Players in a military order

[Haltherrion]

I've done it with D&D too. I don't get what the players are afraid of with a military campaign. My guess is one of two things:

1) They don't like the military in real life, and that feeling bleeds over into game life. If they did it a shot, they might actually LIKE ROLE PLAYING someone who thinks differently from themselves. I ran a RECON (Vietnam War special forces teams) game in college with a British Army veteran/reservist student, a law student who was in Marine Officer training, some regular students, and one hippie pothead student who was totally opposed to the military. VERY fun group -- some of the fun coming from stretching into "unsuited" roles.

2) They think it means you will tell them what to do and they will be railroaded. Tell them they won't and move on. In my experience, the "reason the party is together and has missions" has little to no discernable affect on the freedom of action of the party. How many fictional cops tell the boss to shove it and do what they want? ALL of them!

Good thoughts and I share your puzzlement. It's not like I'm known as a ref that railroads players. They seem to have an unnatural aversion to it and part of the reason I was posting was whether anyone had similar experiences.

Well, who knows when I will start a new campaign (current one just kicked off a few months ago) but without tipping my end, I may be more forceful in asking them to trust me on the start. Although I do like Herobizkit's prelude idea extended to have multiple preludes. It fits well with our groups campaign starts. Certainly adds some work to the campaign start but since my painter puts in 120+ hours painting the starting figures, not inappropriate to get some use out of all of them early on.

BTW a new post of them is at http:://coolminiornot.com/255460 to plug my friend's work

 

[Hand of Evil]

Think of the players a smaller group of the larger unit, then base the adventure around that group. Now think wild west and colonal india. They then can do recon, hunting, security, meet and greets, building projects, etc. and have a force that will back them up. This is the stepping stone advancement of a force.

• Military moves into an area
• Recons and maps areas around
• Builds fort in best location
• Expands out from fort
• Claims land
• Repeat

The players, being a smaller group can be assigned task as needed. Even to the point of dungeon crawls. My players have located orc camps, built bridges, escorted VIPs, patrol for arm shipments, manned watch towers, etc.

 

[Starfox]

To the OP; listen to all the talk about bait-and-switch, many wise things have been said. I have nothing to add to that, but can tell of my own experiences in military style campaigns. I've been in two in the last few years.

The first was in Dragonstar, a space opera setting using DnD (3.0) rules. I was Co-DM. The force was copied off the Colonial Marines of Aliens, and many of the missions were against abberations. In almost all the missions, the PCs were on their own (much like in the film), command and support being at least a few days away. PLayers had the option to be officers (half-dragons and sorcerers were officers in this setting) but few choose to. The military was a backdrop, a source of pay and supplies, and a patron. The campaign was very episodic, with little continuity from mission to mission. There was never a question of taking the mission or not; the brass assigned you a mission and you solved it any which way you could. The players remained grunts the entire campaign. Level 13 grunts do have some degree of pull by virtue of all our decorations, but we never even tried to make a career or go political.

The other was a Knights of Cormyr campaign set in the Forgotten Realms. We started out as squires and scions of noble families, gradually working ourselves up to leading position. We did missions as they came up, and tough we might have had the option (especially later on) to not take missions, there would have been bad consequences of doing so. The crown supplied us and gave us orders. Unlike Dragonstar, we made careers and ended up more or less as lords of the regency.

Both these games ran very well and great fun was had by all. It was liberating to be given missions to solve without having to think about economic compensation or other concerns - the "mission from on high" is a very good adventure hook.

 

[Tuft]

The first was in Dragonstar, a space opera setting using DnD (3.0) rules. I was Co-DM. The force was copied off the Colonial Marines of Aliens, and many of the missions were against abberations. In almost all the missions, the PCs were on their own (much like in the film), command and support being at least a few days away. PLayers had the option to be officers (half-dragons and sorcerers were officers in this setting) but few choose to. The military was a backdrop, a source of pay and supplies, and a patron. The campaign was very episodic, with little continuity from mission to mission. There was never a question of taking the mission or not; the brass assigned you a mission and you solved it any which way you could. The players remained grunts the entire campaign. Level 13 grunts do have some degree of pull by virtue of all our decorations, but we never even tried to make a career or go political.

I also played in this campaign. The intent was that each player should have 3-4 characters each, and that you picked those characters that best suited each mission.

Rather predictably, most players soon had a favorite character each that they tried to put into most missions. Mine was a soulmech (human soul in robot body) wizard. As the campaign was partially inspired by "Aliens", I played that character as a female "Bishop"; with each marine having grenades enough to put any fireball I could produce to shame, I instead loaded up on utility spells - no combat spells at all. I soon realized how much more pure fun it was to play that way, than to just decrement monster hit-point counters. it was a major eye-opener for me.

