Delta Green Overview

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Strap in. Operatives, this is go back your all access pass to modern day RPGs loaded with bullets, backstories, and a whole lot of bad decisions. And here are your mission leaders, Sean and Harrigan. [00:00:19] Speaker B: Hello, Harrigan. [00:00:21] Speaker A: What's going on? Kubla Khan. [00:00:23] Speaker B: What's going on? Kubla Khan, indeed. Kubla Khan. [00:00:27] Speaker A: Have you been. Have I been back in history? [00:00:33] Speaker B: Was it over at Kubla Khan? [00:00:35] Speaker A: Oh, I'm not talking about the convention. [00:00:37] Speaker B: Convention. [00:00:38] Speaker A: I'm talking about the Mongol leader. [00:00:40] Speaker B: Oh. [00:00:41] Speaker A: Referenced in the Rush song is what I'm talking about. [00:00:43] Speaker B: I see. [00:00:44] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:00:45] Speaker B: Nothing new here. Nothing covert, action related. [00:00:49] Speaker A: Nothing at all. [00:00:51] Speaker B: No, I don't. I'm trying to think. Like if I've read a book, picked up an RPG. 0. [00:00:59] Speaker A: I'm sorry to hear that. I am in a similar situation. I have. I have a bunch of stuff that's all. Like, I should read this. I should watch that. And I've just been so busy with work, under the weather generally just. I don't know, something's been lingering since. For. For months now, you know, But. But hey. But hey, diving into Delta Green this season though, so that's good. [00:01:26] Speaker B: I may watch True Detective Season 1 again. [00:01:29] Speaker A: I was gonna say one of the things we should probably dive into are those, like, Delta Green, like at the fringe of like, things that give you the vibes of Delta Green. True Detective Season 1 is one of them. I actually haven't seen the other seasons. I hear they get worse and then get better again. [00:01:44] Speaker B: Maybe I'd vaguely remember any of them. Honestly, I. There are some times I know it's going to be a shock to some people, but I will tune in and tune out. Like I will fall asleep in the middle of whatever movie, TV show. And so therefore my wife could watch a whole season of a show and I could like grab an hour out of. [00:02:12] Speaker A: I wish I could not relate, but I can 100% relate. [00:02:16] Speaker B: I get up in the morning early, and then by the time it's 8 o' clock at night, I am. [00:02:21] Speaker A: Does she get mad at you? My wife gets mad at me for falling asleep. [00:02:25] Speaker B: Yes. [00:02:25] Speaker A: Are you watching this or not? I'm like, I'm trying, babe. [00:02:28] Speaker B: Yes, very much so. Like, I'm not going to watch this with you. And then it's. Yeah, yep, Yep, yep. [00:02:36] Speaker A: Our M.O. is that. That happens a few times. And then my wife Brooke is like, you know what? I'm just gonna watch it without you. And she does. She races ahead when I'm at work, you know. [00:02:47] Speaker B: Same with my wife. As long as it's something that she is on board with, but if it's something I've convinced her to watch, it's [00:02:54] Speaker A: like, oh, that's a whole different story. [00:02:56] Speaker B: It is. [00:02:57] Speaker A: You wanted me to watch your show. [00:02:59] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, right. [00:03:01] Speaker A: That's. Oh no, that's bad juju. [00:03:03] Speaker B: Yeah, it is. For sure. It is. So anyways, so a lot of the true detective shows, I don't know how many seasons we watched if like, to me, I don't even remember, like. Yeah, yeah, yeah. [00:03:17] Speaker A: So you know what our, our listeners can help us with, make some recommendations for things that we should watch that are, that are Delta Green oriented. I know there won't be like a, you know, it's not going to be the actual ip, but there's some stuff I remember an HBO series that I am forgetting the name of that had to do with like a guy being hired to go out to somebody's old estate and go through some old records and the things that he discovered way out in the woods. It was just like two years ago. I'll do some research and come up with it. But there are a bunch of shows that are like right at the edges of this. Make some recommendations, folks. Okay, you know what? And maybe you, I think you know the, the creative team behind Delta Green and their, their doings better than I do. Shame and Shane and Dennis and the boys, I have always been shocked and maybe they have something in the works, which is why I asked you, like, this is a property that begs for a multi season hbo, Amazon, Netflix series. Like, oh my heavens, it could be amazing. There has to be something partially in the works, right? [00:04:25] Speaker B: I thought I read at one time because this, we are not the first ones to suggest. This is my understanding. And, and I thought Dennis posted something out there. I don't know if they sold the rights and it has never happened or it was. They had talked to individuals in the TV movie space and it just never went anywhere. [00:04:57] Speaker A: But Vagueler collection as well. [00:04:59] Speaker B: Yeah. It is not something that was not considered. [00:05:06] Speaker A: You know, what, what a, what a difficult quagmire to navigate if you're in like Detweller shoes and those guys like you sign with a studio potentially and you know, Sean's just musing here. We don't know if they did or we can look it up, but not, not sure right now. But if you do, how do you know if it's ever going to get made and what the team is like and you know, you know, the creatives behind on the other side, like, hey, we ain't the deal, then it sits there. Which happens to a lot of properties, right? [00:05:31] Speaker B: Yeah. There's a lot of control loss. Like that is the biggest thing. Like I don't know what our George R. Martin and what his agreement was with hbo, but he's doing another show too, which was strange. I didn't know. I don't think he wrote the books. My wife's watching it is the Native American set in the 1975 or something that's. But he's an executive producer so I don't know. Yeah. And it's an effects series. [00:06:05] Speaker A: Interesting. [00:06:06] Speaker B: Yeah. She's enjoying it, [00:06:10] Speaker A: I guess. All I would say is the property is like primed for it. The way that. That Hollywood and now the. Not just Hollywood, but the wider film and you know, high end television series. Production agencies have gone for comic books and drawn so many of those into the mainstream. This stuff's just sitting there like waiting for a multi season that the protagonists could change from year to year. Like there's all kinds of stuff you could do around this. Really just sitting there ready for the ripe for the taking. Let's start digging into the media side of this because I can already tell we both have busy schedules. [00:06:47] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:06:49] Speaker A: Let's focus our espionage related stuff on the subject matter of the season. Let's start digging into some media around this stuff. Beyond the rpg. [00:06:57] Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. [00:06:58] Speaker A: Stuff that's related. [00:06:59] Speaker B: Agreed. So yeah, listener send us. Like you got to watch this for Delta Green. [00:07:05] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. Should we move on to comms that are encrypted or sit rep? [00:07:13] Speaker B: Do we have any choice? Dude, do we have any. [00:07:15] Speaker A: You're the mc. [00:07:16] Speaker B: Do we have stuff for sit rep? [00:07:18] Speaker A: I dropped a couple. [00:07:19] Speaker B: A couple in there. [00:07:22] Speaker A: Give me this Sit Rep. First one is DeltaGreen.com I think has a pretty up to date list of all the Delta Green publications from Arc Dream and who was the prior company? [00:07:36] Speaker B: Pagan Publishing. [00:07:38] Speaker A: Pagan Publishing. So when you get right down to it, these folks have produced a lot of material over the years. So it's kind of cool to see it gathered in one spot. So you can kind of go through what's out there. What, you know, what, what the back catalog might look like, look like ET and then the second one is there's an unspeakable Oath website, you know, I think very much related to the zine from the 90s and maybe even earlier than that they have a listing of some documents that are helpful to run Delta Green. So it's character sheets, GM references, it's that kind of thing. I think friend of the show Dwayne has sent us a couple of things over the years. Sean, if you remember about like a primer for running last things last kind of thing. I think it lists that kind of thing on there. So it's worth going to stuff snoop around at least for those who are interested in running or playing this game. Delta Green. That's it. [00:08:31] Speaker B: Yeah. We'll share those in the show Notes check. Take a look at those people. Should we go to encrypted comms? [00:08:39] Speaker A: You better believe it. Sir. We have an incoming encrypted transmission. [00:08:45] Speaker B: Cryptid comms where you can throw us a grenade@grange gobagpod.com or call in 929big dice. We have one from Hamza this week. You want me to read it? [00:08:58] Speaker A: Go for it. All right. Yeah, go for it. [00:09:01] Speaker B: Hi Gobag. A while ago in Episode eight, you were kind enough to feature my questions asking about sandbox espionage play and players running their own agents. I wanted to pass along some tools I put together in that vein for the West End game Star Wars D6, which I've been using to run an andor inspired game. Sweetness. [00:09:23] Speaker A: Yeah. Can I break. Break in here and say awesome? [00:09:26] Speaker B: Yes. [00:09:27] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:09:29] Speaker B: I found this framework to be pretty solid so far. I wanted to pass it along. I will say that two major components that have facilitated this type of play have been a fairly robust setting