Lethal Force and Tradecraft

[00:00:01] 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. [00:00:20] Speaker B: Hey Harrigan. Here we are, another episode of Go Bag. [00:00:26] Speaker A: Good morning sunshine. [00:00:28] Speaker B: Good morning sir. [00:00:30] Speaker A: Time to get on the mics, dust it off. [00:00:36] Speaker B: Talk about Delta Green yet again. [00:00:41] Speaker A: Yeah. This is season two, episode five, is that right? [00:00:44] Speaker B: That's right. [00:00:45] Speaker A: Cool. Yeah. We continue our, our, our press into the Delta Green, the world of Delta Green, the rpg and I think we're making good progress. I think we've covered a few things so far that we wanted to and there's a few more that remain. So I think we're keep on trucking. There's lots of content in this game to explore, man. [00:01:04] Speaker B: Yeah, I'm excited about this one. [00:01:06] Speaker A: Today's I think so should be good. [00:01:10] Speaker B: I believe so, yeah. Otherwise, the infamous intro question. What go bagging have you been doing? [00:01:22] Speaker A: I am sad to say, I think I can officially state none this week. I just haven't been doing espionage game stuff. I've been doing too much work. I've been doing prep for the show, I've been doing this, that, the other thing, but I have not consumed media, played games, run games. There's one thing I, that I, I think I'll mention it in the sit rep that I didn't mention before. I'll bring that up. But it's my, it's minor league stuff but not nothing, nothing dedicated I'm afraid to say. What about you? [00:01:55] Speaker B: Same. Although I mean part of it got a little sidetracked due to Star Trek adventures that you, you and I are participating in with our every other Thursday night group. Although I would say that there might be an element of COVID action in that game. [00:02:17] Speaker A: I was just gonna say it's hard when you're not like monogamous gamers, like because we aren't. Right. Like we like a lot of different stuff. Both Sean and I obviously love espionage covered action games. We both love Delta Green, but that's not the only types of RPGs that we run, play, read about, buy, you know, research, etc. So it's, it's been a, it's been a challenge to try and keep, keep things balanced. But I had the same thought you did where we, I think we've talked about either an episode or a couple of episodes around covert action blending in with some other genres kind of thing like science fiction, like cyberpunk and indeed you could even, you can even have Some Star Trek Adventures covert action episodes for sure. [00:03:02] Speaker B: Yeah. So that would be the closest thing to that. Tonight I have a Delta Green game the other, you know, every two weeks I play with the, the face to face group and I don't. It might not happen again tonight. Like last time we kind of shot the for a few hours just to, to talk. And then this week, due to other, you know, personal and business stuff, I don't know if we'll get to the table again this week, which will be unfortunate. But I did drop my buddy Jeff. You know, I'm like, hey man, kind of thinking of a duet game if, you know, depending on, you know, kind of, kind of my way of making it up to him and seeing if he might be interested in that. But I, I think it's going to be an online component and I don't know if that's really what he, his preference is and that's not his jam. [00:03:52] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:03:52] Speaker B: He may just say, well just come on over and whoop. You know, and I'm like, well, it's this kind of the reason why I want to do it this way. So we'll see. [00:03:59] Speaker A: Especially since I think you know this by now, but online, you know, the pros and cons. But one of the pros is that you can play for like 90 minutes or two hours and especially if it's a small group, you can get stuff done. And that way you can like meet weekly, meet twice a week if you have time in your schedule. [00:04:16] Speaker B: Right. [00:04:16] Speaker A: It's kind of a different pacing to the whole once a month play for eight hours or twice a month play for four hours. Right. It's just a different way to kind of package it. [00:04:27] Speaker B: I mean, as we talk about some of the topics of Delta Green, I'm like, man, there would be some things that I could throw at him as a single agent and then if he gets an additional agent to accompany him like you did with Dirigible and his, you know, your guys's duet game, you know, I don't have to worry about two other people at the table being bored. [00:04:47] Speaker A: Correct. [00:04:48] Speaker B: It's all spotlight one person. Like whatever it is that's happening, you have full reign and control. Control. You have full reign and control. You know. [00:04:58] Speaker A: Haha. [00:05:00] Speaker B: Yeah. Delta Green. [00:05:01] Speaker A: But you have no control. [00:05:02] Speaker B: You have no control. It's all an illusion. [00:05:05] Speaker A: Yep. Yeah. Dude, I have loved that format for many, many years. And in fact, one of the reasons, you know, you