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Old 05-04-2021, 05:07 PM
CDAT CDAT is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by 3catcircus View Post
There are several factors that are always going to impact verisimilitude and suspension of disbelief.

There are always ways to create house rules to address perceived errors or shortcomings in the RAW.

There aren't, however, ways to normalize the real world experience (or lack thereof) of the players. Even when two players may both have the same former background, they're individual experiences may be vastly different.

My own experience? two different classes of submarines as a reactor operator. Both of them going into decommissioning, with one Westpac, an augmentation to go to schools during an Eastpac, one ORSE, one TRE, one TWP, and a POMCERT, plus a bunch of local ops. Port visits in Chinhae, Guam, Sasebo, Brisbane, and America Samoa. Swim call in the Panama Canal. During the Eastpac, when I was back in Pearl Harbor going to schools, other guys in my division were doing port visits in Nanaimo, San Diego, and other spots on the west coast. I missed those experiences. Other guys started back during our Westpac and missed those experiences.

How do you gel that into a consistent overarching framework for an RPG? I think you can look at the chargen and allow some customization, with the packages of skills being the baseline. If I were to try and build a version of me using the RAW, it would be very difficult to do so with any semblance of reality. There are no one-size-fits-all solutions.

When someone who is a veteran does the "yeah but..." thing, it's going to have to be a matter of mutual agreement in how to get over the difference of their past reality vs a shared pretend reality. One could even do the same thing with civilian professions. Guys in my gaming group besides me: light rail train conductor, police officer, and a former air force police officer now in nursing school. The two cops? Vastly different experiences - one dealing with urban decay as a state transit cop and the other in charge of security of aircraft that he could neither confirm nor deny were our weren't armed with specials... But - get them in the same room, and you can see the similarities. We once spent half a gaming session as the two of them debated the merits of each other's service pistols - the transit cop passing around his (confirmed unloaded) new issue sidearm (and the subsequent "Wow, you just violated *every* rule of firearm safety" after the train conductor handed back his pistol...)

I think *that* is the key. Find out how your players can all relate to their characters, even if the reality is different from the game. If all in agreement, then using house rules should study 6 those with the experience while those without won't be the wiser.

My example of the M16A2 vs M16A1? We house ruled in V1 based upon real world cyclic ROF. We averaged the cyclic ROF at 825 rpm for the M16A1 and 800 for the M16A2. As a result, we assumed M16A1 could fire 13.75 rounds per second, which is 4.58 "shots." So, we upped the ROF for an M16A1 to 5, with the M16A2 at 4.4 "shots" which rounds down to 4.

Everyone was happy - the player who has actually fired an M16A2 gets a better understanding of the rules intent, while also satisfying his need for differentiating from the M16A1. That also allowed another player who was playing a ARNG character could be outfitted with an older M16A1, representing the typical ARNG and reservist use of older outdated gear as compared to active duty army...
Quote:
Originally Posted by Rainbow Six View Post
That’s why I prefer a points buy system for character creation. If you have a pool of points that you can spend on any skill set that at least partly addresses the sort of issues that you’re referring to, up to a point at least. Another option is the specialisations that they had in 2013 that allowed you to focus on a specific area.

WRT how much of an impact IG rank and OOC military experience have, personally I think this depends on each individual's gaming group and whether you’re playing face to face or playing by post online. Face to face I’d imagine it’s probably not an issue - everyone knows each other, presumably gets on with each other, and can read each other’s body language.

Online it’s not always like that. You’re bringing together a random group of people who may not all know each other at the start of the game, and while the GM can lay out his vision of the game, not everyone hears the same message. As I said earlier, when it's done well rank doesn't cause any problems. But when it's done badly - usually when one player thinks they are somehow entitled to tell other players what to do - it can wreck a game pretty quick. In general I don't think most gamers want to play a game where they're told what to do all the time. If people's perception of a military game (any game with a hierarchy really) is that that's what's going to happen then I think that's a barrier.
I agree at least on the skill side (have made characters for 2013, but never played it) and feel that 2013 made better characters, and totally agree that different people will have different experiences. As I said I started in tanks, and ended as EOD, but in between them for a few years I was bounced around some needs of the Army, one of which was as a combat engineer (if you ask me worst job in the world), my buddy and I were even in the same unit (at different times) but our experiences are totally different. But at least we are for the most part able to say what we think should be more or less. As for the rank issue that has never really been an issue with any group I have been with (but can see how it could be easy), however as I said most are prior service and/or LEO so already somewhat used to chain of command. Then also we were much laxer with it as went kind of with the "you are on your own" was your discharged, so you can only command me as far as I am willing to let you. It is not like you can call in the MP's to arrest me, added to that most of the time we were mixed groups different branches and often some foreign and/or civilian (most LEO) mixed in. So who really is in charge? On some of my real life deployments I was attached to the State Department, so was never in uniform (was in the RSO "Uniform") so most of the military that I ran into thought that I was a federal agent, we were bossing around full birds as Sergeants (E-5/6's) as when an "Agent" told them to do something they jumped to it. I do not know officialy who would be in command, but in practice the Agents were, and can see cases that could be made to put the civilian in command (non-combat at least) depending on who they are or what they do, some of these might help with player rank/command issues?
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