encyclopedia, what's the Deal with this Planet? And prepping weekly news briefs for my players to provide indicators of how their actions have affected the situation. I'm a bit behind on the. On my listening, so looking forward to checking out both the Mercenary Spies and Private Eyes AP and the COVID Action as Team Sport episodes in particular. Cheers Hamza. K. She they not dude. He as we may have made a mistake in the past, just so you know. Sorry about that, Hamza. Thanks for correcting us so. And thanks for writing in and we will definitely check that out. And if you're interested in what Hamza put together, we'll put that in the show notes as well. [00:10:22] Speaker A: Yeah, so I. I dig that idea of the news briefs where you're reflecting back on the players, what their actions are doing. And it might start off small. Right. As it amps up, it might become a real focus and yeah, I love it. I love it. [00:10:37] Speaker B: All right. [00:10:37] Speaker A: I think. I think she also shared her blog, right? She did. We'll dig into that and have a. Have a look at the details of what she's talking about here. [00:10:46] Speaker B: Yeah, thanks for doing that, Hamza. Appreciate it. Let's get into the mission focus. [00:10:52] Speaker A: Have a seat. Let's get on with the mission brief. [00:10:56] Speaker B: All right, the mission focus for this week, Harrigan's running point. [00:11:03] Speaker A: For better or for worse, here I am all alone out in front, all alone. [00:11:08] Speaker B: I'm, I'm here to support you, man. [00:11:10] Speaker A: I know, I know. Okay, so this week, I think we are the second episode into our season two, which is a Delta Green focused season. We introduced the game last week where we talked about its history and sort of the, the, you know, the overall, like, how did it form up, who's responsible for it, what's it about generally speaking. And we're going to have a series of deep dive episodes that go into, you know, let's talk about character generation in specific. Let's talk about how Bonds work in the game. Let's talk about these home scenes that appear between missions as well as, you know, a little deeper into the lore and some of the adventures and all that sort of stuff. The, the operas, short for operation in this lingo. But today we wanted to do just a, like an outline or a basics of like, what's the system, what's the underlying guts, the mechanics of the game. So you'll know, coming to it, whether or not, you know, is this for you if you, you know, if it's the type of game that will resonate with you or not. I will also say, Sean, we haven't really, I don't think we have this on the, on the slate yet. Maybe we do informally. There are a handful of other games out there that are pointed at exactly this IP people, you know, because you can't, you can't copyright or trademark mechanics and people take settings and they do whatever they want with them. Essentially. There are several other RPGs out there that are like, what if you wanted to play Delta Green but not with brp, not with that system. And that includes Blacklight Iz rpg, that includes Dark Cthulhu Green. I think maybe there, there are a few games out there that Sean and I will probably do an episode on basically alternate systems. If you want to run this style of game without doing it in a percentile based thing. All right, so Sean, interject at any time, otherwise it'll be a torrent of Harrigan speak. And no one wants that. [00:12:59] Speaker B: Well, you might be surprised. You might be surprised. [00:13:02] Speaker A: You got to break in, man. So foundationally, we're talking about the latest edition, the latest version of Delta Green. So not the one that was truly an add on to call of Cthulhu 5th Edition. So this came out, I think, as we mentioned last time, I think kickstarted in 16, maybe hit the streets in 17, something like that. But this one spun off of call of Cthulhu 6th Edition, and that's got some real differences between that game and what modern players of Call of Cthulhu who are playing seventh Edition, what they're familiar with. So, for example, sixth Edition did not have a pushing mechanic and it did not have a luck mechanic where you could spend luck to improve rolls and whatnot. I think there's some sound and fury and consternation in the Call of Cthulhu market where some people love 7th and some people don't, because they don't. They think it gives the player too much agency with these push and luck mechanics. So it, you know, a little bit takes away a little bit from the. You are at the whims of the universe and what's going on in the game. Well, Delta Green is back a generation, so there are none of those mechanics you do not have like in Delta Green. If you fail a die roll, you are looking at the result, period, end of story. Right. There's virtually no way around it. There's amazing GM advice in the book for what failures mean and how players can attempt things without even rolling the dice, et cetera. We're going to get into some of that, but the bottom line is it's a branch off of six that's pretty heavily, I would say, not super heavily, but pretty heavily modified in terms of a skill list and how. How some other things have introduced, how they make it a bit more of a modern, suitable, very deadly game. Anything you want to say about the. The basics? [00:14:47] Speaker B: There is a luck skill or a luck attribute in Delta Green, which some people will be like, [00:14:56] Speaker A: we're going to get to that. [00:14:57] Speaker B: But what Harrigan is mentioning is the. The spending of luck, which is it's. It's different in Delta Green and how it's handled from. [00:15:04] Speaker A: Yeah, but yeah, the one in, in seventh Edition, frankly, is a lot like dcc, right? So you gotta. You got luck in dcc and if you decide to spend that luck, you're. You get lower and lower. And there are moments when the GM will be like, either everybody make a luck roll to see if you make this so your luck will be diminishing, or they may even just be like, who's got the lowest luck right now and this thing happens to you, right? Delta Green. Luck doesn't work that way. It's basically 50 50, but we'll. I do Have a section on that, Sean. We'll cover that. So diving into the characters first, this will look very familiar to many people. It's a pretty trad game when you get right down to it, right. You've got statistics, you've got skills, you got derived attributes. The statistics are the usual strength, dex con, intelligence, power and charisma. There's hit points, there's willpower points, sanity points, et cetera. Then you get into professions. And we're going to go into this in a later episode because there's really some cool stuff in Delta Green where you can like hand build your character or you can sort of grab and go. A pre built template or pregen or there's like a middle ground where you choose these packages. And the packages I think are like really neat little, little bits of game design. They make building a character both unique and fast. So it's, it's just kind of gets away from the like five points here, five points there, which a lot of BRP basic role playing games can get into. Delta Green has a way to avoid that if you want to. And then one of the things they add that is an innov are bonds. And this is basically your connections to friends, family organizations that keep you sane, that keep you grounded in why you keep going and why you keep doing this stuff. So we're going to dive deep into that as well in a future episode. And then the characters also have some what they call final details. Age, looks, name, job, your motivations. This is one of the places where I think quite frankly the agent handbook could do a much better job. And when we. Sean, when we do the Deep Dive on character generation, I think you're familiar there's a separate product that is free, that's available. Is it actually what is last things last in. What's that called? [00:17:13] Speaker B: It is in the. Oh man, need to know. That's what it is. [00:17:18] Speaker A: There is another product we'll get into in the, in the Deep Dive episode that does a better job of like building an agent around your motivations and like who you work, who you might have worked for. There's some random tables around not only who you might have worked for, but the key part that I think the Agent's Handbook is not so good at is the inciting incident, which is basically what was your brush with the unnatural that led you to be connected to Delta Green and for them, for the organization to recruit you. The handbook like hints at it all over the place. And it's kind of a sprawling character generation chapter that kind of goes in and out on like what your motivations might be, et cetera. This other product sums it up in like three or four pages and it just does a better job of it. Now, unfortunately, I don't remember if need to Know is the product I'm talking about or not, but there is a product either at the front end of need to Know or there's a standalone product that says role for profession roll for this, that the other thing. And it includes these inciting incidents which are frankly not present in the agent's handbook, which kind of sucks. All right, so enough about character. So it's a cool character sheet. Anybody who knows basic role playing systems, anybody who knows tradition, traditional role playing games will know what they're looking at when they look at one of these. There's a few things on there that like bonds that you'll be, what's, what's a breaking point, what's a bone, you know, that kind of thing that you'll be asking about. But generally speaking, it's a very trad game when it comes to this stuff. Everything is really swings around the skill system in a basic role playing game. So it's a percentile system from 01 to 100 for each each of your skills. Although I guess you can be rated zero as well, now that I think about it. If you have a rating of zero in a skill. This