How do you role play military people?, HOW DO ROLE PLAY!?!?!?!??!?!?!?!?! Options

[Wounded Ronin]

From a role playing perspective, how can someone who has never served in a military portray a military character who is living and working in the military (as opposed to being off duty) in a way which is, if not realistic, at least not blatantly wrong?

In the past some friends of mine and myself have thought to run military style campaigns for SR. We all had fun enjoying the tactical and objective based style of gaming but I think that most of us didn't really have a good idea of how we should act in terms of character interactions, lingo, and even group attitudes and outlooks.

The thing is I've read several Vietnam War memoirs and I've absorbed certain ideas from them but I don't feel like I had enough info on boring day to day details to pick up on the things that the memoir writers didn't feel was worth mentioning. In other words, I learned certain striking or interesting things, like how during the Vietnam War the majority of the officers seemed insecure and abusive (which lead me to wonder if the military chose officers by some perverse process which was more likely to find bad leaders), but I think I missed the bigger picture on things like how, say, a sergant or a lieutenant acts differently (or not) from the other men in an ideal situation where he's an effective leader and NOT an insecure weirdo. The memoir writers generally conveyed the most interesting or unusual dialogue between personnel but not enough volume of mundane conversation to know for what passes for a normal conversation and a normal concentration of lingo in a military setting.

So, for those of you who know stuff about the military: if you had to tell someone who has never been in the military how to pretend to be in the military for a day, what would you tell them?

[krayola red]

Drill sergeants are all perpetually angry, chain smoking manly men with volume control problems, who always refer their trainees as "maggots." They also must've fought in Vietnam and lost a buddy there.

[Fortune]

A couple of sources that might be available to you ...

The short-lived tv series Over There

The mini-series Band of Brothers

The recently released movie Jarhead

All of these, in my opinion, show squad interaction well. Obviously not everything action-wise is accurate, as it is Hollywood, but they are still good sources for inspiration.

[Derek]

[Fortune]

[toturi]

[Trax]

Sleeping is the passtime of all soldiers when they don't have to work or doing something else. Mostly because you never know when it will be in short supply.

[krayola red]

Hmm, sounds just like college.

[Dranem]

[Fortune]

Unless they're Spike Babies! :D

[krayola red]

Unfortunately, my considerable military expertise applies only to the today's world.

[Dog]

My real-life exposure to things military is, admittedly, the watered-down kind, but my last character had a military background. I played him as a bored kid from a white-collar family who bought into the recruitment ads for adventure and excitement. Then, when he got a taste of the day-to-day drudgery stuff, he bolted. The training that was most useful to him is not the textbook stuff, but the word-of-mouth tricks of the trade. I also emulated a trait I see common among the reg-force guys that I've met: absolutely no tolerance for bullshit.

My players have even less RL knowledge of military lifestyle than I (with perhaps one significant exception.) For them, it is more than sufficient to play up the stereotypes and hollywood version of such things.

[Dranem]

Not to be picky, but isn't dropping out of the forces before the end of your contract/service a criminal offence?

[Dog]

I imagine in most places it is. Which is partly why the character fled from his home nation to the campaign city. His not being able to safely return home or get help from his influential family is a significant plot point.

[Dranem]

That's a neat character hook... adds flavour to your background:
Can't go home as the first thing waiting for him there is a court martial for going AWOL.

I had an SR3 character the the Dark Secret flaw. She was an ex-operative with CAS intelligence (their version of the CIA), working under an assumed identity. Got the idea from watching too much Femme Nikita and Alias :grinbig:
Would be fun to see if I could play that character again.. I never actually ran with the character, as runs that I started with on IRC with her never seemed to finish. :(

[mfb]

the fictional account i've read that comes the closest to portraying realistic people in the military is Sharkman Six, by Owen West. i really recommend it to anyone who wants a peek inside the mind of a military man, for the specific reason that it is written from the viewpoint of someone who thinks he isn't a military man.

some things that stand out in my mind about military... life? personalities? not sure what to call it. anyway: military humor is generally dry as a bone, and deadpan as a... pan that is, uh, dead. there's a lot of in-jokes, maybe as a way of dealing with the sudden absorption of a fuckton of vital information. for instance, the terms "go" and "no-go" are used to note whether a subject has passed a given test in training. so when someone fucks something up, they'll probably hear something like "private, you are a no-go at this station." in BCT, we got finished with a range one late afternoon and were packing onto the busses back to the barracks (at Jackson, they cut down on the road marches during the riflery portion). the last bus took off, and there were still three drills and half a platoon of us left. one of the drills turned around and, in the same hard snarl she used every time she opened her mouth in our presence, ordered, "platoon! you will run behind that behind that bus at a high rate of speed until you are thin enough to fit!"

as far as commissioned and non-commissioned officers go, there's an unspoken balancing that takes place. basically, you're trained to respect authority. nominally, authority comes from rank. but i've never seen a lieutenant that's ballsy enough to order a sergeant-major around in the same tones he'd use on lower enlisted. part of that is simple division of duty; lieutenants are very rarely in a position where they need to give a SGM an order--SGMs take orders from majors and colonels, generally speaking. an ideal lieutenant acts as a controlling interface between his enlisted men and his superiors. he listens to the enlisted, especially the NCOs, because they know more about their jobs than he does, then tries to match up what they tell him with what his superiors have ordered him to do. his job is to get the enlisted to do what his captain wants, and get his captain to do what the enlisted want.

