All in all I think it was a successful start to a 3:16 campaign. There was some interesting stuff there, certainly enough to play again. My estimation was that 3:16 is an excellent traditional RPG more so than a weak Story Game. As a traditional game it has all the GMiness and task resolution with some fantastic narrative elements. Let me expand on that. This game has a lot of great advice for roleplaying and storytelling. It really is what many traditional RPGs should be: Lets get to the point and play. I can easily see how this game could come up with hack after setting hack. Dungeon crawls are the least of the interesting applications here.
As a Story Game I felt that too much of the game was really dependant on the GM. As such, not that a GM is a sign of a bad Story Game, but the game requires some penache to play. I can see where without a decent GM this game would really fall flat.
But again, that is a minor point when reflecting on the source material and what, I think, 3:16 is trying to accomplish. The setting is raw and evocative, the art vague but stylistic. There are enough choices to frame the narration. I see it's predassesors as a light Dogs meets Agon. The system is less cerebral as Dogs but is enough to hang the color on. It is not really a tactical game. Other's have been dissapointed with the few tactical choices available but reading and playing the game I didn't get the idea that those tactical choices were the point.
I also think it's a big part of the GMs responsibility to create interesting NFA tests that challenge the troopers. For instance, the troopers were often at a loss differentiating between illusions and targets. I put them at -1 FA on occasion when the fiction indicated that it was really confusing and let them make an NFA roll to differentiate targets thus mitigating the penalty for the remainder of the encounter.
I do have a long term plan. I'd like to do a little time travel and use the HUMP for flashbacks and as a scrimage line. I plan on doing at least one planet as a space battle where they board an enemy ship and culminating in encounters with "corrupt troopers." I am interested to see how resilient the form/powers/terrain combos will be as we cross off more and more options. I don't like to drift rules too much early in the process. I was kinda disappointed in the artist names for planets although I have determined that I will try to use them for ideas by finding a painting from the artist to base the missions on.
Thier First Planet: Bosch 9 - Highest FA - 2 11 - Low gravity 20 - SIrens 10 - Impair
I decided that the actual sirens were going to be a combination of hallucinations and paranoid troopers caught in the snare of psionic flora.
I wanted the first planet they faced to be cerebral but feral so I described a rich lanscape akin to a YES album cover with lots of flying fauna and exposed root systems to broad-leafed plants. The sky is stratified in multi-colored clouds.
So I have been following a lot of the APs for 3:16 and decided that I wanted to use many of the ideas but try something fresh at the same time.
I only had two players to start and another stepped in a little later. I have four possible other players and I made a character myself in hopes that over the course of a longer campaign I can swap out. I realized through reading the book and APs that much of the really interesting stuff in 3:16 happen over the long game. We had a good enough time that I am willing to commit to that so 3:16 is going to be the game I play for the next month or so. I wanted to see how the game adjusted to drop ins and such.
Sgt. "Flicker" Corporal "Hoss" - my character and NPC Trooper Rylie Trooper Finch
The opening scene is of the two troopers (our Sgt was coming in a little late and our Corporal was my character and was an NPC. I was a bit dickish and included him in the number figuring). They woke up in a cryo chamber shortly after crossing the "The HUMP," a band of space devoid of any object. It is a pinnacle of human exploration. Once beyond the hump, humanity is behind the 3:16 and it's their job to secure space beyond. Of course, as human occupied space expands so does the area one has to secure and extermination becomes far more cost effective than treaty maintanence. Additionally, strange stuff is known to happen in The HUMP and thus why Troopers are put under. In fact, the powers-that-be deploy troopers from cryo as needed.
There were red alert lights on and the cryo chambers were counting down to release times. One trooper was trying to leave the cryo-chamber early even though he wasn't 100% but failed (NFA) and found himself with an E wound. They were all alone. I described them on a catwalk looking at rows of cryo-chambers on a rotating cylinder (catwalk is in the center). The ships AI directed them to the prep area to put on their gear then the briefing room. They showed up and again were the only ones there and the red alert lights were still flashing. They found their Sgt. unconscious, drunk and lying behind the podium.
I decided that the current officers for this directive are advanced AI - namely the ships. The Lt. in charge was named Dietricht. Of course his voice was calm, monotone and soothing. It definately has a personality, though. I figure when character's advance then they have the opportunity to begin mixing human and AI officers.
The Sgt noticed that other troopers had already been deployed to the planet even though their briefing stated that this was a first contact situation. She was locked out of any details and Lt refused to elucidate any further (failed NFA). So the goal is establish frst contact and report back.
Scene 1 (four Threat Tokens) Everyone did a NFA to establish how they would handle the low grav for the rest of the mission and applied session wide modifiers for Dominance only. Soon they see some people in diaphinous civies with a skimmer having a picnic. Two men and a woman (our party was two women and a man). They established contact and I rolled Dominance. I started out with trying for E damage (convincing the troopers to remove their Armor in the poisonous atmosphere) while they did some recon. The guy that succeeded (Finch) was trying to identify the speeder so I explained that it looked TOO familiar, that it was a speeder his father had had. He broke the illusion and next round just started firing. The two girls were roped into almost getting nekkid with the illusions. One used her armor to stop the damage (Flicker) while the other took the shot (Rylie). Rylie found herself wrapped up in thorny vines while Sgt. Flicker was attacked by her armor getting damaged. Rylie had to do an NFA to put her armor back on during the encounter.
Scene 2 (Five Threat Tokens) This was a tough encounter since I dropped their numbers by 2 with Impair. They see some troopers down in a valley close to a massive grove of trees and what they think is the "plant city." The troopers are regrouping and dragging their wounded to safety. Approaching the troopers the squad were fired upon. Here I was careful not to decide if the troopers were illusions or not. I was allowing their rolls to determine that. We finally figured out that some of the troopers were fake and were plants trying to fire guns - I rolled really badly from this point forward. There was an interlude where Flicker found herself the only able bodied NCO (the field promoted one, Greggor, looked to her for guidance). Finch is pushing for the group to strike back while Sgt Flicker wants to regroup to the deployment pods. Both succeed NFA rolls so the group is split (alhtough Finch stays with his squad).
Scene 3 (Six Threat Tokens) Now there are plants in the grove that are leading fooled troopers in some sort of ballroom scene. There are the three AWOL troopers going to blow up the grove with bandoleers of grenades they scavanged from falled troopers. First everyone tries t be the person that saves the duped troopers from being blown up by their fellows. I liked that everyone had their own way of appraoching the problem. The Sgt won and convinced the troopers that they were cowards. Everyone began firing, some blindly, at the ballroom scene. Fince was doing very well and thus we saw the plans die in the perspective of the troopers at the "party" wondering why thier hosts we getting shot to pieces. This scene started with the Sgt taking some E damage which I described at FIinch shooting her. The player wasn't happy with penalizing Finch's player since it was the GM that decided his illusionary involvment was up to the GM so she did not react as such. Sgt Flicker got the final blow.
I sympathise with your luck rolling dice -- I rolled pretty badly a few missions ago when I GMed and my aliens got stomped on, but this weekend my dice were on fire. I kept hitting 7s and 8s with an AA of 8, I was toasting Strengths and Weaknesses out of the group (and even got a PC kill too after bleeding both a Strength and a Weakness out of him).