I want to manage my own SWAT team, help me brainstorm Options

[Wounded Ronin]

Does anyone remember SWAT 2? It had its rough edges but I loved it. The game let you manage LAPD D Platoon, including training, internal procedures, legal problems, gear purchases, and so forth.

Lately I've really been thinking how great it would be if there were a game of some kind that let you manage your own SWAT team. I have been thinking about all kinds of procedural details you could add to improve the kind of stuff they had in SWAT 2.

Specifically, I was considering the possibility of taking a RPG system so you could represent your officers as characters with their own skills, attributes, and personalities. But the RPG system would have to allow for tactical gaming for the concept to work. Once you had your RPG system, you could just tack legal details and internal departmental procedure rolls on top of it to create your department policies and county ordinances.

What RPG system would be best? My first thought was SR3, but that doesn't really account well for facing or for suppressive affects. My next thought was Pheonix Command. It has facing and action time durations, but it's a cumbersome system that hardly anyone knows.

Any suggestions? Maybe once I've picked an "engine" I can create a sample department and a sample scenario.

[Tiralee]

Er Ronin,

I was pretty sure supressive fire was used in SR3. (Had a lot of fun with AV rounds and a HVAR recently.)

If required, add on a TN modifier for the opposed test (remember, if it's harder than normal, add +2!) or a TN to suit the situation (GM Fiat).
Don't forget the cover half/full rules either?

Apart from that police procedures, legal stuff and small-unit tactics would be pretty much required, no?

_Tir.

[Wounded Ronin]

I always felt that the SR3 suppression fire rules were a bit weak, but on the other hand I could just re write them and also try and integrate rules for pepper spray, flashbangs, stingers, etc.

If I just add rules for covering, facing, and posture, maybe SR3 could work after all, especially if it simplified by not having magic and cyber.

[X-Kalibur]

Not that it has rules for facing necessarily, but the base system for Death Watch/Rogue Trader/Dark Heresy could work. Just modify the critical tables to be less.... visceral. It has rules for pinning, suppression, overwatch, moving from cover to cover (tactical advance). It would actually feel like the SWAT games in some regards, probably most like SWAT 2 (that was the RTS one, yeah?)

[Wounded Ronin]

In that case I will have to look those up.

EDIT. Ohhh, I see. It's WH40K.

[Wounded Ronin]

So yesterday evening I went to a FLGS and dropped around 50 bucks to get the Infinity rules. I had asked the store person for suggestions about what system would be best to use for what I'm planning and explained all the suggestions I had gotten here on DSF. He pointed out that Infinity had simultaneous actions, suppression rules, and was pretty tight from the get go when it came to tactical combat. He said it works especially well for situations where you want someone to cover a particular direction. So, I have been studying up on the rules. So far I have a positive impression. Will post more when I'm done studying the rules.

[Wounded Ronin]

Seems like Infinity is great. There's suppressive fire, grenades, covering, "guts rolls" to see if you automatically scramble for cover after being hit or not. There's even ways to airdrop into the playing field, like if SWAT were to enter the scene by helicopter. The only thing I would have to add would be a lot more less lethal items, and methods for arresting people as opposed to just shooting them or killing them in hand to hand combat. Probably end up being a lot less work than trying to do all that with SR3, which means I'll have more time/mental energy to spend on the most interesting parts of this idea.

Only trouble is I can't really make minis. It'd have to be a 2d game with a paper map and paper counters. Otherwise I'd have to make minis and how the heck could I do that?

[Tanegar]

Why would you need to make minis? Imperial Guard minis from Warhammer 40k spring to mind as being possible stand-ins for SWAT officers, and I'm sure there are others. Paint the buggers blue with the acronym SWAT in yellow across their backs and Bob's yer uncle.

[Wounded Ronin]

Why would you need to make minis? Imperial Guard minis from Warhammer 40k spring to mind as being possible stand-ins for SWAT officers, and I'm sure there are others. Paint the buggers blue with the acronym SWAT in yellow across their backs and Bob's yer uncle.