90% of what you see of military life is... i don't want to say it's for show, but it's not real the way a conversation you might have over a beer is real. when a drill gets in your face and shouts, most times he's not mad at you. that's just how drills are supposed to communicate with privates. he shouts so you'll listen. he'll shout so that you'll be intimidated--and so that you'll become used to being intimidated, and will be able to act correctly while somone in command is intimidating you. but mostly? seriously? he shouts at you because his drill sergeants shouted at him. the same goes for everything else; you don't salute officers because you actually respect them (most of the time), you salute them because that's how you greet officers. it's basically set up so that people with different backgrounds, experiences, and personalities can be snapped together like legos into a group that can solve problems.

[Critias]

Ooo-rah!

[mfb]

heh, speaking of Marines. just thought of an example that might kinda highlight what i'm trying to get across.

Full Metal Jacket. Gunny Hartman, Private Pyle. why'd Gunny pick on Pyle so much? because Hartman liked Pyle. Hartman thought Pyle had what it took to be a Marine, capital M. if Hartman hadn't wanted Pyle to be in the Marines, he'd have just let Pyle flunk out and be done with it. instead, Hartman forced the other recruits to force Pyle to keep going. because FMJ was intended to say certain things about the war, it painted Hartman as a sadist. he wasn't; sadists stop tormenting you when they get their fill, whereas Hartman was on Pyle's shit 24/7. and Pyle was just too much of a dipshit to hear what Hartman was saying. to wit: "fit in, and you will do great things because you will have people to help you."

[Derek]

Well, I'd differ on some of the aspects mfb talked about. The relationship between officers and enlisted really, really depends on the specific officer, and the group of enlisted. Some officers deserve respect, some don't, but they all get listened to. The degree of respect determines on exactly how well, and how quickly the job is done.

Also, the lingo is really determined by the service. As an example, the Marines call a bathroom the "head", the Navy the same, Army calls it a "latrine" and the Air Force calls it a bathroom. Thats just one specific example, there are many, many others. Us Marines don't use th3e term no-go (or at least not very often)

The point of that is that you can make up some lingospecific to your character, and use it consistently, and that will make him sound military.

mfb is right about the officer saluting; it has become a thing that you are required to do, and not out of any actual respect, unless you actually know the officer involved. Also the high ranking enlisted and officer relationship is interesting, and as varied as the officer and enlisted involved. Junior officers generally know enough to trust their senior enlisted, but there are always some that have a slightly superior attitude. They usually get changed quickly, sometimes physically. Also, the high ranking enlisted usually report to a higher ranking offer rather than a junior officer. So, if you are a Lieutenant, and you piss off the Sergeant Major, you'll be speaking with your Colonel shortly. Not because the Sergeant Major complained to the Colonel, but trust me, the Colonel will find out.

When I have time, I will try and write more; I've got 13 years enlisted experience, and 5 years (so far) officer experience. However, there are so many nuances of military life that I often find it hard to put down specifically in writing.

[mfb]

yeah, i wasn't sure how to get across the fact that the relationship between officer and enlisted greatly differs depending on the people involved. i've had one LT who had no problem hitting the clubs and getting smashed with us. it worked for her; everyone under her respected the hell out of her. other LTs kept it strictly professional, only chilling with other officers and higher enlisted. it's... well, okay. there's how the military is supposed to work, according to the regs, and there's how interactions between people actually work--the whole gamut, from office romances to schoolyard bullies to drinking buddies to wise elders handing out life lessons to young scrubs. dump those together and shake 'em up, and you get how the military ends up working.

[Kagetenshi]

[mfb]

nah, we really did call all bathrooms latrines.

[Shadow]

When I was in there was a lot of joking around. This is during and post Gulf war. A lot, and I mean a lot of fa.. homosexual jokes. A lot of jokes about pulling out the vasaline etc. Enlisted men always think they are getting it in the you-know-what unless it is leave time. Then they arn't getting enough leave and they are getting reamed again. Considering the ranks E-1 through E-4 do the bulk of the grunt work in the U.S. Army, it is our patriotic duty to complain. Also a lot of drinking, a lot of drinking. We would be released form Duty at 5pm on Friday, I knew guys who were passed out smashed by 5:15. Were talking slamming a gallon of Vodka like that. People join the millitary to get away from things, family, girls, etc.

Also when there was a large number of women in the unit there was a lot of sharing bunks. I never saw it (or experienced it) but I knew people who were always getting busted for it. My whole unit ended up on a month of KP for it. The whole time I was all "but why am I here?"

[Kagetenshi]

[Trax]

At my unit we just call them shitters, or toilet if we're out in public and need to be "presentable". If we're out in the field and the portables are around, they're Blue Rockets.