all set up based on the BattleTech skills system -- that is to say, lower is better. The Technican skills are easy to convert (8 minus bonus), but that's just the first step. There's a set of tables on pages 170-172 that describe all the modifiers that can be applied to each maintenance roll -- suffice it to say, the list is extensive, and there are perhaps half a dozen tables involved. All this isn't particularly troublesome -- that is all precalculable.

The second issue, which made the first thing an issue, was that I wasn't expecting to make these rolls. The party decided they wanted to take care of this while we were in session, so I winged it with StratOps open in front of me. I already know I cheated them of their -1 because we were making component-based rolls, but I don't think that mattered too much. The bigger issue is that I had to remember the components that had to be rolled for off the top of my head. Engines and weapons were easy, and the armor and structure rolls were can't-miss with their Technican/Mechanics levels being where they are, but I forgot to have them roll maintenance or mothballing on the Gyros. It was a sloppy job on my part, and I feel bad about it. In retrospect, we could've handled the whole thing over email and I would've had the proper procedure in front of me. Not only have I screwed up that encounter, but I've given my players an erroneous impression of the process should it come up in the future. My group is well-mannered and understanding enough that if I change the rules they'll understand why, but I would be very concerned if I were running for a group I knew less well.

The takeaway here is when something very logistically intensive comes up, like maintenance rolls and mothballing rolls, and you're not prepared for them, table the encounter. Don't be afraid to take that particular session off-line, because calculating the rolls is time-intensive, especially if you don't have a checklist in front of you.

Scheduling

Awkwardly, it seems that our party won't be having another session for a few weeks due to a variety of scheduling conflicts. This gives me some time to write ahead, but it also means that the next few weeks are going to have more supposition in them than you might have gotten used to of late. I apologize if you read this primarily for the session reviews; I can only encourage you to come back on 1 August.

Scheduling always seems to be an issue with tabletop games. Whether physical or virtual, finding a time when five or six people can get together at the same place at the same time gets harder and harder as you get older, it seems. I feel like I should have some clever insight into scheduling game sessions by now, but I really don't -- for the most part it comes down to scheduling for a particular weeknight and setting quorum, or the number of people you need to run session.

I have tried open-ended scheduling, where we sit down at the end of the session, take out our calendars, and try to find the next three-hour hole in our schedules. I have found this to be a tedious process, and it usually ends up yielding a similar result to a weeknight scheduling, if only because our schedules, at least in the circles I run in, tend to be roughly weekly-oriented. I imagine that if everybody in the game diligently kept an online calendar of when they were and were not free, this could be made easier or even automated, but I have a feeling few people have a Google Calendar or Outlook Calendar or similar that up to date.

My group uses Google Calendar for our scheduling; after each session, I get a quick check of who can make the next week, and if we won't hit quorum, who can make the next week, and so on. Right now quorum for our group is four -- I'll drop one person and still run, but if we loose two for a particular session, I move the session. I then send out the invite for the next session, so everybody has it on their calendars and I can track RSVP's. It is a simple system, and I sometimes forget to send out the invites immediately, but so far that's the system we've used and its worked pretty well so far.

Active and Passive Challenges

Once the party was in-mission, I had relatively little hard-and-fast laid out. I had notes on where particularly plot-important things were, and notes on what was in the weapons locker, but the entire basis for the mission was for them to get into the computer core and pillage it for all the could. I took a lot of queues for the challenges they would encounter from the table talk -- every time they thought of something the opposition (in this case, TerraSec) might do, I mentally evaluated the concept with my advanced knowledge of the situation in mind, and decided if that was something I wanted to throw at them. There are generally two ways players overcome difficulties they plan for: passively, and actively.

When players passively overcome an issue, they planned ahead in such a way that it never comes up. In this example, they needed to get past the front desk guard. Their solution was to fake a communications disruption, and show up as scheduled to fix it. By doing this, there would be no suspicion of ill-intent on the part of the guard -- TerraSec called for a technician, a technician showed up. Everything is proceeding as TerraSec expects, so there's no call for closer examination. In this way, the players just breeze through the checkpoint. This is easy to integrate into the session for the GM: even if I hadn't already considered this encounter (I had, for the record), I could run it simply by describing more or less the best-case scenario the players had envisioned. That's exactly the way it went down in this game; they entered, the guard was expecting them, and let them in, handing them off to an officer to escort them.