mentioned Durable, he and I started playing play by post games I think in like 2003 or 4 or something. Like a long time ago, he was a kid. He's quite a bit younger than I am. And one of the things that we did was we found we fell into a lot of the same, like, we like the certain types of superhero games and certain types of fate games. And we ended up playing what I then called a sol, which meant a solo PC, one gm, one PC now called a duet. You know, popularly, we played many of those types of games over the years specifically for the reasons you're getting at like, and especially you can picture play by post because you were one of the problem children. Some. Sometimes people lose track of the fact that they're in a game. They don't post very often. They kind of slow everything down. So play by post games are very vulnerable to like the group dynamic. If everybody's not on the same page in terms of pace, in of terms, terms of tone, in terms of like what we're trying to accomplish. Well, when you narrow that down to one player and the GM who know each other, or like you and Jeff knowing each other, man, they can sing. It can really be a cool experience because you're. You don't have to do as much spotlight shifting as much. I'm concerned that someone else is part of a group and wants to. Wants to play but isn't getting the same level of enjoyment because they're not investing as much and they don't want to. Well, if you play with the one dude who's so into it, he reskins the RPG with new art and new covers like Jeff does, you can be sure he's pretty into it. [00:06:39] Speaker B: Yeah. So we'll see. That's what I got going on on my end. That's it. [00:06:44] Speaker A: Cool. I'm glad to hear that you're a little inspired by the kind of the one. On one aspect, I think those can be very fun games. Yeah, I'm kind of going the other way. So I've got the game I'm playing right now on gamers playing the single. That one player Delta Green game maybe isn't enough for me for Delta Green because part of the. The issue that Dirigible and I have also had is that sometimes we're slow posters in those games because they tend to be meteor posts, deeper sort of stories. So it takes time. Right. There's a number of new people who have just joined the site and several of them are like, hey, Delta Green's my favorite game. So I've kind of got an eyebrow up. Like maybe I want to get a little Delta Green thing going. A little shotgun scenario. There's a couple of. Couple of ones I have in mind that would be run pretty quickly for some new players kind of thing. So that may be off the ground the next, I don't know, month or two, something like that. [00:07:31] Speaker B: Very cool. [00:07:32] Speaker A: Yeah, we should sit the rep. Let's do that. [00:07:39] Speaker B: Give me the sit rep. Sit rep this week. Really only have one that I was going to reference. I was telling Harrigan, as we talk about in this episode, which, you know, spoilers. We're going to get into combat and Tradecraft, and there's an important document that's out there that some Delta Greenheads probably have in their library and have dispersed to players. And that's Alphonse's axioms for agents or Agent Alphonse's axioms for agents. It's an unspeakable oath. Adam Scott Glancy put it out there, and it's like 44 pieces of information that give this to your players for them to understand and kind of embrace what Delta Green is about. You know, for example, one of the points is always lie to anybody outside Delta Green. Always tell the truth to anyone inside Delta Green. And it goes into a lot of those details which coincide with a few things about Tradecraft, I would say. [00:08:45] Speaker A: Yeah, for sure. It's a fantastic document. One of the problems Delta Green has, I think, lines up with the same way that people say they have an easier time playing a fantasy game rather than a science fiction game, because science fiction games means there's all these unknowns that everybody has to agree on, like, is there anti gravity? Are there aliens? Is there AI? Right. Where if you're not on the same page, people can be playing kind of very different games in their own head. Delta Green, I think, suffers from a similar thing where people who don't know any of the sort of COVID ops, espionage, action, the tropes, the methods, you know, and I mean, you and I don't know them, but we know of them. We watch them in movies, we read about them in books. Right. Delta Green can kind of be a bit of a brick wall for people who are like, I don't know how to play an agent who's going to be doing investigations. And I think this document, the same way the documents we mentioned a couple of weeks ago when we were talking about character generation, there's these additional materials that really help sort of flesh it out. This is that in spades for, like, being a player in the game. I think it gives you some great guidelines. [00:09:51] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:09:51] Speaker A: It's pretty cool. I came up with a quick one while we were sitting here that I forgot about. It's been posted