MGT Only: Mercenary Second Edition Playtest - Recruiting

[rancke]

I see where you are going with this, but here is the thing - we don't really care about individuals (or, at least, the players won't), as we are hiring on by the squad, platoon or company. The whole point of the recruitment roll is to find the type of people you are specifically looking for ('I want 12 burly chaps who know how to use a rifle well!'), rather than grabbing the first bunch of Muppets, and then figuring out who can do the job.

Do you actually know what the players (and referees) care about? And shouldn't you be supporting more than one kind of play to allow different people to care about different modes of play? It's my guess that hiring mercenaries by the individual would appeal to simulationist leanings in that it's closer to the way it works real life.

I'm not a simulationist myself and a way to skip all the fuss and recruit by the squad, platoon, and company is definitely a very good feature. But I'd say that there should ALSO be a way to hire by the individual.

The only mercenary recruitment I've been involved in was when we wanted to hire a thousand mercenaries and our ref didn't want us to but didn't want to arbitrarily forbid it. So he told us he wanted UWP of every mercenary we hired. Fortunately our ref was a By-the-Book type, so I went to Porozlo and started recruiting. One of the other players wrote a program for his Sinclair that generated Traveller characters, and I blush to admit that I actually rolled up 108 mercenary characters¹.

We got some very nice characters, including an ex-general with Tactic-6 and several people with Instruction-4. We had a lot of fun working out training classes for students with various skills-3 so that they could get Instruction-3² and train others to Skill-2.

¹ I still have them in a drawer somewhere. If anyone wants photocopies of 108 Mercenary and is willing to cover the expenses, let me know.

² Much later I found out that you can't teach Instruction, but we believed you could. We never deliberately misled our ref.​

Anyway, while I'd probably draw the line above the level of a platoon, as a player I would probably prefer hiring by the individual for small units like squads and platoons.

So I think there's good reason to include the option.


Hans

 

[Condottiere]

Hiring one thousand mercenaries anywhere in civilization is going to incur official and unofficial scrutiny; even in Tortuga or Sixth World Seattle.

 

[MongooseMatt]

Do you actually know what the players (and referees) care about?

We do. Or, better put, we know how people feel about the rules we have done up to now, and they follow a certain ethos when it comes to complexity and granularity.

The assumption is that rolling up loads of characters is not something most groups enjoy. They want to actually play the game.

And shouldn't you be supporting more than one kind of play to allow different people to care about different modes of play?

Yes we should - up to a point. If we support all styles of play, then the book is going to be a 1,000 pages thick and of use to no one.

These rules are designed to recruit relatively large numbers of people at a time, with some variance in how the players can go about it (variable wages suggested here, for example, are now in). They are specifically not about hiring one man though, it has to be said, there is enough for a referee to work on in these rules to allow him to wing that.

 

[aramis]

Hiring that one key specialist is a common enough issue in military/paramilitary recruiting that it should be covered.

 

[Condottiere]

Hire headhunters: they know the local talent and can vouch for them.

 

[rancke]

The assumption is that rolling up loads of characters is not something most groups enjoy. They want to actually play the game.

I can certainly understand why few people would want to roll up loads of characters. But I find it very difficult to believe that rules for rolling up limited numbers of characters wouldn't be useful to a great number of groups.

Yes we should - up to a point. If we support all styles of play, then the book is going to be a 1,000 pages thick and of use to no one.

It seems to be a very low point you're aiming at here. I'm not myself a simulationist, but it's my impression that simulationism is one of the most common styles of play. And rules for recruiting people retail would, I believe, be useful for a lot more styles than just simulationist campaigns.


Hans

 

[Vladika]

Matt:

You know why you are doing Mercenary 2? Because Mercenary 1 didn't measure up.

From the way you are ignoring fans here, I already see the need for Mercenary 3...:devil:

 

[MongooseMatt]

Hiring that one key specialist is a common enough issue in military/paramilitary recruiting that it should be covered.

This is a good point, and it was going to motivate me to have a box text entitled 'But I Only Want One.'

However...

Is this not already covered by the rules as presented?

When you do your recruitment, you are under no obligation to take everyone who applies - they really are just applications.

So, you spec your Specialist (choose what skills you are after), put up the advertising (make the recruitment roll), and see who applies (number rolled for).

You need only hire one, and discard the other CVs/resumes.


Would that work?

 

[aramis]

This is a good point, and it was going to motivate me to have a box text entitled 'But I Only Want One.'

However...

Is this not already covered by the rules as presented?

When you do your recruitment, you are under no obligation to take everyone who applies - they really are just applications.

So, you spec your Specialist (choose what skills you are after), put up the advertising (make the recruitment roll), and see who applies (number rolled for).

You need only hire one, and discard the other CVs/resumes.


Would that work?

Yep - the important thing is that it's explicit that you don't need to take all recruits, and the sidebar is a perfect way to do it. Keep in mind also: people will misapply it for hiring ship crews - which, despite being out of place for mercenary, should really be covered simply because recruiting is fundamentally still recruiting no matter what you're looking for.

 

[MongooseMatt]

Keep in mind also: people will misapply it for hiring ship crews - which, despite being out of place for mercenary, should really be covered simply because recruiting is fundamentally still recruiting no matter what you're looking for.

We have hit this several times with the new Mercenary, having crossover points with ship stuff.

By and large, we are going to leave ship stuff alone (people are welcome to misapply as they see fit) because a) this book is getting large enough as it is and b) more importantly, if we do a second edition of High Guard (which is not beyond the realms of possibility, though I am not sure I fancy tackling that myself) that is the book it will appear in.

To further explain...

We are not looking at doing a revised/second edition of the core rulebook, in any shape or form at the moment. However, we _are_ starting to think about what such a beast would look like. That means every supplement we do now is with a possible/potential revised rulebook in mind, be it with rules, graphical layout or anything else.

You can see this with our look at the Gun Combat/Heavy Weapons skills - what we decide here will very likely be what is done in a revised edition of the core book. The same applies to the vehicle and building design systems, and (you haven't seen it yet) the double page layout of careers, which now include the D66 events table, rather than having it wrap around to a third page.

So, all your suggestions are getting taken on board at the moment, even if they might not necessarily appear in this specific Mercenary book. A lot of planning going on at the moment...