is one of the things I like about this game does you can't roll against it. So there's always those skills like brain surgery or flying an aircraft that you know you're going to have zero percent chance of doing that unless you've had some training of some kind. So it models that there are crits and failures in the game, which I really like the way they do it. It's not the 01,05 and the 96 to 100 version from Call of Cthulhu. It is the mothership version which is roll doubles of either. And it's good or bad. So if your skill is 50 and you're all 44, 33, 22 or 11, that's a critical success. If you roll 55, 66, 77, 88, 99, that's a critical failure. So you've always got this thing where you're on the lookout when you make your die roll for doubles, good or bad kind of thing. And it's just, it's just one of the critical successes and failure systems that I quite like. You do have the stat. This is one part I don't like about this or or any other BRP game. It's, quite frankly, it's kind of solved partially in seventh edition Call of Cthulhu. But there's always this thing where if you don't have a skill, look at whether the stats apply. And you could do a stat times 5 roll under with percentile dice. Right. I frankly absolutely hate the wiggle room in that. Like, if you have skill system used that roll against the skills. The biggest problem being like a persuade test versus a charisma check. And there's guidance in the book about when you would do one versus the other. But anybody who's listened to my big mouth, you know, ramble on at length about RPG stuff, knows that I don't like that. Where I've got, like, you know, what box does this go in? This one or this one? I have a scenario that's unfolding in front of me as the gm. What am I calling for? And I don't like it when it's not black and white. [00:20:42] Speaker B: Like, to back up. It's a backup. [00:20:44] Speaker A: Okay. [00:20:45] Speaker B: If a, you know, if I persuade doesn't work, I can use charisma times five. [00:20:51] Speaker A: Right. [00:20:52] Speaker B: It's a backup. [00:20:53] Speaker A: And charisma times five is invariably better than persuade, unless you've dropped a ton of points in the persuade, for sure. Right? [00:21:00] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:21:01] Speaker A: Yeah. So that's the part that just doesn't jive. There is some, like I said, there's some guidance in the book around why you would want to do it. I get it, but I don't love it. No, I'd rather default to the skill at a lower level or something. I don't know. Or have the. Have the charisma influence the skill, which it does in a game like gerps, for example. [00:21:20] Speaker B: It just creates the player at the table trying to negotiate that, which I. Which is what I find sometimes. Like, well, I don't have, like, pickpockets, so can I just do decks times five? Like, can I? [00:21:38] Speaker A: Right? [00:21:39] Speaker B: It's like, come on. And you gotta like, no. [00:21:44] Speaker A: And I know there's, you know, you even get into some of these games. You get into, like, maybe it's Dex times two because it's more difficult, or Dex times six because it's easier. Like, no, thank you. I just don't want to be. I don't want to be in that. In the moment, trying to sort all that out for. For our younger listeners and there probably are like, one of you or something. But for our younger listeners who don't remember usenet in the 90s and basically the Internet boards where all things RPG were discussed. So RPG advocacy, whatever, whatever. Right? Flunk, flunk, flunk. If you remember all those memes, how [00:22:20] Speaker B: do you say you're old without saying you're old? [00:22:23] Speaker A: Thanks, John. Thanks a lot. My point is, there used to be the same way there are RPG whether the OSR is full of miscreants who are, you know, awful for the hobby or not, whether the indie space is full of a bunch of snowflakes that, you know, you know, do the whatever, right? The. The consternation and the hand wringing used to be around skill systems back in the 90s, and it was around whether or not your attributes should affect the skill or not. And BRP falls into the. Your skill's your skill, my friend. You're. Whether or not you're strong or smart or dexterous has nothing to do with it. Versus the group side of things and the hero side of things, which is based on your ATT attributes. Your skills were all tied together. I actually like that this is no longer an argument, because both ways work fine. I had a revelation in the 90s when fudge. In a different way, Fudge broke apart all of the dependencies and derived attributes because the systems were so heavy into the derived, derived, derived. We saw it in Top Secret, for example, when we reviewed that Fudge was like, if you want to be good at something, put points into it. End of story. If you are a good fist fighter and you're also good with rapiers, guess what? Those things are not related. Doesn't matter if they're related. You know, fist fighting or the older version of Call of Cthulhu punching and kicking. You know, you got to put points into both of them. Anyway, long story short, let me. Let me not get bogged down here. I really like the difficulty system that the Arc Dream guys have leveraged here, which is basically the average skill. You know, average task is your skill roll. You're trying to make it, and there's a minus 40, a minus 20, a plus 20, or a plus 40. And that's pretty much the only changes the GM ever makes to the game. Unlike seventh edition Call of Cthulhu, you do not roll an additional D. You know, tens die. It's like, not like an advantage disadvantage system. It's this minus 40 to plus 40. But quite frankly, it is so easy in play. And we'll see later when we get to combat. There's a great combat table that shows what the situations might be in a combat situation that might give you a minus 20 or a plus 20 or a plus 40 or whatever it might be. It's just a simple thing that you can very easily get lodged in your monkey brain and then, you know, kind of keep that there as you run the game. Last thing about skills, Sean, I know you like this part too. There's a table in the book that actually calls out what the numbers mean. And those, the meaning of, like, how skilled you are relate directly to whether the GM is necessarily calling for a role or not. So when you get into that situation where you're like, I've got 60% in something, and we all know what rolling in a percentile system can do to you because of the. Because of the math, it's really easy to fail over and over again. It feels like you're just doing nothing but failing even when you have a 60. This game says if you're up to 19%, you're just a dabbler in something. If you're up to 20 to 29, you're a dedicated hobbyist. 30 to 39, you have a college minor or some basic training. A 40 to 59, you have essentially the equivalent of a college major or years of experience. 60 to 79 is decades of experience or graduate or doctoral work. And it goes on from there. The top is a lifetime of experience and pursuit. And it gives the GM this great mechanism to say, you know what, you're going to spot the clue or make the contact or convince the person, because it's what your character does. And we'll get into this when we get into the system proper. But there are basically some advice around why you would still roll. And that's like when the stakes are high, when failure is really meaningful. But generally speaking, if you even have a 40, you are like, essentially you've been to college for this thing or you spent years doing it. I love this system, this part of it. [00:26:15] Speaker B: Yeah, I like. There's many scenarios that I've run where I don't do a lot of skill checks because of this specific reason. And I think it's also part of the. There are times in certain games that if you don't provide the information that makes the game move forward, it comes to a screeching halt. So don't make them roll. Just tell them they know it. Why? Because they're. They've got equivalent to a PhD in this thing. And so it shouldn't be this surmount unsurmountable you know, odds against them in trying to figure out or coming across the clue by for. [00:27:00] Speaker A: Especially in a super swingy percentile system which all these games are. Right. [00:27:05] Speaker B: The only drawback and we might get to this, but I don't know is [00:27:11] Speaker A: if they don't know what you're gonna [00:27:12] Speaker B: say is if they don't roll, they don't get to increase it. [00:27:18] Speaker A: Yep. So we'll get to that. Hang on to that thought. [00:27:21] Speaker B: Spoilers. Sorry, folks. [00:27:23] Speaker A: The way that you. Yeah, because I really like the way that you increase it, but it flies absolutely. In the face of asking them to not roll because they're just good at something. There's a couple of different. I've read different advice in a couple different directions on this. Come back to that because I can cruise through this next part here there. So luck rolls. There are luck rolls in the game. They're generally 50, 50. It's that whole thing like you get to the apartment, is the person you want to talk to, are they home, make a luck roll. 50, 50, 50 or you know, 01 to 50. Yes. 51 to double O. No. One thing I like to do, Sean and I. Look, this is not in the book. You can spice this a little bit with the minus 40 to plus 40. So you could say are they home? And it's the middle of the day and you know, they're like a, you know, they work, they work an office job and it's a Monday at like 11am probably not. So put a minus 40 on the luck roll. Almost a 10% chance that they're home. So you can use that, that same scale to flavor the luck as well. If something is more likely or less likely, quite quite frankly the same as you would a GM would in a, in an old school game where they're saying it's 3 and 6 chance, 4 and 6 chance, 5 and 6 chance. Right. They are doing the mental calculation of how