in the BS Landia Discord. The Laundry is now, I think, on the street for backers at least. Maybe it's in stores, I don't know. But the Charles Strauss novels that have turned into an rpg, the RPG is now, like, it's out there. It's coming soon, if you haven't seen it yet. Which is kind of the, you know, the slightly farcical agency that tackles cosmic horror stuff. Were you telling me this? I don't remember either. I can't remember where I saw this or read it, but Charles Strauss apparently has written some serious cosmic horror as well and didn't. And didn't like how it made him feel like. So he switched gears to do like, this. Lighter. Lighter in tone, slightly tongue in cheek kind of. Kind of stuff, which is the Laundry. [00:10:44] Speaker B: Laundry. Second edition, I believe. I think it's like, it has been out before. [00:10:51] Speaker A: I think you're right. I think this is a new second edition or a new edition with a new system. Like something's different about it. [00:10:56] Speaker B: Yes. [00:10:56] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:10:57] Speaker B: And it was crowdfunded and now out now I say this. I think it's by Catalyst Games. I think they're the publisher, if I'm not mistaken. Maybe. Yeah. I think that's my brain trying to work that back. It intrigued me at first glance, reading, like, I didn't know it existed prior, and people were like, yay, the Laundry's coming back. And, you know, I'm like, what the hell is this all about? And I read the premise and I'm like, oh, cool. And then I read further and went, oh. Like, I also. I did not list this in the links, but I think dark conspiracy is making a comeback. And I brought that up on a Saturday stream and I called you out specifically to that. So I know that's coming for those that are Delta Green fans and some of the COVID black men in that is like, the Men in Black is my understanding type of game. So. [00:11:56] Speaker A: Gotcha. I had the exact same reaction. And I, you know, I'll admit I had not read the books, but when I first saw the Laundry, I was like, ooh, I'm talking the second edition, the recent Kickstarter, right? Or backer kit, whatever the hell it was. And then I read more and I'm like, just. It's just not for me. I just want the. I want the. The grim, the troubled, the dark version of this paranoia. [00:12:18] Speaker B: The game is a Fine game. People rage, rave about it all the time. [00:12:23] Speaker A: But I don't find sometimes people also rage about it. If you remember correctly from a game hole a couple years ago, inside joke. Yes, I was raging. [00:12:33] Speaker B: Yes, the arrogant would be the rager. Yeah, it's a. But I find like, oh, I've never played paranoia. And they're like, sure, you never played paranoia. Nope, haven't played paranoia. But I have owned it. And it was like a later edition. I have all a bunch of PDFs from a bundle from a previous edition. And I think it'd be fun as a con game or a, you know, two session streak. But it's not something that intrigues me long term. So when I talk about the laundry, I'm like, maybe, but it's. If it's too farcical, I'm just not, dude. I don't fire up Austin Powers when I want to watch. [00:13:08] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:13:10] Speaker B: A covert action game, I don't either. [00:13:12] Speaker A: But I appreciate Austin Powers and Get Smart for what they are. [00:13:15] Speaker B: Yes. [00:13:15] Speaker A: And of course, all of the naked gun stuff, all those. [00:13:19] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:13:20] Speaker A: I bet the laundry would be awesome as a one shot at a con game with some buds. Like, I think you'd have a hoot. You'd have a great time. [00:13:27] Speaker B: Agreed. [00:13:28] Speaker A: I will also say though, and this, this kind of gets to my experience. My experience with paranoia at that one con was not great for a variety of reasons. It was a super loud room. There were like eight or nine players at the table. There were two gms or a GM and a. And a co gm. There was just so much going on. It was one of those situ. You know, I won't go into it, but one of those situations where some players, just because they couldn't like engage and hear properly, they weren't. They weren't playing the game kind of. And others were dominating because they knew the game. They knew what all the different like alert levels meant and all that kind of stuff. Right. I was not, not among them. But I will reveal a bias. And you've played games with me. I love humor in games, Sean. I do not love games that are supposed to be funny and where everyone is trying to be funny. And that is like, I don't like toon. I don't like paranoia. Something about it rubs me the wrong way. I want that stuff to emerge naturally. Like, if we play Green Oaks, that game will be a freaking riot. Right. This is the retiree. Yeah. [00:14:28] Speaker B: Yes. [00:14:28] Speaker A: But we're not going to go in with. I don't know, it just. There's a different vibe I get from games that are like, I didn't back the Monty Python game either. The recent Monty Python