Free League's Alien RPG - My Experience

[Fenris-77]

I don't think that a definition of Sci-Fi that doesn't include Star Wars (or Dune) would make a lot of sense to me. I'm just not sure there's a lot of value in a project to exclude things based on a close reading of the word science. Just my two cents of course.

 

[Bill Zebub]

There is only one story ever that qualifies as true science fiction. All other candidates belong to other genres.

However, to avoid starting an argument I won’t say which one it is.










(I am kidding. Just trying to inject some much-needed levity. You can call me Hudson.)

 

[dragoner]

Well, if I know I don't like it. I didn't even use the backgrounds in Rime of the Frostmaiden because they could cause interparty conflict and PvP - which I think is to a much less effect than Alien.
As a rule, I don't like stories that focus on protagonists who are repugnant characters doing despicable things. I don't watch gangster or crime movies (from the Godfather to Tarantino to Breaking Bad). I didn't follow Game of Thrones after the first season.
I honestly don't want to contribute to my already pessimistic outlook on life with entertainment asking me to invest emotionally with terrible people doing awful things.
There are heroes in the Alien films: Ripley, Dallas, Hicks, Hudson, Vasquez, Bishop, Newt. The Alien RPG (at least the cinematic adventure in the Starter Set I played) assumes everyone wants to play Paul Reiser's Burke, like that's the highlight of the fiction.

I have tried to veer away from the characters as bad guys as well, in my setting, even though there are two groups, the Solis and Sidereals, part of their dispute with each other is over definitions. Such as freedom to some is good, to others it is anarchy. I agree I like the Alien series of movies, though I don't really want to play a game in that universe, far too crapsack, same as I love Blade Runner, but it would be terrible for a game.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

But equally, I don't even think most of this is even that complex. I think underneath all of this, people are just upset I don't like Aliens as a setting and they do.

Handwringing over what is and isn't this or that aside, rappelling into a thread just to say you reject the entire premise of a game because you don't care for its setting is a special kind of threadcrapping. Anyway, congrats, you've derailed things nicely.

 

[hawkeyefan]

I don't think that a definition of Sci-Fi that doesn't include Star Wars (or Dune) would make a lot of sense to me. I just not sure there's a lot of value in a project to exclude things based on a close reading of the word science. Just my two cents of course.

I can understand classifying Star Wars as a fantasy rather than sci-fi (it’s sword fights and magic, when you boil it down), but it’s not a hill I’d die on. Nor do I think it needs to be the focus of a thread that’s meant to be about the Alien RPG.

All else I’d say on the topic is we should all stop feeding the troll.

Back on topic, this thread got me thinking about the campaign I had wanted to run for Alien. I was going to take the surviving PCs and have them be recruited by Amanda Ripley to help find her mother, who went missing when the Nostromo vanished.

It’s a straight lift of the plot from the (very good) Alien: Isolation video game. I figured that would be a pretty cool idea for a campaign. My concern is that agendas would be a bit tricky, at least for the surviving PCs from the earlier game. They’d be getting hired by Amanda based on their experience with xenomorphs… so it’s a job for them. That may make it hard to have any kind of other agenda for those characters.

I was also hoping to get a map of Sevastapol Station, the setting from the video game, but I wasn’t able to find one that would work. I thought I had seen that it was going to be in one of the game products, but now can’t find it. All I cna find online are screen caps from the video game, but I wanted more schematic type maps.

I think it’d make for a pretty cool short campaign, kind of retracing the steps of the Nostromo, and arriving at Sevastapol. From there, not sure what exactly would happen, but if the game was engaging, we’d keep going.

 

[Celebrim]

I don't think that a definition of Sci-Fi that doesn't include Star Wars (or Dune) would make a lot of sense to me.

Equally, a definition of Sci-Fi that includes Star Wars wouldn't make a lot of sense to me. If Star Wars is science fiction, then I can turn any fantasy story into science fiction just by adding a space ship to it, even if the space ship flies at the same speed of a WWII prop plane and moves like it is in an atmosphere and shoots tracer bullets and is carrying around a space wizard and his farm boy apprentice on a mission to rescue a princess from a dark knight.

There is a long history of arguing over the definition of science fiction, and unlike what some people have proposed on this thread, it really doesn't have anything to do with trying to exclude women from the community. The term is admittedly slippery but I think there is value in trying to define it because in doing so it helps clarify to you what is really going on in different stories.

