Aliens part 4

I love when characters that I make up either in planning or off the top of my head become important to the story. But my favorite is when a character who was in the original movie but who had a tiny part becomes important. Of course the classic example of that is Danny Hodges. But Aliens is full of these, and not to call out one of my own characters, I've fallen in love with Private Ricco Frost.

I bring up Frost really to talk about a different topic, which is game balance: Balance is an incredibly hard thing to get right. Game designers spend their lives trying to perfect it. GURPS went through 30 years of study and iteration to nail it. But balance isn't something we really do on the Film Reroll. The movies aren't balanced, they are story-telling experiences, not game-design experiences. So very little thought is put on my part to designing a game that feels balanced. In fact, most of the time if it felt balanced, it wouldn't reflect the original movie at all. When we get something that feels like balanced, crafted, intelligent game design, it's usually a happy accident. But for us that's fine. Balance is their to help the experience of the player. And the experience that we're trying to create is for the listener. If one of my players gets shafted in the character department, it's not a failure of game design, it's an opportunity for improv and storytelling.

But one place we kinda want to get the balance at least in the vicinity of correct is in these kinds of campaigns with a physical threat that the party will fight. (That's one of the reasons this was a great campaign for Jon to DM; he's better at balance and the mechanics of game design than I am.) And that's why I brought up Ricco Frost. Jon designed Ricco from the movie, presumably based on watching the character in the film (or maybe just trying to extrapolate out useful skills). But he didn't know I'd be playing him. I understand the mechanics of GURPS and how to optimize them a lot better than the rest of the crew, so I turned Frost's badass Judo abilities into an Alien-crunching menace (with a little bit of dice luck as well). Now, I don't think this is a problem, it's an aspect of emergent storytelling. I don't change how I design a character, based on who's going to be playing them. But I do cast carefully, because if I give Jon a character he's going to be very effective with it, and that's something I consider before I cast. And if I'm auctioning off, or distributing characters at random, this is one of the dangers. Of course, to me, that's just all part of the fun.

One more episode of Aliens to go after this one. Then part 4 of Time Bandits. Then . . . our next movie.