 May 31, 2010 - 6:06pm | "It's Good To Be Bad" I am starting on a future article for the Frontiersman about playing campaigns and game sessions from the villians side of the story. While I almost always prefer to play the hero, there is something to be said for the roleplaying experience of playing the "bad guy". While as a GM we get to do this often playing the role of the antangonist but it might be fun to flip the coin and in the spirit of "Mirror Mirror" and let the players play Rogues, Pirates, Maruaders, Briggands, Corporate Henchmen, Spies, Thugs, Thieves, Space Gangs, Scoundrels, Mad Scientists, Techno-Terrorists, Hackers, Bad Robots, Mal-Contents and various other Villiany. Now, obviously the spirit of SF is a generally positive one so GM's and players should use a little discretion. Sathar are out, I don't want to go down that road and even try to open the door to allowing them to be a playable race, however their agents could be, and I stress could..because almost no one would do it willingly. I am thinking of establishing some character archetypes and guidelines for fun ways to play the "bad guy". This may include a Star Laws Most Wanted, Best Hiests In The Frontier, etc. Please include any thoughts or ideas.  |
 May 31, 2010 - 8:44pm | one way to do this would be to give a PC a cadre filitation and agenda or secret mission they're still part of a party and work on a cooperative venture but have a secret mission that may or may not work against the rest of the party. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
June 2, 2010 - 5:03am | good idea, but i was specifically looking at the whole party being bad |
June 3, 2010 - 7:10pm | good idea, but i was specifically looking at the whole party being bad Actually I was thinking about the Paranoia RPG where everyone has a secret cadre affiliation that would be considered treason by the computer, if it became known, and buy they quick summary execution by any other PC especially if they needed to divert attention from themselves when it comes time to report to the computer. "It was Jones, he was mutant commie traitor, thats why I vaporized him, because he was plotting against you, oh wise computer." Talk about a weird game the PCs work for "the computer" that is paranoid over mutants and commies. and all the PCs are mutants and have secret cadre (commie, facists, ludite, PETA) type affiliations. Everyone on the team has a job that sucks- the leader has guns pointed at his back, the videographer can be shot if someone needs to get rid of some inconvient video footage (or he better prove incompetent with the camera so that that footage never gets recorded but then if you aren't dilegent about your job the computer might consider that treason....), and the team morale guy who is abligated to lead sing alongs and keep morale up and who would just love to bust a cap in his butt- the irritating jerk, and etc. deffinetly a weird take on an RPG. anyhow if everyone has a secret mission or agenda... about the easiest way to deal with that is secret agenda stuff is handled by email. unless one PC spots another palming the micro disk then the GM tells him in an email and he can out the other PC, black mail or set him up to take the fall for what he's going to do as part of his secret agenda. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
 June 6, 2010 - 6:39pm | That reminds me of some D&D games I have ran. Usually a party is lawful good to neutral. However, there is almost always somebody who wants to be chaotic evil. I’m fine with that (I personally always liked playing rouges who secretly ripped off the party myself) as long as they played it smart. If the party went into a village and the CE character started causing serious trouble for the party, then I usually allow them to dispense justice on him. Never came across a player who could keep a bad character alive for very long. The concept of good party versus part party is just a matter of perspective. For instance to us, US soldiers equals good party while Islamic Jihadists equals bad party. But of course if we were all a group of muslims living in the middle east, it may be in reverse. I love my country and truly believe that there is none better. However, governments are made up of people and people are inherently flawed. As such, we are not always the good guys even by our own perspective. I always felt that PC’s who are members of a MegaCorp security force was one of these “bad guy” groups. Personally, I would love to play in a game where the party is the crew of smugglers and borderline pirates who drift in and out of trouble without setting off a galactic wide APB. Think Serenity. Has that movie/series been mentioned on the SF movie lists yet? |
June 6, 2010 - 8:09pm | @ Inigo : one of my beloved ideas/campaign ideas is to run an on line game where every PC has an agenda and any "secrets stuff" is handles by email unless a player is recless and does something dumn like picking a pocket of a party member with high INT and gets caught. Then again I dont know know how well that would work or if it'd be worth doing. one things for sure if a PC succeeds at his secret agenda only the GM will know unless there is a review blog latter on. Plus it sounds like a lot of work. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
June 7, 2010 - 6:00am | Sometimes it helps by adding a little more intrigue. I've had a few players 'get even' with characters (or maybe even a player) who ticked them off. A special item gets lost. Equipment fails at an inopportune time. These events are ones that I had not intended to include in the game session, so it was a little extra spice. I ran a couple of games in an online chat room so I handled almost all of this subterfuge via IMs. As long as the player can keep a 'straight face' and not get lynched, it worked out pretty well. Though, it does have the potential to get out of hand. I just fudged INT roles and told them what would be too far or too counter productive. |
June 8, 2010 - 2:57am | The concept here is for the entire player party to play the villians. While a single player in the group playing a villian would be interesting, the point of the article is for the game session to be played from the villians perspective. Example: the players are all pirates on the run from Star Law and the adventure they have ripping off a UPF shipment. |
 June 12, 2010 - 3:46am | Back in college I penned (and re-penned a few more times since then) a full rewrite of the Volturnus trilogy from the Star Devils' point of view. Players try to sign on with the exploration team and don't get hired, and eventually find themselves being recruited by a privately owned starship captain who doesn't seem to ask many questions beyond the suspicious "Who the &!$¢ are you and how the $%!# did you end up here" interrogations. Players go through the various scenarios from the pirates' angle: ransacking the Serena Dawn, chasing down the survivors who fled in the lifeboat (which is how the whole thing gets stretched across all three modules), helping out around Outpost One including a few expeditions into the nearby forest for some "Karubanda sporting fun", a transfer to Slave City One, another transfer to Sea Port One (their actual main base at the end of the dry canal), a trip to the sea to establish contact with some sea-going Ul-Mor for an underwater mining expedition (Larry got about this far on my online play by post game before things fell apart), and the grand finale of discovering the eventual arrival of a sathar fleet after most of the pirates (who also discovered this) have fled...leading to a climactic "find a way out or help the Serena Dawn lifeboat escapees fight the worms" scenario. I had thought about a Dramune Run rewrite in the same vein somewhere betweenthe mor recent rewrites, but that's when the idea of my Dominion campaign kicked in... |
Although one would need to be sure of the players ability to handle that sort of situation.