It's not about excluding anything. If that was the case, wouldn't the label "science fiction" itself be excluding those works from the body of human literature? I mean, you will in fact find authors, editors and critics doing that. We live in a time "science fiction" as a term has become very respectable, but people these days often forget that like "nerd" the term "science fiction" was a hard insult. I find it amusing that people are now fighting to have their work viewed as "science fiction" when for the longest time the term meant in many circles "trash", "pulp" and to quote one editor of encyclopedia of literary terms I used as a source in high school "novels characterized most by their commitment to novelty as opposed to other literary arts". You'll be able to find quote by writers of science fiction who tried to distance themselves from the uncool term because they wanted acceptance and respect in wider literary circles. Now all the sudden "science fiction" is cool, and people want to be on the inside like the term is membership in a club, and apparently that's your definition of the word because you write:

I'm just not sure there's a lot of value in a project to exclude things based on a close reading of the word science. Just my two cents of course.

It's not a club. It's not about being shut out of a party.

 

[Celebrim]

Handwringing over what is and isn't this or that aside, rappelling into a thread just to say you reject the entire premise of a game because you don't care for its setting is a special kind of threadcrapping. Anyway, congrats, you've derailed things nicely.

I agreed almost entirely with the OP's post. I wrote a short piece I thought was echoing and amplifying what he wrote.

For example, the OP wrote this:

"Just for my playstyle and preferences, maybe a single 4-hour game would be okay. I wouldn't want to get invested in a longer story, however.The agenda cards were wholly negative, creating a constant PvP environment. Agendas included: you want to kill the rest of the party, you must do anything you can to preserve the xenomorph, etc. Every character death was because another character killed them. In this way it feels more like a board game than a typical RPG."

Was he crapping in his own thread to reject the way Alien introductory modules are written (it's not just the one he played, I played a different one with similar results)? It's not like the OP wrote a wholly positive review.

 

[MGibster]

think it's totally fair to not want to play an unseemly character. But if you're going to be in a game where at least some PCs are doing underhanded things to each other, then how do you determine who's the good guy, meaning, essentially, the protagonist (in a standard sort of story)? Should there be an Agenda card that says "You think you're the hero?" And if you get that, is the whole session or mini-campaign now about your survival above all others? Because what does it mean if someone's designated the good guy, and they get iced by a bad guy, particularly if it happens way before the final scene?

There are Agenda cards for characters that are some variation of "Do everything you can to protect your crew." Agenda cards are designed to encourage actions that help move the plot forward and they don't necessarily put you in direct conflict with other player characters. An Agenda card that reads, "It's been a while since you've unwound, go find some drugs." or "Find something you can sell for cash." encourages the PCs to explore their surroundings in search of their goals. The Agendas in Acts I and II of the game don't really encourage PCs to get violent with one another. At least not in any of the published adventures I've read through.

 

[hawkeyefan]

There are Agenda cards for characters that are some variation of "Do everything you can to protect your crew." Agenda cards are designed to encourage actions that help move the plot forward and they don't necessarily put you in direct conflict with other player characters. An Agenda card that reads, "It's been a while since you've unwound, go find some drugs." or "Find something you can sell for cash." encourages the PCs to explore their surroundings in search of their goals. The Agendas in Acts I and II of the game don't really encourage PCs to get violent with one another. At least not in any of the published adventures I've read through.

Yeah, it's more about giving the PCs short- or long-term goals that get them out and interacting with the setting. They do also serve to provide some conflict among the PCs, but it doesn't need to be severe conflict. In our game, the pilot was trying to find drugs, so he wanted to investigate the medical office, while one of the roughnecks wanted to search another area. They wound up splitting up.... which is great for play.

Some agendas may be more at odds with others, but it doesn't have to be rampant, full-on player versus player.

I think 3 of 6 of the PCs survived the adventure.

 

[Celebrim]

My concern is that agendas would be a bit tricky, at least for the surviving PCs from the earlier game. They’d be getting hired by Amanda based on their experience with xenomorphs… so it’s a job for them. That may make it hard to have any kind of other agenda for those characters.

I would consider that wholly a positive and not a negative. Most of the time you don't want to have PC's with sharply conflicting agendas in a story you want to go on for a long time. You very much ideally want to have the party working together in a gameable story because in a gameable story you don't have the power of plot to make it all work out. Whenever you have conflicting agendas in a party regardless of the RPG, you often need OOC agreements and negotiation between players to work those agendas in a way that doesn't derail everyone's fun. Keeping agendas secret and running PvP rarely is going to work out for a longer game.

Aside from that, the conflicting agendas common to Alien stories are part of the power of plot protection given to the aliens, as a way to derail the protagonists when they otherwise should succeed. Pulling back, they are ways for the author of the story to screw over his protagonists and make sure they never have a way out, and shocking his audience. That's fine in the medium of a horror movie. But in an RPG, the protagonists are the audience, and that's just bad GMing.

The other use in story of the conflicting agendas is a way to explain why the characters in an Alien story are frequently jumping through the stupid hoops to advance the plot. Disbelief is less suspended if it turns out that they really weren't just that dumb, they were evil and malicious.