For the record

[telerib]

I decided that the Spider needed some alone-time in San Francisco before the party caught up with him. It would make things waaay more interesting. How to accomplish this?

Why, attack NYC with zepplins, of course.

*insert mad scientist villain here, who kidnaps the President to force US Steel, GM and Ford to turn their industrial capabilities to making robot soldiers to fight in the "coming war."*

PCs obligingly decide to rescue the President.

Is all this a stall? Oh hell yeah. It also fits back into EVIL and that cast of characters, so it isn't a totally *random* stall.

PCs look into the situation in Pittsburgh and Detroit. Some schmuck they've never heard of is running the factory floor in Detroit; Gunter Schlosser is in charge of Pittsburgh steel production. They met him during the Sky Pirates adventure.

So they go to Pittsburgh, with the thought of trying to get information out of Gunter. Which they do. And find mail from the Mad Scientist, postmarked Detroit. And we run out of time. Detroit next week.

One player wondered why they were going to Pittsburgh first, instead of Detroit. "Just because there's a named NPC there?" he wondered. The other PCs insisted that yes, this was a good reason. Post-game, he told me that he was hep to my "stalling" - feeding a named NPC to the group to get them to go there first.

Now, for the record: I never encouraged them to go to Pittsburgh or to Detroit. While the entire game was a stall, very true, Gunter Schlosser was in Pittsburgh because the Mad Scientist needed a competent lieutenant to oversee operations there *because he was (in or near) Detroit.* He could use Unnamed Goon #36 as the Detroit foreman because he's close enough to those factories to micromanage if he feels like it.

I really half-expected them to go straight to Detroit if they had recalled that Gunter had been taking orders from someone, and assumed that his boss would be at the other industrial center. Hey, I had ideas for conveyor-belt fight-scenes either way: one with molten steel, one with bandsaws and welding tools. It's all good.

Also for the record... I wouldn't be above using their metagame tricks against them to influence the party's decisions. :-) It just happens that it wasn't the case this time.

Comments

[edg.livejournal.com]

You may be amused to find out that Dave and I had an hour-long discussion about why we should let the President die, based on (caffeine-fueled, probably) speculation about the global geopolitical situation. (We determined that by letting the President die and then hoping really hard that diplomatic negotiation failed between the US and Germany, we could prevent the Great Depression and our timeline's World War II, although we'd probably end up nuking Havana or Beijing in the 60s.)

[telerib.livejournal.com]

Interesting...

I guess you mean "we" as in "if we were the VP"? 'Cause as it stands, the NPCs aren't going to "let" the President die, and Dr. Krause has no particular reason to assassinate him as long as he's getting what he wants.

If the PCs do nothing, Krause gets his army, (although the US has some severe problems with its steel supply for a while) and the President is released, unharmed.

Then the question is, what does Krause *do* with his metal army of 5[3] armored robots? All the other inventions that were supposed to make war pointless or too dangerous to contemplate never worked, from the crossbow to the airplane. Students of history might be justified in thinking that these metal men will be no different...

[edg.livejournal.com]

Well, okay, this all ties into Dave and Moe's Master Plan to sabotage the steel production, so that it's producing weak steel that will break under stress, thus driving Krause to kill the President in a fit of rage...

...okay, it sounded better last night.

As for the armored robots, yeah, that was my thinking too. Because, frankly, metal men are great against infantry and (maybe) cavalry, but send in a few B-2s and there won't be quite so many metal men for the ground forces to deal with.

On the other hand, maybe he just wants a mining force that'll work 24/7 with no complaints, can tolerate extremes of heat and cold that would faze even the mightiest of mere mortal men, and aren't susceptible to things like fumes or blacklung.