0004 - The Cast

No roleplaying game would be complete without the characters. The living breathing examples of stats and cryptic words are the actors in your campaign. How many do you need? That is up to you but I can tell you from experience, too few or too many will be a problem.

Too few PCs will drastically lower your survival chances. Generally, I have found that PCs can handle up to 4:1 odds, unless the gods of the dice hate you. It is unlikely, however, that one character will have all the skills you need at a sufficient level for survival in T2K.

To make a comparison to D&D, you need your door openers, your healers and your specialists. You also need backups. It is great that you have that Colonel in the medical branch that can perform brain surgery with a toothpick. Great for you, but when he takes the 7.62mm S to the head, who is going to save him. Enter the lowly medic stage right.

Firefights in T2k tend to be short and deadly. You are going to need the heavy hitters. In my experience, a firefight resulting from a random encounter will last between 5-7 rounds. Usually by then, the opposition is dead or wounded. Those few rounds are going to require you to have someone on the guns that can effecively use them. The skills you need must be adapated to your style of playm but generally speaking, you are going to need good small arms skills as well as light support weapons.

Too many PCs bog things down a lot. Assume you have 10 PCs and then encounter a unit of 30 Polish cavalry. In each turn, you have to play out 40! different actions, all of which you will committing to your journal. True, more PCs means your chances of survival go up, but so does the paperwork and all other aspects of play.

My favorite number, at least at the beginning, is six. My original six characters for my current campaign were:

• 2LT Jade Marshall US Army – Aviation 
• 2LT Wayne Logan US Army Medical Corp – Nurse 
• SSG Michael Griffin US Army – Ranger 
• MAJ Edward Harris US Army – Engineer 
• MSG Caitlyn Mitchell Canadian Army – Support 
• MSG Eduard "Potato" Potapenko Soviet Army – Airborne Infantry 

They have recently been joined by three additional characters:

• SFC Jack Robinson - US Army Armor
• SSG Micheal Macron - US Army Infantry
• Agent Sukhikh Klara (Klasha) Kirillovna - US Government Agent

 Yes, I know I bent my own rule. That is the great part of solo roleplay, no one is there to remind you when you do what you just said you should not.

Another important aspect of the characters is relationships. These are supposed to represent troopers that have fought with each other back and forth across Europe. They know and depend on each other. Therefore, they must have a relationship to each other, in addition to being friends.

One tool I use is the relationship table from Solo from Zozer Games. I roll a number of relationships totalling half the number of players. This is three in the original group, which were:

•  Married Couple
• Old (and ex-) friends (its all an act)
• Blames for a past event

I thought about this and came up with :

• Logan and Mitchell are married. They met in the rear area and found a spark. Knowing life is short, they decided to do the deed and have been together since.
• Marshall and Mitchell used to be friends before Mitchell married Logan. In reality, Marshall had a deep interest in Logan before Mitchell made her move. She never brought the courage up to get involved with Logan. She really misses her friend but she feels cheated because of Logan too. She is torn inside.
• Prior to Potato joining group, Potato's unit was ambushed by the Ranger company that Griffin belongs to. Potato witness Griffin kill his best friend from afar. He is aware that in war, people die but he still secretly blames Griffin.

 I also rolled once for the new players. For them I rolled - 41 Sexual partner. Again, giving it some thought, I came up with:

• Macron and Klasha are an item. It is not love, more lust, as both are scared of getting attached when they think about their current situation.

On a side note: I used the solo rules for these reactions. Do not get too caught up in your genres. Use other genres or rulesets for inspiration.

Try to make up a back story for each character. It does not have to be War and Peace, but a few lines of a paragraph or too can make a difference. The character back stories are:

• 2LT Jade Marshall: Jade grew up in rural Alabama. To this day, her drawl is noticable. After school, she began to hang around the local aiport, eventually appreticing there before managing to get her pilot‘s license.
  
  Jade flew cargo helicopters for the construction crews and occasionally out into the Gulf. Her abilities were never recognized, but her fiery temper and liberal use of explitives may have been what kept her from moving up in the world.
  
  When the War came, Jade was drafted into the army as a helicopter pilot. Here too, her perchant for harsh language at inappropriate times kept her from moving up the ladder.

• 2LT Wayne Logan: Wayne grew up in Philadelphia. He graduated from patching up the kids on the street to a full-fledged nurse in the trauma ward. He was perfectly happy with his life until Uncle Sam got involved in a shooting war and Wayne got to visit Europe, for the duration, of course.

• SSG Michael Griffin: Micheal was born on the outskirts of Philidelphia. Micheal learned early that school was probably not his thing. After graduation, he joined the Army as an Airborne trooper.
  
  His dream was of a Ranger tab and a green beret to go with it. He has the tab but the war came between him and his beret.

• MAJ Edward Harris: Ed was born in Lafayette, Louisiana. He went to university, serving in the ROTC. After college, Ed joined the army as an engineer. Frustrated with the lack of promotion, Ed left choosing the constuction trade instead.
  
  Ed remained active in the reserves and when the war broke out, he was recalled. There he found the promotions he was looking for. He, however, did not want a war so he could get promoted.

• MSG Caitlyn Mitchell: Caitlyn was born on a small farm outside Quebec City. She was always sort of a tomboy, working on the tractors and machines on the farm. After school, she went on to technical school and joined the Canadian Army, hoping to see some of the world. Now she is seeing a lot of Europe the hard way.

• MSG Eduard "Potato" Potapenko: Eduard was born in Donetsk. He is a career soldier but even with his rather limited intellectual capabilities, he understands the war is over and the Soviets are still throwing his countrymen into the meatgrinder. That was his motivation to switch sides and he now works to defeat the Soviets.

• SFC Jack Robinson: Jack is a career soldier. He got a taste for driving tanks around and sometimes over everything. He was really disappointed when he became a ground pounder and is looking forward to getting back into the saddle as soon as possible.

• SSG Micheal Macron: After two tours in the infantry, Micheal left the army to become a cop in his home town. He served well and honorably, but when the war started, Micheal was called back in to serve as an Infantryman.

• Agent Sukhikh Klara (Klasha) Kirillovna: Klasha was an American counter-intelligence agent working out of West Berlin. She got caught up in many operations after the war started and eventually found herself stranded in Poland. She has been travelling with a group of stragglers for several days before running into the group

Each story helps to mold a character that is more than a collection of statistics. Remember who they are and let that influence you in play.