So, even in military campaign there can be room for other niches, if the system and the DM allows it...

 

[haakon1]

There was never a question of taking the mission or not; the brass assigned you a mission and you solved it any which way you could.

Maybe this is what the OP's players fear -- that they will be given missions they can't refuse even though "I've got a bad feeling about this". I've definitely had players who resisted adventure hooks, but at the end of the day, if you want to play, you're going to participate, one way or another, in whatever the day's adventure is. The player's choice is in HOW to react to the scenario, not in what the scenario is, for the most part. (Though I do often discuss what the next adventure should be, OOC.)

The choice to say "heck no, we won't go" is an illusion, in every RPG I've ever played -- and really doing so would involve a seriously broken DM/player relationship:
DM: "Hey guys, I bought this neat adventure, and spent dozens of hours customizing it. Let's go."
Player: "No, I don't like the hook. My PC is not motivated by this and wants to stay in town instead. You should wing an urban adventure for the rest of the game day -- preferably with opponents who are weak for my level yet have unexpectedly large amounts of treasure, then buy a new adventure for us, and prep something new for next time. Also, the free beer you're giving me isn't frosty enough. Go fetch me another."

I have a feeling I'll be flamed for not being sandbox-friendly, but this is my experience as a DM and a player.

It was liberating to be given missions to solve without having to think about economic compensation or other concerns - the "mission from on high" is a very good adventure hook.

Agreed. The military campaign can eliminate a lot of the petty aspects of D&D.

 

[S'mon]

Never bait-and-switch. Start the game with "Good Luck, You're on Your Own" - ie let the players know in advance that the game is a sandbox focusing on members of a destroyed military order.

 

[Starfox]

Maybe this is what the OP's players fear -- that they will be given missions they can't refuse even though "I've got a bad feeling about this". I've definitely had players who resisted adventure hooks, but at the end of the day, if you want to play, you're going to participate, one way or another, in whatever the day's adventure is. The player's choice is in HOW to react to the scenario, not in what the scenario is, for the most part.

A beautiful thing about a military campaign is that it is ok, even in genre, for the characters to complain and "have a bad feeling" about things. They need to do the job, they don't need to like it.

What you should be careful with is giving the players ethically questioable orders without giving them a way out. One of the missions in Alien Stars (our Dragonstar campaign) involved glacier-living elves. The elven ranger/tracker of the group (played by Tuft here) proved remarkably inefficient in finding those elves, so the black-halfdragon officer (a PC) had to refrain from whatever he was contemplating. All done without any RL grumbling at the table.

 

[Barastrondo]

A beautiful thing about a military campaign is that it is ok, even in genre, for the characters to complain and "have a bad feeling" about things. They need to do the job, they don't need to like it.

What you should be careful with is giving the players ethically questioable orders without giving them a way out. One of the missions in Alien Stars (our Dragonstar campaign) involved glacier-living elves. The elven ranger/tracker of the group (played by Tuft here) proved remarkably inefficient in finding those elves, so the black-halfdragon officer (a PC) had to refrain from whatever he was contemplating. All done without any RL grumbling at the table.

Also, this is one of those many places where it's appropriate to say "they need to do the job, they don't need to like it" for the characters, but the players certainly need to like it in order to keep them interested in the campaign. Some players thrive on having their characters do stuff that their characters hate, soaking up the adversity and enjoying every in-character grumble and triumph over the suck. Other players would rather spend time having their characters do stuff their characters like. If you think your players are the latter half, that may be where some of the resistance is coming from.

 

[haakon1]

What you should be careful with is giving the players ethically questioable orders without giving them a way out.

In my D&D campaigns that are militaristic, they are fighting for a country (Bissel in Greyhawk) that's basically LG, so their missions fall in that category. And they aren't directly in the military, just pretty darn close, more or less on retainer from an advisor to the ruler.

In my RECON (Vietnam War) game, the missions were based on real military scenarios -- scouting, patrols, rescuing down pilots, that sort of thing. The most "ethically challenging scenarios" I gave them were a Phoenix project mission (destroy Viet Cong Infrastructure -- as in assassinate the local mayor in the Communist shadow government), a scenario like "Air America" (but before the movie went out) where they discovered a US drug smuggling ring and had to prove their innocence and the other guy's guilt before the MP's caught them, and a mission to infiltrate North Vietnam and "paint" a bridge with an early laser targeting device, for a bombing strike. Ethics rarely got discussed.