Recon

Saturday, November 13, 2010

Planning the Bugout, Part Two: This time, it's adjective

So I suppose, in hindsight, I should talk first about the materials I have to work with. When you are a lunatic wannabe warlord with just enough dots in Charisma to land himself in real trouble, your bricks and mortar are the people you surround yourself with. So I'm going to take a step back and talk a little about our group-or more accurately, our group's character sheets.

Remember how I told you most of our gaming is Avatar style-playing as versions, or more accurately parodies, of ourselves? There are things you notice about our sheets that give us a number of our biggest advantages. For non nerds, remember that the World of Darkness scale is 1 (Poor) 2 (Average) 3 (Exceptional) 4 (Very Exceptional) and 5 (Epic)

My own character sheet, when I put down stats realistically, is a generalist more than a specialist-I know a lot about very little, but I know a little about a lot. My highest attributes are Intelligence and Manipulation, both at 4. I also pull down a respectable 3 in strength, wits and charisma. My weaknesses are appearance (2, and that generous) dexterity (2, and perhaps also generous although I am more agile than I look) and perception (1-I'm absurdly self absorbed). Stamina is a toss up-when interpreted as long term fitness and endurance I am probably a 2, but in terms of taking a hit I am a confident 4 from bitter experience, so I usually round it out to 3 and chalk it up to the system. So what we have here is a canny, sneaky motherfucker who wasted a lot of time in college on martial arts classes and dabbled in damn near every other field of knowledge with genuine interest for awhile. My skills emphasize Subterfuge (an honest 4, ha ha ha) Melee (A 3, and that only because I'm back in training recently and have a lot of dormant muscle memory) Academics (3-I am the king of the fuzzy studies) and Survival 3 (For all my mall ninja-ry, I grew up in the woods) and then, y'know, the inevitable 4 points in Nerd Culture Trivia.

So that is me, but how about the rest of the group? Lumped in a group their sheets show consistently above average intelligence and wits across the board-none below 3, with a few 4's. Major weakness? Perception. Hey, we're potheads. High skills include Weed Trivia, Subterfuge, Stealth (We played a lot of spotlight as kids, and, uh, as adults) Crafts, and respectable ratings in Survival and Firearms (Mostly 2's), and a few exceptional members in a few highly useful fields like Brawl, Melee and Medicine.

So what are we doing on this bugout then? Patrolling and contact drills-we need to drill Alertness to make up for that god awful Perception. Medical training for GSW and other traumas, because we have a guy who is an EMT-B certified now and can teach it-everyone having those extra Medicine dots will come in handy in our PAW skirmishes. Movement, stealth and sentry drills to both sharpen our high points (Stealth) and, again, work on that Alertness skill. Communication methodology-if we can move and communicate effectively we will be 90% of the way to being a passable light infantry unit. CQB is going to get a review from the last bugout, because I want to see if you pricks have been practicing it-I want to see muscle memory, raise that Brawl rating, plus get some mileage out of that Stamina roll-we are going to do some live Pugils and maybe have a go with some pads. Brawl may no longer be the most important thing to a unit's effectiveness, but it gets everyone's blood going and trains aggressiveness-an attribute that is not on our sheet and, with us being stoners, is sometimes lacking.

Finally, on the last day (so we have that wonderful infantry experience of a full ammo load the whole time) we are going to do our Firearms and shooting techniques-after we are good and tired and cold and sore, because if you shoot good then, you shoot good fresh. Probably basics-static shooting for accuracy, shooting positions with and without cover, reloads, weapon transitions, lots and lots of dry fire because we are all poor as fuck...hopefully something to raise our Firearms ratings.

Thus ends the tale of our Character Sheets. As you can see, we are fairly inept, but we have our strengths and are working on our weaknesses. Having a few people that specialize and can teach others rudiments is a good thing for us, as it allows us to build exactly the skills we need to rock the Mad Max universe.

And baby, you better believe that's what it's all about.

No comments:

Post a Comment