I think that 1000 Karma system would get you exactly where you want to go with those guys.
Although I would add in the free knowledge skills for int/logic which karma gen does not have.

And I would let them Initiate/Submerge with the Karma.

SR3 had Fields of Fire (FoF) it detailed 6^th World military personnel adequately, Special Operations personnel and regular Military. I worked for 3 years IRL with the US Navy SEALS.

You can find it relatively easily online.

And forget about having the PCs spend money for gear, it'll all be issued to them. All top of the line, ignore availability and price tag. Remember, these are the guys who told the Weapons Manufacturers what to build in the first place. Every unit will have a LAW (FoF pg. 39) and someone may be issued a high capacity grenade launcher (FoF pg. 47). For heavy fire missions they may get Military grade Hard Armor(FoF pg. 54) with integrated rebreathers, and Battletac Combat electronics.

Having taken Money out of the Build Points they'll need to spend; frankly, skills @ 5-6 it's more important that everyone have the right basic skills. Automatics, Longarms, Pistols, Unarmed Combat, Etiquette (Military), Diving, Parachuting, Climbing, Running, Swimming, Leadership, Disguise, Survival, Armorer, Demolitions, First Aid, Language (Military Hand Sign), & all at rating 3 MINIUM, Everyone Rigger, Decker, Mage, Heck if you cant train the Shamans Totem Spirit it should have these skills too.

That's why military personnel are considered highly trained. Not of 6+ rating in 1-3 skills.

This post has been edited by Shaidar: Dec 31 2010, 04:56 PM

Karmagen is essentially making your characters with the karma advancement rules to a karma budget rather than BP. I consider them strictly inferior to franks rules, but they have the useful advantage of being printed in a book which tends to increase acceptance. (In runners companion. IMHO the biggest argument against using Karmagen is you have to buy the book, which is a ghastly abomination upon the earth, responsible for much gnashing of teeth and wailing, and then you need to find the magic errata that has never been officially issued, and then you have something that is only marginally playable, and indeed, huge swaths of the book are not playable, ever.)

However, using the rules as printed in the book generates very powerful, diversified characters.

Using Frank's rules will have much the same effect and is, imho, superior and more effectively balanced. I'd consider cranking the budget to 450 BP maybe, but I suspect you'll have some good looking characters at 400 BP as well.

General observation: Special forces guys don't kill people by shooting them, special forces guys kill people by calling in a PGM or VT artillery barrage on their position. With this in mind, I recommend playing fast and loose with how special forces operate in the field 'for reals' because the way they actually operate is intensely boring.

They don't get to create a new character when they get killed.



It depends. The CT teams are doorkickers. They do a lot of shooting people in the face. But yeah, it's like RPGing a SWAT team. SWAT teams operate in ways that doesn't allow a lot of clever stuff. The tactics on how you take down a house are pretty much set, you do it the same every time, you practice having stuff go wrong so when something bad happens you just do the planned response.

The biggest difference is the tactics and teamwork fostered by the special forces. You don't throw experienced soldiers who have never worked together. This is one issue I really miss from the old editions is the Team Karma Pool. It actively encouraged players to work as a team and to put effort into the team.

Even with lower skills you will find generalists who work as a team and compliment each other will do much better than specialists who act as individuals.

Fair point




I find this sort of stuff difficult to deliver as a game. It feels like you'd be better off playing rainbow six co-op, mostly because the cast of thousands who contribute to one of these, and the fact that you'd send more than 4 guys, mean that the PCs role become very vague.... if you do it realistically.

You can just.. not .. though I guess.

Yeah, it probably works better as a team computer FPS if that's what you want to do a lot of. But it would work occasionally in a SR game. The problem with running hypercompetent PCs is that the it's really rare that the players and GM know the material well enough to understand what the PCs should be able to do and how they would do it.

Which is something that's true of movies that focus on SWAT operators, Rangers, Delta badasses, SEALs, etc, etc, etc -- it's seldom a 90 minute film of them doing things by the book, and getting the job done the way they train. They'll often include a scene or two of them kicking ass and taking names the way they do in all their training sessions, but then the movie itself invariably seems to revolve around a "and then something went wrong" situation.

One of those SWAT members goes rogue, a Black Hawk crashes and the Rangers get a new objective, the Delta team arrives in Guatemala expecting to fight guerrillas and instead they get hunted by a savage alien Predator, the SEALs decide to escort a bunch of African civilians cross-country instead of flying home with their original objective...

...so running a long-time campaign of "best of the best" types, you're going to have a tough job figuring out how to keep things challening and make individual characters matter and keep it from constantly being "and them something went wrong" every night. If Hollywood can't handle a 90 minute show of specops guys handling a problem without throwing a major monkeywrench at 'em, it'll be tough to do so for a very long running campaign.

Philosophical point: The problem 'Whatcha gonna do when Murphy turns up and shit goes to hell' games is the players get irritated because they tend to spend a lot of thinking in trying to come up with a good plan.

Now if you throw spec ops handbooks out the window and just make the players do an increasing escalation of retarded shit (Overthrow the government of thailand, here is 10 million dollars, if anyone asks I am going to say I have never heard of you before.) it will probably work and retain that spec ops feel.

Really well trained pros expect Murphy to show up. The problem is usually they are good enough that when Murph does show, he often goes off to bother the other guys because these guys have a backup plan and for a campaign like that, to some people, it can be boring.

All the spanner causes a PC to do is 'initiate contingency fire-plan plan bravo, alpha, three, niner' it's not really much of a spanner.

