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Them Russians had had enough. We poured it on and then they decided to look for easier pickin's somewhere else. We made an unspoken agreement to leave the other be. Some old grizzled Starshina came forward under a white flag and we negotiated their withdrawal from the town. They gave back the weapons and supplies they confiscated and we made sure no one put a bullet in them as they left. Major Harris insisted they also give up the support weapons, which they did reluctantly. I got that but we didn't want to be on the wrong end of an RPG when we left town.
The fight for the town is effectively over. The NPCs have had their morale reduced to a point sufficient to cause them to rethink their actions and start an orderly withdrawal. Securing the towns weapons and supplies will be a positive sign for the townspeople, allowing the group to stay for a couple of days to heal their wounds. The Russians leave town, headed north, in search of their comrades. No one is really happy with the arrangement. The town people would like to see them strung up and the characters are not really happy about a group of Russian with an axe to grind leaving unhindered. It is not realistic that the Russians would just surrender en masse to such a small opposition force, even with the assistance of the town militia. They are smart enough to know what they can expect if they do surrender.
Rule Set Change
At this point, I am going to change the basic solo rule set I have been using. The next five posts will be done using the Solo ruleset from Zozer Games. This is a lightweight ruleset designed for use with the Cepheus Engine, specifically Traveller. As I may have mentioned, I am also a great fan of the Traveller and specifically the Traveller: The New Era (TNE) setting. Not trying to start an edition war here. To each his own and mine is TNE.The current solo rule set, Mystic GM Emulator, depends on a series of questions to be addressed to the GM Emulator. The chance of the answer being yes is determined as a percentile and the dice rolled appropriately. I intend to keep this, as I find it really helps flesh out the encounters prior to the action. What I am looking at now is a way to speed up the encounter resolution.
Solo uses a mechanism called the "fortune in the middle". In short, once the situation is determined, a plan is formulated on how the characters intend to deal with this situation. The plan is then rated to determine the chance of the plan succeeding. It is also rated determine how dangerous the plan is. This results in a roll to see if the plan is successful and the consequences of the resolution. These can be either good or bad. The more dangerous the plan, the higher the chances of bad consequences. Following the resolution (and the consequences), one of two paths should be chosen for the characters to proceed on until the next episode or scene.
I have already added some of the elements of Solo to my game here, for example, character relationships. Solo also uses elements like NPC lists, plot lines, etc. making it very compatible with GME. I will not be using the detailed combat system that I have been using and my apologies to those that have really gotten used to them. They are really great and a central point of any T2K game. They do, however, slow the story down a lot. I may begin again with that method of encounter resolution after the experiment. We will see.
Parallel to this I will also be running the same experiment on a new solo TNE campaign. I will be recording the development of both on my blog.
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