When players actively overcome an issue, they use equipment or a skill check to get past their problems. This was the case later, when Simon and David made it to the computer room, they started poking around, but they had a guard watching over them. Simon tried to access Alexei's criminal record while they were in the system, and he decided to try to act as if he needed to see that to fix the issue. We decided it was an Acting check, and he made an Opposed Skill Check against Officer Westinghouse, their faithful escort. Simon failed, but not badly, so he was able to pass the access off as a mistake on his part and continue.

At this point, the party's primary plan had failed -- they were being watched as they worked. Simon switched over to more authentic-looking comms maintenance, while the party initiated part B -- Shin. Morgan tends to play his cards close to his chest, so all I knew when he started was that he was going to create a distraction. He accomplished this by entering the station and proclaiming the Word of Blake loud and long to the front desk officer, making a nuisance of himself enough to get himself thrown in the drunk tank. Morgan did a marvelous job acting out the part, so I rewarded him with the other officers coming to grab Officer Westinghouse to come watch the proverbial monkey jump around his cage for a few minutes. That gave Simon and David the time they needed and made Morgan feel like he accomplished the mission.

Simon, having grabbed all the information he needed, sent the all-clear signal to his jamming setup, "fixing" the problem. Then he rebooted the servers before heading out, and to make the fix seem more authentic for the now-returned escort and oversight officer. I felt that this mission had gone a bit too well at this point, so I winged a new obstacle -- when the system was turned back on, it failed to start. Simon was worried at this point, and Officer Westinghouse started making sounds about Quality-of-Service and contractual obligations on the part of Simon's employer (who, of course, didn't actually employ Simon, but the officer didn't know that and Simon had to maintain the illusion lest the actual communications support firm found out.) A few moments later, Simon and David made a Technican/Electronics check to establish what went wrong, and discovered that four different substations of the security system around the building had to be reset simultaneously.

I admit, this was extremely arbitrary and doesn't stand up well to close examination, but my goal was to get Alex and Clark, who had been sitting in the truck the whole mission, inside and doing something. They donned coveralls and came in, and the party fairly trivially solved the four-people-push-four-buttons problem. It did allow Alex private access to the conceal body armor, of which he concealed and wore a set out of the building. It also got David into the Chief's office, where I had a few letters from other members of TerraSec with information about David Alsace and his family's death during Case White, to help set him up as the ultimate baddy of TerraSec to the party. All this done, the party exfiltrated without incident. Shin was released in the morning, no charged having been filed against him.

The takeaway lesson from this session is that with only a loose and easy mission, you can fill in the gaps with the challenges the players anticipate, which both gives you a chance to pad the mission with tense moments, as well as make the players feel their planning efforts were not wasted. Passive solutions offer a moment when the players are waiting to see if they read the challenge correctly, while Active solutions can burn party resources, and tell you immediately whether the party successfully disarmed the situation they were trying to avoid. By only using the most direct path to success as plan, you can fill out the session by reflecting the players expectations back to them, ensuring that they get a sense of accomplishment from the adventure.

Of course, there's something to be said for the "Surprise!" factor, but that discussion will have to wait for another session.

Analysis Paralysis

One challenge that I encountered this week was getting the party moving on the session's mission. There had been a fair amount of back-and-forth on planning, and the conversation was going in circles, both online, and once we started, at the gaming table. The party was trying to figure out the best and most risk-adverse way to carry out their mission, and to get the most out of it. This is the chess-player in many of them, the one that looks moves and moves ahead to try to determine the best long-term plan. The problem, of course, is that with an open-ended problem like an RPG, where the options are really limited by your imagination and your ability to persuade the GM that you should be able to do what you're proposing, there is no clear termination condition to indicate that you've considered all the angles -- sitting and thinking another minute might reveal another possibility. This condition is a particularly severe case of what is called "analysis paralysis" -- the players spend so much time planning they never get to execution.

