Today during my lunch break I went down a weird rabbit hole of watching XCOM 2: Terror from the Deep play throughs on youtube. Perhaps it is just the use of the word 'terror' that forced a connection between these two things in my mind. But I got to thinking about the following high concept for a campaign:
Aliens have taken over the world, and the PCs are freedom fighters in underwater submarine bases engaged in a futile campaign of disruption and defiant violence against them.
The problem with turning a game like XCOM or Terror from the Deep into an RPG is that it falls prey to the old samurai sandbox problem. Having the players act like policemen or alien hunters forces them into a reactive mode which is repetitive and deprives them of agency. A campaign in which the PCs are elite soldiers or superheroes staving off alien attack is one in which they are basically at the beck and call of the DM, either directly because they are generally carrying out missions on behalf of some higher authority, or indirectly because their job is to wait for something bad to happen and then ride to the rescue like cavalry. You can possibly have a fun game that way, of course, but it won't be a sandbox and the players won't have much choice about what to do. It'll be more like a wargame with acting. It'll also be hard on the DM, who has to constantly come up with interesting scenarios rather than following the players' lead, which is one of the main virtues of a traditional sandbox campaign.
(This is the same problem in a nutshell as a "the PCs are cops" campaign: following orders and waiting for bad stuff to happen before acting is not as interesting as its opposite.)
But spin Terror from the Deep on its head and you have something very different. The basic idea behind TftD, for those who haven't played it, is that aliens who have been slumbering on the ocean floor for millennia have suddenly been awakened and are rising up from the oceans to attack human cities, spreading fear, panic, destruction, blah blah, and a special international agency has been set up to stop them. The parallel universe version is that the aliens have taken over the world, and the humans, rather than stopping alien terror, are engaged in a terrorist campaign against the alien overlords.
Rather than casting the PCs as guardians of humanity, in a reactive/defensive role, it makes them purposive actors - planning activities (bombs, raids, assassinations, whatever) - with the whole world as their oyster. Each session they're not looking to the DM to discover what their mission is; they're deciding for themselves how they are going to further their terrorist campaign.
A concluding observation is that players love this sort of thing. I find that the best moments in RPGs, the times when things really seem to sing the most, come when the PCs are coming up with some dastardly plot or scheme; that's when the players come to inhabit their PCs the most, and the point at which distinction between player and character begins to break down. When players are cooking up a plan, they start to truly think 'in character', and they do it collectively into the bargain. A terrorist campaign is one which maximises the opportunities for precisely that kind of mood to develop.
I think a "PCs are cop/soldiers/etc." can work, but you need to have them operate with autonomy, to present with multiple avenues/threats/etc., and to develop at least some degree of mechanical framework to resolve most of the effects what they're doing separately from your own subjective judgments. To take an example from video games, I think the first Dawn of War 2 (a WH40K game where you play as space marines isolated on a system being invaded by orks and tyranids) would let you pick between missions to take action against enemy strongholds, missions to protect your own assets, and missions to gather intelligence/supplies, plus the occasional special mission to take out a warboss or avatar of Khaine. A similar framework could be set up against an alien invasion, with PC successes reducing future enemy numbers, improving morale/supplies, and providing information on effective tactics/powerful artifacts/high-value targets/looming threats, respectively. The tricky part would likely be doing it in a way that supports agency without devolving into just cycling through missions until they win. Beyond the Wall's threat packs (a campaign tool where high-level actors are given an imminence rating the PCs can affect and a threat table of random event prompts gated by the imminence) might be a decent launching point; the Grey Prince pack about fighting off intrusions from a faerie Freddie Kruger and the Barbarian Invasion pack seem like they might be good inspiration, though I haven't played either of them yet. Another thing I haven't read/played myself, but I've heard the 3E adventure Red Hand of Doom has some kind of mechanic for judging how the PCs' actions impact the invading hobgoblin armies.
ReplyDeleteThat all said, playing the PCs as the terrorists is far easier to pull off and still a blast.
I think if anything it's the repetitiveness that is the real danger. There are only so many interesting scenarios an individual DM can come up with. A group of 5 players between them are so much more creative, even if unintentionally.
DeleteThat's true. It'd probably work best in a campaign with a clear end date/condition, rather than the typical unending sandbox. Perhaps that's more akin to an adventure path off rails?
