Last game ended with the infiltration of "the farm," the kidnapping and interrogation of Reggie, determining that the Freedom Farms folks were the next stop. This game was the assault on the survival school grounds.
First, they spent a good deal of time re-equipping, and came in loaded for bear. I made a point of mentioning that the equipment list included backup goons (only one of the pre-gens they chose was really combat oriented), so between the 10 equipment points for the mission, and the Scrounger's 12, they came in (at night) with everyone equipped with night vision goggles, flash-bangs, a few regular grenades, and 3 goons with rifles.
This was a straight forward assault. The party snuck in from the west, clearing buildings one by one, heading towards the office building, until one of the game guards spotted them and opened fire.
The players, all very experienced, made excellent instinctive use of cover (allowing full DEX diving for cover), before they even had the rules explained. They had an unfortunate tendency to roll exactly 9 points of damage (like, 25% or so of the damage rolls), and I believe that every critical hit that was rolled was against a militia guy with one Body Point left. There was lots of lead flying harmlessly through the air on both sides.
The final tally was one character fairly well shot up (3 BP left), another somewhat shot up, and one surviving militia guy to be interrogated (one of the "one BP" left guys, who critically failed a WIL roll as a morale check, and crawled under the Humvee and wet himself, and immediately surrendered at the first opportunity.) Between a regular interrogation (while they piled the other 11 bodies up in a neat stack, and he was somewhat cooperative to begin with) and some pharmaceutical assistance, they extracted all the info available.
One particularly interesting moment was when somebody with an INIT of 2 rolled two 5's for initiative, and wanted to know what the critical success was. No, rationally, since it's impossible to actually fail an initiative roll (and thus, you can't critically fail), you shouldn't be able to critically succeed. But in keeping with the cinematic nature of the game, I like the idea of there being some king of bonus for it. After kicking a few ideas around, what we ended up with is:
If you have at least two of the same number for your initiative roll, that's your initiative number, but you get a free action, i.e., if you take a second action in the turn, there's no -20 on the roll for it. It actually worked out pretty well (we had it happen four times - two of them double 0's - they went last, but got to make it count).
Next month will be the final fight with the two trucks.
That is a nifty idea for the "critical" initiative roll. I like it.
Mark
I love this idea - so simple and effective.
Sounds like a ton of fun! I had someone ask about the crit on the init roll once before and I just rejected the idea out of hand - but that's actually a really clever way to manage it.
It worked well for us, but I do see the argument against it. If you can't critically fail, or even fail at all, well. But it was fun, and that's what counted.
Next game, I'll need to remind them about bones, and we introduce automatic weapons fire. And RPGs, but not in the PCs hands. I expect the Wheelman will be ready to throw as many bones in to making those rolls as he needs to.
Just to clarify, with regards to the initiative houserule - if I have an INIT score of 3 and roll 3,3,7 my INIT for the round will be 3 but I also get a free action? I take it, therefore, that an INIT score of 1 will never be able to achieve this, unless you allow Bones to be used to also allow for additional actions at no penalty (i.e. one additional action for each Bone used).
The situation hasn't come up yet, but that sounds pretty sensible to me. Go first, or two twice, under those circumstances.
Yeah, which tends to exaggerate somewhat the advantage of being more experienced/higher rank. Plus, of course, minor NPCs don't roll initiative at all.
That, too, hasn't come up yet, but I kinda like it. Bones have a lot in common with luck points in Top Secret, and were always pretty freewheeling with those. The general rule of thumb was you could do pretty much anything, so long as it made the game more fun. (Of course, in Top Secret, once you used a luck point, it was gone forever, and you only got one fame point per level.)
I think that it would be very easy to be too freewheeling with bones. On the other hand, if one is aiming for a very cinematic, James Bond-ish sort of game, you'd have to work at it to go overboard.
Yep - like the idea that more experienced/more competent characters have the a chance of getting a free action.
With regards to Bones, I'm very much in the camp of using them according to the style of game you are trying to achieve - Hero Points ala James Bond can allow for a very cinematic feel but they don't necessarily have to destabilize the game. Using them more like Bennies (Savage Worlds) can create a grittier feel to the game experience while still allowing the characters to have a chance to shine.
There was a time, in our misspent youths, when characters were pieces of paper, gaming tokens, and frankly, not much more. In those days, we had a real fondness for games in which characters could be created very quickly, because they died easily. (Yeah, I'm looking at you, Boot Hill, where it took 15 seconds to roll up a character, and five to kill him. We had a game where the gamemaster had to prohibit rolling up any more character during the gun fight, because it took longer to go around the table than it did to create a new character.)
Those days are long gone. Now, even with a game like Covert Ops, where a character can be created, game mechanics-wise, in a few minutes, we will invest quite a bit of time in to fleshing them out with that extra dimension. I even give extra experience for background stories. ("Tell us something we didn't know about your character.") So we're a lot more defensive of them than we used to be. People get upset when a character they've invested hours in to, and several game sessions, is suddenly a fire starter.
So the biggest advantage of bones (or any similar mechanic) is to let characters fail without dying. And they can be quite versatile in doing so. The suggestions in the rules aim towards a pretty cinematic tone - characters can not only do heroic things, they can do outrageously heroic things. But with a few simple limitations, or even careful interpretation, it can be very gritty - characters survive impossible odds because they got lucky, rather than because they're James Bond superheroes.
The fact that the gamemaster gets bones, too (though, on average, I think, fewer) helps keep balance, but yeah, it could destabilize things. Fortunately, I have players who aren't prone to hogging the limelight. Because they're so defensive of their characters' lives, they'll reserve bones for the most desperate moments. And when they're feeling adventurous, they'll go more for entertainment value than stealing the spotlight. But it does require some thought, sometimes.
In the end, bones give both players and gamemaster options that, properly used, make the game more fun. And that's all that counts, in the end.
@ taustinoc - damn, you took me back to my childhood with the first paragraph of your last post :) My friends and I used to play Boot Hill during our lunch break at school - the map of the town was just right for some epic gun battles and the next day...we'd do it all again :)
The James Bond RPG by Victory Games and the Top Secret game (first edition) were also a very big part of our early gaming - the James Bond game introduced us to Hero Points and the idea of our characters being able to buck the odds with luck and skill rather than just relying on the whim of the dice.
Great days indeed - and I'm glad to say that my present gaming group still loves it when I get out my James Bond RPG books and run a few missions; that game really did/does manage to replicate the feeling and atmosphere of its source material.
I'm now getting very anxious to run some Covert Ops for my group as well - a mix of Mission Impossible, Strike Back, Spooks, Burn Notice et al :)