Again, this is not specific for gaming -- if I had a nickle for every time I've seen in at work, I wouldn't be going to work anymore. The trick is that the situation rarely resolves itself. Some form of outside intervention is required to stay on your schedule, which with only a three-hour session once a week for us, is pretty tight. We start at 0900 in the morning, and we generally have breakfast and stragglers wandering in until 0930. Around 0930 the session proper starts, and we handle the bookkeeping since last session -- spending XP, after action reports XP, maintenance rolls, income, etc. That usually takes 10-15 minutes. By 0945, the party starts discussing preparations for the session.

I am usually silent for the preparation step, and only handle direct questions about game rules, or any information-gathering checks the players make (Protocol, Streetwise, Investigation, etc.) Generally speaking, the party is ready to roll by 1000. If they are not, and the conversation is starting to spiral, I generally speak up and try to find a way to push the party towards whatever my imagined solution to the session is. That was the case this week. Bert had a number of clever ideas that required enormous effort, such as raiding a junkyard for a truck, repainting it as an ambulance, faking an emergency call, and so forth. The rest of the party wanted a plan with less moving parts, and ideally less cost. By 1000, they had lapped the conversation three times.

Around 1000, I was able to steer the conversation in the direction of the rest of the party's plan, which involved scrambling the phone lines into the TerraSec station and then showing up as technicians to repair it. Bert was able to offer a chunk of his plan -- intercepting the station's communications lines so that when the call for help went out it was routed to the party's truck nearby rather than where it was supposed to go, giving them the ability to appear legitimate. They ran the plan by sending only two people in, then sending in more people as the situation developed, until by the end the entire party was in the building. I'll cover the actual execution part of the plan tomorrow.

Visiting TerraSec

It is always a wonder to watch player operation planning. The party ran around in circles for almost the entire weekend working up various plans that, at their height, involved a box truck repainted as an ambulance, a sewer-based extraction plan, and robbing and possibly having to assault a police officer. The negotiation went on a full hour into session before I was able to gently guide the party to consensus, and they decided on a plan that involve using their great and mighty amount of Communications/Conventional to break the TerraSec head quarters communication system, then show up as technicians to fix it.

The team showed up in the middle of the night to take advantage of the lower shift size, and set about fixing the phones. Simon and David went in under aliases. The officer observing them proved to be a bit too on-the-ball for them to blatantly get away with just downloading what information they wanted out of the computer, so Shin came in and created a disturbance in the police station. That created enough of a distraction for the undermanned staff that Simon and David were able to grab the information they needed. When they got ready to go, however, the entire station computer died. A bit of investigation revealed that nobody had actually powered down the system since 3053 at least. Simon responded by calling in "more technicians," Alex and Clark, and the four of them working together were able to fix the system.

The key improvisational points for me in this session were the officer watching diligently over them, who had enough understanding of the system to recognize that they were poking at places they shouldn't. David was able to make a high success on his Acting check, so this wasn't an enormous problem, but it gave the players the feeling they really had something to worry about. The computer failure was also unplanned -- the players simply breezed through the checks to remove the data, and Morgan did a magnificent job of roleplaying Shin as a vagrant with a stack of badly-made pamphlets, trying to bring the Word of Blake to TerraSec. He made himself enough of a nuisance to get locked in the drunk tank overnight. The system failure allowed an excuse to bring the rest of the party, who had been waiting outside, in for a little bit, and also allowed Alex access to the weapons locker, where he was able to get some concealable armor.

The second part of the session, which I did not expect us to get to, was mothballing the Firestarter. The party found a place to hide the 'Mech about 80 km into the mountains of Colorado, and set out to put it there. While moving overground, though, TerraSec located the 'Mech. Alex, at the controls, was able to down the TerraSec chopper with a laser, raising suspicions, but not revealing his location to the rest of the world. The ComStar party spent the next two weeks camped in the mountains mothballing the 'Mech, resulting in two engine criticals and two destroyed flamers, but otherwise an intact vehicle.

Over the course of this week, I'll talk a bit more about the individual mechanics of each of these phases of the operation, and how I handled them and how my players reacted.

