a few concepts

[nominesine]

I'd be an american, making an anti american mission... during a time when america is engaged in a foreign conflict.  

Well it seems you will be stuck with making US side missions until the cows decide to come home again  

But honestly... why do you need to have a bad side and a good side? Why not consider them to be just different sides? That willing suspension of disbelief pretty much sums up the gaming experience for me.

[Roni]

How about a mission with lots of good sides versus one bad side (or one good side vs lots of bad sides, depending upon your point of view) ?

Did anyone ever see "55 days in Peking" ?  It was about the Boxer Rebellion in China against Imperialist colonisation in 1900.  The Boxers rose up, killed lots of civilians and drove the rest back to the diplomatic quarter where they were put under siege for 55 days before being relieved by a column sent in from the coast.

The neat thing was that the "good" guys (ie - we westerners) were made up of British regulars, US Marines, German naval troops, Italian carabinieres and a smatering of troops from a half a dozen other countries, all working together.  14 years later we were all killing each other in France but for that one period we were all on the same side.

Now imagine the same mission set today (ie - 1980's).  You could set a mission in Iran in 1980 and have it that the students tried to take out both the US AND the Soviet embassies at the same time.  Working together, the US and Soviets fought off the initial attacks before being laid siege by Iranian regulars (al Quds and Revolutionary Guards).

Now US planes flying from Soviet airbases and a carrier in the gulf fly overwatch while various other nations try to get extra troops to the US and Soviet compounds.  First the Brits send in their embassy guards, then the Italians, then the Poles and so on.

You could make heaps of missions around this one concept.  Special forces dropping in to beef up the defences (don't drop off target or you're toast !), British troops trying to cut their through the back streets of Teheran to the Soviet compund, US attack helos flying from a secret base in the Iranian desert, spetsnaz and black ops working together to take out the Revolutinary Guards HQ, the possibilities are endless !

And of course if you wanted to be fair you could throw together a few missions where you played a brave revolutionary leading your volunteers against the Western infidels and godless communists in the name of Khomeinie and Allah !

I know I'd play in that mission !



roni

[Ade]

Pushing it a bit to describe Westerners as the 'good guys' in the boxer rebellion - after all, our main interest in China was the highly lucrative opium trade. I see your point about the irony of WWI and the Iranian mission ideas are very interesting. Makes a campaign a lot more interesting though if you can use the storyline to make the player unsure whether he is on the good guys' side...

One way you could work moral dilemmas into a campaign would be as follows.  Let's say the player is a member of an antiterrorist unit. At the end of a mission, your team has captured a terrorist.  You know they are planning a major attack. You have the option of torturing the prisoner to find out what is going to happen.  If you refuse to use torture, the prisoner doesn't talk and you have to play one or two extra missions to get the information.  Or, the terrorist attack takes place and an AI character close to the player is killed. There could be other consequences later on, like certain AI characters will or won't help you in certain situations depending what happened.

The player should not know in advance what the consequences of making the 'moral' or 'immoral' choice will be. Just like real life, you have to think about it...

Ade

[Roni]

Hi Ade

Point very well taken.  In actual fact every single western nation (including the US) were in China to carve it up and extract completely ruinous trade terms from the Chinese.  Every one of us there were guilty of the worst excesses of colonialism and imperialism - so if anyone wanted to lay calim to being the "good guys" it would have to be the Chinese.

Still, the show was a "ripping yarn" and boys own adventure stuff - godless hordes of screaming yellow peril chinese, how could you not be drawn in to that fantasy as a 12 year old ? !

I'd love to see how they'd make that movie today - a dark and brooding anti-hero, forced to exploit the natives in his role as a shill for a multinational corporation, lots of bullet time and slow-mo dancing daggers type sequences, western corruption vs eastern purity.  That sort of crap.


No, my point was that just about any situation could be drawn to make one side favourable over another.  And a multi-nation mission would be heap of fun, no matter who was "good" and who was "bad".  How about a multi-lateral Bosnian intervention in 1994 - who'd be the "good guys" then ?

I like the idea of a moral dilemma type mission.  I had an RPG idea like this many years ago.  The players were supposed to be a small group of Wehrmacht regulars posted to the Ukraine in 1942.  They were to have seven guys to patrol 60,000 square kilometes of area and jut one directive - keep the rail lines open !  One went east carrying troops, the other went west carrying wounded, prisoners etc.

So how do you oversee all that space with just seven guys ?  Easy - militia !  Vigilantes.  Fifth columnists, Ustachi, Waffen SS.  Recruit from the localas and set them against each other.

Oh, and by the way - the SS were going to show up and ask for unrestricted use of the local stadium, four bulldozers and a thousand pounds of quicklime.  Oh, and a list of all local communist party leaders, former military officers, Jews, gypsies, intellectuals, and Catholics.

No questions asked please.

The sad thing is that I used to play a lot of RPG's and saw way too easily how so many players fell into the abyss.  "Round up all the Jews ?  Sure - no problem !  Do they neeed to be alive, breathing or just able to walk ?"

Scary what people can turn into really.



roni out