On Fri, 18 Oct 2013, Onno Meyer wrote:
I've finished two vehicles for Mike's setting, working on the third. Stargate lives in part from their villains. They are not just a force of nature, they are people -- some are cruel, some are evil, some are sexy, some are charismatic, some are all of the above. When the heroes travel in an all-terrain amphibian or an airship, it is reasonably easy to for the GM to arrange a confrontation. The bad guys capture the gate, the good guys have to infiltrate the base and do something about it. Or the bad guys damage the vehicle and haul the heroes in front of the Evil Overlord [1]. How do you handle it if the heroes sit in a FTL-capable starship? As a first step, the ship has considerably higher HP than DR, so it can be shot down one hit at a time. But how do you board something the size of a Winnebago [2]? Technobabble power damper fields are not really covered by GURPS 3E vehicles. A tractor beam would have to be quite large to catch even a small starship. It could be mounted on a cruiser-sized vessel. Any thoughts? Regards, Onno
You could have tractor beam traps on the ground. The ship comes too close and the IFF is not responding correctly, it gets held. Someone with a proper authroisation has to realease it.
"Unkonwn starship you have trespassed into our territory, surrender and prepare to be boarded or we will destoy you!"
Something the party has picked up (because it is a valuable technological artefact that needs to be analysed at home) in some way sabotages the ship.
The cave so suitable to hide the ship does have a hidden door that locks the ship in, and the enemy has the remote control.
Some spy sabotaged the ship controls.
[1] Employing competent jailers seems to be against union rules for EOs. How can GMs allow the PCs to escape, without having the NPCs look stupid?
Whenever possible i make the opponents amateurs, it makes GMing much easier. What works especially well is amateurs who try to compensate their lack of experience with refining their plans more and make them ever more elaborate and complex. That gives the party something to find out, and my own errors are hard to distinguish from the intentional errors of the villians.
With security there often is a discrepancy between what is in the protocol and what is actually done. If the pcs are for some reason not in a dedicated high end high security prison, this can allow the pcs an out.
There might be more parties at work then the pcs and the EO. The EOs guards might steal on the job for instance, maybe they switched a working security gadget for a damaged one, to sell the working one on the black market, and then reported equipment failure but the replacement has not yet arrived. Or they need extra hands to move thier loot, and they figure prisoners at gun point would do just fine. Or just the stereotypical guard who attempts to rape the party member with most unarmed martial arts skills.
Something like this can be an effect of too much plotting on part of the EO too. To foil rescue attempts by the parties allies, the EO decided to come up with a cover identity (they are con men i just caught. whatever rewards they offer you for releasing them, they can't pay), while locking someone else up under the identity of the pcs elsewhere. The scheme is on a need to know basis, the ordinary guards, don't need to know.
Or maybe a chief minion of the EO does not want to give up the command of the elite forces yet, for one reason or an other, and so attempts to keep it a secret, that the mission objective is reached already.
Sometimes you can have some traitor. (Once i had a plot with the pcs getting captured and the traitor was to free them. However as pure coincidence one pc managed to avoid capture (he had decided to try to fight invisible, which he had not done before and got wounded early so he stayed on the sidelines), so i scrapped the traitor, since i no longer needed him. The players were quite baffeled, that i seemed to have played Xanthos roulette here.
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