Content

I need to plot the arcs of the various plot hooks I've laid out at least one session in advance. Right now there is major interest in the Alexei arc and the Bioweapons arc. I feel like the Alexei arc is the one I want the group to run with, because that's more local and limited in scope than the Bioweapons arc, and the latter will be considerably more potent if there are reports on the effectiveness of the weapon at Alarion when they reach the research facility. Alarion gets bombed in April of 3069, about a year downtimestream from the current campaign date, but after that they can chase that lead as they see fit. I just need to make sure I don't give them adequate clues to pursue that arc sooner than that, which should be pretty easy.

The characters, led by Simon, seem to be setting out on a classic "Chase" scenario -- both TerraSec and the party want to find Alexei, and the pursuit provides me with something I can build story around. In addition, the party investigating various resistance hideouts as they come across them give me a good way to provide more or less any supply I can think of from MRE's to tactical nuclear weapons. Them running in this direction makes my life considerably easier.

I haven't given much thought to what the rest of the Terran Resistance looks like, but now I'm considering how Alexei would fit in. It makes little sense for him to be a major leader, but he could certainly work for a cell with grander plans. What I'll likely do is have him linked to a criminal organization, in which he was serving as a spy for the anti-Word groups on-planet. This allows me to set up a hierarchy the characters can read about in the TerraSec reports they'll retrieve next session. The resistance cell can serve as a half-ally, a third faction in what until now has been a fairly clear ComStar/Resistance vs. Word of Blake/TerraSec split -- a group with a vested interest in seeing the Word of Blake out, but alternative motives that may not entirely jive with the party's. That may or may not be obvious coming out of the gate.

Also, a factor I'm coming up against is mitigating the speed of the campaign. As previously noted, the campaign is supposed to average one session every 6-9 months of Game Time, with obvious bunches at the beginning and end. I need to come up with a variety of reasons that particular leads can't be acted on for months or years. Ideally I should come up with limiting factors that allow the players to collect information but only be able to take direct action during specific times. I think for the Wyrm plot I can give them a hook for an adventure in which they can join a TerraSec tour of the ship sometime in late 3069 or 3070. In my vague mindset, it will launch in 3074, and there will be another session in that arc then.

Alexei's arc is simpler -- he can disappear and the party be unable to find him until he pops up again. It feels like a cheat, though. I would rather find a more elegant solution to limiting that arc.

The Bioweapons and Sarna arcs are both very difficult -- they both involve static facilities that party could theoretically travel to at any time after they discover their location. I would like the Sarna arc to be one of the first pursued for timeline reasons, but so far only Alex is really keen on that. Also, I have no good idea for an intervening session in the Sarna arc -- each arc should be three to five sessions, and I only really have one for Sarna so far -- discovery and investigating the HPG in California that has been weaponized. The Bioweapons arc is equally tricky -- I can interpose a university mission or somesuch, but stretching that arc is going to have to come from player action.

I'm planning on giving the players information on the Alexei arc through a member of his organization who is being held at TerraSec. The Bioweapons arc will come out of an officer who has been corresponding with the Montana TerraSec headquarters about a curious incident involving some Denver residents who went missing while camping in the Montana Badlands. The Wyrm arc is on the Chief's computer. The balance of the hooks are simply in the station's computer. Still need to write those all up...

Coordinating Investigation

Out-of-Session, I had Simon and Clark make rolls to try to learn what they could about the TerraSec HQ building they were planning to raid in Sunday's session. Clark was rather unimpressive and failed all but one check, which he made exactly. Simon looked cleared to do the same until the last role, when he threw a natural twelve. Then he threw another six on his exploding die. Then another six. Then a five, for a total of 29 -- one less than a "Miraculous Feat" (A Time of War, p. 42) Anthony asked to blow a point of edge to get the elusive bonus, but I ruled that miracles had to be natural, largely because it didn't matter at that point whether he got the last point or not -- he succeeded by enough to get all the information I had to give him.

