Continuing the discussion from Pre-generating a stable of PCs for sci-fi thrillers:
There are six main types of activities that parties of PCs generally have to do, or often find that they want to do, in the mystery, thriller, adventure, caper, and clandestine-operations RPG adventures that I run: investigate, find, infiltrate, execute, flee, and fight. I don’t mean that I set those things out for the PCs to do; the PCs in my adventures have to improvise their own way though the obstacles that I place before them. It’s just that
- when the rubber hits the road it turns out that at any time the party will be doing one of those six things, so that any player who designs a character with no way to contribute to one or more of them has to be resigned to playing in audience mode some of the time, and
- unless the characters have, among them, several ways to do each of those six things the party will face troublesome limitations, and will have to do some things the hard way, while the group may find things a little monotonous if they have only one tool for a large category of tasks.
Investigate
Under the heading “investigation” I consider all types of investigations and intelligence-gathering, the things that a party might do to find out what is going on when that isn’t common knowledge. If they have a goal, they find out what they must do to achieve it; if not, they discover some of the opportunities available to them that they might choose a goal — what things that belong in museums are at hand to steal, what plots to destroy the world are afoot for them to thwart. Further, they discover what the situation is, what other parties are involved (and something of their interests and activities), what they have to do to achieve their goal, where they have to go to do it, and what obstacles will be in their way. Note that this does not apply only to ultimate goals for the adventure, but also to intermediate goals that must be gained as means to those ends.
There is a wide range of different activities and abilities that characters might undertake and apply to investigate an untoward event. They might take statements from witnesses, ask questions of the families, co-workers, and social contacts of a victim, investigate a victim’s quarrels and financial records, reconstruct their movements. They might search a victim’s home or workplace or car or other places of interest for physical evidence of a struggle, search the coats in the victim’s wardrobe for matchbook clues, try to determine what if any of their possessions are unaccounted for, canvas their neighbours for witnesses. They might confront interested parties and ask them questions, or converse with them socially and lull them into making indiscreet statements and inadvertent revelations. They might research financial and official records to discover hidden interests and other secrets, go to the local and steer the gossip to subjects they are interested in, check social media and newspaper morgues for background material and evidence of old quarrels, or a similar event occurring every time the stars are right. (it there is a body, they ought to view it in situ and attend its autopsy if permitted to do so. They might tap phones and intercept or at least monitor wireless, stake out a premises or plant watching or listening devices. They might survey public-source intelligence on a characteristic thing or material. If they have informants, or contacts on the Force of in the Agency, they might tap those.
In some settings an genres PCs might find that there is not sufficient evidence apparent at the start of an investigation, and that they have to do things to make NPCs reveal themselves. They might pick a suspect and needle them until they lose conrol. Or beat up a criminal until he gives them the name of another criminal. Or bully a witness until they are frightened into talking. Or pretend that they have discovered a secret and ambush whomever comes to kill them. Or act suspiciously and nab whomever starts investigating them.
Different investigative methods are used in different genres, but there is very often at least some element of searching for a discovery or information in adventures of many genres. Give some thought to how your character is going to get involved in any sort of investigation that occurs in your paradigmatic adventure, both in terms of (a) making sure that your character has relevant abilities that complement the rest of the party, and (b) bearing in mind that investigation is active, so that the correct remedy to not having enough information is to go out and get more. Shake the tree if you have to.
Find
After investigation, you have discovered (or decided) that you must (or will) do the deed to the thing or person. But if it’s not obvious where the thing is you have a new problem. Sometimes that can be solved by more investigation, but when it can’t, or when you don’t want to try, there are some special techniques for discovering a location.
One approach is if you have access to a vehicle, object, or person who has come from the location. They can be exampled for geographically-revealing trace evidence (clay, mud, pollen…), for postmarks and despatch addresses. Their GPS breadcrumbs or cellular communications records can be peeked at, or their toll receipts. Perhaps they can be tracked back. Or a person can be lulled or tricked or bullied into revealing information. If you don’t have access to such a package or vehicle, maybe you can induce the opposition to send out something that will prove revealing.
Another approach is if you know of a package, person, or vehicle that is going to return to the secret location. You can put a tracking device on or in it or them. You can follow a person or vehicles on foot or in a like vehicle, or track them or it through traffic and surveillance cameras. You can follow a person or vehicle using an observation drone. You can squirt aniseed onto one of its wheels and follow its trail with a bloodhound. Sometimes you can just plain track them. My favourite is to stow away in the vehicle — a lot of my characters in Twenties and Thirties adventures have from time to time crouched on the luggage-racks of cars.
