His team of 6 soldiers, 1 commander, an infinity computer cracker and the observer struggle on the short journey from the drop off point. First they ran into a deep canal, barked a shin getting across it, but patched that up and got all their equipment across. The site was hidden, and it took about a day of looking around to find the entrance. In the morning half of them were suffering from some nasty disease native to Steel. They normally would have headed back at this point, but the observer was there, so they trudged on.
The observer, meanwhile, took a personal disliking to Wong. While that mission wasn't considered a success, some of the other moments were.
They found the entrance, and discovered a government military installation full of corpses dead from disease, and with obvious signs of robots. They searched the building for the computers they need, and ran across 8 myridons powered down (they aren't needed anymore) A set of 'just right' rolls, including a critical failure on perception, led the stealthy, trained team to be surprised by the single powered Myridon, which woke up the others. In the initially chaotic fight that ensued, they used up half of their LAW ammo, and had one guy take a serious injury in his arm.
Wong actually performed well at what he was trained to do: lead. As all these things went wrong, and there were times when the green troops could have given up, turned back, or broken and run, but Wong held strong, and organized his men to face the challenges. Of note was his command of the use of the LAW ammo, which at 5 lbs a piece, could easily have been wasted in the fire fight. At the end he managed to lure the last few myrmidons into shooting all of their ammo at the same time so they could be easily picked off with the precious one shot weapons.
Notes:
- BAT bushwacking lacks a terrain skill, but has naturalist. It'd be nice to have naturalist default to survival or be replaced by it
- The Myridons where very tough. A large part of this was probably the range-- at those ranges aiming is slow and you have a chance to hit by just by spraying fire -- which favors those who don't have spend 5 lbs of gear per shot. Also, the tech difference between the two sides really hurts: Ultra tech weapons will do much better against the DR 30 armor. Rovers would probably have been a better choice for the threat level indicated.
- 100 point soldiers are not all that impressive. And with all his points in command, Wong isn't all that impressive at anything but commanding.
- Applying peril across the board isn't a great idea. This was a heavy weapons team, and they did all right at beating a foe two TL's higher than them selves with effective numeric superiority. They struggled with survival because they really aren't built for it.
- The fire team is just big enough to need a better mechanic for combat. I suppose this time was important because we needed to find this stuff out, but I'd rather spend more time on Wong and less on his team
- The fire team is not optimized for medium foes: their expensive weapons were over kill but heavy, and their cheap weapons were just barely not effective enough. They probably would have done just as well against much heavier foes. Once again, this was in part due to the close quarters.
- I used the Laws wrong -- they shouldn't have gone off against foes less than 10 yards away. I was also told that the blast damage should be including fragmentation when its hitting a tank or something like that.
- I handled weight abstractly. That was... iffy. Turns out heavy weapons crews have a lot of very heavy gear. Next time I should be more thought into their gear. Also, having a limited number of five pound "solutions" for the enemy turned out to be a great tension builder.
- In many games I play, I find strength to be overrated, at 10/level. In a heavy weapons crew... Its probably worth it. Xing and Qin had high ST, and it was worth every point. They survived hits, used weapons others couldn't, and generally pulled the team along.
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