How would I go about running an MGS game? I was thinking about the PCs being their own freakshow team...

How would I go about running an MGS game? I was thinking about the PCs being their own freakshow team, with their own powers and specialties, but I don't want to get too crazy with it. Other alternative is making them part of an outer heaven/diamond dogs PMC. There was some homebrewed plotline of an MGS with the numbers filed off about chernobyl or something, anybody have that? We used to have some great threads of people making their own crazy teams.

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>How would I go about running an MGS game?
Everyone is Snake.
This is what Les Enfants Terribles project was REALLY about.

>plotline of an MGS with the numbers filed off about chernobyl or something, anybody have that?
This?

Well the system needs to be able to handle Tactical play, and support themes of Espionage and Action. It namely should specialize in that rather than be a generic system adapted to it. Supernatural themes do exist, but are incredibly minor.

Players and Major Enemies go by code-names usually denoting abilities or certain themes that want to be explored. Animals and specialties are common ones. The names of enemies can express a different theme than the Players.

Once the game has started GM can only communicate with the players through the Codec, as can players not in the immediate vicinity of one another.

Each campaign is a set mission with it's own parameters and requirements to complete. These expectations can change depending on the events that happen during the mission. Missions are very likely more than they initially seem to be.

?

Never played it.

It seems to be a more concise version of a d20 system. That could very well work if players are already accustomed to it.

I've been wondering the same, user.

I keep going back and forth, unable to decide between something like FATE, since it'll be easy to slap together the batshit character concepts, but then I think it'll be lacking in crunch when it comes to gear and stuff like that - so I lean towards GURPS, which I've always found too crunchy and simulationist in the past but I'm starting to like the versatility of it.

I think that if I cut down GURPS combat to a slightly more abstract system, it might work.

I've also been thinking about using Open D6/Minisix and just hacking together my own attributes and skills, which would be a nice middle ground.

I'd lean away from FATE, it only seems to work with very specific groups. Savage Worlds might be worth a look

Are you ?

I'm still standing by Strike! (tactical is covered, has optional rules that fit for espionage/action), but you could attempt Savage Worlds or Mutants and Masterminds as well. Possibly GURPS or Hero if you really like to crunch it.

Shadowrun works, since it is designed in part to allow OPERATORS OPERATING and has tech levels up to the peak of what you see in the mainline MGS series, while also having magic and a basically-magical internet dimension to cover the NANOMACHINES shit and the AI shenanigans.

It also has a fair degree of lethality while allowing PCs or NPCs to be so much more powerful than regular dudes they might as well go home. If you start your dudes off with higher than usual Karmagen or Prioritygen they should be able to make a Cobra-grade type of dude.

But keep in mind that Sadhowrun is very crunchy so it takes a fair degree of understanding to play well, and the Shadowrun setting is strongly built into the rules so you'd need to basically make your own splatbook for it to work properly. Unless you're running one major campaign at least, it won't be worth your time.

I've been thinking of doing a similar style of game and found a free system called Ops and Tactics. It focuses on semi-realistic combat with modern weaponry and has splats for magic that you could just flavor as NANOMACHINES.

I've heard good things about Ops and Tactics, though I haven't seen the splats.

Bump

>I've heard good things about Ops and Tactics

Hooray!

>though I haven't seen the splats.

Well, I'll post them.

OaTs can handle Tactical Espionage action and gunfights really well, but outside of crazy powers and stuff, you may have a bit of a hard time.

Here's Advanced Arms. May be necissary for what you're running.

>Shadowrun

This is one of my other recomendations, outside of OaTs.
I'm biased tho

Here's modern Magika, It's got magic and stuff.

This is FID, the Field Identification Guide.

It's got monsters and soldiers and junk.

And the core rulebook.

It's..got..guns? Lots of guns. Some would say, too many guns.

But not me! Cause I like guns.

Not OP but thanks for the PDFs.
Looks fun.

No problem.