If you can find a person who knows the location, then perhaps you can induce them to share it or to reveal it by an indiscreet word or action. Or you can drug, trick, or bully them into telling you. Quite a lot of different interpersonal skills can be pressed into service!
This is not usually a very big part of any adventure; it might be short enough to sit out. But perhaps you ought to give some thought to making sure that your party has a selection of methods for doing this at need.
Infiltrate
In some adventures the big challenge is finding the person or thing, and once you have done that you can walk up and do the deed to them: arresting a culprit once you’ve solved a mystery, for example. Other times the things or person may be on top of a mountain, at the bottom of a lake, under and ice-shelf etc., or in a secure location such as a home, office, den of criminals, mansion, palace, fortress etc.
Action, caper, thriller, and clandestine-ops movies have provided up with an almost embarrassing profusion of ways to get into a building that either the opposition want to keep you out of or that you don’t want them to know that you are in.
- Infiltration. If the approaches to a perimeter are watched or patrolled, the party may have to sneak through a patrolled area, which calls for military scouting skills.
- Literal house-breaking. If there is a part of the exterior or perimeter that is unobserved and unpatrolled because there is no entrance there, you can use building tools, construction machinery, tunnelling, or perhaps even explosives or cutting torches to make a hole in the structure.
- Second-storey work, a.k.a. cat-burglary. If there is an entrance (perhaps a window, balcony door, or entrance from an enclosed courtyard) that is unguarded and inadequately locked because it is deemed to be inaccessible, you can gain access to it with climbing and mountaineering skills and equipment, or perhaps by swimming (perhaps with SCUBA), parachuting, or using a small boat or quiet VTOL aircraft (a balloon, perhaps).
- Physical penetration, a.k.a. Bacon & Eggs, or Black-bagging. If there is an entrance that is inadequately guarded because the door is locked or secured with electronic access control, a person with the technical skills to pick mechanical locks or otherwise exploit the weaknesses of security apparatus can gain access by circumventing the security. That may involve sniffing and cloning electronic keys, “borrowing” and duplicating mechanical keys etc., but surprisingly often that isn’t necessary.
- “Social engineering”. If there is an entrance that is guarded by a point guard who controls passage, or if people pass through it using keys, it may be possible to get in by tricks as simple as just following someone who opens the door, or as preparation-intense as presenting in the guise of a courier or maintenance worker with a fake express parcel or work order — or in tuxedo and diamonds and a fake invitation, if there is a social event in the mansion.
- Cuckoo work. When outsiders to the secured place are routinely or occasionally granted admittance, and if the people entitled to grant admittance are accessible, it may be possible to arrange to get in for a business meeting, job interview, social occasion, or make-out session. If a randy prince has ordered the guards to admit his floozies to a palace with no questions asked, this may fade into social engineering. This category also includes bribing, persuading, blackmailing, or flattering a person with legitimate access to the secure place to let one in for a purpose that is neither licit nor genuine.
- Inside work. Once one member of the party has got in he or she may be able to open a way for the rest.
Case the joint! Getting in to the secure place often requires preparation and planning, which require preliminary investigation. The physical vulnerabilities of a security system may be revealed by military reconnaissance methods or burglars’ skill at casing a joint, or information about them may be elicited e.g. from the staff or habitués of the place while they are outside on errands or off duty. Revealing plans can be obtained from building authorities, construction contractors, or security installation firms. Sometimes photos on the social media of residents of the place can be useful. Information about upcoming opportunities for social infiltration can be found in local news, social media, gossip networks and so on.
It is very common in genre movies, and a useful trope in RPGs, for one or two characters with different sorts of counter-security skills to be required to get through concentric layers of security, and for counter-security experts to have to get a character inside who has the special abilities to do the deed to the thing or person.