This result actually pushed up my deadline for putting the map and information together -- I had to get it to him so he could share it with the party to plan the operation. As a result, the in-game document creation has been delayed. Again, I tried developing this map with Campaign Cartographer 3. I bought the Cosmographer and Modern expansion packs, because I found the graphics included with the base product to be somewhat lacking. I have to say, I am somewhat less impressed with the product turned out by the tactical-scale maps than the beautiful overland map that I was able to make for Clark's Ranch. To compare:

This is the map of the Headquarters building I was able to slap together. The clip art is handy and the sheets let me easily highlight the objectives that the party needs to go after, but somehow the map just doesn't feel like it pops the way I feel it should. This is likely more a shortcoming of the user than the product, but given the effects I was able to get in a fraction of the time with the ranch, it like the latter is a better application. For comparison:

Clark's Ranch is fairly straight-forward, and I expect to convert it to a MegaMek map potentially in the late campaign, as a defending-our-base mission is a staple of this kind of campaign. More to the point I was making, though, the map I produced simply looks better. Not professional by any stretch of the imagination, but better than the Ink/Scanner/Photoshop method I used before, and certainly in a fraction of the time.

Anyways, I'm sure the mapmaking is less interesting than the actual nitty-gritty of rules and adventure planning, so I'll get back to plot and character development tomorrow.

First Target

The party has informed me their first order of business planetside will be infiltrating a TerraSec facility to try to recover more information about their plot hooks. This requires me to build a TerraSec station, and a major one this time. My 26x26 square battle mat may not be up to the task, but I do not have a good surface for my 46x96 MondoMat (that's pretty much a convention toy.) All those issues, however, are secondary; first I need to think about the purpose of this adventure.

I've asked my players to CC me on their emails regarding their plans for the next session, so that I could meet their expectations. I know their primary goal is to find more information on the Word of Blake bioweapons program in Montana. Simon has a personal goal to find out what happened to Alexei, if TerraSec knows anything. Shin wants to find and relay information that will be useful for the ComGuard's next attempt to retake the planet. Finally, Alex wants to get more information on any of the intercepts they got, as well as raid any weapons and equipment they might have access to.

So I need to provide at least the following elements in the TerraSec building:

1. More information on the plot hooks.
2. Considerably more information on the bioweapons program, or at least where to find it.
3. A dossier on Alexei (perhaps an opportunity to grow his character more)
4. Information on the fate of the 394th, 166th, and other ComGuard units that made planetfall.
5. A new gun or other toy for the party.

I looked at a few pictures of existing Police Headquarters (I've spend very little time in them myself), and etched out an office space. Mostly desks, a few cells, an armory, a computer room, a break room, a locker room. Ingress and egress -- two doors, one to the lobby and a locked back entrance. Overall the building gives the impression of the bureaucratic center of a police organization, more than a functioning precinct. For the purposes of this adventure, that's what I want. It is very easy to get caught up in one aspect of planning, such as map-making, so it is important to not spend too much time on one part.

A big part of this adventure is going to be recovering documents of different types. I need to enumerate which documents need to be written. Again, we need one for each plot hook, and the Bioweapons hook needs to be lengthier and contain more information if possible, but I want them to have an idea of where to go for any of the hooks. The documents on the 394th are pretty easy -- they get mashed by the 9th Division, possibly with Manei Domini support. A dossier on Alexei should be interesting... I may have to come up with something remarkable, but I can't imagine what right now. I'll meditate on that one.

Finally, selecting a toy; something that rewards the party for their efforts. Right now the party's main danger is taking damage, so I think the first reward they'll get is some body armor, and incidentally a few service pistols if they want to take them. The heavier stuff will be locked away elsewhere, but a bit of armor should get them on their way.

Creating Clark's Ranch

I pulled out an old copy of Campaign Cartographer 3 to help me lay out Clark's Ranch. The first thing I wanted to figure out was the size of Clark's Ranch. By Cameron's descriptions, Clark's ranch is fairly small -- only a few large animals. I'm estimating his ranch at 20 acres. A few quick calculations assuming a hex is approximately a 15-meter circle gives me 114 hexes of land in the Total Warfare scale.

The tool lets me throw down a hex grid pretty easily. First, to establish a reference point, I put down the road that connects the lot with the rest of the world. Then, the fence we already know is there that the cows and horses graze in. The tree line to the southeast was established last session -- that should be added. I previously established the house was about 100 meters from the treeline, so that's about 3-4 hexes away. The barn should be out by the grazing area.

