Tensided SDN2 Campaign Discussion Thread

Hotfoot · Post by **Hotfoot** » 2004-11-22 01:33am

Arthur_Tuxedo wrote:Well, Gerard enjoyed the last session, so at least that's one person. I myself did not. There was a lot of quibbling in the previous session, but people managed to enjoy the conflict and it turned into the best session of the campaign. This time people got angry and stayed that way, and the anger was directed as much toward myself and Tensided as the adversarial players. One person left as soon as his character was incapacitated (not even waiting for the results of the willpower check to see if he stayed conscious), the other said he stopped caring about the rest of the session and just wanted to get it over with, then said he was withdrawing from SDN3. This was on top of thinly veiled hints that I wasn't going by the rules. All this over an incident where both characters ended up surviving, for Christ's sake!

I was shot in the head with a .50 caliber rifle round. It's pretty much game over when that happens. I left because despite saying that I was looking for trouble, and despite all of my implants, I was caught as though I were completely off guard, and frankly I would have said some rather not-nice things I might not have meant.

No one likes being ambushed by surprise. I can understand that. I cannot understand the severity of the reaction, not after the previous session, and not from the calibre of players involved (still not naming names).

Dude, seriously, if you're not going to name names, you shouldn't put up chat logs that name the names for you in the same post. In any case, I had problems with the last session, yes, it was fun, but there were things that greatly irritated me, such as Xak being able to act at the same time on me when I should have had pretty much total surprise on him. In addition to that, the entire situation with the Killswitch was, quite frankly, wrong, and it left me with a sour taste in my mouth. Had it been handled as I specified it should have been, both M6 and Xak would have had killswitches installed, and this scenario from this week would not have happened.

To be honest, I'm feeling a little sour toward GMing right now. In this session, the players managed to stop the inevitable robot invasion before it happened, so there's no storytelling need for a follow-up campaign. I still want to have an SDN3 as something completely new, but it can wait.

Honestly, I figured the SDN3 campaign was going to be about either the continuing campaign against the corps, lead by Carlos and his new army, or him trying to recover from the losses involved. The Skynet bit came out of the blue and, no offense intended, but it felt rather forced.

Overall it was a great campaign, much better than SDN1, which was run via this forum (not a good format for an RPG, IMO).

OpenRPG does have its advantages, I will say that. The software could stand to use some tweaks here and there, such as how to handle multiple conversations (the ability to create subwindows for groups of people would be nice), but overall it's pretty good.

Arthur_Tuxedo · Post by **Arthur_Tuxedo** » 2004-11-22 01:58am

Hotfoot wrote:
Arthur_Tuxedo wrote:Well, Gerard enjoyed the last session, so at least that's one person. I myself did not. There was a lot of quibbling in the previous session, but people managed to enjoy the conflict and it turned into the best session of the campaign. This time people got angry and stayed that way, and the anger was directed as much toward myself and Tensided as the adversarial players. One person left as soon as his character was incapacitated (not even waiting for the results of the willpower check to see if he stayed conscious), the other said he stopped caring about the rest of the session and just wanted to get it over with, then said he was withdrawing from SDN3. This was on top of thinly veiled hints that I wasn't going by the rules. All this over an incident where both characters ended up surviving, for Christ's sake!
I was shot in the head with a .50 caliber rifle round. It's pretty much game over when that happens. I left because despite saying that I was looking for trouble, and despite all of my implants, I was caught as though I were completely off guard, and frankly I would have said some rather not-nice things I might not have meant.

Trying to spot an ambusher whose location you don't know when there's abandoned buildings all around, each one a potential place for a sniper, is very difficult, even with enhanced vision and all of that.

No one likes being ambushed by surprise. I can understand that. I cannot understand the severity of the reaction, not after the previous session, and not from the calibre of players involved (still not naming names).
Dude, seriously, if you're not going to name names, you shouldn't put up chat logs that name the names for you in the same post.
In any case, I had problems with the last session, yes, it was fun, but there were things that greatly irritated me, such as Xak being able to act at the same time on me when I should have had pretty much total surprise on him.

I bent the rules that time. I probably shouldn't have, but your character ended up winning the battle anyway, so who cares?

