From: lev0@kimbark.uchicago.edu (Ron Levy (Armchair))
Newsgroups: rec.games.frp.misc
Subject: Re: Living Steel
Date: 17 Oct 92 03:20:17 GMT
Article-I.D.: midway.1992Oct17.032017.4551
Reply-To: lev0@midway.uchicago.edu
Organization: University of Chicago Computing Organizations


>Ever tried to use Phoenix Command for role playing in general?
>My players are concerned about the lethality of the system, and 
>are pretty freaked out by the volume of rules. I was wondering how
>it worked out for other who've tried it.

Sure.  We used it and had fun with it.  The thing to remember is that
like most seriously military games, the way to survive as people is to
NOT get into fights, and when you do, you have the skills and the
numbers and the means to END those fights as soon as possible.  If you
aren't doing something useful, stay under cover.  Explosive flechette
rounds kill people, you know.  I'm led to believe that the rules were
created by ballistics and wound trauma experts who were also gamers,
and who wanted to create a really realistic gun combat system.  They
did something, that's for sure.

We played whatever module there is in the insane city with the rock
music and the gangs.  I am assuming that our GM heavily modified it.
We did a lot of negotiating, and participated in a stylized sort of
mock-rumble to see which gang would get the most food.  A few people
detected that we were actually an infiltrating military team, and we
had to break ambushes and defend our position (as well as defending our
turf from the other gangs physically and politically).
As an example of a few things not to do:

When standing on guard, two people have a difficult time observing
a full 360 degree area.  Three is just barely sufficient, four is
optimal.  Quadrants.  We had set up a guard with only two people, and
our enemies got a LOT closer than we would have liked.

If you are the medic, you wait for the firefight to end.  It won't be
very long.  Then you do your work.  It is not your job to peek around
corners if you are not trained in doing so.  Our medic got his pistol
out and peeked around a corner.  He got spotted and nailed and shot
right in the head, taking 1.2 million hit points of damage.
Basically, this amount of damage determines how much time you have to
live IF you can be gotten to a hospital in that time.  After taking
1.2 million points of damage to the head, you have about .4 of a
second to be gotten to the hospital.

Peeking around corners is dangerous.

-------

We'd also do some Phoenix Command one-shot missions that were heavy on
combat and short on roleplay.  Basic beer and pretzels shootemups,
kill the terrorists, rescue the hostages, blow up buildings.  Building
characters was fun, optimizing armor and ammo to the point where if we
picked up a rock, we'd get that many less actions per turn.  Also fun
was seeing how little damage you could do to a hostage shooting
through to the terrorist behind, using the proper armor-piercing ammo.
It happened only rarely, but then, terrorists WERE prone to using
human shields....

So have fun with it and keep light.  Remember that death, as well as
heroism, can be a single bullet away.


-- 
Snake Owner's Safety Tip #3: 
	Never, EVER say, "Do da wittle snakie-wakies wanna come out to pway?"
anywhere near their cage.