game. [00:14:38] Speaker B: I watch the movies. [00:14:39] Speaker A: I love Monty Python. But I don't know, man, maybe I'm wrong on some of this stuff, but I've always had less than thrilling experiences when I'm sitting down with a group of people who are all kind of trying to outdo each other in terms of how funny they are and the jokes they tell and all that kind of stuff. [00:14:54] Speaker B: So I have had players want to be the stand up comedian in a. In this. In the group. And it like, dude, it gets old really fast and I'm like, I can't like, dude, reel it back. Not everything that happens in this RPG turns into like this punchline for some reason. So I, I can empathize and I am similar. I haven't played Toon, but it's your point. It's very much a. Like it's on the. If it's on the menu and I'm gonna play it once at a con or yeah, 100% and go bonkers. Sure. But do I want to put it on my shelf and go, oh, I really need to get this to the table and run it all the time? [00:15:33] Speaker A: Nah, Compare and contrast that with both. And forgive us for the inside baseball stuff here, guys, but with the Outgun game that Digital Hobbit ran, which was hilarious, but those games don't have to be hilarious. And with the. And with the Turbo breakers game, the World of Dungeons Turbo Colon breakers game that Wayne ran around, sort of, you know, modern day Special Forces kind of dungeon delving type of stuff. Also like ridiculously over the top and funny and just so good. But they didn't, they don't start off with like, you know, a bunch of comedians at the table and, you know, trying to write better jokes at each other kind of thing, you know, I don't know. What are you, what are you smiling about? [00:16:18] Speaker B: I just thinking of the breakers game and I played Jason Hobbs or. No, I called. I called him. Was it like something like Jake Jacob. Jacob Schobbs or something? The floor repair guy? Floor salesman, yes. So if you don't know who Jason Hobbs is from Hobbs and Friends of the OSR and Hobbs and Friends. That's. I played him as a character and it was a joke and you know, anyways, that was. [00:16:43] Speaker A: So we need to lean on Wayne because he's going to Game hall this year. [00:16:46] Speaker B: Yes, he is. [00:16:46] Speaker A: And we can do a redux. [00:16:49] Speaker B: Yeah. So anyways, anyway, Little Little insight into Harrigan and I's outside the go bag. Outside the bag. [00:16:58] Speaker A: Hey. Yeah, there you go. [00:17:00] Speaker B: Yeah, there you go. [00:17:01] Speaker A: There you go. [00:17:02] Speaker B: We don't have any encrypted comms this week that was of note or had come through. So I think we can skip that and get straight into the mission brief [00:17:12] Speaker A: as of this recording, you and I, right now. It's April 12th today where we're recording. We don't have the first episode of season two up live on the podcasters, do we? [00:17:21] Speaker B: We don't have any episodes live at this point. [00:17:25] Speaker A: What does that mean? You took season one down. [00:17:27] Speaker B: Oh, I'm sorry, Season one is. I'm sorry, season two. We do not have any season one. Yes, season two. [00:17:34] Speaker A: That's what I thought. [00:17:34] Speaker B: Season one is all out there in audio and we're slowly releasing them on YouTube as I think I queued up four video versions of our episodes from season one to be out, especially the [00:17:48] Speaker A: ones that are appropriate to be video, that sort of thing. [00:17:50] Speaker B: Right. [00:17:51] Speaker A: I gotcha. I gotcha. Yeah. My point. My point is for encrypted comms. We haven't released the beginning of the Delta Green season yet. So I'm not surprised that there's no. There's no action. Right. [00:18:00] Speaker B: Yes. [00:18:01] Speaker A: The. The radio waves are quiet. [00:18:02] Speaker B: Yes. [00:18:04] Speaker A: Cool. [00:18:05] Speaker B: The audience thinks we are off. [00:18:10] Speaker A: Yes. It vanished into the ether. Yeah. [00:18:13] Speaker B: So now when we drop all these, we'll be like done with the season as people talk about Delta Green and [00:18:18] Speaker A: it'll be way right again about stuff that we won't remember because we're both old with terrible memories. [00:18:24] Speaker B: We'll get into the next season, which I don't. We probably won't in season one or. [00:18:30] Speaker A: It's episode one you talked about. Did I? Did I said? [00:18:34] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:18:34] Speaker A: Yes. I don't remember you, actually. [00:18:37] Speaker B: I'm waiting for the actuallys to come through. [00:18:39] Speaker A: So there'll be some. [00:18:41] Speaker B: Yes. [00:18:41] Speaker A: And we've already proven, as people get through these Delta Green episodes, we've proven we are not the experts in this stuff. We just like it. [00:18:47] Speaker B: Yes. We're becoming experts. [00:18:52] Speaker A: Sure, if you say so. [00:18:53] Speaker B: Let's get into mission brief. [00:18:56] Speaker A: Have a seat. Let's get on with the mission brief. [00:19:00] Speaker B: Combat and