Aliens (Part 2)

We're back with more Aliens! This is a real fun campaign so far, I think! Hope you're enjoying it. It's a real back-to-basics approach. Lot of action. Lot of characters for us to chew through.

I find there's a real challenge in building a proper RPG version of a film-antagonist which I've learned to tackle in various different ways over the years. Consider the classic movie "monster": The Xenomorph, Michael Myers, Darth Vader, whoever comes to mind for you. There's a classic structure to hollywood popcorn movies where the villain is invincible until they're not. Now, one of the chief-appeals of the Film Reroll for me is that we eschew those kinds of tropey structures because the events in our version are determined by dice. Hence we have taken down big-bads in the first 15 minutes (Speed) or failed to stop them (The Rock), and the fun is in trying to find the cohesive story in what the dice have given us. We fully embrace the randomness, but accepting it beggars the larger question, which is: Where do you set the villain's power-level? 

Because I have to decide how powerful our villain is before the movie starts. So if the movie shows me a villain who is invincible in the first hour and yet loses in the end nevertheless, do I set the villain as the unstoppable monster or the stoppable one? If you wanted to exactly reproduce the movie, I suppose you could just make the villain weaker at the end, but I reject that approach, first because it's lame, and second because I'm not trying to reproduce the movie, I'm trying to break it. Having unexpected things happen in dice rolls is the best way to break a movie, so it's not at all my interest to try to be overly-slavish to the original. Instead I try to divine the underlying reality and set the respective power-levels based on that.

The easy answer is the obvious one, which is that you should set the villain as less-powerful than the invincible version, but more powerful than the guy who gets punked in the end. The villain's defeat is meant generally to be a product of the hero's growth, so the villain should be slightly unbeatable, so that if our hero were to grow the ending from the film would make sense. Of course, the difference is that generally we don't give anyone bonus character points for fulfilling an emotional arc (that's not how GURPS works), and also our versions of the characters are as likely to regress as they are to grow. 

But the real answer is less obvious, the real answer is that we find a new story, framed around something unexpected that comes up in play. There's always a more interesting story to be found that doesn't necessarily hinge on how powerful the bad guy is. The bad guy should just be as powerful as to make it feel like it's the same one from the actual movie. Ultimately, you just gotta set the number and let the dice decide. You could make your bad guy a total badass and he might get taken apart in a couple of crits. In this business you never know.