DeletePart of what I like about Beyond the Wall's threat packs is that they're only checked weekly for a chance at something happening (with an imminence-in-12 chance of a threat event). It seemed too infrequent at first, but it actually works decently to give the players more breathing room for side adventures instead of putting on so much time pressure that they tune out anything else. Of course, that's only good if you want it to be an initially nebulous threat that waxes over time.
The samurai sandbox link won't give me access.
ReplyDeleteOops, put in a broken link. Will fix it now.
DeleteFor "PCs are cops" something like The Wire could be good for a sandbox, procedural based shows not so much.
ReplyDeleteYeah, "there's a criminal conspiracy in town and you have to get to the bottom of things" can work, I'm sure.
DeleteThere's a different XCOM2 from 2016 (a sequel to the 2012 series reboot) with basically the exact same premise you outline: it takes place in a timeline where the player lost to the aliens in the first game and follows the resistance movement launching guerilla campaigns from a mobile flying base.
ReplyDeleteHonestly I found that setup much less compelling, and I've barely played it at all compared to it's predecessors. Part of the fun of XCOM is being The Man, assembling super-special forces strike teams and managing tension between the panicking world governments amid the chaos.
However, this is just speaking about the video games, I think the resistance setup would work a lot better for a traditional tabletop game. People are a lot more tolerant of bullshit scenarios being sprung on them out of nowhere when it's a computer doing it than a human DM, where it can feel adversarial even if the surprise was generated randomly. Also, when a group of PCs get together the tendency is towards crazy antics which is usually at odds with the image of heroic defenders of humanity that the traditional XCOM setup implies.
I think anything that shifts the structure of a game to embrace the inevitable "murderhoboism" of a group of RPG players is always going to run more smoothly than one which tries to fight against it and coerce players into certain behaviors.
Yes, I agree with the last paragraph 100%.
DeleteSomewhat ancillary to your main point (or maybe not?), but you could always make it player-directed.
ReplyDeleteLike with superheroes, in a good superhero story, there's usually some thematic through-line between whatever the hero/heroes were doing before the event occurs. So basically, you give the players the autonomy to sandbox (e.g. listen on the police scanner, investigate any open leads on cold cases, prowl the streets, do general research and/or their real-life work, etc.), and build the crimes / mysteries / calamities around that.
This is even more ancillary to your main point, but I also don't think it has to be any more repetitive than picaresque fantasy. Maybe they choose to go after organized crime; there's a kingpin, and there's a bunch of other gangs which can be pitted against each other, recruited, taken out, etc.; and if the kingpin falls, there's a power vacuum to deal with. Or maybe it's a corrupt government, or international espionage. Or they choose to investigate the mysterious deaths and uncover any number of serial killers / mad science experiments / aliens or monsters, etc. Or they're invited / stumble upon other planets or dimensions to save them from environmental disaster or crime or intergalactic war or evil gods or whatever. Maybe one of their own goes rogue. Maybe they choose to go rogue, rather than be reactionaries for the government (Dark Knight Returns; The Authority; Invisibles; etc.).
I realize that was more on the superhero end than XCOM or cops-style stuff, but even then, just look at XCOM 2 (2016), which kind of is itself an inversion of the XCOM formula. Or maybe it's XCOM, but instead of just fighting aliens, they're also dealing with (intentional or accidental) alien / interdimensional terraforming or environmental threats. Or they're XCOM but now they've beaten the aliens and are now travelling through space, the deep, or other dimensions with their new technology on a journey of exploration, science, diplomacy, resource gathering, or war.
I don't think these scenarios are any more reducible, or at least not significantly so, than sandbox fantasy.
I think the issue with this is that it puts a lot of pressure on the DM, but I will explain why in a blog post.
DeleteI'm not sure I agree but I'll wait for your post about it :).
DeleteI had a large section of a campaign that functioned like this - the party were trying to overthrow the government of a Venice-style maritime city state. They planned their own missions of assassination (including of other resistance figures at one point!), burnt down granaries to force bread riots, built alliances with foreign powers and conspired to force a civil war between heirs to the throne. It was ace, and fondly remembered, and my prep consisted of a one-off big investment in detailing the city and its governing family. They did the rest. It featured many kinds of mission (even the occasional somewhat contrived 'dungeon crawl') and gave the characters a lot to chew on.
ReplyDeleteAh, I've not DMed a game in a while and this comment makes me want to do it.
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