tradecraft. Chocolate and peanut butter. Sometimes I'm going to tackle combat and then my esteemed colleague will get into trade craft and we'll banter, inject each other's opinions and comments. [00:19:18] Speaker A: Who's he? If I met him. He sounds great. [00:19:20] Speaker B: I know. News flash. [00:19:23] Speaker A: Yeah. This won't be hearing in the rest of the episode, it'll be someone else. Oh my. [00:19:29] Speaker B: All right, yes. [00:19:29] Speaker A: Combat and trade crap. I mean, part of, part of what we're trying to do here is we're not, you know, we're not trying to plow through every page of the book by any means, but we're trying to look at different chunks of it that matter to people who decide on a system or want to pitch the system to their players or, or learn about it. And we felt like, you know, we don't need a full episode on combat or trade crafts. Let's put it together and have that delicious sandwich. [00:19:49] Speaker B: Yes. Yes. And I was telling Harrigan before we hit record, I'm like, you know, I like. I like Harrigan's approach to some of the topics. Obviously it's very much more conversational and how he kind of presents it where I'm more, you know, going through step by step on how sanity works. And I think that's important to some degree. But how I per. I mean, and I've admitted to Harrigan, I'm like, if I listen to myself present that I'd probably put myself to sleep. [00:20:18] Speaker A: You're being too hard on yourself, man. [00:20:20] Speaker B: And then maybe, and then maybe. But regardless, in this one combat, little more. This will be, in my humble opinion, it'll be. I thought it would be quick. Harrigan's like, n. It's not going to be 10 minutes, but we'll see. [00:20:32] Speaker A: You got different approach. You're going to sing a song? Are you going to do some. Get a whiteboard and do some strategic drawings to. [00:20:38] Speaker B: To. [00:20:39] Speaker A: To convey it? I was thinking maybe write a poem, [00:20:41] Speaker B: you know, a haiku maybe, perhaps. [00:20:43] Speaker A: Okay, all right. [00:20:46] Speaker B: But combat, obviously, conflict resolutions, always big in tabletop role playing games. And the biggest one that always bubbles up to the top as far as frequency is usually the combat component, depending on the game that you are playing. Delta Green is not absent. But I would say in Delta Green, there is a saying, if guns get pulled out in Delta Green, people die. So it is very lethal. It is not the focus of this game. It's not a tactical combat game, as some people might find appealing in other popular tabletop role playing games. But it does happen. So having said that, keeping in mind it is deadly. You don't want combat to typically happen. Just like we mentioned, real life simulationist, A gun gets pulled, bullets hurt people in this world. And it's not like a couple hit points of damage. Like literally one shot could kill an agent. So it's something to keep in mind as we go through this, but essentially the combat sequence is very simple and straightforward. It's actually, I think, sometimes even more complex as you read the rules. But it's in a nutshell. Hey, I'm gonna, I'm gonna start there's a surprise. Otherwise it falls to Dex for the initiative on who begins if there is a question. So it's a little interesting because some people will say, wow, we don't roll. No, it's, it's. Whoever has the highest dexterity score goes first in order, highest to lowest, and then it stays. Yeah, go ahead. [00:22:21] Speaker A: I would wind back even a little slightly further and just say it's a very trad BRP combat round type system. Right. You have combat rounds, everyone takes their turn. [00:22:31] Speaker B: Yes. [00:22:32] Speaker A: And you go, you know, round one, round two, round three, round four. This is like a play by Power by the Apocalypse game where there's no. Where you follow the fiction, there's no. This is super trad in terms of how the combat rounds roll out. And to your point, a minute ago, what I would say is, me personally, I always want my, my RPGs. I don't play cozy RPGs. I think I could probably have some fun with them at some point, but I want conflict in my games. I don't have to have combat in my games. And this is one of those things where Delta Green should be filled with tension, should be filled with, with peril, should be filled with mystery and revelation, terrible revelation. And when combat happens like it is going to happen, right? There's like, let's put it this way, one of the things that they talk about in the books as well is that you shouldn't be, you should not be encountering the unnatural too often, which means a lot of the antagonists are human. A lot of the things you run up against, they may not even be people who know about, you know, the conspiracy or the, or the unnatural, but they're problematic and you have to deal with them because they're off the rocker or whatever. Right. So combat will absolutely happen, but it's just not something that you can fall back to. Like dnd where it's like, this is the default mode for problem solving. If you do that, you're going to get dead. Like, it's, it's. It's that simple. Even without guns, it's pretty, it's pretty dangerous. And the flip side of that though, Sean, is I. It's one of the reasons I like this system a lot is if you apply like critical thinking to real combat scenarios like set up an ambush, make sure you have enough ammunition, put somebody on the roof so they can cover the door. All that stuff plays out in this game in a way that's better than real initiative. And take your order. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. No, like the GM will factor in everything you're doing so you can set it up so that you have the odds with you. God help you. As we see, we saw an impossible landscapes for that one scene, Shawn in the mall where the odds are against you. You're done, you're cooked. Like we got, we got, we got blasted in that scene. Anyway, I don't want to interrupt you too much, but it's very traditional combat. Sean's going to go through the guts of it. But there's some elements that I think make it bubble to the surface as there's a bit more going on here. That makes it quite fun actually as well. [00:24:43] Speaker B: Yeah. Thank you for that by the way. [00:24:48] Speaker A: Sure. [00:24:49] Speaker B: Once initiative is determined, obviously it goes player by player. And the unique thing is that you only get one. One action. One. It's not one action, not one move action, not a major action and a minor action. It's one action per turn. And those actions include aim, attack, called shot, disarm, dodge, escape, fight back, move, pin, wait to act later, some would say deferred and then anything else that requires some type of concentration. So that has a catch all for ones that weren't previously listed. But most of the times they're going to fill in some of those. Now on your turn you can wait till your turn. But if you are fired upon because the. The baddie gets the drop on you, you can react to that out of order. So you can basically attempt to defend yourself. But by defending yourself you are taking your one action for that combat sequence or for that combat round. So when you do that, you. It's usually. You usually pick two things that you have to do when you're doing that defending piece, which is dodging or fighting back. So dodging. Use your dodge skill. It is an opposed role. Both of these will be an opposed role which dodge allows you to run up to 20 meters to reach cover. And it's purely defensive, which means that when you dodge, that's the deal, that's what you're hoping to achieve is get out of the line of fire ideally and get behind some cover, which is huge because then you get into cover space and dis like put some minus [00:26:44] Speaker A: twenties on the other side. Right. [00:26:45] Speaker B: Penalties and bonuses. So when you talk about combat with the book and you're talking about having a bonus or a penalty for shooting somebody. It's usually at a plus 20, minus 20 increments as an overall hole. And not getting into those nuances entirely, but you know, hey, I'm right there. Person's in front of me, they're defenseless. Yeah. You get a plus 20. Yeah. Point blank. There's also a rule about point blank. But essentially because of the lethality piece of combat, it would behoove you, especially if they've got the drop on you, to dodge, like seek cover. Like big. It's a big deal. I don't want to get shot. Shocker. Right, like what? I'm not going to rush in like with machine gun fire, you know, as an agent who may not be like a military based individual or any individual for that matter, which is important. So there's the dodge piece and then we mentioned the fighting back piece. So fighting back is typically used with melee weapons, melee combat and unarmed combat skills. So the skills involved are melee weapons or, and or actually or unarmed combat skill. So again opposed role. The difference between dodge and fighting back is that you are typically in a struggle, right? The person has a knife, they're going to fight you. Maybe it's a pin type of attack that they have on you. So you declare an offensive action to complement your fighting back. So those offensive actions that you're able to do when fighting back include the attack called shot, disarm and pin. And obviously for called shot, gotta have a missile weapon in your hand. Like you gotta have a gun. Otherwise how is that even gonna work right now if you win? [00:28:45] Speaker A: I don't know if that's true. Can you not like do a called shot to someone's eye or something like [00:28:49] Speaker B: that with like a poke in the eye Three Stooges way? That's a good question. I don't know. I think the knife you might be able to. I don't know if it's strictly two missile weapons. [00:29:03] Speaker A: I'll look it up as you. As you carry on here. [00:29:05] Speaker B: Fair enough. If you win, you know, you roll oppose checks whoever has the highest wins or lowest wins the attacker. The attacker's attack does nothing to you. Right. It's rendered useless. And then. And it defends against the the attacker, obviously that targets