Surviving

[kato13]

DeaconR 12-02-2005, 09:12 AM What are some tricks gms use to keep players focused on survival? It strikes me as being one of the key components of the game. Even if your player group end up becoming attached to a unit or base things are still supposed to be lean, right?


I remember one game I played in where the gm was trying to rob us of most of our gear but was confounded by my character being very careful with our pack animals and making sure they were properly looked after. I remember telling him that he should have taken it as a compliment to how seriously I took the situation.

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Enforcer 12-02-2005, 10:02 AM I believe in doing it the same way. In every game I play in, including other games not of the T2k set, I make sure I do maintenance and check food supplies. We had only one gm who was sadistic enough to make us (at least those of us who didn't do anything), loose stuff off of our equipment lists. I tended to do this also, I would make a list of what a person had, and if they didn't keep track of it carefully, they lost something soon. I never had any character starve though. I think canalbalism (sp?) would have won out.

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DeaconR 12-02-2005, 10:08 AM Cannibalism.


But I'm curious about how gms get their players to be at least a little paranoid about general survival issues like making sure they have enough food and other equipment for instance.


One means I use is the refugee encounter. It's unpleasant but it should be; the players see people who look like the cast of a zombie film walking around or watching them gloomily from the ruins and it gets them thinking.

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Enforcer 12-02-2005, 03:13 PM Only 2 others in my group have the wherewithal to actually buy lots of food and other sundries, the others being civilians that have never been in a camping situation (never mind a survival sitaution), and their characters go hungry quickly (but they still do not learn).

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kcdusk 12-02-2005, 10:45 PM Well, having enough food and water lends itself to survival ...


What about upkeep? Many find this boring, book keeping for an RPG ... it can make players feel like survival when their weapon jams on a 17 or more because it hasnt been looked after, or you tell the players the driveshaft of there jeep is making a grinding sound. Sure, spend time on upkeep to nurse it through but no matter how hard you try until you get another driveshaft it will make that grinding noise. Unless you miss upkeep for a day and then the noise will stop altogether, because the jeep has stopped also. Upkeep giving you a survival feel now? Keeping an eye out for burnt out jeeps who may still have workable driveshafts just became the new game in town also.


Weather. High winds can make it tough. COld at night? Did you collect wood? Rain, now things (you?) are wet. Oh wait, we're in T2K Europe ... that rain has eaten through my ponche, shite! - its acid rain!!! Better find some harder cover for the night. Of course you just lost your sleeping bag to the acid rain also. So even tomorrow night when the sun comes out you'll have nowhere to sleep. Feeling like the worlds against you? Are you surviving yet?


Did you just come back from forageing for food? Tough luck, you left your pack behind and wild dogs have gone though your stuff. CHewed a hole in your back pack, taken what food you had, now your left with whatever you were able to forage just now (is it enough?).


Disease. Did you drink from that lake just outside of town? The town where those sick people were? Darn, can you spell cholera (not sure if i can?)?


That scratch you got in a firefight last month hasnt healed either. Fact, might have got worse? You look pale, you feeling OK, you havnt been yourself lately ... whats that foam coming out your mouth for ... dont worry, this 16gauge needle wont hurt a bit and its full of goodness for you .... Do you trust the members of your party? (best to put this one down, he's suffered long enough and his feet are the same size as mine and his boots are newer).

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Targan 12-03-2005, 07:30 AM Right on Kcdusk, that's the kind of ambience a good T2K GM should try to achieve. Several PCs and significant NPCs in my current campaign have died from infected battle wounds, and the player of Po (a RL Psychologist) has written some excellent psyche tables which have seen extensive use. I would estimate a quarter to a third of the characters in the PCs' party are suffering some form of mental illness.


Along the way characters have suffered from frostbite, exposure, hypothermia, hearing loss due to explosions, heat and chemical burns, poisoning, torture, slow death from bloodloss, functional and aesthetic impairment, small pox, cholera, typhus, typhoid, dysentary, vitamin deficiency, post traumatic stress disorder, Stockholm Syndrome, dysthemia, depression, psychogenic fugue, catatonia, amnesia, malnutrition, leukaemia, cerebral impairment, summary execution, and having their bodies and souls devoured by an alien artifact. And the players keep coming back! Masochists.


The player of the PC US Navy SEAL/Company XO seems to have some kind of obsessive compulsive need to compile lists, and his character is a manic hoarder of loot, so book keeping duties pertaining to the party's stores fall to him. While in NYC the party has maintained healthy stocks of food, in part as a result of Po's "Target Zero" policy which includes trading weapons for food whenever possible. I would not describe Po as a humanist.

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DeaconR 12-03-2005, 08:56 AM Enforcer: some players don't learn because they really honestly don't understand why bad things happen to their characters. Go figure.


KCDUSK: Those are all good ideas. My group are made up of people who are good roleplayers who take the situation fairly seriously but I'm always looking for new ones.