But is that not kind of the point? Sometimes playing Shadowrun the point should be that the legit or illegitimate professional criminals pull off a job and no one ever knows that they were even there.

Mr. Murphy is a highly initiated Magician however, so I wouldn't count him out of having a laugh shooting even the best laid plans to shit.

I just don't see why he has to show up with the orbital drop bears every mission, that's when players throw their hands up and say "Fuck it, you want to GM like that, why should I give a shit about my character in your world ... my Spec Ops guy ignores the mission and starts tearing your exquisitely detailed world (in your head) down around your ears until you nuke him with GM fiat, whose coming with me!"

And screw realism, its some suspension of disbelief I would be after, a fairy tale with cyber and future weapons cloaked in shadow. Spec Ops Shadowrun should be pretty easy to get to "Holy crap, I can't believe we pulled that off!" even if you represent Spec Ops love of planning for Mr. Murphy to show up. Spec Ops should be the guys you call on when you don't want someone else to fail who could do it cheaper and even then that doesn't remove the chance they could fail because of someone else's stupidity, information even in SR4A's Wireless Big Brother world isn't 100% perfect - especially because of the astral and the balkanization it facilitated. Besides, even with the PC Spec Ops uber stats, Players are still players and will pick less optimal choices just because its fun, so no worries on having realistic Spec Ops characters.

Now, if you don't mind, I am going to go watch A-Team again - "I love it when a plan comes together." (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

Most of the missions would be legwork punctuated with a very visible and loud firefight. The issues always come into the fact that you have 11 terrorists vs. 9. The mission has to be advanced because the General suddenly changed his routine or worse is that an unexpected coup occurred and our heroes are trapped in a war torn government trying to get out. All it takes is a few stupid and unexpected issues to suddenly complicate the missions.

Black Hawk down where the mission began to breakdown when a soldier fell out of the helicopter.

There are other issues such as being seen during the insertion such as happened during Vietnam.

Worse is forces like the SAS Bravo Two Zero where they lost communications and then encountered an enemy force.


Then you have other options such as highly trained elite forces that are mercenaries. They are equipped and funded locally and so lack much of the super special gear one is used to by modern military standards. This was used by Executive Outcomes from South Africa. They did with 300 men what the UN had problems with 15000.

Oh man, please tell me you have links to articles telling those stories of FUBAR and SNAFU in more detail Omenowl (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

SR tactics need to be much more flexible than RL tactics. Magic is not only the great equilizer, it is also able to change the makeup of the battlefield on short notice. Creative bad guys with augmentation can pull stuff simply impossible today. I would say that working by the book is quite a deadly proposition in 2072, and that attacking in large numbers will only gurantee detection.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXRi28W-ENY




-k

Aaaaaand I have just found new inspiration for my campaign hahaha.

But really this thread has given me a lot of ideas for how to run this. Now I'm trying to decide between them being one of the elite teams for the UCAS or another organization like the Draco Foundation, Atlanteans, or maybe just make them a Firewatch team. I'll talk to my players and see what they like but each has it's own challenges I would believe.

I'm not sure how you're gonna show this in a RPG anyway. Every member of the team usually has one minute or so to make plans for every three seconds of actual action, with instant knowledge of everything that is happening to his teammates, as well the occasional telepathic tactical discussion between them when he's not sure of what to do.

Do you allow them that much time to make their choices? In my games you don't because I think that really breaks the flow and makes things take much longer then they should.

I was rather thinking of players that start to think at what they will do next as soon as they finished their turn, with nothing else to do than listening to what's happening to the rest of their team (unless they're hit themselves, of course). I'd sure not wait a full minute after I asked a player what action he/she's gonna take. The problem is how fast I can return to him/her to actually ask the question. With say 8 PC or NPC involved in a fight, you can get between 8 and 24 pools to calculate and as much rolls to make (attack - defense - damage), at least on the first initiative pass.

Well Blackhawk Down is of course a book and movie. I recommend the book much more to give the full scope of operation. It has delta force, navy seals and the ranger battalion working in conjunction. You also have the diplomatic channels to get the Malaysians to bring their APCs to raid in the rescue. I liked Mark Bowden's writing style and I read it mostly from the philadelphia Enquirer online. The book is much longer and detailed.

Bravo Two Zero has a book about the incident as well. I heard about this one on the history channel.

Operation Eagle Claw is another special forces failure.

Same with the vietnam recounts being the history channel. Look at some of the actions where Service crosses and Medal of Honors were won.

You also have the loss of several Navy SEALs during the Panama invasion.

I am sure books by Tom Clancy would give you more ideas.

But THE BIGGEST FUBAR in US Special Operations history, with the most Spec Ops personnel injured or killed for a single operation, is Granada.

Here is a pdf relating the events and some of the SNAFUs/FUBARs that occurred.
http://www.history.army.mil/html/books/gre...urgent_fury.pdf

Actually, Panama was truly awful. The mission to prevent Noriega from escaping in his jet was designed by a moronic glory hound, and every attempt to prevent disaster was sabotaged by him.

http://www.specwarnet.net/miscinfo/patilla.htm

Wow that was pretty 'special' - I hope someone got court marshalled?

It is difficult at best. The way RPG combat usually works already has the group working as a perfectly integrated team, for the reasons you state.

Maybe one could permit the group to make suggestions for or actually form the overall plan, then assign them to an individual task that depends on the other teams to do their job. You would basically have a "standard" runner operation that can go wrong on account of others being messed up.

It also helps if your group can refrain from having outgame "telepathic" tactical teamwork discussions.