you that turn. But your offensive piece that I mentioned is it takes place and has an effect, but it's only against that single target. So if you're being targeted by multiple opponents and you're going to fight back, it's only fighting back against the one Individual that you're really tangled up with. So you're aware, and that's of your choice. And it's typically going to be within the narrative, right. If you're. If Harrigan and I are tussling on the ground and there's other people that are involved in a bar room brawl, your. Your target of choice is typically the one that you're up in here entangled with. [00:30:05] Speaker A: So I'm pretty sure you can do a cult shot with. With unarmed as well. Like if someone has body armor on and you want to punch them only in the face. [00:30:12] Speaker B: Okay. [00:30:13] Speaker A: Kind of thing. It allows you to roll grenades into small places. You have to do a called shot because it's a small target. There's a few things like that are kind of going on. Since I'm interrupting, can I continue my interruption, please? This is why I said it wouldn't be 10 minutes. So one of the foundation stones, I don't know if we've said here, is it's the roll under percentile system we've described before. So when someone shoots at you, if they are competent or attacks you hand to hand, as long as they're not the average Joe on the street, but somebody who's either a different agent or a cop or someone like that, they're generally going to have a 40 to 60% chance to succeed. And without the stuff that Sean's talking about for fighting back and dodging, it could turn into more of the classic, I swing, you swing, my turn, your turn, my turn, your turn. Especially since the dex order doesn't change, right? So if Sean has dex 10, I have dex 9. Sean always goes first. So he goes, I go, he goes, I go, he goes, I go. Can get kind of stale. Well, when you throw in the fact that you can wait till a later action that you can fight back that you can dodge, it mixes the combat up enough, I think, that it starts to make it really interesting. So, for example, if you have the best decks of all and you don't know if you should shoot, let's put it this way, and I've been in this situation, I think I had a higher dex. I decided to shoot back. And I got the shit shot out of me because I couldn't dodge, because I had used my action to shoot. What I probably should have done was wait to see what people, what the opposition is doing, who they're shooting at. And if you need to burn a dodge, then because someone puts their sights on you, you can. And if they don't, then you can Take your shot. Right. There's a lot of nuance around that stuff. And I really like Fight Back I think is a brilliant mechanic where it turns into this, not this like, you know, bad movie style of guy takes a swing and now it's clearly the other person's person's turn to take a swing. It turns into this like clench fracas. This just, you know, all bets are off. You're getting into with the person to see who can put the other person on the floor or whatever. And the fact that you're making these opposed roles to see who can do it best in Bought was best embodied for me, Sean was the couple of combats we, we did have with my marshal in Impossible Landscapes against a cop in one case. And I forget who the other guy was. One of the like special forces do is near the truck if I remember remembering correctly. But I just remember it being very visceral because of the fact that, you know, it was these one, one opposed role after another. You can get hurt when you attack somebody. You can get hurt if they fight back. I've, I like that mechanic generally in games. Really like the fact that there's additional risk to putting yourself sort of in harm's way. And Delta Green has a pretty cool way of doing that. There is a weird, there's a weird rhythm you can get into where you're, you have to keep fighting back and as soon as you fight back you can't do anything else. So you're, you're sort of stuck in the combat. But that's also pretty realistic. It's pretty cool. Anyway, sort of interrupt you but I, that those are two parts of the game, the fighting back and the dodging and whatnot and the, and the fact that you can wait, I do not love the deck's order not changing, but I can, I, I, I can deal with it because it has these other parts of the game that let you the shift things around a little bit. [00:33:28] Speaker B: Yeah. And I have to think that that was part of the thing like do we want people to have to reroll every time or reset that initiative or roll for initiative? Because I think the, the big thing about combat and Delta Green is typically somebody is going to pull a gun or a weapon or they're going to hide behind a door and that is initiative, period. Surprise round. Especially if the other person isn't expecting it. And I would say in Delta Green this scenario is probably more likely than everybody seeing eye to eye in a room and you're not sure who really pulls the weapon. First or how they defend each other, which is I think really assumed in other role