likely is this but then they still roll the die. You exact same thing with the Delta Green system. [00:28:38] Speaker B: And I do it. I use luck a ton for those questions that I don't know bear any relevance. [00:28:44] Speaker A: Yeah. When the PCs are just asking you things. Right. I don't know, do these documents exist? Right. You just use the luck roll and again you can flavor it. So that's like, oh, there's probably only like a 50, minus 20. There's a 30% chance those documents exist kind of thing. Yeah. It's actually very useful. And I remember one of the very first games you and I ever played, Delta Green together. You were the gm and I was like, this has a sweet luck mechanic. And you were like, I hate luck. Do you remember that? [00:29:10] Speaker B: No, I don't, actually. [00:29:11] Speaker A: You hadn't really read what it was in Delta Green and you hadn't put together how to use it. You were thinking we were going to use it. Like, I failed the task. I burned luck or I used luck. You were like, I don't want to do that. Shortly thereafter, you saw the light and were like, oh, this is actually a pretty sweet little. It relieves pressure off the GM is what it does. [00:29:32] Speaker B: It does. And as long as it's not used in lieu of some weird, like, skill based check. Right. That's it. [00:29:39] Speaker A: Yeah. That's the same thing for any game. Right. Like, don't roll luck if the skill matters. [00:29:44] Speaker B: Right. [00:29:44] Speaker A: If how good they are at it matters. It's only when it's outside of the scope of what the player can affect. [00:29:48] Speaker B: I have had players like, can I roll luck? And I'm like, no, not on this you can't. It's not a. It's not chance or happenstance. Chance. [00:29:59] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. You're chasing a guy down the street. Can I roll up to see if a piano falls on him from above? No. No, you cannot. [00:30:07] Speaker B: You gotta say it in the player voice. Can I roll up to see if a piano falls on him while he's running down the street? No. See, there you go. [00:30:17] Speaker A: Now that turns into. Sean, can you please go get the snacks? Can you leave the table, please? Right. Send that player up on the table. All right, let's keep going. Opposed. There's some cool opposed tests in here. So many games have that whole I'm sneaking, I'm looking, we're arm wrestling. I want to grab the thing. Well, I want to also grab the thing right between two players or two NPCs. And very frequently people get into this snit about whether it's better in a roll under game like this. Is it better to roll as low as you can, or do they want the blackjack style, the Price is Right style where you beat your number but you roll as high as you can, which obviously lends. I'm a fan of the ladder. The ladder, by the way, because it lends. There's more modeling of somebody who's higher skilled because a 59 can still. Can still. You know, the other person can't even get a 59 if they have a 40. Right. So there's a way for. You're just representing the. The difference in skill level. Delta Green goes one step further. There's a pretty cool little table that shows it's just a four blocker Basically, you know, it's a table of four cells, but it shows what happens if you both succeed and one crits and one does not both succeed, one rolls higher, et cetera, et cetera. But the coolest bit is if you both fail, there is provision for the GM to say, you know what, we're going to go with whoever failed the. The lesser failure. So in other words, whoever rolled, I think the lowest. So if you both have a 30, somebody rolled a 40 and somebody rolled a 35, the 35 is actually a success if the handler wants it to be. This is critical because in a percentile system, you get into those situations in combat and others where nothing happens round after round after round because no one can succeed. These BRP games are really vulnerable to that. This is a situation where you're able to say, you know what, just robo dice one time each and we will resolve it. Even if you both fail, I still have the ability to resolve the action and move it forward. I love that little piece. All right, so there are pursuit rules. I'm not going to get into them deeply. I don't think they're particularly good. I'll say that to you. They're the, they're the. Of the variety that's like you have to succeed a certain number of times in a row to either catch the person or get away from the person. And I've had situations where it's really hard to get the number of successes you need in a row. So it's like a rubber band. It's like, you know, you're catching them. No, you're not. They're getting away. No, they're not. You're catching them. And it kind of goes on and on. So I would probably do something a little bit different with the pursuit rules if I rode around the game now. There are willpower rules. And a lot of these, by the way, sanity, willpower. These are all tied back to your statistics, right? Your power in this case. So willpower is all about being, resisting exhaustion. Can you operate when you're sleep deprived and that sort of thing. So you can picture these back room scenes where the agents have been up for 36 hours, but they got to get something done because something terrible is going to happen. It has provision for all that stuff. And then we get into the combat system, very traditional combat system in terms of. It's a turn based thing. There are combat rounds, people take turns, they go in Dex initiative order, which not everyone loves because that's a static thing, right? It might be static and it might not be the most interesting thing in the world, but I tell you what, it's pretty fast. It lets people just kind of like get it, get their, you know, get a move on. And I would also say there's nothing stopping the GM from just being a little bit improvisational and saying, you know what, to start things off, I want you to each make a dex check. And this is one of those situations where I think a dexterity check might be a good thing to roll dex times five sort of thing. So there's a group of set actions. So I will say this. It's a pretty prescriptive combat system where it tells you all the things that you can do. Aim, called shot, disarm, dodge, escape, fight back, move, pin, wait, and then critically, anything else. There's a move, an action called anything else which really, it covers all the ground. So it's a pretty neat little system. We've talked about critical hits and misses before, but they are well represented in the combat system because those 22, 30, you know, 33, whatever the critical hit is, generally use double damage. You can always take it and do something a bit more flexible with it if you want to. Like I would allow you. You want to throw in a disarm as well. You want to throw in a knockdown, want to throw in, push them in front of the subway, subway train. You can, you can do all that, right? If you get the critical success. And on the critical failure, there's some. There's not a lot of guidance, but there's some good little tables around, like what it means. That's probably a firearm mishap or a misfire. And there's a, you know, roll a D4 for how long it takes you to clear the. Clear the chamber kind of thing. So there's just some, some good little rules in around that stuff. Pretty good. I've mentioned that there's this cool table of attack modifiers which involves like range, movement, cover. It's all within this minus 40 to plus 40 sort of range. There's a BRP, rears his head, lets you know that it's a BRP game by saying if you're strong, you're going to get a bonus to your melee and your unarmed combat. Right? Like a D4 or D6 kind of thing. So in other words, if you're big and strong and tough, you're going to do more damage when it comes to fisticuffs and that kind of thing, it's a low hit point game for sure. Like, I think Sean is at con that derives your. Oh, strength and con divided by two. Right. I think it's. [00:35:31] Speaker B: I believe so something like I don't make a lot of characters. [00:35:36] Speaker A: Yeah, fair enough. I believe it's. You add your strength and your con together, they're on a typical 3 to 18 scale. White like the original D D's, right. So your hit points never go up. Whatever. You roll your strength and your con, add them together, divide by two, that's your hit points period. And weapons are doing that. D4, D6, D8, D10, D12. And then we'll get to lethal firearms in a moment. But like a. Like an AR15, single bullet is going to do D12 damage. I don't always love hit point games when it comes to like modeling modern firearms and whatnot, but in a game where the hit points don't go up, I quite like it. So a D12 can easily one shot most people, but it can also roll a one or two, which means you get. It's just a graze, right. It just went through your shirt, drew a red line across your arm and you're bleeding now, that kind of thing. So I think if you think about it the right way, it really can model a lot of different things. It's pretty cool. You've used combat a lot in your games. [00:36:32] Speaker B: One thing about hit points though. Do you know, like when they're dead and incapacitated is a little unique. [00:36:38] Speaker A: I love that. Tell us about that. [00:36:40] Speaker B: So I think, what is it? Two hit. Two hit points. I can't remember the exact. It's two hit points. I think they're incapacitated. One hit point, they are bleeding out. It's. It's not like zero and dead. It's before that essentially. Like if you don't get them, like if they're at one hit point, they're in a lot of trouble, period. [00:37:05] Speaker A: Two or fewer, you're unconscious, which is really cool. Really cool. I would also say this, like it's N0, I think is death, right? Yeah, sure, you're dead. But the cool part, really cool part is that you can be resuscitated. [00:37:20] Speaker B: Yes. [00:37:21] Speaker A: So there's a whole like you are literally dead, just like in