Military campaigns - is it fun being told what to do?

[Rob Lang]

My next Icar campaign (and second setting) will focus on the military, specifically the Recon Troopers who are front line cyborgs in power armour. They are well equipped and can call in air strikes, orbital bombardments, commandeer civilian craft and equipment and cause havoc if need be.

Military campaigns I've run in the past have been quite tightly defined mission goals. Go to X, kill Y and evac to Z. You can set up the missions so that they can be achieved in a variety of ways but the end goal is given immutable. As the end goal is fixed, this is railroading - regardless of the journey, the end goal is win/lose with defined conditions.

My group thrives in a sandbox and although campaigns begin with railroading to get them used to the system/setting the goals they set are chosen and defined largely by them. Someone can offer them work but they are invited to say "no".

Therefore there is a clash between the prefered group play style (sandbox) and the desire to play military. Players have rightly voiced their concerns about the lack of self-determination.

I get round this by having the campaign start with the chain of command being "lost" and the team being put in a hazardous situation. During the campaign, they will meet other bits of the command structure but they will have been charged with something important by that point so will have a valid reason to say No to a senior officer. The feel of the campaign will be one keeping on track with a goal while chaos engulfs everywhere. The players will have to make the decision.

I am writing this up as a setting for Icar, so I need to make sure it will be ok for other GMs to run. And so my original question.

How do you make your military campaigns fun? Do you keep the command structure? How do you help players have self-determination? Is that important to you?

[Onix]

Having dealt with this a lot, there are a few tricks that help with most players. However I have only one for the most determined sandboxer.

Military campaigns are best for starting players who really don't know the world that they're stepping into. Because they don't know what's possible, they also don't know what to do. The structure can be very useful to introducing elements of the world. To use this concept with a player that knows the setting already, putting them in an environment that is very far removed from what they are used to can put them in this mindset at least for a game or two. Think of the difference between the UK and Afghanistan and how soldiers might be very out of their element at least to start.

Make commands reasonable. Make the CO worried about his men and let him be the one that says "Lets get out of here!" first. To reinforce this, have him kill the mission when the players think they can make it. Also if any PCs are down, have him pull them out by focusing the NPCs on rescue. The CO should be the reasonable and conservative one. If you can get the players to look at command as a valuable resource the problems tend to melt away.

Give the players open ended goals like "Go over and rescue survivors, we don't know the conditions over there yet, just bring back anyone you find."

Throw resources at the players they've never had. Make them part of the command structure, they lead a squad and maybe eventually a platoon. They have more autonomy than a regular grunt at that point and they have minions. It's a very different feel than being the minion.

Give the players autonomy by explaining what their mission is and then when they get there, they realize the mission won't achieve the goal. For example, they're sent to take out a radar installation but they find out the target is a decoy and the real installation is in a different location. Do they just scrub? There has to be a consequence built in to that. If they fail, bombers being sent in will be shot down and lives lost. Do they go after the actual installation? If they do, the playbook they were sent with is all wrong. Of course you can only use this particular trick sparingly.

For the sandboxer, usually the best trick is to have them cut off from their command. Usually for a sandbox military game the rest of the force sent is about to be wiped out, the players see it and run. Now they're stranded in enemy territory and have to find a way of communicating where they are to be rescued (without broadcasting their location) and surviving in the meantime with dwindling resources. In some cases, there is no or very little hope of a rescue and the PCs have to find their own way (home or just live).

If you want an example of how to structure a military campaign for non-military players, the Robotech cartoons are a good example. The stuff that goes on just would not fly in the military but it's convincing to someone who has no idea what being in the military is actually like. It makes it seem like the characters are doing whatever they want. Which is what your players may be looking for.

[Rob Lang]

[Onix]

If the goal is complete autonomy, I'd say no to be in the military you've already given up some of your autonomy. If the goal is an intermediate level of autonomy then yes.

Not to get into the minutia of the argument but railroading is pretty open to interpretation. Because I'm of the opinion that it's not 100% bad and most players think it must be, I've discussed it quite a bit. Most of the time the consensus opinion is that railroading means there is one set end state for the game and more importantly, there is only one way to get there (rails). Some will look at any kind of framing of the story by the GM or even the setting and cry "railroading!" but they're in the minority. Really, by even introducing any setting the GM is framing the story and therefore restraining the player's autonomy. At a certain point most players agree that giving the characters a job or a mission is not railroading. Defining how the players will achieve that is railroading.

Actually a group of players just did a sandbox military campaign for The Artifact. The GM put the players in charge of a firebase on the surface. The players were given the task of building up the defenses and protecting the base in general. How they did it was up to them. For that the characters would have to realistically start a bit higher up the chain of command than normal but if that's what the GM wants, that's what he gets. That's a military sandbox.

A vast majority of the time my PCs are out on their own, they may be out on patrol when something happens that triggers the game. I do dictate the start conditions, sometimes the end condition is set and sometimes that condition is to simply escape or survive. Unless the explicit goal is to have the PCs go renegade (which we've also done) and the players are allergic to any kind of framing by the GM military style games are not going to work for them.

To the title of the thread, A large number of my players do enjoy the missions they are sent on because they are interesting and the stories could not be told without the military setting. In The Artifact there are a good number of non-military, very autonomous characters. The vast majority of the time, players start out playing the heavy hitters and occasionally migrate to the more nuanced characters that tend to have more control over their own destinies but they come back. That's their choice I just build the games based on their characters, so yes, it can be fun. You just have to get them over their sneezing fit and give them some benedryl. Maybe they had a bad experience with railroading in the past but doing a structured campaign does not equal railroading.

