Re: ME System vs. Background.

[Jacob E Boucher <jbuchr@xxxxxx>]

On Mon, 30 Jul 2001 CamaroGen1@aol.com wrote:
>        Actually, i have found the two mesh very well.  If you take the 
> foreword of BLACK OPS, that what is described in the book happens all the 
> time, and has since WWII, just that Joe Blow doesn't know, its perfect. 

Hurm...

I don't want to sound like some gaming purist here, but Black Ops and ME
have two completely different levels of Unreality and Supernaturalism.
Here's a good idea.  Buy Kenneth Hite's book "Nightmares of Mine" put out
by Chaosim (if you can find it).  This book is a treasure trove of ideas
and inspiration on the genres of horror, suspense, and thrills, chills,
etc.

Aside from a lot of other good stuff, he as two system ratings he calls
Unreality and Supernaturalism.  Unreality gauges how different the game
world is from the "real world".  Level One Unreality is Just Like the Real
Thing, while Level Six is, well, total mind-job.  Supernaturalism is kinda
sorta tied into Unreality, in that you need a little unreality to have the
supernatural (unless you believe the supernatural really exists, of
course), but you can have some variation in the two.

Millennium's End is a world setting very much like our own, but with just
a few historical tweeks to make the planet more dangerous, more violent,
etc., about the level of Unreality in a Tom Clancy novel (suprise).  Note
the lack of psychics, aliens, demons, were-wolves, and vampires in Rainbow
Six.

Black Ops, on the other hand, is about as Unrealistic as The X-Files or
Men In Black.  Yes, on the surface it seems like our own world, but just
below that, everything's insane.  Demonic serial killers, Grey technology,
sewer-slithering Worms the size of school busses, and a super-secret
agency of mythically skilled ubermenchen running around the planet with
experimental railguns capable of flattening dinosaurs.

Yes, you *can* blend the two, but it's not going to look anything like
Millennium's End.

> i have never started characters out in Black Ops.......that doesn;t 
> happen...you have to be recuited for exemplory service elswhere, how many 
> points does a ME chararacter that has been on 20 long missions have?

Probably not 600, that's for sure.  Look in Special Ops.  The majority of
the templates in there fall around the 125-175 point range, IIRC, and the
higher-end totals are for real cream-of-the-crop units.  BE/BE agents can
have been cops, paramedics or computer hackers, nowhere near the level of
multi-task training that a top-class SEAL or SAS operative would receive.
Black Ops characters have point totals that rival even the most powerful
mythic figures in history, each agent a Nobel-level expert in two dozen
different disciplines.  It's totally unrealistic, but it works for a game
about hunting werewolves in subway tunnels and dogfighting UFOs.  But for
a realistic game of technothriller suspense?  Nope.

I'm not saying that you can't have fun with it, but I *am* saying that
someone shouldn't go out there and buy GURPS Black Ops thinking it's going
to have good information for running a Millennium's End campaign, unless
you want Aliens and psychic assassins in ME.

Jacob.

-- 
Jacob E. Boucher 
AIM S.N.= jbuchr 
http://people.bu.edu/jbuchr