Targan: I think the word you mean is actually humanitarian. And btw, I was laughing a bit at your mortality list because it seems like you have used almost everything in the option list, but I'm sure you'll come up with death by bear, leprosy , shark, cancer and other horrors sometime.


One of the effects of robbing my players of their heavy weapons has been to make them very keen on scavenging areas when they have time to. One of them, who both in and out of character is skilled in both engineering and chemistry went rummaging in an old restaurant for sanitary cakes, since you can make tear gas out of them.

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Targan 12-03-2005, 11:43 AM Recently Po sent some of his men to a major airport specifically to scrounge for the radioactive emitter cannisters used in x-ray screening machines. He wanted material to make dirty (radiological) bombs for use against populated areas. No, not a humanitarian either. And as a joke he sometimes refers to himself as the "Medicine Buddha". Must be the eight fold path less travelled by!

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Red2 12-03-2005, 12:10 PM Just to add a note to the weather comments...It has always amazed me through the years how little some GM's pay attention to campaign weather. I'll tell you, from current experience...the weather is vital to a soldier.


Whether its brutally warm (where's your next drink of water coming from in the desert or during a drought), brutally cold (hey, my MRE is frozen--don't laugh, I've seen it happen) or anywhere in between weather (IMHO) ought to be used for more than scene setting.


Sunrise/Sunset, Moonrise/Moonfall, the phases of the moon (both for religious and physiological reasons) all are additional factors that are overlooked.


Take Care

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abaumgartg 12-03-2005, 05:10 PM Hypothermia may make for a good mini adventure; especially if you can get 1 or 2 PCs off by themselves. The disorientation (hmmm, which way was the rest of the party? You came down the hill to check out the noise but which hill was it?) and some mild hallucinations (foot steps just "over there", wolves just out of sight, or the irregular sound of machinery not too far off) could really mess with the PCs' minds. I think you would have to give them some clues (you can't stop shivering, your hands seem *so* clumsy, you should feel cold but you really don't), but not spell it out for them that they have hypothermia. :mean:


Obviously this would be a side-bar adventure. But it may help players take the environment, especially staying dry, more seriously.

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DeaconR 12-09-2005, 08:25 AM With regard to the weather comments, I think that another component is shelter. If you make weather and the environment seem serious to the players they will not knock an opportunity to sleep somewhere warm, dry and safe. I don't have much of a problem with this kind of thing with my players.


Also, sleeping in a vehicle doesn't cut it. It's better than nothing but unless you are in some kind of RV nothing beats bunking down in a real bed, in my opinion.

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graebardeII 12-09-2005, 09:42 AM With regard to the weather comments, I think that another component is shelter. If you make weather and the environment seem serious to the players they will not knock an opportunity to sleep somewhere warm, dry and safe. I don't have much of a problem with this kind of thing with my players.


Also, sleeping in a vehicle doesn't cut it. It's better than nothing but unless you are in some kind of RV nothing beats bunking down in a real bed, in my opinion.


Then you have the opportunity to make the night, which should be peaceful and warm, a nightmare as the characters are bothered all night by bedbugs. Muahhhaaaaaaaa

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chico20854 12-09-2005, 10:03 AM Sleeping in a vehicle can be quite comfy for a soldier if he/she puts some effort into it, although armored vehicles are harder to work with. I was usually able to find a spot to set up a cot in, under or next to my duece (at NTC we had a virtual RV, to be expected for the supply sergeant's truck). In the light infantry units I was in that only had HMMWVs, it was a bit tougher, but I found the spot... on top of the extra camo nets in the trailer. Just like a feather bed!


But for added realism, I agree, make the players play this stuff out... have them argue over who gets the comfy spot (and then discover that someone else moved into it when they were out on guard!), have their cots get lost/broken, make that ramshackle hut on the edge of the woods be the object of a firefight with a marauder band in a blizzard! This is another important part of realism, in some ways more important than how much damage a 7.62N does...

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ChalkLine 12-09-2005, 10:19 PM I find if I'm tired enough I can nab an hour's sleep in the back of a ute filled with survey stakes, lying on wood is really fairly comfortable if you're wearing heavy clothing, and the sides of the ute keep the wind off. This works best during the day in clear weather of course, the wind is blocked and you get what warmth the sun has to offer.


Being wet absolutely sucks, you can be dog tired and cold while maintaining cheer but let your feet get soaked and the days is absolutely sh!t. Of course, T2K PCs are always wet.

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DeaconR 12-10-2005, 08:33 AM Yes, of course you try to get what rest you can when you can.


I remember in the Deathlands series one thing that was nice and realistic was the main character, Ryan, who is depicted as one of the toughest men alive, being utterly distracted and debiliated from a toothache. Part of the focus of the story was dealing with that. Anyone who has ever had anything wrong with any part of their head will sympathize.


Then apropos of what was just said about feet, remember the part in the film Glory where one of the guys risks getting flogged so he can find himself a decent pair of shoes. (which the Army had not yet bothered to issue to the Regiment)


I would add to all this the subject of food. Being able to get a hot filling meal should be something the players do not take lightly.