In addition to that, the entire situation with the Killswitch was, quite frankly, wrong, and it left me with a sour taste in my mouth. Had it been handled as I specified it should have been, both M6 and Xak would have had killswitches installed, and this scenario from this week would not have happened.

I can understand that. That was my mistake (although I don't remember you mentioning anything about a killswitch in M6) that I mis-interpreted what you said. But I would have rolled with it, and not soured what could have been a great showdown.

To be honest, I'm feeling a little sour toward GMing right now. In this session, the players managed to stop the inevitable robot invasion before it happened, so there's no storytelling need for a follow-up campaign. I still want to have an SDN3 as something completely new, but it can wait.
Honestly, I figured the SDN3 campaign was going to be about either the continuing campaign against the corps, lead by Carlos and his new army, or him trying to recover from the losses involved. The Skynet bit came out of the blue and, no offense intended, but it felt rather forced.

It had been part of my plans since the beginning of the campaign, but I can understand how it would have seemed out of the blue. As a GM you always try to tell a good story while still giving players freedom, and sometimes the story isn't novel quality.

Hotfoot · Post by **Hotfoot** » 2004-11-22 02:26am

Arthur_Tuxedo wrote:Trying to spot an ambusher whose location you don't know when there's abandoned buildings all around, each one a potential place for a sniper, is very difficult, even with enhanced vision and all of that.

These buildings were empty, yes? He was positioned by a window or on a roof, yes? His body temperature is significantly higher than that of an abandoned building, and last I checked, he had not invested in any sort of thermal masking equipment. I must say again that I think the concept of actually sniping with a massive heavy machine gun is, well, just a little silly. Had he been lying in wait with a sniper rifle (He had a M82 Barrett, did he not?) with appropriate coverings to mask his presence from augmented eyes, I would have very little to complain about in his trap.

I bent the rules that time. I probably shouldn't have, but your character ended up winning the battle anyway, so who cares?

I can understand that mistakes happen, but I'm pointing this out anyway because I felt it needs to be addressed, and part of the problem with the combat in the last session was that, to me, it showed how unrealistic the current combat round system is, with even unaugmented characters having the same reaction time as augmented ones.

I can understand that. That was my mistake (although I don't remember you mentioning anything about a killswitch in M6) that I mis-interpreted what you said. But I would have rolled with it, and not soured what could have been a great showdown.

I was testing the waters with Xak, to see if you even were going to allow it. Given what happened with Xak, I figured it wouldn't even be worth it to bother with M6.

It had been part of my plans since the beginning of the campaign, but I can understand how it would have seemed out of the blue. As a GM you always try to tell a good story while still giving players freedom, and sometimes the story isn't novel quality.

It's not even that it was out of the blue, I like a good plot twist now and again but...well, it made no sense.

Arthur_Tuxedo · Post by **Arthur_Tuxedo** » 2004-11-22 03:06am

Hotfoot wrote:
Arthur_Tuxedo wrote:Trying to spot an ambusher whose location you don't know when there's abandoned buildings all around, each one a potential place for a sniper, is very difficult, even with enhanced vision and all of that.
These buildings were empty, yes? He was positioned by a window or on a roof, yes? His body temperature is significantly higher than that of an abandoned building, and last I checked, he had not invested in any sort of thermal masking equipment. I must say again that I think the concept of actually sniping with a massive heavy machine gun is, well, just a little silly. Had he been lying in wait with a sniper rifle (He had a M82 Barrett, did he not?) with appropriate coverings to mask his presence from augmented eyes, I would have very little to complain about in his trap.

I can see your point about the thermal vision, although I still think having to scan every window and hiding spot in a setting chock full of them is hard to do, even if the potential target would stand out once you were looking in the right place. But I don't get why it's silly to use a machine gun for that purpose. There was a marine sniper in Vietnam who used a Browning M2 as a long range sniper rifle, at ranges far in excess of 200 meters.

I bent the rules that time. I probably shouldn't have, but your character ended up winning the battle anyway, so who cares?
I can understand that mistakes happen, but I'm pointing this out anyway because I felt it needs to be addressed, and part of the problem with the combat in the last session was that, to me, it showed how unrealistic the current combat round system is, with even unaugmented characters having the same reaction time as augmented ones.

Some sort of iniative system for surprise situations might be called for, I agree. There were no rules in place at the time (there still aren't) so I had to think on my feet.