real life. And if someone can't do CPR or someone can't resuscitate you, then it's all over. But this is. I don't know, there's this fragility built into the system around the hit point system where not only do you not have very many, but like Sean says, like, guess What? All those times when your DND character or your other characters are wandering around with one hit point and all your faculties are perfect. You have all your abilities. Not in Delta Green. [00:37:47] Speaker B: No. [00:37:47] Speaker A: Not in doubt. The green. [00:37:48] Speaker B: No. [00:37:48] Speaker A: Right, yeah. [00:37:49] Speaker B: That is funny. You're at. If you're at one hit point or 100, you're at the same. [00:37:53] Speaker A: You're good. You're all good, and then suddenly you're in dire, straight. [00:37:56] Speaker B: Yeah. Your vigor is all good. Yes. [00:37:59] Speaker A: Yeah. So Delta Green has pretty sweet little rules for like, resuscitation, stabilization, treatment, recuperation, like, all that kind of stuff. It has a great little quite lethal system. And then as soon as you bust out, like, the big guns like explosives, or you put the select fire weapon into auto fire, you turn on something that's called the lethality rating. People have probably heard about this elsewhere, and we may have even talked about it in the first episode, but it is a little wonderful modeling of just how bad it is to be in the line of fire in the open of a fully automatic weapon, because that turns the D12. Let's take the AR15. Right? If you happen to have a fully automatic, you know, let's say you've got a. An M4 or something like that, and you put that in full auto, it no longer does D12 damage for the single bullet. It now does percentile dice with a lethality rating. And I forget what it is for that gun, but it's probably in the range of like 20% or something like that. If. If you roll less than 20, your target is dead again. They can be. They can be stabilized and resuscitated. Right? But they're dead. They're dead if you're a less than 20. And if you don't roll less than 20, you add those two D10s together and do that much damage. So you're looking at way more than 50% wipeout for most characters. So Sean has seen this in games I've played in, like, getting into a. A firefight where you're, like, not undercover and not in, like, body armor is incredibly bad news in this game. It's. It is not good. Not where you want to be. Just put it that way. [00:39:30] Speaker B: Yeah. And I think with that, with those set actions, when you do, when it's your turn and you determine that you want to dodge, right, that's your. As a matter of fact, you can go out of turn. Right. So if the. The bad guy has the drop on you, you do have the ability to take that. Your action at that time. To do. To do the dodge. [00:39:52] Speaker A: Not to shoot back. Not shoot back. [00:39:54] Speaker B: Right, right. And then when it is your turn, you've already used your action, so it's done. But it, it does preserve the fact that you can, you know, go dodge or seek cover quickly so that it alleviates that. What potentially increases the chances of you surviving being shot at. [00:40:16] Speaker A: Yep. By sacrificing your action to do something else. Right, Correct. So there are. Yeah. You still don't want to be in a firefight. That's the bottom line. No, it's. It's really trying to get close to reality. If that, that's like, that's the way to think about it. Like, do you want to be. Do you want to be heading into a building where you don't know what's in there and you got your own M4 or whatever? Like, who's in there? What do they have? Like, this is not think about in reality doing it. Right. Especially if you're not trained. So. Yeah. [00:40:41] Speaker B: Yeah. So it's not high action. It is very much a. A gun. Seek cover. Like that's what I do. That's the first thing I do. I don't draw my weapon. I run for cover. Bingo bango. Good. Right. [00:40:56] Speaker A: Get undercover. Yep. And you know what? There are a number of provisions for speeding combat because again, like a number of different trad games, especially like a roll under swingy trad game, like a. Like a beer basic role playing game. You can have those situations where combat drags a bit. Right. Where people just can't hit their numbers. You're going back and forth. It seems kind of either a little goofy or it's breaking the mood or whatever. Delta Green has a couple of provisions for that. Sean mentioned one of them where you got the dodge thing where you can, you know, you can kind of sacrifice your action to try to get undercover type of thing. It also has the ability to fight back, which I like a lot. So instead of them, it's. Let's. Let's say you're in hand to hand combat. It's not. It does not have to be simply a. I swing and miss, you swing and hit ice wing and ice wing, you swing, I swing, you swing. You know, that kind of thing. When they attack you or when you attack them, the decision can be made by the person who's getting attacked. I want to fight back, actually. And what that means is you roll an opposed test and whoever rolls higher does damage. So it turns into that whole like, oh, we're going to get a result. No matter what. And we're not just going to have a bunch of whiffs on the, on the percental dice and even that little thing, it might cut like a round or two out of the combat and cut it down to three or four rounds instead of five or six, which makes a difference. I think it's pretty, it's pretty cool. I think some games take this thinking further in terms of like always getting an outcome like the, into the odd games around, always doing damage or games like Warlock, you're always doing opposed roles and the higher number always deals damage sort of thing. Right. Even if they don't meet some other threshold, you're always dealing damage. It's all just to shorten that sort of draggy combat sort of thing. And I think it works really well. Last thing I would say here about combat system generally is those lethal firearms also have kill radiuses and they model suppression and multiple targets and all that sort of stuff. And again, getting into the prescriptive side of things, there are rules for being poisoned, being freezing to death, suffocating, falling. And in a game like this, you don't necessarily want that OSR mindset of rulings over rules. You kind of want to know how it works so the players can understand and the rules don't change from one moment to the next. Lock in the trunk of a car, it's how long do I have? I'm trapped underwater. I want the same rules to kind of flow back and forth kind of thing. [00:43:15] Speaker B: Because in some games you level up and you get traits or feats that prevent that or it extends that. So now I can hold my breath underwater for, I don't know, my constitution times 10 rounds. [00:43:31] Speaker A: Yes. [00:43:32] Speaker B: And so they're trying to root it into the reality or a simulationist type of approach. It's not level based and that helps keep things grounded into contemporary modern day setting. There you go. [00:43:47] Speaker A: Yeah. I've talked about the old GURPS reality distortion level meter they used to have in some of their books, which is basically the how bananas is the action versus how grounded. And if you said last week, open your door and walk outside. And that is the delta green world. [00:44:02] Speaker B: Right? [00:44:02] Speaker A: Right. Like don't go get hit by a car. Don't, don't, don't shoot it, shoot it. Go get shot like it's that world with all the other cool stuff added on top of it. [00:44:11] Speaker B: Can I jump over the movie vehicle when it comes towards me? Sure, you can try that. [00:44:21] Speaker A: All right. There's a very robust sanity system in the game which is it's very rooted in Call of Cthulhu, right? It says, you know, you got 0 to 100. I think sanity, maybe it's 0 to 99. I forget what the. What the limits are, but what Delta Green has done is in the current edition, they've added in a bunch of really cool stuff where they've broken sanity into. Well, what did you witness? Is it horrific violence? Is it this sense of helplessness that you can't do anything to change or prevent what you're seeing? Or. Or is it the unnatural? Is it stuff that just shouldn't be, that you're having to process? And there's little subsystems in the game for how you can get desensitized to this stuff and it doesn't affect you anymore at the sacrifice of some of your humanity type of thing. And of course, you can't get desensitized to the unnatural. So there's just these really neat little subsystems around. Not only does it model what you're seeing and you getting desensitized, but it also models how do you recover from it? What kinds of things do you have to do in your home scenes to. To recover from what you've experienced sort of thing. It models temporary insanity where if you take five or more. I love this little system, actually, because I will admit I really don't like sanity systems where you roll randomly for like, what phobia you pick up, which has nothing to do with the moment you're in, which some of the older Call of Cthulhu systems were really vulnerable to that. At least if the GMs didn't apply a little bit of critical thinking, they were. This game says if you take five or more, are you going to run away? Are you going to fight and struggle the thing? Or do you submit? Do you faint? Do you collapse? Do you like go after it? Or do you run for your life, which is. It's a beautiful thing. So it basically says flee, struggle or submit. Love that John's just none. [00:46:10] Speaker B: I am nodding. [00:46:12] Speaker A: It then brings in the idea of a breaking point. And your breaking point will be calculated multiple times over the course of the game. After you reach it, it is your sanity. Take away your power. So if you have a sanity of 60 and a power of 10, your breaking point is 50. When you hit 50 in the game, you pick up a disorder. So