Unfortunately, the Campaign Cartographer has a very limited base graphics set, so finding a icon for the house was a bit of trick, and the barn is harder. I may need to go Google image searching for better images, but for now I can find one thing or another. For now, a European-style monastery is the best stand-in I can find. Place that, throw down a few paths, a driveway, a hither-to-unreferenced brook, and I have a draft map of the world. I add a few labels, export to PNG, and send it to Cameron for approval. The result is:

I'm fairly happy with it. We'll see if he is. Overall, I had a pretty good experience with this tool, and I am now wondering if I should watch some of the YouTube videos the company puts out to help me use it more effectively. I certainly paid enough to get it in the first place.

Battletech on a Kindle

I'm writing this from my vacation on Cape Cod, because my parents were kind enough to give me a new Amazon Kindle for my birthday. This was one of the perfect examples of something I would never buy for myself, but I have really rather wanted. One reason I wanted one was for BattleTech purposes. So within a few hours I had uploaded a copy of A Time of War to my Kindle to see how it looked.

The good news is that the Kindle handles the upload just fine, and actually dithers the rather complicated art and formatting of the rulebook quite well. Unfortunately, that's about where the good news ends. Without zoom, the text is barely readable if you hold the Kindle inches from your nose, and each page takes a few seconds to load, with page skip functionality only rudimentary. Sadly, I don't think I can recommend this clever idea for GM's, even for just for keeping tables handy -- its less "at-a-glance" and more "at-a-squint." Nevertheless, toys are toys, and I'm sure I'll find a way to integrate the Kindle into my GMing arsenal at some point.

Wyrms

One of the plot hooks I gave my players leads to a Wyrm SDS ships being built in Galveston, TX. The only information on them is listed on page 189 of Jihad Hotspots: Terra. This kinda of loose briefing information is, to my mind, ideal for a campaign hook -- a few hard facts, a few dates to orient the plot device in the timeline, and the rest at the gamemaster's discretion. Let's go over what's known about the Wyrm, what I've added so far, and the directions this might go.

The Wyrm was built as a Terran SDS platform to counter the fact that ComStar already knew the locations of all ground-based SDS systems, and could use that to their advantage if they ever attempted to retake the planet. Construction started 3058 or 3059, shortly after the Word of Blake took Terra, but the first system wouldn't launch until 3072, meaning if they played any role in Case White at all, they were firing from the pier. By the time of the Coalition's assault in 3078, twelve hulls would have been completed.

The specific vessel being built in Texas that the party knows of is Wyrm #7. Whether or not this is the seventh or the eighth hull (implying a Wyrm #0) I'm leaving as wiggle room for myself. I know enough about the history of shipbuilding to know that ships don't necessarily complete in the order they are started, let alone the order their numbers are assigned, so I can have this ship completed as early as 3072 if I would like. Likely, its time of completion will depend on when the party gets around to dealing with it.

The Wyrm is also enormous -- six hexes long and five wide at its wing turrets --180 meters by 150 meters, and 60 meters from keel to bridge. It is an ideal environment to run a covert adventure in, especially late in the game. I envision this plot arc as being a number of missions to interfere with the ship's construction culminating in an attempt to destroy it during its launch, or perhaps during the Coalition assault at the climax of the campaign -- forcing the ship to surface so that space-borne fire can annihilate it seems a fantastic session.

From a plot perspective, this hook is my catch-all; anything I need to introduce into the campaign that I haven't already covered with another hook can go here. The original introduction hook had to do with TerraSec trying to requisition Wyrm #7 for themselves, and the yardmaster arguing that it was stupid beyond words for the law enforcement branch of the government to have an SDS system. Whether that was a miscommunication or if there's something more there is something I can use going forward to guide the campaign in the direction I need it to go.

A brief editorial note: Monday is a major national holiday in the United States, and this weekend I'll be away on a family vacation spending time with my nephew, so there may not be a regularly-scheduled posting on Monday. Fear not, though, as we'll pick up Tuesday, July 5th.