It had been part of my plans since the beginning of the campaign, but I can understand how it would have seemed out of the blue. As a GM you always try to tell a good story while still giving players freedom, and sometimes the story isn't novel quality.
It's not even that it was out of the blue, I like a good plot twist now and again but...well, it made no sense.

Why not? The robot army that was going to steamroll the corporations turns out be fatally flawed, explaining why the corporates never used it themselves. Seemed like a good plot twist to me.

Gerard_Paloma · Post by **Gerard_Paloma** » 2004-11-22 03:15am

It's clear to me that you guys cannot let this go, regardless of the fact that things still worked out in your favor; everyone lived to fight another day.

That said, I think it's best that we three go our seperate ways as roleplayers. It's difficult to prevent OOC attitudes from seeping in to IC actions, and it's bound to happen if we're together again. I've talked with Art about this, and he agrees. So I think it's best that if I'm participating in a campaign, neither of you do as well, and if one of you is in a particular campaign, I'm not.

Hotfoot · Post by **Hotfoot** » 2004-11-22 03:36am

Arthur_Tuxedo wrote:I can see your point about the thermal vision, although I still think having to scan every window and hiding spot in a setting chock full of them is hard to do, even if the potential target would stand out once you were looking in the right place. But I don't get why it's silly to use a machine gun for that purpose. There was a marine sniper in Vietnam who used a Browning M2 as a long range sniper rifle, at ranges far in excess of 200 meters.

If the entire area is roughly the same temperature, all I have to do is look around for the hot spots. Trust me, it's not that hard to do, even without a top of the line cybernetic visual processor helping to filter out unimportant data. As for the M2, if you look at it, it's not exactly designed with sniping in mind. It's over a meter and a half long and is designed with a center of mass far from the firing mechanism. There is no way to set it up or to hold it out of a window that provides good firing angles that also does not have the thing hanging halfway out of said window, thus making it rather easy to spot even from 200 meters away to someone without highly augmented vision. It is a huge gun.

As for the part about the marine sniper in vietnam, there's a lot more to that than just a marine hauling around a 100+ pound gun plus additional ammo and using it as a sniper weapon. It was used as a sniper weapon at fixed installations, such as firebases, where the weapon was secured to positions and had to be test fired at identifiable targets to ensure first round accuracy, after calculating the data from the test firings into range cards. In other words, a lot of prep time went into setting these things up, as it should be, since we are talking about a weapon so heavy it takes three normal soldiers to cart it around with a minimal ammo supply and tripod (which, I should note, is not quite as accurate as a fixed installation).

Some sort of iniative system for surprise situations might be called for, I agree. There were no rules in place at the time (there still aren't) so I had to think on my feet.

Usually, in a surprise situation, the surprising party goes first, and the surprised party sits there with a silly look on their face as they are attacked.

Why not? The robot army that was going to steamroll the corporations turns out be fatally flawed, explaining why the corporates never used it themselves. Seemed like a good plot twist to me.

Fatally flawed? To me, that says, "some design flaw kept them from working right the first time. Now we can make them work, and we'll make them work for us." However, one does not build and enable Skynet just to lock it up for fifteen years so someday someone can insert a key and punch a code to reactivate it. Creating a skynet-esque system makes little sense as is, especially one that's ready to go the moment the controls are released. At multiple points, the corp should have stopped the project and destroyed everything involved. It would have been easy and efficient. Even when they got to the point where the machines are locked up and turned off, they could have easily dropped several bunker-busters on the place (conventional ones work just fine for the job) and wiped out the evil machines.

Hotfoot · Post by **Hotfoot** » 2004-11-22 03:42am

Gerard_Paloma wrote:It's clear to me that you guys cannot let this go, regardless of the fact that things still worked out in your favor; everyone lived to fight another day.

You're missing the point. This was never about winning or losing, it was about playing the game and putting it through its paces while we're at it. Just because there was a happy ending doesn't mean everything was handled well, and I'm trying to address that.

That said, I think it's best that we three go our seperate ways as roleplayers. It's difficult to prevent OOC attitudes from seeping in to IC actions, and it's bound to happen if we're together again. I've talked with Art about this, and he agrees. So I think it's best that if I'm participating in a campaign, neither of you do as well, and if one of you is in a particular campaign, I'm not.

