Looking for potential staff for a Colonial Marines (Aliens) game
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@misadventure If I could hire a Ken Burns soundalike for occasional memorial documentary clips, I would.
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@fatefan Well, MU*s are low budget, but you could make a list of "voices" to suggest e.g. Morgan Freeman, Sigourney Weaver, Sam Elliot, Dorothy Parker, Harrison Ford, Linda Hamilton, Woody Allen, Claudia Christian, Punch and Judy (Cowboy Bebop), Queen Elizabeth.
You get the idea.
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@misadventure Keith David it is! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4ya8Jx577o
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@fatefan said in Looking for potential staff for a Colonial Marines (Aliens) game:
If I could hire a Ken Burns soundalike for occasional memorial documentary clips, I would.
Um, no. You want zefrank.
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@auspice said in Looking for potential staff for a Colonial Marines (Aliens) game:
There's already discussions on ways to enhance the 'OH GOD THEY KILLED KENNY YOU BASTARDS' beyond hoping people can give a damn about an NPC that was in two ST poses.
Because this is a thing I care much about and I think I've even had discussions with @Seraphim73 in the past on it.
I remember in one of my scenes on BSUnification, the players seemed actually choked up when the throwaway NPCs bought it. I may have been cheating by throwing a pupper into the mix, though, but I was really impressed with the buy in by the players for that mission.
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@faraday said in Looking for potential staff for a Colonial Marines (Aliens) game:
But I think that players should work harder too to react as their character would to NPCs being killed. Your character knew them, lived with them, hung out with them, and then watched them get killed right before their eyes. Even if the NPC never had a name before that scene... ICly their death should matter to the characters.
I agree with this at the beginning of the game but at some point it would stop mattering at least to most characters.
I have done a lot of research into world war 1 including reading a ton of personal accounts from those in the trenches. Humans develop a mental callous (not the best term) towards the deaths of others after seeing it on a regular basis for a while. -
@thatguythere Sure, totally. But that jadedness applies to everyone (barring close BFF ties). A PC/NPC divide has nothing to do with it. If your character's that jaded, they'd be just as jaded to a PC biting it as a NPC. Killing off more PCs won't help.
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@faraday said in Looking for potential staff for a Colonial Marines (Aliens) game:
@thatguythere Sure, totally. But that jadedness applies to everyone (barring close BFF ties). A PC/NPC divide has nothing to do with it. If your character's that jaded, they'd be just as jaded to a PC biting it as a NPC. Killing off more PCs won't help.
I completely agree there. In general I am not in favor of more PC deaths but instead making those death moments have impact and be meaningful. Ten deaths in a random combat scene has no more meaning than I body count PC or otherwise. Now lets say instead you have an NPC like Newt from Aliens make her a part of an interesting plot make her important and than have the end scene with her death and maybe a few of the PC buying it trying to save her and those deaths become meaningful. Relationships have to be built just as much for a character as for a person in RL.
If you have a game with high lethality that becomes a harder trick.
I agree with your point that NPC/PC divide shouldn't determine IC reaction of a character to another characters death the point i disagree with was : "ICly their death should matter to the characters."
Which all depends on how much the reacting character has seen and how important the dead character was in his life. -
I'm a bit hesitant to offer advice on humanizing NPCs, as I'm sure that you have your own ideas and have it handled. But this being the Internet, I'll offer unsolicited advice anyway!
I wrapped up a long-running online tabletop game with high NPC casualties (and moderate PC casualties) a couple of years ago and I found a couple of techniques that really take advantage of using the Internet as a medium and a resource.
Obviously, for MU*s, casting is a thing. There has been no shortage of military shows for a while now, so finding folks with the right 'look' for Colonial Marines shouldn't be a problem. Putting faces to the names really is a great first step.
Two other techniques that worked really well for me both involved weaving those characters into the background of various scenes and situations.
For instance, I gave the campaign's Discord server a pseudo-message board feel, kind of a barebones chat/news aggregation vibe. To that end, the NPCs of note had their own chat avatars (headshots, usually) and their posts, joking back and forth about various topics (the most successful was an ongoing argument between two NPCs about hot water use in the ship that ended up being something the players loved to have their characters riff on) and sharing various news stories to the group. The links just lead to mock-ups of webpages I threw together in GIMP and Scribus, but they looked pretty good.
Also, when I was doing written cut scenes, I'd do them from the viewpoint of an NPC who was going to figure into the upcoming stories. Like the pilot interrupted while recording a letter for his family, etc. Do that a few times and the players start developing a feel for the characters and if not affection, at least a sense of attachment.
Basically, it boils down to filling the background with a pool of characters that might or might not be important but will soon be familiar. That gives their loss more of a narrative punch. And it makes for interesting background action as newbies arrive to replace the fallen NPCs as well.
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@ganymede said in Looking for potential staff for a Colonial Marines (Aliens) game:
@jennkryst said in Looking for potential staff for a Colonial Marines (Aliens) game:
Throw it into the BattleTech MUX engine! Because that will never go wrong, right?!?
Do you have access to this? Because I would so run a Battletech game in a second. Kind of.
I suck at searching here, but there are links to the BTech Mux Engine fork in github somewhere on a thread here ... I loved the BTech battles on the old BTech 3065 Mux.
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I had some pretty good times on the Battletech MU*'s back in the day, though I found out the hard way that they had terrain collision mechanics coded in the hard way when I hit a lag spike while piloting a hovercraft. Very unfortunate. There was a distinct lack of RP on those games though, saddly, though there was plenty of opportunity for it I think.
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@three-eyed-crow said in Looking for potential staff for a Colonial Marines (Aliens) game:
I think players tend to assume/talk like they're more gung-ho about character death than they actually are when it's them dying, and any game-runner is going to have to be prepared for that.
@Seraphim73 and random people I never really got to know from TGG can attest: I ain't afraid to assault a trench on my own. Everyone else will catch up. Eventually.
MSB free since 24/3/2018
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@faceless said in Looking for potential staff for a Colonial Marines (Aliens) game:
@three-eyed-crow said in Looking for potential staff for a Colonial Marines (Aliens) game:
I think players tend to assume/talk like they're more gung-ho about character death than they actually are when it's them dying, and any game-runner is going to have to be prepared for that.
@Seraphim73 and random people I never really got to know from TGG can attest: I ain't afraid to assault a trench on my own. Everyone else will catch up. Eventually.
This reminded me (for different reasons of course) of the old WEG D6 Star Wars, where your starships /speed/ was based on what you rolled. We had one character making a run on a super star destroyer who rolled so well, he was literally there /by himself/ for like, 3 turns...
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@faceless said in Looking for potential staff for a Colonial Marines (Aliens) game:
@Seraphim73 and random people I never really got to know from TGG can attest: I ain't afraid to assault a trench on my own. Everyone else will catch up. Eventually.
You were doing it before Wonder Woman made it cool.
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@faceless said in Looking for potential staff for a Colonial Marines (Aliens) game:
@Seraphim73 and random people I never really got to know from TGG can attest: I ain't afraid to assault a trench on my own. Everyone else will catch up. Eventually.
Jack: What are your legs?
Archy Hamilton: Springs. Steel springs.
Jack: What are they going to do?
Archy Hamilton: Hurl me down the track.
Jack: How fast can you run?
Archy Hamilton: As fast as a leopard.
Jack: How fast are you going to run?
Archy Hamilton: As fast as a leopard!