A couple of my players found the daily upkeep stuff irritating since they hadn't had to seriously do it in a roleplaying game before, but I found that being nicely descriptive about what it is like to go hungry for a day or two began to get them to pay more attention to details.

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kcdusk 12-11-2005, 02:40 AM Upkeep and all that it involves (food, drink, maintenance, rest/sleep, tending to wounds, keeping warm n dry & boiling water before drinking etc) is something DnD types wouldnt do - to them its needless bookkeeping and stops "the real story" from developing.


In T2K, this can be the real story. I'm surprised (though maybe i shouldnt be) that so many military/ex-mil types are involved with the game and these threads. Listening to them, warmth, food etc is a big part of "keeping it real", hence in T2K it shouldnt be overlooked - but it might be foreign to roleplayers from other genraes.


Still, it shouldnt overshadow everything else. Its great to have these things to drag PCs down if they are finding hte going easy and to add atmosphere, but neither should it be deadly or drawn out (though again sometimes it is worth it!).


I'm for it - and am glad to read that people that have been in the field support it also (gives some credence to me using it).

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ChalkLine 12-11-2005, 05:15 AM Being of a somewhat cynical bent, I find it easy to describe the negative things about settings!


It was a given in WW1 that morale would rise after the troops were allowed to shave after coming out of the line, getting clean is such a buzz after you've been filthy for a long time. NPCs should often reflect this, and 'Leader' rolls would ensure subordinates are fed, rested, clean and supplied.


Morale is one of those funny things, the GMs perceptions can change and make the poor NPCs in the party (and T2K seems to have more NPCs per party than any other game) seem mercurial, but I really think morale should be stressed. An unhappy NPC should seek cover faster than a cheerful one.

Of course, if your survival efforts are not making the grade, expect morale to be rather low.


One of the things I keep in mind as a player is that the average house has about ten metres of easily recovered copper pipe (perfect for stills) waiting to be ripped out of the walls, hot water tanks are often copper and are also good for stills, there's metres of wire that's good for lashing things together as well. Some roofs are lead covered, this have obvious uses. Curtains are useful for sandbags, it's amazing what you could do with an average household if your life depended on it.

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ReHerakhte 12-11-2005, 05:55 AM G'Day All,

Since ChalkLine mentioned the shaving business, I'd like to add a few other thoughts about it and although this obviously pertains to men, there are some aspects applicable to women!


Shaving in the field can be both a positive and a negative device in regards to morale, if leaders insist on daily shaving it can become a tedious chore that lacks any obvious benefit. It uses water that might be better used for cooking or drinking, it means you have to reapply any camouflage paint you had on your face, the clean smell can sometimes be noticed by people who aren't cleaning themselves and it means you have to keep some sort of shaving device with you (each one has its benefits and penalties, razor blades are lightweight but don't last too long, a straight razor lasts forever but needs a good leather strop to sharpen it and so on).


For those living in really grotty conditions, shaving and the chance to actually clean your face while doing it can be more than just a pleasant experience.

Forsaking the shaving can have some benefits such as lessening the requirement to reapply camouflage to the face and a short beard can help break up the outline of a face. It also lessens the possible chance of cutting yourself and thus removes one more chance of getting an infection.


People generally expect soldiers to be clean shaven and if they aren't, they sometimes assume the soldiers are poorly disciplined or too far gone to be much use as a soldier anymore. Sometimes it's correct and sometimes it's the exact opposite. When you start matching the unshaven state with such things as alertness, you can tell if the soldier is 'switched on' or a lost cause for example.

I suppose what I am saying is for a Referee, something as simple as the shaven/unshaven state of an NPC can convey a lot of information if the observer can figure it out. As an example, Leaders can see that the NPC has flagging morale or is too fatigued to care about cleaning themselves, especially if they were know to take some pride in keeping neat and tidy. Worn out and patched up uniforms and gear can't be avoided but something as minor as a haircut and a shave can indicate that although possessing well-worn gear, the NPCs themselves haven't been worn down by the War.


Cheers,

Kevin

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kcdusk 12-11-2005, 10:07 PM Anything that feels like "death by a thousand cuts" would indicate survival to me. And if that could include some "near-death" experiences, all the better.


"your eyes slowly adjust to the dark, and you can feel the warmth of a fire somewhere close by. Hot, stinky breath is in your face, as the pigmy notices you coming out of your coma. Yes, you survived the firefight with the elite US unit that has gone rouge, but now you are holed up in a cave somewhere with a small group of rockthrowers, without food, you've lost both your weapons and the only cothes you have is the ..... loin cloth (!). Oh, and that rockthrower needs to apply a special paste from a herbal tree to your wounds twice a day for the next month or you'll die also. The snow is expected to clear by the next full passing of the moon and the last you remember hearing was the Rads in this part of the world were "almost acceptable". But apart from that, life is good"

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