Reach for the stars with your bodycount, Deep thoughts on mountains of slain Options

[Wounded Ronin]

Hyzmarca's thread which got locked really got me thinking about body counts and player characters. I think playing Jagged Alliance 2 version 1.13 made me obsessive about player character body counts. The 1.13 mod made it possible for characters to get body counts well into the hundreds because of a combination of enormous amounts of targets (i.e. you can decide to give the Queen 3,000 troops, or whatever, AND set them to aggressively counterattack conquered sectors) and the fact you can now equip your characters with a huge variety of sniper rifles which are actually capable of shooting all the way across the map, as they should be. However, my ruminations on bodycounts lead me to think about player character bodycounts in the context of tabletop RPGs. Specifically, must we differentiate between actual rolled one-by-one bodycounts and handwaved bodycounts (i.e. your character detonates a nuclear device in downtown Seattle and millions perish, but the GM didn't roll dice for millions of average citizens with 3s across the board. He simply handwaved those millions.).

In a video game like Jagged Alliance if you want your alter ego to have something insane like 700 kills you actually have to go and execute all those kills with your sniper rifle. You have to go through the logistics to gather up enough ammo for that many kills and it needs to be the right ammo for your gun; 1.13 in particular is especially complicated with sniper rifles and designated marksman rifles firing 5.56 NATO, 7.62 NATO, .300 winmag, .338 (?) lapua magnum, 12.7 soviet, .50 BMG, that Soviet round used by Moisin Nagant rifles which dimensions I've forgotten, and even that subsonic 9x39 (?) cartridge. If you're using an exotic rifle like the 12.7mm Gepard (M2, was it called?) actually getting over 700 rounds of the requisite ammo to your character is a fair chore. And then on top of this of course you then have to move your character around the map and position him so that he can use his bigass rifle to blow away hundreds of enemy soldiers while at the same time not getting outflanked, blown up by mortars, or screwed when reinforcements from adjacent sectors appear on the edges of the map. Especially if you do this "Iron Man" style with no saves or restores except in the case of bugs messing up the game I feel like it's possible to really take pride in having managed to give one character something like 700 kills. There is absolutely no handwaving by the computer...every kill is played out to the very last detail.

On the other hand, in a SR game, I can see a GM, or even a player, wanting to handwave some of this stuff instead of rolling for 700 guys. I can imagine a GM saying, "OK, Hmm, your mortar lands dead on in the middle of the squad. They, uh, all die." instead of rolling for everyone and having to manage several guys with different wound mods in addition to the rest of the enemy forces present. Certainly, as with the atomic device example, there could be some cases where for all intents and purposes the GM *must* handwave, if the event gets too big and setting-altering.

So there are a few questions we must address. The first question is whether or not we must differentiate between a "rolled kill" played full out, and a "handwaved kill"? I cannot help but feel that adding handwaved kills to your PC bodycount is not legitimate. If you didn't have to struggle through the rules and logistics and myriad dice rolls to earn those kills it just seems tough to take pride in that as a player accomplishment using that character. Think about how much more is behind you, as a player, using that character to play the game very well and knowing the rules cold, actually getting the better of a certain number of GM controlled opponents. (Or especially if the GM assigns one player not to control a player character but rather to just control the opposition forces which would generally make things even more challening.) Basically, if the effort invested makes the figure have emotional value, we clearly must count rolled kills and handwaved kills seperately.

Another question that comes to mind is how we establish what a respectable, impressive, or paltry number of kills is. In real life in this day and age infantry kill counts for individuals definitely seem to be a lot lower than the Jagged Alliance 2 1.13 700 figure I mentioned before. I read some real historical after action reports from SEAL teams in the Vietnam War which were included in certain scenarios from the Electronic Arts game SEAL Team and I saw that in many cases combat between SEALs and Vietcong or NVA would produce at most several confirmed kills. In the Vietnam era and later war memoirs I've read usually the person writing the memoir also only describes maybe 1 or 2 personal kills of the enemy. However, a typical Shadowrun character probably kills at least 1 or 2 enemies per gaming session. So, we need to realize that an impressive body count for a real person is not impressive for a Shadowrun character. In Shadowrun we have inflated standards. But how inflated? What are the benchmarks at which we can start taking pride in our characters' body counts? At what point, even if we assume a tactically sucky GM, does a rolled bodycount start to become indisputably impressive? 100? 200? 700? 3,000?

My instinct is to set the benchmarks at perhaps 500 and 1,000, but that's just because they're nice big numbers that at the same time don't seem too out there. What do you think? What numerical expectations would you hold over a player's head if he expected to be able to boast about playing well?

Incidentally, bodycount issues could affect home brewed sanity rules. If each kill subtracts a certain amount of sanity in your system then having enormous body counts might end up being guaranteed insanity, which probably isn't realistic. If it were me, I'd cap a maximum lifetime sanity loss figure due to killing of others, since I figure that once you've done a certain number and not gone completely insane you can probably take any number more, having gone totally numb.