Paul, you’ve kind of gotten me excited about playing Pocket Danger Patrol again. I might get it out and see if I can find some local people who want to play. Actually think it’s a better game than Lasers and Feelings.
Danger Patrol (and especially Pocket Danger Patrol)
1 Like
If it’s online, invite me! I’d love to see it in action.
1 Like
And I would add one of the threats to the flashback scene.
Yeah, I like how Seth did this in his APs - the first scene would be, narratively, a flashback, but mechanically it still worked as a regular threat roll.
I had a game session planned this evening, and one of the players didn’t show up.
What to do?
Naturally, I suggested that… I had something in my pocket which could do the job!
We were talking about Star Wars, so I said, “Hey, let’s play Pocket Danger Patrol in the Star Wars universe. I’ll explain as we go!”
Everyone was on board.
We did setup, character creation, and one round in about two hours (maybe a little less), and we had a blast! I improvised some Abilities, which weren’t quite perfect, but worked well. (The list was very good, I think; however, categorizing them into two columns wasn’t really working out. We mixed and matched, which represented the fiction well: for instance, closing your eyes and trusting in the Force while operating the reactor could be Tech and The Force, even though they probably would both have been Role abilities.)
It was a lot of fun! Four contrasting heroes, and some wild hijinks.
Fortunately/unfortunately, we had amazing dice luck. On the first turn (we used Seth’s trick of making the first action a flashback), we eliminated three threats, including an Epic-level threat (8 hits to take out, regenerates one per turn) and one linked threat, while suffering almost no setbacks. (On my first roll, I rolled eight dice and managed ten successes!) It was exciting but also almost disappointing - I think we were all looking forward to seeing these in action.
We got two fantastic d12 outcomes, as well:
The Imperial asset, Asajj Ventress, is desperately in love with one of the heroes, and will probably show up to help later, at an opportune time.
My character now has the wonderful line - “The heart of the black hole lives within me - d12”.
I’m still curious about finding ways to make the game more organic. So far I’m following the lead of Seth’s writeups, and they’re quite mechanically driven.
2 Likes
Some thoughts after that first session:
I’m already thinking of ways to improve the handling of Threats in this game. I think you can and should do stuff like this:
“The black hole is an Epic threat, with a countdown.”
"There’s another threat - ‘No one knows how to get near the black hole without being torn into gravitationally-shredded strips’ - which “guards” the black hole.
And you can do stuff like, “Darth Vader’s presence is utterly terrifying”, which can be guarding Darth Vader (if heroes need to muster their courage), or it can be a Hazard, if it just hinders them.
I think making some creative and interactive threats like this - “there’s a traitor in our midst”, “someone sabotaged the ship while we were rescuing Elia”, etc - might be key to really getting some “juice” out of this game.
Those who have played it a bunch, does that sound workable and useful? Or not?
2 Likes
I’m going to fool around with this a little more. Would this be a workable application of the rules?
Return of the Jedi
Basically, I’m formulating the final “scene” in terms of Threats.
- The Death Star wields awesome power, capable of destroying just about anything, even planets.
Epic-level threat, requires 8 hits to take out.
-
The Imperial Fleet is powerful, able to crush the Rebels with superior numbers and firepower.
-
The Force Generator on Endor; guarding the Death Star (1).
The Death Star cannot be attacked until the Generator is down.
- The Stormtrooper Forces on Endor seek to crush the rebels.
Potentially, guarding the Force Generator. Or is that overkill?
-
Darth Vader, Luke and Leia’s father and the Emperor’s apprentice, wants Luke to join him or to die.
-
Emperor Palpatine, Sith lord, sorcerer, and dark leader of the Empire, seeks to turn Luke to the Dark Side.
-
Darth Vader’s Loyalty to the Emperor is forged in decades of blood and manipulation.
While this threat exists, Vader and Palpatine are Linked Threats.
- Luke is Tempted by the Dark Side, which seeks to turn him to Evil.
Hazard; applies two Threat dice to Luke whenever it affects his decisions.
Presumably the Ewoks are a d12 earned in an earlier roll - perhaps one of the “flashbacks”!
The characters in play might be Luke, Leia, Lando (representing the Rebels), and Han.
Their “placement” is a little odd, relative to the mechanics of the game (in this formulation, one character is facing four of the Threats!); I wonder if this is a limitation of the medium, or if someone else might draw the Threats differently.
I imagine that, if normal humans unfamiliar with the movie play this, they might have both Luke and Leia go to the Death Star to confront Vader and Palpatine, or something like that.
In this version of the game, each film might be one or two sessions/scenes of the game. This clearly covers the latter half of RotJ or so.
It’s pretty hard to represent the dramatic triangle between Vader, the Emperor, and Luke in this format. Anyone want to give it a try?
I’m very curious to hear what people familiar with the game might make of this - I’m only speculating based on a single session of play, after all.
