Uhm... ya.
In another post, az_gamer reminded of my online version of The Shadow Falls I ran at a local con. The players decided to take Rico with them after a failed attempt by Noskov's brother to intact his revenge (see White Lies Operation: Wounded Wolf). While the players were dealing with the encryption on the data cube they recovered, Rico was sent to interrogation. One of the players wanted to know more about the setup by the Russians. The Director refused. The player announced, "I pull out my piece and point it between her eyes and say 'Take me to Rico now.'"
I'm like... uhm you realize she is your superior and you work for an organization with rules of conduct?
Player, "So what."
*scratches head
Since this was basically a one shot con game and I knew he wanted to know more about the story I decided that the Director would lead him to Rico to watch the interrogation and that this incident would go on his permanent record. Oh ya, I kept his character and wrote notes on the back in case I see the player in my next game. Good times.
YOUR THOUGHTS
Espionage games can get out of hand quickly with agents who feel like their above the law. What situations do you find yourself in and how do you handle them in the spy themed genre?
Back in our Top Secret days, way back, when we were still playing (mostly) CIA agents, we had one guy playing a character who was a CIA agent, but his cover was as a DEA agent. A real federal cop, with a real badge, that will survive any degree of scrutiny, because it is real. This is important.
We're investigating a kidnapping, and had traced the perps to a hotel. We knew what room was theirs. We were trying to pick the lock, when the hotel detective comes up and demands to know what we're doing (somebody saw us, and called him). So there we are, with a real federal cop, with a real badge, investigating a real crime (with a federal jurisdiction), with real probable cause of a felony in progress. So what does Mr. DEA do? He pulls out his gun and shoots the detective in the head and kills him.
Now, that's stupid. Really, really stupid. But wait, there's more! At that point, we're in the hotel room. One of the other agents is a German operative, in the country illegally, and has highly illegal C-4 on his person, and Mr. DEA knows all this. Does he blame the murder of the detective on the German terrorist? No, that would be too simple. Instead he:
1. Takes the elevator down to the lobby.
2. Has the concierge flag down a cab.
3. Takes the cab to the airport.
4. Buys a one way ticket to Portugal because the US doesn't have an extradition treaty with Portugal.
5. Flies to Portugal.
The gamemaster, eventually, took pity (it was a favorite character) and let him bring the character back (with a lot of hand waving about why he wasn't prosecuted), but from that day on, his codename was Clusterf**k. The character's code name was Clusterf**k, too.
(We also had a guy who we'd never seen before, and never saw again, show up one Saturday for a Top Secret game. He discovered that you got 10 experience points for shooting unarmed civilians, so he took his sniper rifle up on the roof of a shopping mall and started shooting people. He was outraged when the SWAT team showed up and killed him (enough times to ensure he was out of luck points). Nobody minded that he never came back again.)
And then there's Dave. Dave's a great guy, and a great roleplayer, and always fun to have in a game. But when a game goes off the rails, there's at least a 50/50 chance that it was the directlresult of something Dave did.
Top Secret again, after the characters had . . . retired from the CIA and started our own . . . private spy agency. We were investigating an illegal uranium mine in Senegal that was supposed to be selling yellowcake to terrorists. We flew in in our C130, and our cover was arms merchants. The Senegalese army posted guards outside our airplane, more to keep an eye on us than to protect us from the locals.
So we're heading into the capital city from the airport, which is some distance outside of town. The gamemaster mentions that there's a car that's keeping pace with our cab, sometimes behind, sometimes in front. Dave, being Dave, jumps to the entirely unfounded conclusion that it's following us. (Mind you, the GM had also mentioned there was only one highway between the airport and the city, so there really wasn't another route.)
So Dave tells the cab driver, "Put your right index finger into your right ear." Cab driver is somewhat nonplussed by this. Dave follows up with "Put your right index finger into your right ear, and I'll give you $100." Which is at least a month's pay. So the cabbie puts his right index finger into his right ear. Tourists are weird. And kinky.
And Dave pulls out a shotgun and blows out the windshield (the cabbie's hearing was somewhat protected by the finger in his ear - Dave's a considerate wingnut) and blazes away at the car "following" us.