[Chainsaw Aardvark]

Star Trek has a military sense of order (captain, uniforms, armed ship, admiral, etc.) however, about 90% of the time, the mission is go to "Point X and use your best discretion". Conflict then comes from what is best for the crew, what fits in the confines of military ethics (non-interference Prime Directive being diplomatic with enemies) and what might be best for the encountered aliens of the day.

I don't quite recall how interstellar communication works in ICAR, but I can think of why it might not be used. One of the reasons the German U-boat flotilla of the second world war would eventually suffer about 75% mortality rate, is because admiral Donetz micromanaged them too much. Code-breakers were able to decipher orders, and vector hunter-killer groups based on detected signals. Between really powerful (AI?) anti-cryptography measures, and the simple fact that interstellar distances are so great back-up can't be sent - constant communication probably wouldn't help.

Speaking of sending back-up - refusing a rescue like that example, would probably be a violation of a great many laws. Skipping over the whole theft aspect, there are maritime/space laws that require people to render assistance to a distress call, and bad cosmic karma for letting people die when you could have helped. I'm pretty sure sandbox play does not mean freedom from goals or freedom to be in-game SOBs, it just means you can tackle problems as you see fit, and chose when you want a side-quest.

How much respect do you want them to have for the military hierarchy? It is possible, and in some cases preferable that the leaders give their underlings a fairly free hand with the mission. Taken a step farther, perhaps the leaders are corrupt/callous/a double agent/incompetent and the struggle is should the players follow their orders or find another way.

Twilight 2000 always took the route "you were in the army, which ran out of fuel and fell apart, so you're on you're own". It would certainly be possible in ICAR that everyone is together because of the military, but then the ship breaks down and their stranded on some foreign planet. Or they work for military intelligence, so they have some discrete goals and a sense of urgency, but aside from the occasional dead-drop, they don't have command actively watching them.

Furthermore, i would point out that there is always a trade-off when you give up freedom in a game. Yeah, being in the space navy means you go where they tell you too - but you do so in an awesome battle-suit, and all the missiles you want are free. Bigger action scenes and more hectic battles can be staged, because its not like you're going to bankrupt your salvage company every-time you launch a hundred cluster bombs. ("Even if we have more ammunition than fuel, I still need to use the chainsaw, not the machinegun, to cut down trees" - Mr. Welch.) Guns and armor are also freely replaced (within reason) so they can play with neat toys, and shooting down a player isn't the end. (useless fact: the HE-219 night-fighter was the first operational combat aircraft with ejection seats.) The GM can run a more traditional story-arc, needs less prep-time, can deploy players to spots they think are tacitly interesting rather than wandering,

I suppose you go in 50/50 and let them play as mercenaries, so they do have some military goals and backing, but are a bit free to negotiate the terms.

[Onix]

The Star Trek example is a good one, it illustrates a group partly up the command structure and it also illustrates another trick I forgot. Distance. I frequently emphasize just how remote the characters are from anyone else. This does two things. For one, if they do something unethical, there's some squish room. They can bend the rules and unless their team says anything, no one will ever know. The second thing it does is it makes reporting back to command and asking for help a welcome thing. It's all about making the giant NPC that is the command structure part of the player's team instead of despots and overlords.

[bender42]

I would suggest having the PCs hook up with a guerilla type resistance group. After they begin to actually care about the group, then have them hook up with high command who orders them to go. That will certainly introduce some autonomy, especially if they say no.

[Evil Scientist]

[misterecho]

I would second Chainsaw's advice. Give the group and a vague mission goal. "Investigate Reaver activity in the Theta quadrant".

Build up a good idea of the structure of the Theta quadrant, create some interesting encounters in various places. They can happen if the PCs go there. Have interesting and varied settlements and infrastructure. Make theta a cool place to explore, and make the PCs want to protect it from the ever increasing Reaver threat.

[vulpinoid]

Another interesting way to take this question is to consider the nature of the stories being told.

Sure a game can follow a mission structure, but are the stories about the mission, the relationships between the characters and the outside world, the relationship between the characters themselves, the ways they change as people in response to the outside world?

A true sandbox would leave all of these open as viable storytelling routes, but that can make for a very disjointed game when one player is focusing on the outside world, one is focusing on PC dynamics, and a third is playing an introspective game.

Sometimes it helps to have a bit of railroading in place to get everyone on the same page.

Some games do this by ignoring the aspects of internal reflection (they just don't have mechanics for this sort of stuff and don't encourage it in any way), some games rigidly define the hierarchy within the group but allow the group to wander as the leader sees fit...

Why not force the players into railroaded series of background events, and tell stories about other things. A series of horrific encounters might make for a great tale about the atrocity of war. These may set the scene but the true roleplaying comes from the players choosing how their characters react to such things (and these choices are as open as any other). A story about rebellion might have very strong rigidly bureaucratic scenes, but the characters become a bubbling cauldron of rebellious energy and have to find other means to expend this energy without jeopardising the mission.

People seem to think that the story is the scenario, but many of the better anecdotes from my time in roleplaying have come from the moments between the scripted elements. Those scripted elements simply inform the narrative and given is a sense of place.