I suppose I could do that as well. I didn't think of it because I'm not normally a mini person, but when you think about it, any gaming mini could be used, as long as they're all in proportion to each other.

Less stats in the Infinity system means less of a distinctive feeling for each character, but I've been brainstorming of a way to allow for a skill advancement or perk advancement system to let each officer seem a bit more like a character.

I am thinking that everyone could start with all the stats at a certain baseline level. It could be possible to use some kind of points to "buy" various perks, such as Martial Artist, or Veteran, for each officer. Alternately maybe they can gain these skills from surviving enough missions.

There are only a few skills, ballistic skill, hand to hand combat skill, and an intelligence type attribute that would apply for treating wounds or maybe disarming bombs. The way I see it, players could spend some kind of in game resource to raise these skills between missions, representing training, but if not actively maintained using resources the skills would gradually lower, especially if at a very high level. That would give a sense of specialization to each character and add a little bit of a role playing aspect.

I'll have to tweak around armor and weapons to make them suitable for a "realistic" modern campaign. No automatic railguns, heh heh. Since I'll be chopping out a lot of the default game materials maybe I can make a little bit more refinement and nuance in this area, e.g. try to differentiate between a revolver or single stack pistol, and a high capacity lower caliber pistol. Make the high cap low caliber pistol 2 attacks per Order, and have the single stack or revolver get only one, but then have the single stack penalize the target's armor save slightly.

In terms of adding new and interesting gameplay specific to a SWAT type situation, I need to really flesh out less than lethal grenades and armaments, and also figure out about arresting people, about figuring out whether or not a bad guy surrenders, and also about evacuating wounded or arrested people out of the scenario.

There is already a "guts roll" in Infinity you must make after you're hit but survive, where you may be forced to give up your position and flee to cover. So, maybe a character is impaired by tear gas, a flashbang, pepper spray, etc., and then is ordered to surrender by an officer, he must make a "guts roll" in order to not surrender.

There are already rules for hand to hand combat although in the basic Infinity game they just let models kill each other. Maybe instead of choosing to inflict a wound, an officer can choose to "pin" a suspect once he wins at hand to hand combat. If he moves away from the suspect, the suspect is unpinned, but as long as he stays in base to base contact he maintains control. Once a suspect is pinned, it takes a full order to search and hogtie the suspect with zipcuffs and collect any evidence he may have on his person.

Last summer, I attended an informal CQB training held by a SWAT officer. He explained to me how in a real situation, especially if a department doesn't have a lot of highly trained SWAT officers, regular uniformed officers may be called in to provide support on fairly safe and easy tasks, freeing up SWAT officers to do the dangerous and specialized tasks. For example, if the SWAT team is clearing a building, and they need to keep some people covering certain doorways into areas they've already cleared, they might consider bringing in uniformed officers in order to do that. The uniformed officers aren't going to be clearing rooms or anything like that, but they're just going to stand behind cover and keep their guns trained on a door to make sure that nobody comes through it.

So, for the purpose of a game, maybe restrained suspects and civilians can be removed from play by minis with average stats representing uniformed officers who can come in from the deployment zone, pick up the restrained people, and then carry them back to the deployment zone moving at half speed. In order to prevent people getting too creative with abusing this mechanic, if any uniformed officer gets injured or killed, there would be a really big score penalty for the SWAT player.

[Tanegar]

This actually sounds really interesting. Do keep posting; I'd like to know how it turns out.

[Wounded Ronin]

I continue to work on this project. I am now thinking in terms of a role playing/management type angle where the GM administers the rules, creates interesting scenarios, and controls the bad guys.

In infinity there are camo markers for pieces that are basically invisible. I am thinking of a Hero Quest type progression where on the playing field, points of interest, such as suspects, hostages, and booby traps, are represented by camo markers. As SWAT gains line of sight onto the camo markers they are revealed if they are in plain sight, or kept hidden if they are hidden. For example if a hostage is tied up and crammed into a cupboard, he will stay hidden until someone succeeds in a roll to detect him.

