The Pacific & Gaming

Over the last couple of days, I watched "The Pacific" mini-series on Amazon ... as a massive fan of "Band of Brothers," I always meant to watch this but when it originally came out, I didn't have HBO and then, it just fell off my radar. Having seen it now, I will say that, overall, I still prefer BoB but will acknowledge that "The Pacific" is still really, really good. Episode 6, for example, is incredibly intense and the crap that the Marines went through during those campaigns ... wow. Just horrible.

That said, it certainly made me think about how to replicate a lot of this sort of thing in RPGing. The big thing that immediately comes to mind are the stakes: in these sorts of movies, machine guns mow down characters willy-nilly, artillery and mortar fire tear apart bodies, and snipers take people out without warning ... if a player spends an hour or more (for example) creating a character, complete with awesome (or heck, less than awesome) backstory, and then that character takes an unseen sniper's round to the head in the first round of the first combat, that can be problematic. And irritating as crap.

For example, a year or so ago, the Saturday Fantasy Grounds group played a WWII GURPS game which was set pre-Operation: Market Garden. In this scenario, those of us aware of the history knew that this had the potential of ending with a TPK, but because the PCs kicked so much butt, we ended up (after the game ended) declaring that this was an alternate world set in the Infinite Worlds. The most interesting thing (to me) for character creation was the following stuff that the GM set out:
  • Earn 5 plot points for a character back story.
  • Earn 1 plot point for a character nickname.
  • Earn 2 plot points for a brief summary of what the character went on to do after the war.
With this in mind, the character(s) almost have "script immunity" for major encounters so the GM utilized the flesh wound rules without the game being straight-up cinematic. I'm wondering if that's the best way to approach this sort of thing.

That said, I am curious about the use of the Artillery skill for mortars and think I'll probably do some number crunching on that here shortly...

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