I'm sorry you feel that way. Frankly, I don't have a problem with you as a player at all, and I'm pretty sure Marcao feels the same way. However, if you and Art would rather not have me playing anymore, that is regrettable, but it is your decision to make.

Post by **Alyrium Denryle** » 2004-11-22 07:53am

*lks up at above argument and looks lke a sad panda*

Well, I enjoyed playing with all of you. I enjoyed the last session(it could have been better) and am satisfied with the outcome. Though I am sorry I messed up SDN3 by succeeding...

There are times when you gat layer on player action, and times when rules are bent, or things not tken into account. It is human nature to be fallable in this manner. We arent gods, and getting angry at each other and messing up a very good rPG group is not the way to get things fixed.

Maybe I am just used to being attacked by party members(You know, the one's whp's characters are chaotic stupid)

Gerard_Paloma · Post by **Gerard_Paloma** » 2004-11-22 02:53pm

Hotfoot wrote:
Gerard_Paloma wrote:It's clear to me that you guys cannot let this go, regardless of the fact that things still worked out in your favor; everyone lived to fight another day.
You're missing the point. This was never about winning or losing, it was about playing the game and putting it through its paces while we're at it. Just because there was a happy ending doesn't mean everything was handled well, and I'm trying to address that.

You could have fooled me. Your actions screamed to me, "Our characters are getting screwed, no fair, he's cheating." However, if you say this is all about improving the system, I have no choice but to take you at your word.

That said, I think it's best that we three go our seperate ways as roleplayers. It's difficult to prevent OOC attitudes from seeping in to IC actions, and it's bound to happen if we're together again. I've talked with Art about this, and he agrees. So I think it's best that if I'm participating in a campaign, neither of you do as well, and if one of you is in a particular campaign, I'm not.
I'm sorry you feel that way. Frankly, I don't have a problem with you as a player at all, and I'm pretty sure Marcao feels the same way. However, if you and Art would rather not have me playing anymore, that is regrettable, but it is your decision to make.

I didn't say anything about you not playing Tensided anymore, just that I don't trust myself to remain IC with you and Marcao again. You're more than welcome to play Tensided, I just won't be playing with you.

Hotfoot · Post by **Hotfoot** » 2004-11-22 03:20pm

Gerard_Paloma wrote:You could have fooled me. Your actions screamed to me, "Our characters are getting screwed, no fair, he's cheating." However, if you say this is all about improving the system, I have no choice but to take you at your word.

Frankly, the last straw for me in the session was when the car swerved to save Ernesto (and by extension, Mikal). I felt like it was a cheap move that was designed to placate me, like, "look, you're not dead yet, it's all good, see?" I don't like being coddled. When I play, I play in character and by the rules. If that gets my character killed, so be it. Had you set up a trap with a thermal dampener hiding your body heat and torn the car apart, along with Ernesto and Mikal with a full burst from the M2, I would admittedly be a little upset over the loss of Mikal, but it would have been very passing, because I would have been left with very little to complain about. I would, of course, still be annoyed over the fumbling of the entire killswitch situation, which in part allowed that scenario to occur in the first place, but that's a somewhat seperate episode.

The bottom line is this: I don't like being coddled or mollified. If I die, and it was legit, I can handle that. I actually get more annoyed if the method of saving me is ridiculous. Frankly, if you sniping Ernesto and Mikal was allowable in the system, you should have been able to do it, end of story. There's no way that in the microsecond between when Mikal is shot and Ernesto is shot, the car veers off out of control. Part of this problem is the way APs are currently implemented, where they are used to put your character into a coma and at the same time remove them from danger. It's too powerful, and it rewards foolish players over cautious ones. The concept is fine, giving players a way out from bad luck that would end up killing them, but once you hit a certain point, it starts getting very silly.

If Mikal were to walk into a MegaCorp's headquarters armed to the teeth and start shooting things up like Neo, he should get spanked by security, and spanked hard, resulting in his death. As it stands now, he would get shot, thrown back into the street, down an open manhole cover, and washed out to sea before the security teams even knew what was happening. If I intended Mikal to make a heroic sacrifice in that scene so that Ernesto could save his baby sister (by keeping the security forces occupied), the sacrifice is meaningless, because Mikal is okay, and will be back to fight another day, thanks to a series of contrived events.