Cabbie slams on the brakes, and everybody bails out in different directions. Me and the third agent in the car stayed together, and had a fairly uneventful time climbing over fences through back yards, sometimes preceded by sleep gas capsules, and made it back to the plane without incident (where we listened to the radio reports of someone trying to assassinate the Minister of the Interior on the highway from the airport). Dave, on the other hand . . .
I do not recall all the details, but by the time he got back to the plane, he was wearing stolen clothes - a Hawaiian shirt and Bermuda shorts, had covered his face in black shoe polish, and was talking with the worst Jamaican accent in human history. The army guards were too freaked out to even shoot him.
But wait, there's more!
Along the way, he'd been holed up in an empty Lufthansa office for a while, where he had acquired a blank cargo manifest. After the mission was over, everybody filed after action reports. Everybody else's consisted of detailed accounts of everything that had happened, and how it was all Dave's fault. Dave's report was the cargo manifest, with every box filled in, and in the Comments box, it said "Sh*t happened."
Sadly, it was the most coherent report my (other) character (who was in charge of the entire organization) ever got.
Dave sounds likes his antiques spiced up the game. But the DEA agent, did that take the fun out of the game?
In my CO games, the players have always identified targets correctly. I only hand waved two killings where I thought there was a chance the target may been NATO operatives (I just ruled behind the screen they were CITADEL).
I think you mean "antics." At least, I hope you do.
It's never dull with him around. He holds the record for accidentally creating the most recurring villains.
Not really. This was a long time ago, when we were young and stupid and found great hilarity in playing characters that were, one and all, psychotic serial killers. Clusterf**k wasn't even the craziest (that was "the Good Doctor," who was actually a doctor, and who had a surgical stainless steel chainsaw - in his interrogation room), just the funniest. We do things a little more seriously these days.
In my CO games, the players have always identified targets correctly. I only hand waved two killings where I thought there was a chance the target may been NATO operatives (I just ruled behind the screen they were CITADEL).
Well, if he'd identified the hotel detective as as a target, that would have been different. It was just blind panic, coupled with boredom from not having rolled dice in a while. As I said, we were young and stupid.
We did have one mission where we broke into the neo-Nazi base, rifled through their records, copied all their computer records, and escaped without a single trace.
And then Rob (not Dave, for once) pushed the button on the remote detonator, setting off the explosives he'd planted all over the base, and completely destroyed it. Making all the information we'd just obtained useless. I'm not sure I'd classify that as "misidentifying the target" so much as "misidentifying the mission."
-----
"Well, at least we captured the Iraqi general."
"I don't have the general. Do you have the general?"
"I think we left him in the APC."
And the APC blew up, with perfect comedic timing.
I ran a Covert Ops game with a group where an entire encounter was totally read wrong. They were sent to investigate the disappearance of a scientist, to his summer villa overlooking the sea. When they arrived and started looking around, a bunch of suits came and started flipping over things and searching. The players read the room totally wrong, stalked and started taking out the "bad guys" -- who were actually CIA agents investigating the same missing scientist. This was supposed to end up a role-playing encounter where the operatives gained some contacts to use as resources/assets during the rest of the adventure. They captured the leader of these "suits," dragged her half a mile and crammed her in the trunk of their hidden offsite SUV. When they got her to HQ for interrogation, I wasn't sure what to do as the GM.
They SHOULD have been taken off the case and reprimanded, or worse.
I considered having their handler do a cover-up to sweep the mistake under the rug... by sending them to do the grim work of the house "cleaning" to hide evidence of the incident. But that didn't seem a good punishment.
So I decided not to punish them. Instead, I changed the intended story a bit. Adapted. Yes, it was the CIA and yes, the operatives got reprimanded for not reading the situation right, but under interrogation it was determined that this CIA team was working with CITADEL to abduct the scientist, a corrupt Director in league with the enemy, and this player mistake uncovered something bigger. I made up that the CIA agents were there, returning to the villa where the abduction occurred, searching for something the scientist needs in order to finalize their nefarious plans. So then I had the SECTOR director trade the captured corrupt CIA agent back to the CIA and arranged a meetup at the villa - the agents were sent back to meet a new CIA team so the mission could continue as I planned it. And this time, they didn't kill them. lol
Sometimes, the Rules of Drama supersede the printed scenario. It's hard to enjoy the game when everyone dies (or goes to prison) in the opening scene. Even for the gamemaster.