Players in a military order

[Haltherrion]

A recent thread got me to thinking about starting a campaign with the players in a military order. I’ve considered it a few times for my campaigns but have always shied away from it due to player objections.

Most players seem at best lukewarm to the idea and a few are vociferously opposed to it. While I don’t always give my players a say in the setting, I do give them a say when there might be objections under the theory that if they agree to an unusual setting, the buy-in gives me a little more runway to make it work. To date, I haven’t been able to get them to bite.

The irony of it is that in all of my intended military situations, the military order does not remain intact for long. Typically the concept is for the order to be defeated and dispersed in the first scenario. This then gives them ties to people who might help them and also starts them with possibly some unusual gear or mounts but leaves the game direction more in the players’ hands. But I have so far deferred from tipping my hand and the setting starts have been rejected.

Often at campaign start, the world is set but I will offer the players one of several starting situations. For our most recent campaign, they had the choices of starting in a petty human kingship, starting in elvish lands or starting in an adventuring/mercenary company. It was always my intent that the later suffer an early defeat and loss of their castle and holdings (which has happened now in the game; the players could have involved themselves with that thread and changed the outcome but chose not to and the company is now dispersed). They chose the elvish lands start (there was more to the descriptions for the players but no need to go into that here).

Other times, I’ve tried to interest them in being members of an order of griffon or dragon riders, thinking that a flying mount might overcome their objections to being in an order. Again, the intent was that the order would suffer an early catastrophe and the players would be on their own quickly enough but the dislike for orders is strong enough that they avoided those choices as well.

Someday I may just put them in such a setting ask them to trust me. I’m not that interested in running the players long term in a military order because I don’t want my NPCs calling too much of the story direction but I’m curious to hear if anyone has tried that as well.

Any thoughts or experience with this? This is just a general discussion thread; I'm not starting a new campaign at the moment

 

[coyote6]

Have you told the objecting players up-front that the military is only a starting condition, and that the order will shortly cease to be a factor?

I've ran or played (mostly played) many campaigns where the PCs were in the military. They weren't D&D games, though; they were mostly GURPS Special Ops games, Twilight: 2000 (with and without the T2K setting), and the like.

My favorite (played) campaign ever grew out of a T2K-turned-GURPS Spec Ops game; Force Recon and SEAL PCs in a world falling into chaos during an increasingly weird WWIII.

I've run a cop game or two, too, where the PCs were detectives; plus a one-shot where the PCs were LA SWAT after a terrorist nuke on the day the East Coast gets destroyed by an Atlantic Ocean meteor strike.

Clearly, that group didn't (doesn't? it's been a while) have many problems with the concept. Then again, the cops mostly came from the Lethal Weapon school of police work, and the military were engaged in small unit raids & other special ops hijinks.

 

[billd91]

Don't just ask them to trust you, tell them part of what you're going to do. If the initial campaign concept is to break up the military order right away, have them make up characters of the broken-up military order from the start. Don't have them build characters to be joined up and then take that away from them. I've had a GM do that and it kind of annoyed me (in this case, we were members of our respective nations' WWII super-soldier programs converging on Berlin in 1945 - at the end of the first session, we were transported through time to 1989 for the rest of the campaign - I felt the game had been seriously uprooted at that point).

If you want to give them a real connection to the NPC members of the military order, run some flashback or prequel sessions to give them a sense of the history before returning to the game present and the broken order.

 

[Ed_Laprade]

I wouldn't play in a game where the party were grunts under orders from on-the-spot superiors either. Your problem is that you aren't giving them enough info. In fact, they are going to be mad at you if they ever do go along with you, because you intend to yank the premise they are relying on out from under them. Give them the real story and they may well change their minds.

Read Coyote's reply carefully. Note that in all of the cop/military games he mentions the players aren't being bossed around by NPCs very much, if at all. Anyone who joins a game to play A Mighty Warrior, Powerful Wizard, etc., doesn't want to be told what s/he can and can't do by some NPC.