Execute
There is a terrific range of things that the PCs might have to do in the place once they get there. According to the genre and mission, the setting and the ethos of the campaign, they might have to take a thing, place a thing, replace one thing with another, examine a thing, or alter a thing. They might have to open a safe, find a hiding place, examine records, take records, alter records, replace records with fakes. They might have to rescue a person, kidnap a person, deliver a person, replace one person with another, or with a corpse, or replace a corpse with a person. They might have to drug, harm, or kill a person, including using the place a a sniping position. They might have to treat as sick or injured person. They might have to deliver a message or item, or receive a message, or persuade a person to believe a fact or to take a course of action. They might have to marry or fuck a person, or perform a wedding for two or more people. They might have to collect sample, perhaps from a person using needles and swabs and biopsy tools. They might have to search the place for evidence, place watching or listening devices, install a wiretrap, or instal a rig that will perform a practical effect (or even, I suppose, project an optical effect). They might have to stage a scene to convince onlookers of some event. They might even place an explosive or incendiary, or an aiming beacon for artillery, guided missiles, and bombs. Pretty often they have to arrest somebody. Sometimes they have to fight.
Some deeds can be done without the characters having any particular skills, so that the people with the counter-security skills to get in can do them. Other times they require special abilities, or can only be done by a particular person. As a GM I sometimes prep adventures by offering a challenge that the whole party will have a necessary role in overcoming; one way I do that is to present a challenge in which some of the characters will be needed for their particular counter-security skills and others for their unique abilities to execute the mission once the others have got them into the place. I gently discourage players from generating characters that can do it all.
Flee or pursue
Many of my favourite movies in these genres have spectacular chase scenes in them, in vehicles, one skis, on foot, and even in free fall from aircraft. In RPG adventures chases and races can be very important, as for example when the PCs have to escape from the failure of their infiltration or after the success of their plan, or when they want to prevent their quarry from escaping them. But I have never managed to make them actually exciting, so I try to keep them short. That means that it can be okay for a patient player if heir character has nothing in particular to do in them.
Running on foot is an important special case, because a foot chase can easily break out from a burglary or social scene. So everybody might have to do it. Swimming and skiing chases also have the property that you can’t have a specialist driver do it for you, but those are less prone to being forced onto PCs. All PCs have to be able to run, or to have tricks for escaping foot pursuit, or to be prepared to get captured now and then.
As for chases in aircars, boats, and cars, those vehicles often have passenger capacity to convey a whole party of three or four. Which means that one character can specialise in driving things well enough to count on showing well in chase sequences. Even if different character specialise in different vehicle types, that leaves us with all but one players not needing to drive or pilot the vehicle during any particular chases sequence. I try to make them thrilling, I try to keep them short, but nevertheless its good if any character who isn’t the driver gets something to do in chases. Shooting at enemy vehicles is nice. I guess the remote control of escort drones and ambush rigs would be another possibility. I occasionally think of e.g. a motorcyclist who can take a shortcut to escape the pursuit and then set up and ambush for the pursuers or quarry. It might work on film but I’ve never quite seen it in RPG.
Fight
RPGs generally devote a lot of attention to combat, which is appropriate because the stakes are high and a lot of players care about the details when their characters’ lives are on the line. That means that combat in RPGs — or at least, the ones I favour — tend to be time-consuming.
Fortunately, it’s very usual for every player to make sure that they have something to do in a fight, and something effective. And the structure of combat rules in RPGs is usually such that a player gets involved and their character has something to do even if they aren’t very good, which is not the case in, say, social infiltration or lockpicking.
In James Bond 007 , when characters were built on “Agent” or “Rookie” budgets and had to specialise hard, and where parties really needed a breadth of capabilities among them, so that some PCs were forced to be designed as mediocre fighters, we did see a character type (“Clunk”) that was specialised in fighting and would protect the rest of the party in a fight by cleaning three clocks per round. In games that have a finer distinction among combat skills (JB007 has only two) what I tend to see is that all characters for this sort of campaign are adept with handguns and either unarmed combat or the use of knives, and the equivalents of Clunk bring on the ultra-violence not with very high Handguns and UC skills, but by spending points to be able to cut a swathe with a long gun, and maybe be able to use spears as well as fight unarmed.
Like running away, fighting is an essential fallback for when things go badly wrong. But though characters in these genres are not supposed to be soldiers or fight pitched battles in the towns, I do quite often see plans that go “and then there will be a fight, which we will win”. And that’s fine, so long as the players stack the deck themselves and don’t count on me to do it for them.
I don’t run games with grindy combat. James Bond 007 and ForeSight aren’t really lethal, but in either one a medium or heavy wound is the system’s way of telling you that you lost the scenario and ought to bug out.
I have actually done this as part of a pentest. It is stunningly easy if people aren’t alert, and if their full-time job is letting people through they aren’t alert.