Feel free to email me at [email protected] for any concerns, sudgestions, questions or complaints

Yay someone saved my write faggotry

Sadly I'm at work so I don't have the character profiles for the Black Star Group or the art a drawing did for it

This un? I was in that thread, I had posted my own freakshow team that got a drawing but I don't have the art for this one.

Very cool, is this the one based of d20 modern?

Make the players into their own PMC.
Either give them a name for the PMC or let them decide one as a group. It will let you get a vibe for how well they are going to co-operate.

I'm not sure I'm ready for the Big Dick Dogs

I'm not usually big on d20 and it's derivatives, but this looks really cool and seems to suit the genre, whereas most d20 iterations just force a square peg into a high-fantasy-shaped hole.

Loosely, yep.

Yeah, we had to go a log way to get away from that.

bump

This looks awesome, only thing I have to say - I get why you've used calibre for determining damage, but it's a pain in the arse to have to flick through the book and find the damage separate from the weapon table entry - is there a particular reason you didn't just duplicate that info in the weapon tables themselves?

Dog-Bear

Yeah, the game kind of assumes you're a gun nut and have already memorized the damage for each calibre type...which is not good for beginners.

As a Britcuck my experience of guns is solely secondhand from movies, games, documentaries, and Hickock45, but I do have an interest in the mechanics of it all.

I have a general understanding of calibres and whatnot, it's just that I don't know how their power is expressed in this particular ruleset.

I'm thinking about using this over GURPS though. I like the look of GURPS but the idea of explaining the system to my players makes my head hurt, this should work since they're familiar with D&D.

I love how every Metal Gear project that Veeky Forums collectively works on always manages to feel so authentic.
The themes people come up with and the way they get implemented into the characters backstory and personality are always fascinating like in Anyone remember that other Metal Gear antagonist team Veeky Forums came up with?
It featured people like a sniper that turned each battle into a spectacle akin to a rock and roll concert, he studied his enemies psych profiles and used a megaphone to provoke his enemies into attacking so he could get easy shots.
He was created after the the exchange of "how do we make a sniper that isn't just a The End rip off? "By making him the opposite of The End"

Or a psychic that comes from a long standing family of other psychics but the more you fight her the more you start seeing that she doesn't actually has any powers.
Hallucinations are holograms, telekinesis are strategically placed magnets and the mind reading is just her her studying your psych profiles and cold reading the rest.
She was ashamed of being the only family member that never developed powers and spend all her time developing the skills needed to pretend (she build all the equipment herself).

There was a bunch of more to it like the rest of the antagonist team or a full on codec support crew, one of which was the sister of the fake-psychic who works as a profiler for the FBI.
I wish I still had the links to the threads, that shit was pretty cash.

They wouldn't fit, and there is just no good way to add them to the stat line that I've been satisfied with.

You're supposed to write them down on your character sheet(which is on the blog at opsandtactics.blogspot.com) and be done with it. The books are primarily used as a reference.

What would be the best system for running a PMC?

Depends on what your defintion of "Running" is.

If you're talking about Modern Combat Ops, a bunch have been mentioned already(Ops and Tactics, GURPS, Shadowrun). Twilight 2013 works, if you're willing to put in the work.

Now if you're talking about running the financial aspect of it, that's probably best left to a system with good "Money Combat" system.

What system would have "money combat"?

Monopoly?

So you'd have to rename everything and then add some sort of raid mechanic to capture other people's stuff, with property developments making this harder and some way of building up your own force?

I'm not quire sure. I just made up "Money Combat" on the fly.

Honestrly stuff dealing with the paperwork aspect of any buisness is shitty. Just RP it.

You have to be Kojima crazy to come up with this stuff, which is a combination of being willing to go completely over the top and a meticulous devotion to unimportant details that no one else would ever care about.

Metal Gear appeals to the best traits of Veeky Forums.

You're probably right.

