DM Guidelines (Cybergems)

Campaign Styles

There are a number of ways to handle the between-battle parts of a Cybergems campaign.

Adventurer Style

The most Gemlords-like way. A player's point limit is exactly as much of a fighting force as that player controls, not counting hapless civilian workers. When players capture vehicles or equipment, the point limit needs to be raised so they don't have to abandon absurd amounts of existing resources.

Serious Grind

The players are members/owners of some sort of powerful organization, with exact point totals and deployments carefully determined and tracked. When getting into fights, the players split control of whatever forces they have in the area, fairly. In order for force conservation strategies to matter, the enemy organization(s) should have equally well-tracked forces.

This campaign style will almost inevitably result in many unwinnable or unlosable fights.

Starting Resources

For the Adventurer Campaign Style, 50 points should be a reasonable starting point limit. For the Serious Grind Campaign Style, the group as a whole could have more like 500 points, with no more than 50 points for any individual character. Higher values are more complicated, and probably not ideal for a first campaign.

Advancement

When players acquire new equipment in the Adventurer Campaign Style, the point limit should be raised so that, after sharing equipment fairly, they do not have to abandon much, if anything. Sometimes a major battle or bribe can cause the players to lose resources: in such a situation, you may decrease the point limit so they can't afford to replace those resources.

In Serious Grind, players can collect as much as they can get their hands on. In addition, other venues can be declared as resource generators: wages to give a steady influx of additional points, factories that create points-worth of some limited category of items or augments, and so on. Opposing forces should also get additional points at some specified rate.

Maximum Starting Points

You can choose to specify a maximum starting point value, such that players can't build new characters which cost more than that limit. This makes keeping powerful characters alive more exciting, but means that players who play recklessly will end up being forced to play an army of cheap characters and stolen vehicles. If you use a maximum starting point value, you may want to consider increasing it as the point pool increases.

Encounter Design

In terms of encounter design, the advantage a tactical RPG has over a tactical wargame is that entry into the conflict is not so overly well-defined. An assault on a fortress could start with an attempt to scale the walls, or the battle might not start until they're well inside, because they've disguised theirselves as government health inspectors. An ambush in a bar might be detected or avoided entirely.

That's not to say you can't have any fights with clear planned beginnings, but you will be missing out if you don't let the players have some opportunities to come up with ways to arrange battles in their favor.

Encounter Pricing (Adventurer Style)

In order to maintain some campaign flow, it's better if the players win more than half of the encounters they fight. However, in order to make sure the encounters are fun and challenging, the encounters should not be trivial. Therefore, the point value of an encounter should be somewhere between three-quarters and equal to the combined point values of all players.

You can use higher point values, but there should be sufficient advance warning of such a battle that the players can arrange to fight on their own terms or not at all.

You can use lower point values, but the battle won't be very interesting if these opposing forces don't have a significant situational advantage. Forces with no hope of actually harming the player characters should simply be handwaved to defeat, rather than going to the trouble of rolling for initiative, placing out models, and so on: when a 200 point Paragon player character is confronted by a handful of 5 point thugs, the player should just say "I kill them" or "I scare them off" or something, and the campaign can continue.

Expended Resources

The ammunition rules exist primarily as an appeal to realism. If a force has already used up all of its bullets, for example, it would be unwise to use its full point value to determine the strength of the opposition. Using a single encounter's-worth of forces to enact a hit-and-run strategy to wear down the force's ammunition over several minutes, hours, days, or weeks is perfectly valid, however.

Encounter Pricing (Serious Grind Style)

With this style, the players are free to send forces against impossible odds, with no real chance of actual success, aspiring only to inflict disproportionate harm to the enemy. Vice-versa, sometimes the players may send an overwhelming army to crush a few weaklings; if you feel that the weaklings are incapable of inflicting significant harm or unwilling to be so suicidal, you may have them surrender or flee, but otherwise they should strive to inflict disproportionate harm to the army.

Defeat

The players are likely to occasionally find theirselves outmatched. Be sure to have some defeat condition that doesn't involve annihilating the entire party in mind when making an encounter. Ravenous beasts can be willing to feast on some of the fallen as the survivors flee; organized people can attempt to capture as many player characters as possible, and place them into prison. If a prison is built by competent people, it may be necessary to institute some contrivance in order to make escape possible.

Even with Serious Grind, imprisonment is a useful policy, as it gives the players a reason to surrender when presented with battles they cannot win, leading to the potential for prison-assaulting scenarios later on.

Terrain

Cool set pieces are cool. Many abilities are dysfunctional on a completely flat field. The random map generators for The Oppression World Campaign Setting are designed to inspire you to fill your maps with dangerous, useful, or inconvenient features.

Worldbuilding

In order to rationally interact with the world, it must have some meat to it. Although statting out and describing the motivations of every NPC in the world, every cave, and every building takes far too much time, you should at least have some idea of things like social structures, major characters, demographics, architecture, and geography.

It's very tempting, when the players provoke some form of conflict, to say "well, I said there would be a thousand soldiers in this town, so that's what you have to fight", but if you want to be able to do that sort of thing, you should consider reasonable encounter design when deciding how powerful various forces in the world are.

Major NPCs

Having a few major NPCs who try to help, hinder, or work at angles with the players can spice up the campaign significantly. From a tactical RPG angle, it's good to have some major opponent characters for the players to be fighting against. If the players could ever want to fight against a character (or the character could ever want to fight them), that character shouldn't be significantly stronger than the entire party. If the character needs to be far too powerful for the players to defeat at their current point limit, then you need a very solid justification for not having that character go out on a player-slaughtering trip.

For major villains that the players are trying to foil, it's perfectly reasonable to have the villain level at a rate comparable to that of the players: after all, the villain is also a proactive adventurer of sorts.

Extra Advice

Handwaving

Sometimes it is more efficient to fast forward past a scene with an obvious resolution than to play it out, like a battle that all players are sure is trivial. Even challenging fights can have stretches of rounds where the players don't have any new decisions or rolls to make, such as a battle where both sides have depleted their very long ranged attacks, and now need to run forwards for a minute.

Note that this is not a tool for steamrolling over disputes: if someone thinks that the consequences are uncertain, then you should play it out so that you may educate them or become embarrassed about your miscalculation.

Refluffing

"Refluffing" is the practice of taking an existing game element, and changing the name or description (the "fluff", as it were) without significantly changing the mechanical content of that element. It is a popular technique, because it allows players to introduce themes they find interesting without risk of unbalance.

It's far from a perfect technique, however. Partial refluffing, where one character or group uses refluffed material, is a lot like giving those characters free disguises that they cannot remove.