2 Likes
Yes, that sounds workable. That sounds awesome what you’ve done. You make me want to play that game and I don’t even really like Star Wars.
I really like your idea about formulating the final scene in terms of the threats. I’m probably going to borrow that.
When Luke learns that Vader is his father, this becomes a complication. If the heroes roll badly against the emperor, that would be the first complication that I would add.
Other complications that would make the game interesting but aren’t necessarily in the original script:
- Millennium Falcon breaks down possibly as a result of rolling badly against the Imperial fleet or the death star. I give this a count down.
- Somebody important is captured (per gamma patrol rules)
- The forests of Endor are on fire. Possibly as the result of a firefight with the Imperial stormtroopers. Or possibly as a result of attempting to blow up the force field generator.
Adding complications makes the story far more interesting, because they arise out of the players actions, and they help to stop the players from bulldozing the threats. They prolong the intensity and excitement of the game.
ps.
And now that I’ve looked at your posts again, I think that threat number one and two need more focus. What will happen if they’re not defeated? What are those threats trying to achieve?
I would treat Vader’s terror causing as a complication, something that can be defeated without actually defeating him. It would make a cool part of the story to describe how the characters overcome their fear of him. It could be something remembered from a flashback or something in the moment.
1 Like
Nice details! I agree; I was trying to be faithful to the film, but that could really use brushing up.
Would you agree that:
- PDP is well-suited to a sort of “climactic scene” formulation of play? Where the entire game is one complex conflict?
Because that could be ported over to other styles of play, quite effectively.
However, in Seth’s replays, it looks more like “every roll is a scene”. With the game we started, we started with flashbacks, so it definitely looked like that.
Which do you tend to do in your games?
I agree that developing Complications is a huge part of what makes the game feel interesting and organic. Unfortunately, we only rolled one so far, and I worry that the one we chose might not come up in play. (We had damage and sabotage to our ship; however, it’s likely that “in the present” we won’t even be using the ship.) Is that ever something that is an issue in this game? Or not worth worrying about?
For the Millenium Falcon breaking down, how would you formulate that as a Complication with a countdown? Can complications have countdowns? Or do you just make it a 3-hit Threat, effectively? How do you handle this?
1 Like
- Danger Patrol
- Gamma Patrol (direct PDF link)
Are there functioning links to the other games mentioned here? I was able to find a page that looks like it’s about DangerQuest, but all the useful links have gone kaput. Also, the page is in German. BoardGameGeek has a page about it, but just a blurry image of the PDF, no actual PDF file that I could find. Mike Wight’s own blogspot page seems to be gone.
@avram, I collected these materials and links while doing my “research” for the game.
First of all, Pocket Danger Patrol can be found at www.dangerpatrol.com, as you surmised. (This was linked to early on in the thread.)
I suppose I can share them here, too! Hopefully this doesn’t distract from the questions in my last post too much:
Seth’s GMless PDP procedure was already linked to earlier…
Here’s a nice D&D-based hack of Danger Patrol itself (not PDP!):
And here is DangerQuest:
https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B5K_Bqfr0dqcY3lBWnJvdDZSZW8/edit
I think that covers everything!
1 Like
We continued our Star Wars game… it’s been interesting!
On one hand, we’ve been having a great time. The story is quite exciting. We have one hero who got double-crossed by his lover, and is now going to be dissected by the Empire because they think he produces Gundark pheromones.
Another character - mine - has awakened Force powers (according to a prophecy) and has now turned to the Dark Side.
(These are both Threats, as in the Gamma Patrol rules: after a countdown of 2, Maggus will get boiled down and Elia, my character, will turn into an irredeemable monster who murders for the Sith.)
On the other hand, it’s hard to make this work with the mechanics. Not exactly smooth; we’re doing OK, but it’s hard to know what to do when and what to apply when. The Complications, in particular, are hard to bring into the action (and we rarely roll them).
We’re also wondering/worried about the math. Our initial rolls were so good that we took out three Threats on the very first turn! I was worried that it would make the game too easy (especially in concert with the d12 reward dice we’re scoring so often!). But since then, we’ve run into some serious bad luck. Two characters taken out in the second round of rolls, and we’re out of almost all of our bonus dice.
What happens next? Does that put us into a bit of negative spiral? I’m not so sure, but the players are wondering. It seems like the game can easily get into positive or negative spirals, they are saying.
What does this tend to look like, in practice?
What happens if the heroes “lose”, and what does that tend to look like?
1 Like
Thanks for the links!
(These are both Threats, as in the Gamma Patrol rules: after a countdown of 2, Maggus will get boiled down and Elia, my character, will turn into an irredeemable monster who murders for the Sith.)
That is a really cool narrative use of the mechanics.
The Complications, in particular, are hard to bring into the action (and we rarely roll them).