you've seen enough that there's, you know, you've got some stuff that's going to linger with you and with your character. And again, there are ways to treat those disorders and whatnot, but they kind of pile up. And the way that you look at the next breaking point is now you're at 50, you take your power away again. Your next breaking point is at 40. And when you hit that, you're going to get another disorder. So it's a really clean sanity system. When you hit zero, you're permanently insane. Your character is taken and, you know, GM does whatever they want, basically. And there is. Have you seen this, Sean? There's an optional rule for keeping all of the sanity points and the loss secret. [00:47:04] Speaker B: Yes, I've heard of that. That is fantastic. And I just want to comment that this mimics my life. Like, I'm always around my breaking point. I may. Or. And it's even secret. Yeah, I may or may not have hit my breaking point and accumulated a disorder, actually. [00:47:24] Speaker A: Yep. Or no comment. Yeah, yeah, no, there you go. No comment for me either. So you've gone through these missions, these operas that are really hard on your character. Right. So how do you. Your sending these going down and down and down. You're picking up disorders, you are breaking. You are having to struggle and see things that you just no one should see. Right. How do you recover? How do you keep going? The part that I forgot in my notes, incredibly, is bonds. So we mentioned in part of the character generation process, depending on your profession, you're going to get generally between two and four bonds that you get to define. And the bond is like my loving wife, my estranged spouse, my kid who's in college, who doesn't want anything to do with me, my best friend, my co worker, my boss, you name it, ex girlfriend. It can be anybody. It could be an organization. [00:48:17] Speaker B: Now Harrigan is just throwing out examples people. He's not taking them from his actual life. And it's just funny. This is just examples, like to plead the fifth. [00:48:31] Speaker A: Yeah, it's cool though. It can be your group of veteran buddies, it can be the support group you belong to. It can be the hobbyists that you're with. Whatever what you're doing is you're aligning up these bowling pins, these people in organizations that you are then going to tear down and damage as the game goes on. So when you take sanity damage, you can decide, actually, I'm going to sacrifice a bond here. Instead of taking the sanity damage, you roll a D4. There's a little mechanic around it where you lose some willpower when you're doing this. But you also lower this incoming sanity damage, like with some. Almost like the bond is armor but you also lower the bond by that amount. The bonds start off as your charisma score, right? So if you have a 13, Charisma, the bond starts at 13. Roll a D4 down, you get a 2. Your bond is now down to 11. Throughout the missions that we're talking about, your sanity is going down, but you're also damaging your bonds. And these are these. Are you losing touch with people? These. Are you wondering, is it still worth even maintaining the relationship when we do the episode on Sanity Unbon? Sean, I want to have a deep dive on some of the jank that's in this system a little bit where you and I have talked about, where it's not super clear in the book when all this comes out. Like, let's put it this way, if you see something in the moment in the mission and it affects your sanity and you're saying, I want to bring the bond in to deflect it, when does that take shape? Probably take shape the next time you see them. So you have to remember that you have to write that down. Like not only did the bond go down, but there was a specific, like a three or four point hit to the bond. So how does that manifest either the next time you see them or if you want to kind of, you know, break the boundaries a little bit, do you do a cutaway scene that shows the other person caring less about you? Like looking at their watch like they missed dinner again or they're not going to make the getaway on this weekend after all. You know what I mean? Like there's different ways to model it. And the book isn't super good at telling you how to represent those broken bonds or those diminishing bonds. [00:50:34] Speaker B: I was just thinking like, you know, they're doing things on their end that will ultimately be discovered by you. [00:50:43] Speaker A: Yes, the agent. [00:50:45] Speaker B: Right. You go home and you find out some weird. [00:50:48] Speaker A: The locks are changed. Some. [00:50:50] Speaker B: Well, that or some weird phone number is in your wife's like telephone or pants pocket. What's that all about? Oh, then you. [00:51:00] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a wonderful one. [00:51:03] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:51:03] Speaker A: I guess my point is this. The, the mechanics are laid out. These like golden mechanics that are like, like few other games that are such rich role playing fodder are laid out before you. And the game doesn't do a great job of giving you a bunch of examples or like, like Sean's talking about is that the next time you're in the home scene and you're, you know that you're. And you encounter something like, whoa, what's what happened? Or is it a flashback? Or is it in the moment, like you remember now someone telling you something that wounds you? You know what I mean? Like, there's many ways to do it, and it does not give you a great set of, like, menu options or examples, but it does not take away from the fact it's one of my favorite RPG mechanics ever. I think I love this mechanic. [00:51:47] Speaker B: And then if you get a bond, [00:51:49] Speaker A: a zero, it's, oh, this is great. [00:51:52] Speaker B: You lose. You lose the bond and you can replace them and you lose the bond, I think permanently, if I'm not mistaken, I could be wrong. And you can replace them. And eventually what happens is, as you do more missions, you tend to establish bonds with. With your agents. It's your co workers at that point, and you can relate more with them because of everything that you're going through, and you commiserate with them. [00:52:23] Speaker A: And so even though you're not supposed [00:52:24] Speaker B: to, even though you're not supposed to, it becomes, hey, remember that operation, you know, last year, two years ago, six months ago? And you have a commonality because you've been on these missions together in your cell or as your group, and. But yeah, it's. [00:52:41] Speaker A: We covered this last week. Except those bonds are worthless. [00:52:44] Speaker B: Right. [00:52:45] Speaker A: They don't. They don't provide the same. They don't start at your full charisma score, for example. Right. They don't start at 13 in, you know, in the case we're talking about. Here's a tidbit that's related to what you just mentioned, Sean, that I love that I came across last night as I was paging through the book again, when you cross. This is right from the book. When you cross a bond off, don't erase it. After all, there's no forgetting a vital relationship that went bad. [00:53:09] Speaker B: That's right. [00:53:10] Speaker A: Like, that sums up the game's spirit so well. So. Well, remember that daughter that's estranged and won't talk to you anymore? She's still on your sheet, buddy. She's still there. [00:53:23] Speaker B: She's still around. You know, your ex. Your ex spouse. They're holding grudges and all kinds of stuff and still could be involved in their life. Yeah. [00:53:33] Speaker A: Yep. We could. Frankly, we could drill on bonds for, like, an entire episode. And we will. So I'm. I'll move on. But just understand, like, the bond system is, like, it is really worth looking at, even. Yeah. [00:53:45] Speaker B: With Call of Cthulhu insanity, it is the. There is a mantra of, oh, you investigate things. You come across the missiles you go insane and then you die. Like, oh, that's the thing. And it's a downward spiral and it just and never ends. And it's just. That's the deal. And with Delta Green, they've created the bonds to offset that to a major degree. And then it also obviously, as we gush about it, provides story rich elements you can put into home scenes or interactions. Even when the person's on a mission and they get a call on their cell phone from that bond, wondering where they are because they're supposed to be at home or going to their son's baseball practice. [00:54:31] Speaker A: Yes. Just give me another idea. When they're in the moment and they're using that like bond deflection, the. What's it called? [00:54:37] Speaker B: Actually you project a project because there's [00:54:40] Speaker A: two ways to use bonds. I didn't realize that until recently. There's two ways to use bonds. One is to project, the other is to like prevent a disorder. I think something like that. [00:54:51] Speaker B: Interesting now. [00:54:53] Speaker A: Yeah, I, I'll. We'll look into it. I think I have it. My notes that are, that are coming up here. But what you just reminded me of, like you could be in the moment. You know, your phone buzzes, you get a text from that bond. That, that's the. Okay, we won't go. Yeah, exactly. [00:55:05] Speaker B: Where are you? [00:55:05] Speaker A: What's going on? Y. Yeah. Yep. I thought we had a. I thought we had a thing tonight. Yeah. [00:55:10] Speaker B: Are you going to be here? Like I got a call. Like I get agents that call at like at evening. I touch base with my. Or I reach out to my, my significant other, my kids. I do a phone call to check in and then they, they give them the, the third degree. Like where are you going to give [00:55:26] Speaker A: them the what for? [00:55:27] Speaker B: Yeah, you got to, you got to. [00:55:28] Speaker A: You're. [00:55:29] Speaker B: Wait a minute. Where are you? What's going on? Why are you home? We have. Yeah. [00:55:34] Speaker A: Dude, it's