 

[knightofround]

Honestly, it sounds like your players are not interested in being members of any organization whatsoever. I think you just gotta let it go and give them more of a sandbox-style game they want...or step down.

From your post it seems like you're trying to think up of ways to "bribe" your players into playing your type of campaign. That might work in the short run, but it won't be much fun in the long run because neither you nor the players are getting the kind of experience you want.

Personally, my favorite kind of D&D campaign is fantasy-special ops...and I had some great campaigns with other players that felt the same way. But its not one-size-fits-all.

You gotta play to your audience...

 

[Barastrondo]

I'd also encourage you to tip your hand. The surprise value of playing through the order being shattered is probably not worth having to overcome players' initial reluctance to the hook.

I've actually run a scenario like this, only I told the players flat-out "You'll be the remnants of a mercenary group that's been betrayed and demolished." They built their characters from that premise, we began the game with a description of how Things Went Down, and the first stuff they were doing was scouring the battlefield for survivors and dealing with... scavengers. The game lacked the element of surprise, but I think that was a good thing: everyone knew that their real character concepts would be people who were in a mercenary group and now must figure out how to get revenge/rebuild, rather than people who are in a mercenary group and were without dramatic hooks they could trust.

Surprise can be a very good thing, but it's exceptionally hard to surprise people with the truth of what your latest long-running game is really about and have it come off well.

 

[coyote6]

Yeah, usually, the superiors would give orders to go do something ("here's your mission"), and then the PCs (along with any NPC grunts) would go do it, as they saw fit (and often with some plot twist that made specific orders irrelevant). Usually, some PC was the unit leader (and rarely did a player volunteer to be the one in charge; there was a lot of, "I was the CO last time, it's somebody else's turn").

Interfering and/or bossy officers (and civilians -- CIA spooks, journalists, Congressional staffers, etc) were essentially plot complications that were inflicted occasionally -- like random encounters or wandering monsters, except they hung around a while and you usually couldn't just shoot/stab/explode them. Nowadays, I'd probably hand out a hero point or the equivalent to everyone as I announced that "Colonel Wastebottom will be in charge", and/or give them out every time the Colonel did something obnoxious.

NPC officers in charge in the field (that weren't intended to be temporary obstacles) were usually Doomed to Die/Be Gravely Wounded at the first hint of danger. It's amazing how unlucky competent NPC unit leaders can be, with all the failed parachutes, random artillery, booby traps, stray bullets, etc.

---

Man, now I'm wanting to play or run some special ops. Like I've got time!

 

[Hawke]

Go watch Band of Brothers and The Pacific... I think it's easy to see how small groups of soldiers have a cool mission that is beyond just someone generic in the line.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

I ran a game with the PCs all members of the military. They took to it very well. But I played the military with a light hand. As they were PCs they clearly shone above the rest of the unit and therefore got given the more dangerous missions and their immediate commander was happy to give them a pretty free hand when it came to making decisions.

As they went up in levels and proved their worth they got promotions, medals and awards and invites to join Church based knightly orders too. (It was a Dwarven Kingdom, all very organised with different groups working well together for the greater good.)

Eventually several of the PCs left the military as their terms came up. (I played an 'adventure or 2 per game year' pace.) Two stayed and became senior officers. My DM PC became unnecessary after a couple of new players joined the group, so I had him disobey orders (heroically!) and his commander (a PC) gave him 7 years hard labour. A player left so his character died heroically in battle with Fire Giants. All up, it's worked really well.

I think the key is to still allow the players freedom and give them the benefits of the military side of life (medals, back up in an emergency, promotions, dramatic deaths/saves of NPC buddies) without too many of the negatives (unwanted interference from idiot officers being the classic, excessive death of NPC buddies as well.)

Cheers.

 

[TheYeti1775]

Have you asked why they are against it?
Have you told them the thought process you have? That they are the last remanants of a defeated force, very likely one of the few that might have survived leading to a hunted existance.