I know I started something yesterday and it’s frustrating to interrupt it, but I’m reading Herman Melville at the moment, so I’m in the mood for ten thousand word parentheticals.

I got an email the other day and I wanted to react to it in depth and publicly because it probably voices the sentiment of a lot of Diaspora players and so the default audience for anything new that VSCA will produce. I won’t reproduce the email (it was sent as private communication after all) but here’s the gist: Hollowpoint seems like a cool place to play (modern action) but the system is alien and not to my taste — please please do it differently.

From the general, abstract place in my head: Hollowpoint is an experiment and experiments need the freedom to fail. One of the things it experiments with is a kind of objective that is common in action scenes and badly modeled (sometimes impossible to model) in what I will call “guy versus guy” systems. So I’m going to try something very different (though not unrecognizable: leaf through your copy of Reign) to get at what I want to get it. I am certain that this divergence will be unappealing to a lot of people. That’s cool — that’s data. It’s also really appealing to at least one person so I hope there will be others. If you’re on the fence (and as the game does not yet exist, that might be a good place to be), hear me out. If you’re committed to disliking the very idea, move on — there will be other VSCA games and if you love Diaspora, you can already get that.

So I was watching Heat the other night — a Michael Mann movie with some very smart action scenes — and noticed how well Hollowpoint maps into it, and that’s exciting, because that film is very much in the target zone for the game. By way of example is the famous bank robbery scene: the crew has executed a bank robbery without violence and in the course of exiting they are bounced by the police. The crew has automatic weapons, great training, and willingness to cause harm and hurt but they are also professionals: their objective is to escape with the money.

No in guy vs. guy gaming, this is really, really hard most of the time. Because the system will focus on which cop your character is trying to kill each time-slice, you the player are focused on the wrong thing with distinctly uncomfortable (to me, and in this genre) effects.

First, I (the player) have to plan how to most effectively kill police officers because what the system primarily lets me do with my assault rifle is kill people. I am not enjoying that in this context.

Second I (the character) am not explicitly interested in killing police officers. I am interested in escaping with the money and don’t care if I kill police officers. But the system models me defeating police officers with my rifle.

Finally I (both player and character) have sophisticated, staged objectives that involve violence against a large opposing force with full knowledge that I cannot just kill all of them (and here’s a place where some guy vs. guy games really drop the ball for me — I can kill all of them. Seriously, I can kill the entire LAPD to solve a problem, just by looting corpses for ammunition.)

The scenario is a classic “breakout”. The police are technically a defensive surrounding force and the robbers objective is to create a weak point in their line, penetrate it, defend their egress, and escape. People are going to get killed, but the solution is not about killing people. You don’t create a weak point in a defensive line by killing everyone — you create it by making a zone where no defender is willing to oppose you effectively. If they are all dead, that’s certainly one solution, but you, with the objective of breaking, don’t actually care. And if you’re a pro you also know it’s not a feasible step in your plan anyway.

A breakout is achieved by aggression. The unit under siege identifies a point of egress and advances on it, concentrating fire. Flanks are protected to avoid being enveloped but the focus of fire is the point of egress. And you advance constantly and aggressively. Go watch Heat and come back.

Okay see that? That’s what you want. And when the line folds, you exit, secure transportation, and depart. The criminals are using several important tools in this process: they are making people feel too afraid to be effective by shooting the shit out of them. Terror is the tool there. They are identifying and neutralizing core sources of resistance (vehicles, commanders). Killing is the tool there. They are leveraging the fact that they do not care about innocent bystanders and the police do, giving them vastly more free mobility and fields of fire. Again, this is mostly about Terror.

But the bulk of it is not about a series of guy vs. guy incidents. It’s about effective use of ammunition, mobility, aggression, planning, knowledge of the space, sustaining fire (rapid reload!), and effective fire (shooting at the target — a notoriously hard thing for non-sociopaths to do). So a system that gives you a tool for defeating one other person by intimidating or killing her is not giving you enough to work with. The richness of this scene — and all of its energy — would be missed by focusing on who shot who. Watch that scene again and listen to it. This is one of a very few films that use accurate sounds of gunfire. Turn the volume up. Listen to the difference between the light assault rifles of the crew and the boom of Pacino’s heavier rifle. Listen to the echoes off the buildings. The chief issue resolving this scene is how afraid everyone and how willing they are to do harm. The ability to accurately hit a target is a tertiary factor at best.

So Hollowpoint, being interested in this sort of scene, does not do guy vs. guy action except as an exception. Instead it’s about the individuals in the crew and their contribution to an action against an opposing force with a common objective. An assassination, for example, is not “killing a guy”. An assassination is a sophisticated preparation of a space in which an effective killing blow can be struck while allowing the assassin to escape. An ambush is not “killing six guys”. It’s again a preparation of space in order to destroy a unit of men (as a unit, not each man) and then exit the location safely (or otherwise manage the objective: you ambushed them for a reason).

Now I am not slagging guy vs. guy gaming. Diaspora is very much a guy vs. guy design and I love it. But the model doesn’t do everything well and it doesn’t do what I want here. So far, in play, Hollowpoint certainly does meet my needs. I know every roll that Val Kilmer’s character made in every scene. I know what choices he made with the dice he got.

Interestingly, the most disappointing part of that movie for me is the last half hour or so. I think it’s obvious why, in light of this discussion. It forgets what it’s really about. Or it doesn’t detect what I think it’s about.

It’s cool to dislike some or all of my games. Vive la différence.

–BMurray