endless. The whole like. I talked to Jerry. You're out of town. You didn't tell me you were going out of town. [00:55:38] Speaker B: Like going out of town. I called the office. You said you were at the office. What do you mean exactly? [00:55:42] Speaker A: The office would be a good one. [00:55:43] Speaker B: Yep. [00:55:44] Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. And I forgive us folks, we do gush about this part of the game. The game's not perfect. Right. As we, we've talked about already. But we'll get into further there. There are things to kind of tinker with. But man, there's parts of it that if you want like dark, rich role playing, this is your Game. And I think, you know what, there's a. There is a great Seth Skorkowski video on Delta Green that he did relatively recently. And he actually said the end of the video, he's like, it's a bit more like Cult than it is Call of Cthulhu, actually. You know, in terms of how dark it gets, right? Yeah, yeah, it gets. It can be beyond the cosmic horror. It gets into the broken relationship stuff, which is maybe. Maybe darker. Right. All right, so there's not much more to cover here. But I will say the whole. And this is a part. Sean, maybe you have. I have not explored this very much in my own gaming. The home scenes are really cool. These are where the opera's done. You know, maybe you. Maybe you all survived, maybe you didn't, but you basically go back to ground. Delta Green is done with you for now. So you go back your regular life, right? It might be days, weeks, months, might be a year before Delta Green calls you again on the next mission. So you run these, what are called home scenes. And it is where all of that damage to your bonds comes home to roost. So wherever you've lowered them, that's where you have to role play these scenes and show what's been happening. But also there's a. There's a whole system in there around what do you do during this time. It's a downtime system, and it is a downtime system that is focused on repairing bonds. Or get this. If you fulfill your responsibilities to people, you are repairing the bonds. So you go meet with that group who you've been neglecting. You spend time with the kid that you haven't seen or your ailing father. Right? You do all that stuff. But there's also. I'm not going to go through them all here because we're going to dive into this. But they're just to give you a little whiff back to nature. So if you're the kind of person that's like, I got to get away. I got to get to a cabin. I got to go on my own trip, that damages your bonds and restores your sanity. I freaking love that. So you're recovering your mental health, your sanity's coming back, but your bonds are like, wtf, dude? You were away and now you're still not doing the thing. So there's this, like, wheel that turns and it's just, oh, it's so good. It's so good. You can develop a brand new bond. You know how you do that, Sean? [00:58:05] Speaker B: I don't remember the Nuances, but by hurting other bonds. Oh, that's right. Okay. [00:58:10] Speaker A: By spending time with the new bond, by hurting your own. [00:58:12] Speaker B: That makes sense. [00:58:14] Speaker A: And then the last one I'll cover, which I think is super cool, is you can go to therapy, but when you go to therapy, you're hurting your bonds because you're busy doing other things. And people are also like, you're going to therapy now what the. Right. You gain sanity, but you also risk like infecting or affecting your therapist by telling them too much. And there's roles for all of this. You make rolls to see how it goes, to see how much you recover, et cetera. It's way more systemized than I knew it was. It's pretty cool. [00:58:42] Speaker B: Yeah. You have about three or four options and we've hit on a few here already. But one of them is also increasing your skills. It's not level based, so whenever you fail a skill check, you check it. That allows you to increase it, but not, not in addition to that, during a home scene, you can actually determine like, oh, I'm going to go to college and, or pick up classes and courses. [00:59:03] Speaker A: You damage your bonds, but you damage [00:59:05] Speaker B: your bonds because you're not spending time with them. Like, it's fantastic. And so during those home scenes, it's like, what are you wanting to do? Do you want to clear your mind and risk a bond or do you want to spend time with your bonds yet you know you don't. [00:59:19] Speaker A: Which is kind of cool because in the, in the, in the opera, you may have taken a ton of sanity damage and you're like, look, I just gotta, I gotta do these things to help myself. But you also may have sacrificed a whole bunch of bonds and not taking much sanity damage, in which case you just, you're like, I'm going to fulfill my responsibilities, actually, I'm going to spend time with the bonds, build those back up. So it's a really cool cycle that you go through. [00:59:40] Speaker B: Now, Harrigan has mentioned the word opera twice. And I don't know if anybody caught it the first episode, if we actually mentioned it, but opera is codename for operation in Delta Green. Just want to throw that out there. [00:59:51] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, yeah. The same way you can't say, you can't say Delta Green. You say program. [00:59:56] Speaker B: Right. [00:59:57] Speaker A: Opera is like a code word for a Delta Green operation. [01:00:00] Speaker B: A couple tickets to the opera. [01:00:02] Speaker A: That's right. That's right. You go to the opera tonight. I mean, there's, there's one of the first compilations of adventures in the in the New version of the game is A Night at the Opera, right? [01:00:11] Speaker B: That's right. [01:00:12] Speaker A: All right, well, you know what? You mentioned the skill improvements in home scenes. Let's. Let's circle back to your comment like 30 minutes ago or more where you talked about how there's this tension between rolling too often and not rolling, etc. Because the way you improve your skills in Delta Green, if you fail, you tick a box. And when you're in the home scene later, you roll a D4. Although that changes depending on what edition, what printing of the game. Sean, remember when we were playing. [01:00:39] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:00:39] Speaker A: Different. Different printings do things a little bit differently. [01:00:42] Speaker B: Yeah. I do it at the end of session. [01:00:44] Speaker A: I think the new One is a D4. [01:00:46] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:00:46] Speaker A: Some of them are like add one point, not D4 and that kind of thing. Right, right. Yeah. Long story short, what that means is if you're a player, you should be trying to roll and fail all the time to try and get your skills up. Right. That's what you should be trying to do. And then here is the GM saying, actually a percentile system can be miserable to always fail at. So we have this whole mechanic around how competent you are. If you have a 50 or a 60, I'm not even going to call for a role. I've seen two pieces of advice or thinking around this, Sean. One is, yeah, as you get up in your ranks and are not making the roles, it's harder to improve the skill because you already got this body of knowledge. So it takes longer. I've also seen people say if someone uses it in lieu of a skill role, in other words, the GM says, yeah, you're right. You just. You just find that forensic clue because you have, you know, criminology whatever whatever. At 80, they tick the box. I've seen some people say, tick the box. They get it and it goes up by D4. Interesting. If I were going to do that, I'd want to make sure it was. Maybe it's not a D4. They get. Maybe they get a plus one or something. Or something. I don't know. [01:01:53] Speaker B: In any case, make a threshold where it's like if it. If they have the skill at 70 or 70 plus, they don't roll, they could still check it, but you only get one point. [01:02:03] Speaker A: Yep, yep. So bottom line, there's a little kink in the road there. The GM has to navigate around, like, how often is this happening that I'm not calling for roles and how does the skill reward system work and how tight is it to the Home scene. Because like you said, Sean, we've. We have played mainly single operas without a lot of time between. So we haven't done a lot of home scenes. Often it's like after the session in the games that we play, where you get the D4 kind of thing. And quite frankly, D4 results in such a low value, you're not appreciably racing ahead anyway. All right, last thing I would. I would add here. I think we're up at the tail end of this. There's a whole equipment section which is. It's. I would call it serviceable. You know, it's got. It's got a good selection of weapons, vehicles. None of those mechanics blow me away. But they also are very like. They do what they need to do. So the cars have like armor and hit points and they have a generic speed, you know, that kind of thing. So it's pretty easy to work with what they provide you with without it being too detailed. I don't know anything else. The only thing I've got from here is maybe a couple little things that we haven't hit on yet, pro and con. But anything else big picture wise, the system that we haven't covered? [01:03:09] Speaker B: I don't think so. [01:03:11] Speaker A: All right, meant to be an overview here. I've already talked about the charisma versus persuade thing that I don't love. I do think as. As trim. I should have mentioned this before. I traditionally have considered the call of Cthulhu skill lists as being way too large. Especially like they get. They're get. They get better through time as you look at, you know, second, third, fourth editions. Sixth being what this is based on. Seventh is better. But call Cthulhu 7 still has, to my. About, to my eye, way too many skills. Delta Green does a better job, but it still has too many skills. It's