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#1
11-16-2010, 03:27 PM
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Personal Gear
Here's a question,
Just how much gear do you, as the PD, allow your players to carry? My personal view is that giving the players a single change of coveralls and underwear doesn't consider that eventually the inside of the ole V-150 can soon make one wish to be the towel boy for a Texas High School Football Team, just to get clean again! So, I allow the players a rucksack for dismounted missions and a duffle bag to carry a few changes of clothing and personal gear. Besides, its amusing to watch how many players can't bear to be seperated from every item of gear. Not to mention being an evil PD and tagging some unfavorable mods to the ole fatigue table! 
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#2
11-16-2010, 03:53 PM
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I give the PCs a Personal Effects Satchel (found it on the Blog), and a Foot Locker, and in their Emergency Shelter that holds extra equipment and mission vehicles they have a smaller footlocker that holds things like spare eyeglasses, civilian clothes, important personal effects with significant emotional attachments since they are meant to have a life after the project.
I had thought of using the cargo container cache idea for the team's personal belongings so they would have their personal belongings when they build their own homes after the project had run it's coarse.
__________________
Fuck being a hero. Do you know what you get for being a hero? Nothing! You get shot at. You get a little pat on the back, blah blah blah, attaboy! You get divorced... Your wife can't remember your last name, your kids don't want to talk to you... You get to eat a lot of meals by yourself. Trust me kid, nobody wants to be that guy. I do this because there is nobody else to do it right now. Believe me if there was somebody else to do it, I would let them do it. There's not, so I'm doing it.
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#3
11-17-2010, 08:50 AM
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I've always taken the approach of allowing each team member a box of personnel effects in the resupply caches. I've also added cases of sodas/beer, boxes of candy or chewing gum and have notes from the "Upgrade Support Group" giving best wishes and good luck...
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#4
11-17-2010, 09:34 AM
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I allow 1 duffel bag in one of the supply caches and 3 varied size foot lockers and 2 duffel bags what I call the "nesting cache". The first would probably be accessed during normal first year operations and the second would be accessed when the project decided on a semi permanent location for the team.
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#5
11-26-2010, 07:56 PM
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Quote:
I recall you once made a great case against coveralls and having to get out of them simply to go to the bathroom! The Basic Issue seems to lack basics like a towel, boonie hat, etc. Could be implicitly included, I guess, with the underwear and rain gear, but still annoying. One problem is that with a large allowable personal gear allowance, some players have the immediate urge to basically ditch almost everything MP-related (beret, coveralls, weapon if allowed) and "go native" or at least end up looking like some survivalist nut-job or US Army deserter. Hey, if the Project thought this was a good idea, they would have allowed personnel almost complete freedom to pack their own kit. Instead, I believe a consistent Project image and "brand identity" should be maintained. This isn't just something common to the military, many companies enforce a dress code and code of behaviour not just to be control freaks but because they somehow calculate there is a tangible or intangible benefit to doing so. (A player in my game jokingly complained that it was fun to customise the uniform and I replied I have all the "Aftermath!" books and no one tells you what to wear in that game...) Not all Project issue makes sense and there are puzzling lapses. (See the wide-brimmed hat/towel above, not to mention wider issue of NODs and Kevlar vests. That's just another thing that makes TMP a distinctive RPG, not all the choices are the "best possible" under all circumstances. Reposted from another list: Quote:
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#6
11-27-2010, 09:03 AM
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__________________
The reason that the American Army does so well in wartime, is that war is chaos, and the American Army practices chaos on a daily basis. Last edited by kato13; 11-27-2010 at 09:14 AM.
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#7
11-27-2010, 05:00 PM
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Sure, and if wishes were horses, beggars would ride! Also, I want to make clear you make good points that are difficult to refute logically. (As always, I don't necessarily believe you're wrong or I'm right, merely there are other perspectives to be shared.) In real life, even the best most lavishly equipped military (and paramilitary) forces have constant issues with gear in different conflicts and situations. (Not just military but police, rescue, NGOs large and small, etc.) It seems like a constant that there will always be poor choices in procurement and logistics. For the record, I certainly do believe that you (or I, or a chimp) could do better. Strangely, that's not the point. There are always constraints, budgets, even simple human error (which also defines major parts of the Project). We are free to pick and choose the "best" gear list to our hearts' content. In theory, the Project should be equipped to the best standards of 1987 (or whenever) with a fairly limitless budget. In practice, I think the Project won't be. A lot of thinking about TMP seems to revolve around the perpetual search for the "perfect" gear/weapons/vehicles and the optimal combinations thereof. Yet paradoxically, real life always lacks this perfection. So errors or "non-optimal" choices paradoxically add verisimilitude by reinforcing the characters are not living in a perfect world (because none of us do). That's realistic, it's human nature. It may also seem counter-intuitive, I know! For that matter, I can well believe that your experience with packing would lead you to doubt the numbers, but that's a technical issue. It's clear that MP personnel are traveling very light by modern (or even 80's) standards. Even if we take the numbers as correct, around 30kg of weapons and gear (including food for 2 weeks, which can be shitcanned) isn't that much at all and doesn't allow for cross-loading. We take for granted that what the teams are issued is all they're going to get, period, until they crack a cache (which should not be all that soon). It's possible that the original intention was to activate the Project, then do supplementary issues of things like toilet paper, NVGs, Kevlar in general as needs are assessed in the field. So as time goes on, their load will be added to as time goes on... like in real life. Tony
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#8
11-27-2010, 06:23 PM
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I never take anything personally, like the old saying goes opinions are like arseholes and everybody has at least one...(my wife claims I'm special, I have three)....
 For me, I actually enjoy all of the various takes on TMP, if this was real life AND TMP enjoyed a 50-year lead in...you can almost see 3-4 generations of gear being issued, not to mention the various attitudes of the frozen teams...care to game a team of hippies from the sixties? Or how about combining a team frozen in the first phase, with a team frozen in the '90s (hmmmmm, mental note). Not to mention that as teams got closer to War Day...lots of fun can be had with an evil PD...can you see the team opening the lockers and finding that they are armed with surplus M-1 carbines, maybe some Land Rovers, fresh from the fusion conversion facility, and a few cases of Mountain Home food, so sorry, we didn't have time to build your resupply cases, Supply Base Charlie is three hundred miles thataway. Maybe thats the strongest part off TMP, don't like the canon, feel free to modify!
__________________
The reason that the American Army does so well in wartime, is that war is chaos, and the American Army practices chaos on a daily basis.
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#9
11-27-2010, 09:12 PM
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I think you may be thinking of "Aftermath!"? That game is intended to be completely customisable! The shitty parts of canon are part of what makes TMP distinctive from others games in the genre. Much like how crappy M16s, defective gear and an impossible political social situation make playing Recon set during the Vietnam war seem more authentic; modifying these details won't necessarily improve the scenario. This may surprise you but I started running TMP with fully customised gear lists. After a while the obsession with "perfect" guns and gear (not just me but everyone else) made me question what the point was. Players can suffer without the cool Humvees and G36s (or whatever) and learn to deal with it as a part of the scenario. Probably that's a little on the old-school side and I'm becoming more cranky in my old age!  If their PCs are carrying Stoners and Uzis, dressed in Resistweave coveralls and berets while hanging off the back of an XR311 or V-150 Commando the players bloody-well know they're playing The Freakin' Morrow Project, not some gussied-up Post-apoc RPG or Aftermath!/Twilight 2000 by another name. (Not that I don't like AM! and T2K on their own terms, of course.) Tony
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