I didn't say anything about you not playing Tensided anymore, just that I don't trust myself to remain IC with you and Marcao again. You're more than welcome to play Tensided, I just won't be playing with you.

As I've said, I don't have a problem with you. If you think you can't keep yourself IC in future games because of the events of the last few sessions, well, that's regrettable, but I can honestly say that I would not mind playing with you again and that I don't take any of this all that personally.

Hotfoot · Post by **Hotfoot** » 2004-11-22 03:49pm

Despite it all, I figured I'd post Mikal's final post for the SDN2 campaign. One final twist for the road, as it were.

The last few days had been a hellish ride, and Mikal knew who was ultimately responsible for it all was himself. He did not have to respond to Carlos’s request, he could have slipped into the shadows once more, but such was the danger of friendship. His attachment to Ernesto nearly got him killed, but it was of no doing on Ernesto’s part, and he would not jeopardize the bond they shared if he could help it. A weakness, perhaps, but one of the few he allowed himself. No, he knew who had to pay for what happened. M6-41, the psychotic tin can, was merely one man. He could be handled. Carlos, however, could eventually become a threat, as much of one, if not greater than, the corporations. He had gone off half-cocked into a situation that would have triggered a new world war, not against each other, but against some godforsaken doomsday machine. It would not have been a war, as much as it would have been an apocalypse.

Saying goodbye to a city was never easy, networks and contacts would be left behind, as well as safehouses and usual haunts, but he had done so several times before, and money made it all that much easier. Once he was ready to go, one last thing needed to be done. The Vice President’s cell phone was turned on, and Mikal’s cybernetic voicebox scrambled his voice into an electronic mess, making it impossible to trace to his born voice. The message he sent was a detailed description of Carlos, his men, any bases of operation known to Mikal at the time, of Xak and his abilities, and of M6, just for the sake of completeness. No mention was made of Jack, in part to professional courtesy, as Jack was largely interested in himself, and had not gone out of his way to make an enemy of the Russian. Such a move showed intelligence, but the true test was yet to come. If Jack was still in the company of the others when the corporations made their move, he would be in considerable trouble himself. If the others discovered he had not been fingered, they might suspect him, and M6 would likely clean that up if he wasn’t already dead.

That dirty task done, Mikal disposed of the phone with acid, followed by a thermate grenade, to ensure that the corporates had no solid way to track the call back to him, and he slipped into the shadows once more. He knew when and where he would contact Ernesto, and he would have quite the surprise for him the next time they met…

Arthur_Tuxedo · Post by **Arthur_Tuxedo** » 2004-11-22 03:56pm

I think we've all said our piece about the whole incident. I've cooled down, and am no longer feeling sour toward GMing or angry about the incident. I recognize that there are areas of the system that need improvement, especially when it comes to spotting and sequencing . Sometimes it takes a bad session to make a system's flaws obvious, so the session ends up improving the game after all.

Arthur_Tuxedo · Post by **Arthur_Tuxedo** » 2004-11-24 11:46am

Sorry I ignored this before. Kept forgetting to respond.

frigidmagi wrote:Questions: Sweeps, flips, trips are covered in the wrestling concenration of HTH skill?

Those would all be considered a takedown, or a throw. I actually haven't even looked at the grappling rules in well over a year. When I do look at them, I'll probably change them in some way or another. Got any suggestions?

The Poor Character flaws, is this meant to be like a vow of Poverity or just starting off poor? I ask because it mentions paying back the XP if the flaw no longer applys.

Just starting off poor. Although "vow of poverty" is a pretty cool idea for a higher magnitude flaw. The paying back thing is mostly to scare people away from being munchkins, although I might enforce it if I felt like someone was gaming the system.

Gerard_Paloma · Post by **Gerard_Paloma** » 2004-11-24 10:49pm

Finished the writeup for the last campaign. The full story, including everyone's prologues, is available right here, or from the Source page. It's in PDF form, and numbers exactly 100 pages total.

Now that we're *counts* 3 days removed from "The Incident," I have to say I've cooled down, and been able to think clearly. It's silly to stop gaming together over such trivial things, IMO. You guys don't have a problem with me, I don't have a problem with you guys. Just as long as I never have to see those bastards Mikal and Ernesto again...