I don't, but I have the unfinished drawing somebody did of mine.
The Viet Cong death squad Con Trai Tan Sat "Children of Massace".
-Rotting Man, assassin specializing in blades whose body is slowly decaying.
-Sealed Boy, child who got his limbs blown off by landmine now sealed within a stolen soviet prototype mech suit
-Burned Woman, her body covered with burns from napalm, destroying her nerves so her body now runs at a much higher heat, enough that she can concentrate it in one place to melt metal.
-Dead Elder, ancient shaman who has been shot hundreds of times, uses ancient techniques to keep himself and the Children alive and to increase their powers
-Orange, a vietnamese child malformed from exposure to agent orange, skin a strong orange and dotted with cancerous growths, posessing strong psychic powers.

I really want to see this team you're talking about, that sounds amazing.

It was pretty wild.
Their leader was a Big Boss wannabe that used BB's style to convince people to join him, he did it right down to wearing a fake eye patch.
I think he was even designed (if you could call 40 fa/tg/uys throwing suggestions in the air "designing") to be as infuriating as possible, quoting legends like Big Boss but always taking it out of context to fit what he is saying or even his name being straight up "Bigger Boss".

He was essentially the anti thesis to every other Metal Gear villain, where Zero, Big Boss or Solidus all believed they were doing the right thing even if it got their hands dirty, our OC made all kinds of silver tongued promises to make people work for him but was only out for personal gain.

There was tons of other stuff of which I only remember small parts, like the support character FBI profiler from this post only being a projection created by the fake psychic to fuck with the players, this twist was only supposed to be revealed late in the mission after the players already made friends with her.

I also remember some vague Aztec themes, something about ancient indian magic that could be used to a new sort of Metal Gear, which is what the antagonists were after/the protagonists wanted to secure and after the Metal Gear gets defeated Bigger Boss pulls an Armstrong and is even stronger if you fight him personally.

Seriously there way way more shit I only remember fractions of like a twist being that you were working for Patriot proxies the whole time or another team member that walked on stilts and specialized in laying traps.
I'm going to take a look maybe I'll find it myself.

Anyway what I wanted to say is god bless the creativity of 100 autists thrown together given basic instructions.

Id use Dark Heresy and tone it down a bunch to fit. Less crazy crits. This will allow for cyborg ninjas and stealth snakes. You could even take some pages from Rising and MGS4 and have them be a PMC subcontractor.

I wonder how we could harness this enormous power

We should turn it into a weapon to surpass Metal Gear.

So, how do you run a campaign where the PCs ARE the bosses?

Carefully.

(1/2)

You could do the basic Metal Gear formular from a different viewpoint.

Usually the enemy boss squads in Metal Gear games were just in the middle of a going rogue against whomever they worked for before (probably the US government) to complete a mission that the squad leader set them

This mission can have symbolic meaning for each squad member as if it's something that's related to their backstory/personality, if you actually want to go full Kojima it can be tricky to figure out what that mission should be so maybe try to plan ahead and choreograph the character creation so that each backstory fits your narrative.

After establishing the characters and the goals (maybe even including a briefing session where the leader convinces them to go rogue) the squad goes to work.
At this stage they are not traitors yet so they can move freely in position to start their real mission, once ready all hell breaks lose.
The local soldiers don't know whose command to listen to, the radio support is asking what the fuck they are doing.

(2/2)

Now comes the real game, the PCs are trying to accomplish their goals while halfway through the mission the government responds by sending in soldiers themselves to neutralize you, I'll leave it up to you if this is supposed to be one super soldier or perhaps another squad of freaks with their own abilities.

What I imagine could be difficult is actually making accomplishing the mission engaging.
Usually in Metal Gear games the villain squad didn't meet much resistance, Shadow Moses for example was completely empty except for soldiers loyal to Foxhound, Big Shell too only had minor soldier squads that could easily be dealth with by Dead Cell.

Makes sure there is plenty of resistence for the squad to fight.
One example: The group are trying to crash a meeting of major world leaders to mind control them but it has such a high security level that even the squad isn't allowed in there.
When they arrive and it gets made clear that they won't leave just because they were asked to they start assaulting the location until they reach their goal.
The government response comes halfway through from outsite meaning that they will have to fight on two fronts and even split the party to handle all threats.