I’m having a hard time understanding why. Could you explain what’s going on here in more detail?
I think the complications and the threat/harm dice rules are two of the most important part of the game.
and we’re out of almost all of our bonus dice.
This is where you could be taking rest/recovery scenes/actions and where a lot of free play could happen.
On one hand, we’ve been having a great time. The story is quite exciting
Right on!
Good questions! And both fairly easy to answer:
The Complications were tricky because they were very much based on fictional events. Our first was that our ship was damaged after a chase scene with some Imperials. And the hyperdrive was malfunctioning, as a result. However, after that our ship actually got impounded, and we’ve never managed to get it back (our only real attempt ended us a double-cross when the acting PC got “taken out”). So it’s been very difficult to find a reason to involve those dice in the action.
The second Complication we have is “Gundarks running loose”, after we freed a bunch of them. There have been a couple of scenes/rolls where that seemed relevant, but I think there was only one where we rolled the dice.
I feel like the intent of the rules is for the Complications to come up almost constantly, but it seems like a shame to bypass what’s happening in the fiction to shoehorn them in. I’m not exactly sure what to do with that!
As for the recovery scenes/actions, that’s an excellent idea. However, with two characters “taken out”, and the Danger Meter a point away from disaster, no one’s taken the option yet. It seems unwise!
I’m also not sure if that means we’re playing something wrong, or not.
2 Likes
I see what you mean about the complications and recovery scenes. All I can think is that the complications might come back into play later in the story.
I wonder if there’s any hack or kludge for making the danger meter go up.
Indeed. It definitely ties in with my main question about this game, which is basically:
Does the “game” (players + 3 threats, the global Danger Meter) cover an entire story, with each roll being its own scene? Or does the “game” cover one extended scene in a story, after which you’re supposed to graduate to another?
We completed our game - ending in defeat, as three characters got Taken Out (and two did so permanently!) and the Danger Meter hit 6. We could have continued to play, but chose not to.
We had a blast, for the most part, but there were some concerns about:
- The potential for “death spirals” built into the game (actually, both positive and negative).
For instance, when I saw the rules for characters who are Taken Out (I’m using Gamma Patrol’s 2-pt countdown), I thought they were really “soft”. If a character gets Taken Out, we have two turns to save them. If that’s three characters remaining (as was the case at our table, with four players), that means we have six “moves” to take down this threat (and most threats go down after one or two moves). Easy!
However, I hadn’t taken into account how this builds on itself, since each character getting Taken Out also effectively speeds up the progress of countdowns and the Danger Meter. With only one character remaining, we had only one shot - one roll of the dice - to rescue a character, and then the remaining two were lost to us.
(To explain: three characters were all lost on a given turn. That leaves one action, for the remaining character, which, in our case, also failed. Now - I presumed, since any other reading of the rules didn’t make much sense - we advance each countdown by one. Now we have three characters who are about to be lost, and only one action to save them. A “chain reaction” of rescues is possible, as each rescued characters tries to save the next, and this is what we tried to go for, but a single loss ends the “chain”.)
- I didn’t mind the potential of losing the game as much as the other players, it seems, but they found it quite grim.
What didn’t help is that, when things are going against you, there aren’t many ways to turn them back in your favour. The only real recourse you have is trying to roll as many dice as possible - and, in a way, even Threat dice help you, technically, to score more hits - but this is a path to sacrificing your character, which doesn’t necessarily help all that much when the other characters are counting on you to rescue them.
A lot of RPGs have “last resort”-type things you can lean on when everything is not going your way. In PDP, though, you’re pretty much always using all you’ve got, so there isn’t a whole lot more there to pull out at the last minute.
Add in the way the action economy goes wildly against the heroes when some are taken out, and it’s quite a death spiral. The Threats, after all, act each turn - so the fewer characters are rolling, the more often the Threats take action.
Giving characters the Gamma Patrol “lost but can be rescued” possibility is nice (dramatically, it’s lovely!) but makes this even worse, since each character “Taken Out” means that the heroes lose one action per turn AND need to expend an extra action per turn to rescue that hero. i.e. One character Taken Out means that you’re losing 1-3 Actions (on average) compared to the Threats.
Challenging!
(Notably, in the original Danger Patrol, the Threats act in reaction to character moves, so the action economy is automatically balanced.)
We brainstormed once possible redesign: rescuing characters is a minor threat, rather than a major one (requiring 3 hits, perhaps), and characters who are Taken Out automatically “recover” while they are imprisoned, making their return extra dramatic. Something like this could help counterbalance a death spiral.
Meanwhile, though, this is all conjectural! It’s possible we got something wrong in this game, after all.
I’ll be playing another game of this with @Hopeless_Wanderer over the next week or several weeks, and I’m excited to see how he runs the game! I will definitely report back after that happens.
There’s a lot of really cool stuff in this game, and I’m keen to learn more.
1 Like