Quote:
Originally Posted by CDAT
Just out of curiosity what do you do for those who do have military experience?
For example my local group has three former NCO's, two more former senior NCO's, and one former officer. Now I do agree that the rest of the group who have never served do not really have any idea what it is like to have been in the military and most of them will even admit it.
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At that time, there wasn't anybody in the group with any military experience so the situation never surfaced.
Some time later I was running some Merc:2000 games for a second group who did have some knowledge of the military. Two of them were seriously interested in the armies of WW2 and one of them had been in the Air Training Corps (a department of the Air Force in some Commonwealth nations to introduce high school aged people to a career in the Air Force).
Those guys got more leeway in generating rank but on the flip-side, I expected more from them as well and there were a few times when I basically said, "Well your characters would know from their military experience that blah blah blah..."
However the main benefit to the Referee in running a Merc game was that these PCs would be hired for certain roles and their previous rank was an advantage but didn't mean they would be given a similar rank or role position in the team for that particular mission.
In the few times I ran some T2k games with these guys, they took the tasks pretty seriously and generally went with the group consensus approach unless one of the players had some real time knowledge and then he was usually expected to take charge (this worked fine for the group as I only had three players at the time).
Overall it worked out fine and I've only ever had one problem with someone who knew better about the military. He was basically a selfish prick who was playing the game for himself and wasn't interested in "team play"despite having been in the navy for a decade or so.
Fortunately this was for some introductory D&D games so I didn't have to involve him in any plans I had for a T2k campaign.
Ultimately however, I've never had the situation where I had players in a T2k game that had real world military service. I think I would probably discuss with those players what they wanted their role to be in game and work out ranks in game as part of that discussion and their PCs backstory.