Well, when I was writing the Tunguska Strain scenario, I was trying to keep in mind that Metal Gear is heavily based on real world urban legends and the myths surrounding the cold war and espionage, and is usually grounded in real life events. It's kind of like a less edgy world of darkness. So it was important I start with events that ACTUALLY happened in history, and twist them to suit my needs. So I started looking for historical meteor impacts, and low and behold I got Tunguska lake. In real life the Tunguska Impact, aside from being quite big, is also quite unimportant - the object disintegrated on impact. But what if it didn't? What if the soviets recovered it? And what if that turned out to be very significant because of SPACE BACTERIA?

From there I needed a way to tie it into Metal Gears other major theme (besides the military industrial complex): Nuclear Proliferation and destruction. The series is all about how close we are to doomsday at any given time because we've built weapons capable of annihilating the planet and the only thing keeping us from that annihilation is Mutually Assured Destruction. Most MGS villains are out to seize control or subvert MAD for their own gain or goals. I thought it might be interesting if The Assembly (a loose plot thread never tied up or mentioned by Kojima again) had a goal that didn't involve using MAD, but flipping the whole table by invoking it.

That lead to The Tunguska Strain's individual theme (which all Metal Gear stories have), trans-and-post humanism.

So if I have any advise it would be to crib real history as much as possible, because in MGS everything is connected and nothing is a coincidence: this will make things feel less detached despite how wacky it gets. This was one of MGSV's greatest weaknesses in my opinion, as aside from a tertiary link to the Soviet-Afghan war and the growth of the PMC, it wasn't linked to the real world much at all. You could argue that MGS1 and MGS2 weren't based on actual events AT ALL, but they WERE loosely inspired by actual nuclear policy: Shadow Moses doesn't exist, but it takes place in an actual island chain called the FOX islands, and nuclear waste repositories like Shadow Moses DO exist. It's a give and a take: MGS plays fast and loose with reality and facts, but there is (usually) something to anchor it down. I would argue the plot of the series slipped in quality the further Kojima slid from reality.

So start with an idea. Look for a historic disaster or event - the more innocuous and mysterious the better - and go full "what if" from there.

So what actual events was MGS2 inspired by/based on?

None, which is probably why it's considered the weirdest/wackiest. MGS2 was itself, a satire of MGS1, as well as a look at contemporary conspiracy culture complete with strange code words, secret military conspiracies, the president being kidnapped with no one being told, the Illuminati, super AI, etc. MGS1 was a look at nuclear proliferation. MGS2 was a look at nuclear proliferation if all the things people thought were true, were true. MGS3 was a look at how we GOT to where we are. MGS4 was about where we MIGHT be going.

MGSV was fan service.

>Burned Woman, her body covered with burns from napalm, destroying her nerves so her body now runs at a much higher heat, enough that she can concentrate it in one place to melt metal.

That is so nonsensical it's simply perfect.

...

>I don't want to get too crazy with it

Then you're not in the spirit of MGS. The two things you absolutely need to capture the right tone and feel of MGS are as follows: handling the stupidest shit imaginable with a straight face, and an active, seething contempt for your audience. The game must say "I hate that I produced this game, I hate that you are consuming it, fuck you."

It also helps if you read some kind of science article, fundamentally misunderstand it, and base your entire story on it. This works from everything from Mendelian genetics (MGS) to cultural theory (MGS2) to linguistics (MGS5) to just the basic facts of how day and night work (Metal Gear 2).

>seething contempt for your audience

Kojima loves his audience

it's facts and science he hates

You're thinking of Millar

Or to use a more japanese example, Hideaki Anno

Or to use a japanese VIDYA example, Tomonobu Itagaki

He was a bit mad at them during the MGS2 era, where a lot of that game was taking digs at fans but even then I don't think he had contempt so much as frustration

He made MGS2 in an attempt to broaden videogames demographic and it failed miserably. Raiden was an attempt to appeal to new fans/females, and his existing fanbase rebelled. But yeah all of MGS2 was basically satire of MGS1

MGS3 was when he decided to just make shit he thought was cool and made a James Bond movie and thought it was cool

He tried to be subversive again in 4 to mixed results.