got. Delta Green still has things like artillery, just really, really specific. [01:03:49] Speaker B: I think that's a valuable skill in life. [01:03:50] Speaker A: And I know you. You do gunner pursued that. [01:03:53] Speaker B: So. [01:03:54] Speaker A: I know, I know that's your was. What was it? Your. What do you call that in the. [01:03:58] Speaker B: In the military MOS or military occupational specialty. [01:04:03] Speaker A: There you go. So that's why you like that. Well, my. [01:04:05] Speaker B: I was fire direction, by the way. Don't. Don't write me and call me a cannon cocker. That's not what I did. [01:04:10] Speaker A: I told my cos my civilian occupational specialty was archaeology right before I got into. Into the tech field. And Delta Green models both anthropology and archaeology. Archaeology is one of four subfields of anthropology. You don't really need both is all I'm getting at. There's medicine and pharmacy and surgery. I get what they're going at. But if you're going to get to that level of, like, hair splitting, then, you know, now you're in, like, hundreds of skills. So they've tried to do a reasonable take on this, but there is a provision for all those skills that are unnamed, all the specialized stuff, like scuba, for example. There is a way in the game, Sean. We just got to get to this. Not in times five, and it's not in times five. What it basically does is it allows you to use a different skill. Use a skill in a very specialized way that not everybody would have. So I think when you check the box for scuba, it lets you use athletics to do scuba stuff. And if you don't have the scuba specialization, you can't do scuba stuff because you haven't been trained. It's more like a. It's not a number. It's more like, I had this or I don't. Right. So it's like parachuting, scuba that, you know, I think electronic lock picking, that kind of thing, where it's like, just roll the skill, but you can't roll against this thing. You just can't do it unless you have a specialization. When you. When you add that in there, why not use that same thing for archaeology and for artillery and for whatever. Right. That kind of. Because there's, like, military operations and sciences in there and that sort of thing. Anyway, the COVID I'm back to. Back to some issues. The COVID art of the Agent's Handbook. Let's tell us about that. Sean, what you think about that? [01:05:56] Speaker B: I don't know about the Agent's Handbook, but the Handler's Guide drives me bonkers with the Cardassian on the front. No offense, Dennis. I appreciate your artwork. [01:06:05] Speaker A: They're both bad. [01:06:06] Speaker B: Wrong choice. That's just not. [01:06:07] Speaker A: I don't understand, because I like Detmiller's art throughout the books. [01:06:12] Speaker B: Correct. [01:06:12] Speaker A: And you know what? I don't think we've said this. The books are incredibly thematic. [01:06:17] Speaker B: Yes. [01:06:18] Speaker A: In terms, like, when you go through them, they're works of art. In terms of, like. I think we did talk about this, but it looks like a note page sometimes. Sometimes you're looking at a typewritten page, sometimes it's a handwritten note. And it's all to convey the spirit of the game. Right. It doesn't make it necessarily the quickest read or the easiest way to reference materials, but, boy, does it get you right locked in. And it's Dennis's art throughout. Right. Like, I think every image. Is that right? [01:06:43] Speaker B: Yeah. Majority of the work. I don't know if they do a lot of freelance help, but in the advantage of, you know, Dennis is a professional artist in addition to his role playing work. And he's worked in the creative art space for quite some time, even in comics, I believe, and graphic. Graphic novels. But it also provides a consistent look and feel throughout the book with the art. Right. [01:07:07] Speaker A: What I'm talking about, what I'm getting at is like, at least for the two core books, the Agent's Handbook and the Handler's Guide, I think it's his art throughout. [01:07:16] Speaker B: It is. [01:07:17] Speaker A: And it's really good. Except for the covers. But the covers are two of the worst pieces. Like, I don't get it. Like, you could go flip through those books and you could pick out 50 paintings that would be better on the covers. [01:07:32] Speaker B: The Conspiracy, which was a crowdfunding campaign done in. I don't remember a few years ago that I got in on, which covers the 90s era and some of those details. It's just like, it's black with some texture on it. It's actually a textured cover, but it's black with like a green triangle on the front. I'm like aces, you know? [01:07:53] Speaker A: Better. Yeah, I have it. [01:07:55] Speaker B: Yeah. 100 better. Yeah. I think moving forward, some of the covers, I mean, God's teeth is pretty crazy, right? And it's like, okay. I mean, there's a lot of teeth on God's teeth. Like the COVID in that creature. Like it's. [01:08:14] Speaker A: Whoa. [01:08:14] Speaker B: Right. But yeah, the. [01:08:15] Speaker A: Yeah, it's cool. Yeah, it's cool. [01:08:18] Speaker B: Yeah. But the agent, the Handler's guy drives me. Absolutely. [01:08:21] Speaker A: Handlers by with the Kardashian bonkers. And we're not talking about Kim Kardashian. We're talking about Star Trek. [01:08:26] Speaker B: Star Trek, Next Generation Kardashian with the brow ridges. Yes. [01:08:31] Speaker A: Just the expression. Expression on the agent's face. On the. On the Agent's Handbook where he's got that dumb. Like he's been hit with a hammer in the middle of his forehead kind of makes me crazy. [01:08:41] Speaker B: I have. Jeff and I are. We have a vow. My buddy Jeff does. He. He repackages RPG books. Like he'll put in his own art. Yeah. He reskins them and. And puts in his own art and. But he doesn't sell them. He doesn't sell them. [01:08:55] Speaker A: That. [01:08:55] Speaker B: That's not. That's taboo. But he and I are like, we gotta change the covers of these Delta Green books and get it reprinted. [01:09:02] Speaker A: Oh, he agrees. [01:09:03] Speaker B: Yeah. Oh, yeah. He's like, let me know what you're thinking as far as ideas go. And I don't know what it would look like. I don't know what I would come up with, but it's not what is currently in place. [01:09:14] Speaker A: Yeah. All right. The last little tidbit I'll throw out here before we wrap up, and we'll get to this when we talk about character generation, but in terms of distinguishing little aspects of the game that I think stand out, I really love the fact that if you have stats, so we're talking strength, dex, con, int, etc. If you have a number below a 9 or above a 12, there's a provision for you to write in, like, what makes you special or not special in this area. And that little thing just fleshes the character out. Like, you know, bad leg. You know? You know what I mean? Like, I had a head injury, so [01:09:47] Speaker B: my Inc 8, now 17 ripped. [01:09:51] Speaker A: Yeah, it's just kind of a cool little thing that I wish more games would do. And then I've already referenced this, actually, so I won't dive deeply here, but this concept of these professional packages, when you're building a player character, so the profession comes with a bunch of skills, and it even has ones for like, what are your hobbies? Here's a package of hobbies that, in other words, what does the hobby turn into in terms of skill values? So you just pick it up and drop it on your sheet and you're done. Like, it's really pretty cool. It's a. It's a. It's a midway point between build your character from the ground up, which I love. And here's a pregen. There's this place in the middle for Delta Green, which is like, build a character in like 10 minutes. It's pretty cool. I dig it. That's a good overview for those players who are non believers about the value of a Delta Green season. Maybe this episode kind of shines a light on, like, there's some. Some subsystems, some areas that we want to get into. Like, we said we're not going to do 30 episodes on the thing, but I do think some of these things require some unpacking to really show, like, what they can do. And quite frankly, Sean, I think we've uncovered a couple of things where, like, I want to know myself. Like, how do I approach this better? I read it and I'm like, sweet, Cool. How do I implement that and I want to get into the how do I implement that part of it a little bit more deeply. [01:11:10] Speaker B: And we'll do that. [01:11:11] Speaker A: Yeah, baby. [01:11:13] Speaker B: Well, excellent. It's great overview of the mechanics of Delta Green. High level overview. [01:11:23] Speaker A: Next week, Character generation. Right. I think is what we're going to [01:11:25] Speaker B: do the next episode. Character generation. Let's get into the weeds of that thing. Yeah. On behalf of Harrigan and myself, thanks for tuning in to Go Bag. We'll catch you on the next one. [01:11:36] Speaker A: See ya. [01:11:37] Speaker B: This episode of Go Bag, produced with help from the following friendlies, field operatives, special agents and black ops directors. Joe Swick, Roger French, Merkel Froilich, Tony Sugarloaf, Baker, Polish Ogre Who Scarl, Farty McMutterpants, Laramie Wall, Eileen Barnes, Hepto Lima, Aaron Railia, Wayne Peacock, Jeff Walken, Yorkus Rex, Eric Salswiedo, Phil McClory, Jason Hobbs, Michael Holland, Remy Billido, Crystal Egstad, Eric, Avia Fornak, Brian Kurtz, Chad Glamen, Jim Ingram, Orcus Dorcas, Chris Shorb, Brian Rumble, Victor Wyatt, Kevin Keneally, Andy Hall, Jason Weitzel, Salt Hart, Tad Lechtman, Nicholas Abruzzo, Matthew Catron, Curtis Takahashi, Angela Murray, Mr. White 20, Jason Connerly, Shannon Olson, Ryan West, Kristen McLean, Linda Larry Hollis, Lenseal, Jake at Faded Quill Grain Jake at Faded Quill Gaming Test Trekkie, Tim Jensen, Nubis, Christopher Lang Kwalog, Peter Skaines, Wendy Forcon, James Fraser, Ronald Dirigible and Chaplin Grimaldis. Thank you, Operative.