Firefight Slog Postmortem

[Shaun]

Hey, thanks everyone! I appreciate the responses. Lots of good stuff to think about. I’m probably not going to respond to everything right now, because we’re starting the World Burning session in a little less than half an hour.

@"cathexis"

Besides having a long firefight, how did things go?

Overall, pretty well. Like I said, we’re doing the World Burning session tonight, so it’s at least fun enough for everyone else to start a full campaign, and that makes me happy. I’ve never managed to get through a full campaign of BE, so this is sort of my white whale of RPG’s. I’m excited though.

@"cathexis"

5. Yeah, it’s hard to assassinate someone in firefight. The only decent way I can think of pulling off an assassination is through the liberal use of PAc’s and Fusors. It’s far better to set the capture of the enemy CO as part of your objective and then go gunning for their men. Also re-read Soldiers Under My Command (starting on page 506), especially if you’re trying to whittle down their men.

Totally agree. I think that’s one of the things that really slowed everything down. Firefight isn’t Fight, so you have to come at it differently.

@"Luke"

2. Check out the TIME optional rule on page 479. That can help speed things up.

Now that we’ve gone through it, I’ll totally keep this in mind. Everyone but me in this game is sort of a newbie. Well, technically, most of us have played before, but it was at least three years ago, in a brief and aborted campaign that I ran. I think that we’ll be able to bring this rule to bear during this campaign, now that we’ve screwed one up

@"Luke"

3. Flank, Flank, Flank. When someone takes a position, flank them. When someone tries to Flank you, Suppress them. It’s a beautiful ballet. But if you used CC, you should have had things end even faster. CC deducts dispo from both sides.

Normally, yeah. One of the things that made this difficult was very poor dice rolls. Granted, it’s been some weeks since then, but with the CC’s, we either tied or lost every time. I think we wound up losing a total of 1 dispo from the enemy scripting a CC. Incidentally, we did Flank once the enemy had advanced into our position, but we wound up getting hosed by it. That was actually the maneuver that ended the conflict, since we had to leave our position in order to execute the Flank. We lost to a DF, if I recall correctly.

@"Luke"

7. Did you pass the test with the +3 Ob for making the Circles test in a conflict?

Sure did! I guess my only issue with this part was when this roll is made. We knew we needed it, but everyone had spent their builders earlier in the maneuver, so the question was, do you roll at the top of the conflict, or immediately when you choose to do the specialist action?

@"zabieru"

4. You did this exactly right. If you’d set it as “take over the command center,” and then put the command center on the map, and then your players had successfully advanced to the command center while losing all of their dispo… What next? They have, in the fiction, advanced to the command center and taken hold of it, and yet the rules tell us that they have not achieved their objective, meaning they have somehow not taken the center. (Yes, you can gloss it by saying that they got flanked and driven out, sure. But it’s better to frame the action so that awkwardness doesn’t arise.)

Yeah, I was totally wrong above. I don’t know what I was thinking. I think my main frustration came from our side being so stationary. But, yeah, making the objective achieving a position is a bad idea.