I defense of MGS2, the Patriots' spiel to Raidan about the future of culture in a world increasingly connected by the internet has literally come true. He nailed that shit.

MGS2 was later-day redeemed by it becoming reality, as well as MGR making Raiden cool (finally), yeah

...

Rolled 29, 86 = 115 (2d100)

THUDNERSTORM
GIBBON

I don't know what kind of schtick that involves, but I do know it means goofy long arms.

Rolling.

Or not I see.

All that writing is ruined for me because the author doesn't know how to use apostrophes or the difference between affect and effect.

There's a pretty fun system for exactly this kind of game: press.invincible.ink/what-is-dog-bear/

Basically the players are agents who have already completed the mission and are telling the story to the boss, who asks questions. Comes out like a codec call.

order every PC to smoke a pack of marlboro reds before playing and to gargle a mouthful of bleach.

Then use walkie-talkies and only refer to each other by codename.

affirmative grenade wasp.

Rolling

Shouldn't it not be the final two numbers, but the final sets of two? Since 00 can fill in for 100. That'd make you Praying Chimpanzee

Rolled 11, 47 = 58 (2d100)

Rallin

Always remember: in MGS, thoughts, feelings, and ideals gave a real weight.

Volgin wanted to "unite" the world. Armstrong wanted a world free of politicians abusing their lower at the detriment of the people. Raiden fights to protect the weak.

Spread the memes of your game into the PCs, and the players.

Rolled 93, 97 = 190 (2d100)

SNIPER HEDGEHOG, WHO SURROUNDS HIMSELF WITH A THORNY DEFENSIVE SHIELD. YOU CAN ONLY STRIKE HIM FROM THE FRONT THROUGH HIS SCOPE

HAMMER CORGI, A YOUNG WOMAN WHO HAS SEEN IT ALL ON THE FIELD OF BATTLE AND STILL RETAINS HER SMILING DEMEANOR...UNTIL SHE BLUDGEONS YOU TO DEATH

Rolled 88, 41 = 129 (2d100)

Rollan.

METAL GEAR?

Who knew that when you make a sequel to a franchise that's a giant middle finger to itself and its players, you end up not pleasing anyone?

There's plenty of room for cheesy fanservice for women in Metal Gear, and there's already been tons of it, but you can't really sell a sequel to a franchise by literally making fun of the franchise itself and anyone who might be drawn to it. That's not attracting new fans; it's just shooing away old ones.

>Who knew that when you make a sequel to a franchise that's a giant middle finger to itself and its players, you end up not pleasing anyone?
MGS2 is actually a personal favorite of mine but I know I'm in a minority. Most everyone else picks 1 or 3.

It's seriously crazy how much of internet culture MGS2 predicted.
Granted, Kojima wasn't the one who invented the, dare I say it, Meme of the underlying philosphy but he did manage to present the philosophy in an amazing way.

>YOU CAN ONLY STRIKE HIM FROM THE FRONT THROUGH HIS SCOPE
Wasn't there one famous sniper who actually managed to do that?
He has the only ever confirmed kill by shooting another sniper through their scope.

>Wasn't there one famous sniper who actually managed to do that?
No, even perfectly lined up it's impossible due to all the shit actually in the scope, the bullet gets deflected.

The White Feather allegedly did it, but there are people like () and Mythbusters who claim it can't be done. I haven't seen enough detailed study on it myself, so I'm personally willing to take the White Feather more or less at his word.

orteil.dashnet.org/randomgen/?gen=CxPbZAMS
Use link related for everyone of them and make up their powers based on their names
>tfw avenging goat

What if a character wanted to playing a Rising style cyborg?

They seem pretty OP, so how would you take it?

It's like a jedi in a star wars game. Either everybody is or nobody is, otherwise you're gonna end up fracturing the group. Only exception is if everyone agrees to work with it and not be douches.

>Gentle Cardinal

This won't hurt a bit.

RICHELIEU, YOU DOG! Don't think we are unaware of your part in the death of Buckingham!