bladerunner_35 skrev:
Yeah, I can still make this tuesday the 17th at 18.oo.
Excellent!
bladerunner_35 skrev:
1. I am afraid there won't be a red thread or cohesion to the campaign and that it will be very episodic. I do not mind sandboxing at all but just running around stirring up shit for the sake of stirring up shit or running mission of the week is not very appealing to me. There needs to be something driving the campaign forward - forward meaning an ongoing story that builds from session to session and that is something more than just the accumulated experiences of our characters.
One of the things I
always do behind the scenes is to have a list of factions/corps/whatever which are pursuing their own goals. That was partially exposed in Savage Marches, with the reputation gains for collecting "Resources" (Food/Influence/Morale/Security/Tech) for Eastmere, but I was also tracking those things for multiple factions in Brassport, the orcs you encountered at Close Inn, and several other groups that you never got around to meeting. And this played directly into the game you saw - the reason the orcs were stealing cattle from Close Inn in the first place was because they were looking for additional Food resources.
For IZ, I'll definitely be doing something similar regardless of what form the campaign takes - NAC operatives, ronin, running a security company, whatever - even if it's only so that I can give you a list of the latest headlines off the news feeds each week. In a West Marches context, that would be modified somewhat so that my behind-the-scenes faction game would instead provide the source of job listings for you to choose from, with the news reports following later after the jobs are done, either by you or by NPCs.
In more concrete terms, West Marches doesn't mean that you can't arrange for a theocratic government to take Chicago over and sign treaties making the city effectively a part of the NAC, it just means that, to accomplish that, you'd have to find appropriate jobs to do to pursue that goal by your own route rather than me laying out a specific path for you to follow.
So not just "PCs stirring up shit and doing missions of the week", but rather "factions competing with each other and sometimes drawing the PCs into their web". Does that provide enough of an ongoing story to meet what you're looking for?
bladerunner_35 skrev:
I think that my misgivings steem from the fact that West Marches do not have a story - just an "environment". This may or may not work. In Savage Marches it worked well enough and we built on the story from session to session even if it just happened to be "last time we killed enemy X and liberated village y".
I think that mostly comes down to what "story" means to you in this context. If you're looking for
The Story, which is a pure and unified whole with a single beginning, middle, climax, and ending, then I agree that West Marches may not be the best model for that. Instead, it gives you a tapestry of many little stories playing out in parallel, sometimes in isolation, other times intersecting, with beginnings, middles, climaxes, and endings happening all the time. I expect that a larger Story will emerge from the tapestry of little stories, but it will be the Story of a city or a region influenced by many characters rather than The Story Of The Five PCs.
bladerunner_35 skrev:
How about, as Dave suggests, we play a mercenary group? We are all employees of a "security company" (think Black Water/Xe/Academi) and like in Savage Marches there's a pool of recruits and PCs to draw members from for each mission. We would all start as raw recruits and as we gain experience, succeed at missions and roleplay we gain status and influence in the company and will have more say on which missions we are assigned to and what missions the company will undertake.
If we're going to use the "flexible/player-driven scheduling" aspect of West Marches, then I think you'd probably have to either be independent contractors or high-enough up in the company that you're able to pick and choose which missions you want to be on from the start.
bladerunner_35 skrev:
I understand if it would be too much for other players but personally I would really enjoy if there was some resource management or administrative duties if we go with The Company.
[snip]
If we really want to dig into that aspect of gaming we could make executive decisions, like which missions to send our limited recruits to and while we play through "our" mission Dave rolls for the other missions and then we'll see how much money we manage to earn this month and if we make enough to just pay bills and salaries or if we can buy some new and shiny Jaeger m90 carbines to our veteran troops or hired new recruits. Or perhaps buy that APC or finally put Sebastian's character under the knife in order to have our very own cyber psycho...
We could definitely set up some faction stats for a small PC-run company and have you guys run it in the faction-level game. Or perhaps multiple factions, so that everybody gets one of their own, even if your character isn't technically running it, depending on whether you'd prefer to do collective or individual management.
The system I'm using for faction-level play comes straight out of Other Dust (a post-apocalyptic game by the same guy as Stars Without Number), with a few pieces bolted onto the side from the IZ1 "Hostile Takeover" supplement (mostly just Corporate Trappings), and it's fairly simple. Each "faction turn", you have eight actions to choose from (half a page describes the rules for all eight), then there's another two pages of perks that you can get to give bonuses to certain actions, and that's pretty much all you'd need to run a faction.
I post in English, but can read Swedish. When replying to me, either language works.
