"Wow, we've got a lot of stuff!"
Players are acquisitive.
They start out fairly normally, and if you use the usual rules and say a five man group they get a load of equipment just starting out. However, after a few weeks of game time they can have a caravan of gear they can't bear to leave behind.
I've seen players happy to start out on foot with just a backpack soon end up with an MBT towing a trailer of junk, plus more. It's in their nature.
It makes a lot of sense. Everything about the setting states that all this stuff will get rarer and rarer. The constant struggle for food especially makes hoarding a natural response. Also, the game tends to throw up friendly NPCs, even the much-loved UK stragglers with their sterling SMGs, and soon they have a little train of camp followers traipsing along behind them.
Now, the first thing many GMs think is "how do I trim this train of stuff down to a lean, mean crew?"
Well, that's not hard and I'm not going to talk about that. Instead I thought we might discuss embracing the little society the PCs create and some ways it can be teased into good story-moments for players.
The first concern is of course working out how they move all this junk. Road trains are the usual method but there's also trains and watercraft as well. Now, from a tactical point of view you don't want your camp followers subject to a meeting engagement. It's going to be upsetting for the PCs if they have a heavy firefight complete with IEDs against a marauder ambush to find out that their NPCs are scattered across the road in bloody heaps and their stuff is on fire. So sensibly they should have two groups; the caravan and the scouts.
This works well with road, rail and river travel. The scout team(s) has or have a small, fast and nimble vehicle or two and they move ahead of the slow caravan looking for threats and either dealing with them or ensuring the caravan avoids them. T2K has many scouting vehicles in the list and these can often be used for rail and rivercraft as well although both these methods of travel can have specialist vehicles/vessels that travel on those mediums as well. 'Bogghammer'-style 'technical-boats' are great for river scouting and there's an enormous amount of specialist small rail vehicles in use by railways that range from the size of a jeep up to that of a railway car.
These scouting groups don't brew fuel or haul heavy loads, they are combat groups and only haul combat loads. If they need to rearm and resupply they go back to the caravan.
The caravan can haul everything else including specialist assault equipment that can toughen up the scouts. If the players need to penetrate some serious blocking situation that T-55 on a railcar or barge then comes into play without it having to be guzzling fuel every game day. Similarly the NPCs or wounded and recuperating PCs can be useful for providing supporting fires as well as just tending stills, scrounging/scavenging and standing guard. This means those mortars they've never been able to leave behind become useful and they may even be able to get a few shots off with that huge D-30 they've been lugging about to overawe any opposition. After all, the OPFOR don't know how many tubes or how much ammunition they have.
Of course the main group, the caravan, will not move fast but this in most games is a definite plus. Slow and steady exploration means that the GM can spend some time to detail the terrain they travel through.
Of course this is going to need some careful keeping track of. Players range from the bookkeeping-avoidant to those who revel in the minutiae. I find an hour or so with a cup of coffee and some paper spent with the players can organise shifts for the NPCs, how far each caravan vehicle goes on a fuel load and how much fuel the whole circus needs. You also can work out how fast the NPCs go through food and other supplies. Those NPCs permitted armaments (quite often the odd POW gets dragged along) need access to resupply as well and some NPCs will be tasked as hunters, although the large size of the caravan will tend to scare off game and it's more likely the scouts will do the bulk of the hunting.
While the card system for working out NPC motivations is a good start there's also many other systems for fleshing out NPCs and I really recommend the GM take the time to use these. The old AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide had a great set of tables (admit it, we all loved those tables) on page 101 to 102, Cyberpunk 2020 has some stuff on page 36 to 39 and I'm sure other games I don't know about have some good stuff you might want to look into, as well as your imaginations. These NPCs then become real, rounded individuals with wants, needs and desires and it becomes very easy to craft adventures and side adventures around, and the best thing is the players take them where ever they go!
How they do their scouting is of course going to vary wildly. Crossing flat farmland will be quick but traversing a ruined city might take weeks. In fact much of the time might simply be taken up finding a route the heavier vehicles in the convoy can use. While heavy trucks dragging big trailers might just need a good bridge every now and then a deep draught vessel or a heavy train might need both a special route as well as some careful engineering occasionally. GMs can use this to pause movement for a while to get the players to properly explore an area, deal with some sort of threat or even if the GM needs to take a breath to detail the upcoming route.
Some scouting groups might well be comprised entirely of NPCs and this is both a boon and a bane for the GM. It's good in that they might get into sticky situations the players have to get them out of and the GM can just feed info via them to the players, but it also means the GM has to sit down and work out their movements, consumables cost and what they discover. Also, as the players will be the commanders in most cases this will not be something you can just do all in one hit as the players will reroute them fairly often. I'd be interested in trying it out but it might not be for the fainthearted.
A caravan such as this is of course going to be an entirely different kettle of fish for settlements and groups they meet on the way. A bunch of nobodies in a hummer might not be a big problem; they won't impact the local foraging and hunting too much and the settlement would probably outnumber them so they'd feel a bit more confident but an entire convoy with heavy equipment is a different matter. As mentioned there will be concern about their impact on the local resources and also the presence of heavily equipped individuals in large numbers might be off-putting.
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