This style of play will let the GM have the NPCs act in character. I am thinking that if SWAT scores well in a given scenario the player gets more budget for training and equipment. However, SWAT will lose score for things like unauthorized use of deadly force, for missed shots that endanger bystanders, for officers down, for failure to save hostages, etc. Ideally in each level the suspects will have a goal, I.e. make it to the edge of the level and escape, and each suspect goal achieved would also reduce SWAT score.

So, right now, it's more like a tactical role playing game, and less player vs. Player. I feel like if it were player vs. Player, the player controlling the bad guys would "automatically" know that SWAT was about to show up and there wouldn't be an elegant way of stopping him from executing all the hostages as his first in game action, or constructing elaborate fields of fire and defensive positions and hiding spots for his guys, which is behavior that is not typically seen in real life during SWAT raids. Also, you couldn't do the Hero Quest style revealing of the map, which in my opinion is a lot of fun.

[Tiralee]

Ronin - Lego.

Instant Mini's, can get police-flavoured ones and even better, you can make up your own SWAT van using the rest of town-city set pieces.
Although having your boss be a one-eyed peg-legged pirate is awesome as well.

Tie-bomber deployment! Strange, mysterious helmeted OP FOR...heh, heh, heh....

_Tir

[Wounded Ronin]

Ronin - Lego.

Instant Mini's, can get police-flavoured ones and even better, you can make up your own SWAT van using the rest of town-city set pieces.
Although having your boss be a one-eyed peg-legged pirate is awesome as well.

Tie-bomber deployment! Strange, mysterious helmeted OP FOR...heh, heh, heh....

_Tir

Wow, that would be epic. Lego SWAT. And if a sniper scores a kill, you pull the target's head off and lie the target down.

[KarmaInferno]

Even better, search "BrickForge" and "BrickArms" for third-party Lego compatible custom accessories.




-k

[Wounded Ronin]

Hey...does anyone know about how much it would cost a police department to acquire a helicopter and pilot?

[CanRay]

Hey...does anyone know about how much it would cost a police department to acquire a helicopter and pilot?

Winnipeg just dumped CAN$3.5 million into getting ONE Helicopter. CAN$1.3 million is the yearly operational costs.

Global Article here.

[Wounded Ronin]

Well believe it or not I'm making progress on this project, probably because unlike my other projects the scope and scale is very manageable.

I feel like my biggest sticking point at this moment is something which is secondary to the actual battlefield rules, which is basically chargen and/or department resources. If you can create custom officers to fill your department, how do we devise a points system for that that makes sense in terms of a game? Those points will probably have to be seperate from the points you need to buy equipment for your department, since equipment isn't specific to an officer. How do we deal with the fact that you would have to buy both cheap items, like ammunition or a flashbang, and budget-blasting items like a multimillion dollar helicopter? Finally, what about medical bills, life insurance and disability insurance, and things like that? Finally, since department policies are up in the air, should those be assigned some kind of point value in terms of how much they hinder deployment and mess with your roster? For example, if you wanted to play more realistically, you could have a department policy that says any officer who shoots a suspect is placed on administrative leave for X missions while an internal investigation is conducted. That's policy at many real police departments. If you have something like that in game, it means that there will be a lot of turnover in your SWAT team as officers are constantly rotated out, and there would be a lot more personnel management you'd have to do to make sure your team is always ready to roll with the right specialists. If you chose not to have such a policy, then it would simplify gameplay, and you'd need far fewer officers, so a lot of management stuff would go right out the window.

Anyway, as soon as I come up with a first draft of the rules, I'll post them here, in the form of a list of things that go differently than Infinity. After that, maybe I'll do a paper and pencil playtest, and if that goes well, I'll see about if I can run a beta or not at a local gamestore or something like that.

[nezumi]

Baltimore City's foxtrot unit costs $4m a year, and is operating almost 24/7.