playing games like D and D. Right. Once it's then into the order then it's just who can react the quickest, which is typically the case anyway. Right. If you're fast and it's combat, there is a component of that. So let's just keep that and use it and then it could go into those rounds and then the fact that you can defend or like it's your turn, maybe it's not your turn, you're being attacked, but you can do something. Okay, so it's not. Wait until my turn. Can't. Can I defend myself? Well, no, it's not your turn yet. You know, like it's kind of pretty, you know, ridiculous in that regard for other RPGs. So with this one you can, I mean there are other ones that you can do defense and to defend and you know, increase your bonus or partial defense and all that other stuff. But I don't know, I like it and how it facilitates what it's trying to do in combat in a, in a contemporary rpg. [00:35:07] Speaker A: It's, it's fast, it's deadly. Yes. It's not, it's not hard to understand if you're, if you're new to the system. This is not a combat system that's hard to, hard to grock. After you, you know, get through a couple of combats, you'll, you'll have it down. [00:35:20] Speaker B: Now there are things to, to elaborate on and get into detail about like when you're, when a person's using armor and what does that, how does that play a role in like resolving the damage or, or things of that nature. There's areas effect if you're throwing grenades around and of course those come into play which have to do with like the +20, -20% chance and then reducing damage and things of that nature and then the COVID component. So if you're behind cover, how much cover also plays a role into whether you are going to get hit, which is usually a penalty. Excuse me, or a bonus to you as the target. But the other thing that I wanted to bring up, which I think is also very delta green, is the lethality rating that some weapons have. [00:36:11] Speaker A: So basically they reserve it for the more dangerous firearms really. So if you have like a 9 millimeter and you know it's just a semi auto, you're not going to have lethality rating. I think that does 1d10 or 1d12, I forget which. In other words it does a lot of damage. It can do a lot of damage. And I like the fact that it's a single die, which makes it a little swingier, right? Like you're just as likely to get a low number as a high number, which represents grazing and getting winged, all that kind of stuff. But God help you if they roll a 10 or a 12, because you probably have 10, 11, 12 health if you're lucky, right? And as we talked about last week, if you're down to zero, one or two or one or two health, like you're on the ground like you're crawling, right? Like you're very injured. And if it's zero, you're out, you're dying. So it's, it's serious. But as soon as you start stepping things up and you go to like, and I forget, I think, I think they give shotgun sell lethality rating. But as soon as you go to like a burst, the burst fire on a submachine gun or a burst fire on like an assault rifle or you're, you know, God help you, you're looking into the like, like large sniper rifle, 50 cal range kind of thing. These lose the damage die. And it just has a lethality rating, typically 10%, 20%, 30%, something like that. And what that means when you roll your, you're still trying to roll low, you're still rolling your percental dice. If your lethality rating is 20 and you roll a 19, you kill yourself, you kill your target. It's, they're down. That's it, right? If you, if you don't roll lower than 20, you add the two D10s because you're rolling percentile dice. You add the two D10s together and it does that much damage. So on average you're doing 11 points of damage. So they're, they're brutal. You know, as soon as like the, like the higher end firearms come out, like when the, when the, when the dudes fast rope down from a helicopter with the night vision goggles and the M Force, like run like they, they all can kill you or multiple agents in one go. Because there are also rules, depending on the length of the burst for how many targets they can cover. There's just, there's a lot of like little nuanced rules like that around automatic weapons that make them even more deadly. Is that what you're. You were going after? [00:38:21] Speaker B: Yes. [00:38:22] Speaker A: Yeah, but I love, love these rules. [00:38:25] Speaker B: Do you know the rule for critical success on a weapon with lethality rating? [00:38:31] Speaker A: I don't think I do. [00:38:33] Speaker B: Lethality rolls themselves cannot Critically succeed or fumble. However, if the initial attack roll right. Is a critical failure, or fumble if it is a critical success, the lethality rating is doubled. [00:38:50] Speaker A: Doubled. [00:38:50] Speaker B: Yes. [00:38:51] Speaker A: Nice. All right, so if you don't mind, let's walk through this because what Sean's talking about, let's say you have a 60 in the firearm skill. Is that the right skill? Trying to remember. Yeah, he's saying that without knowing. [00:39:06] Speaker B: Sounds good. [00:39:07] Speaker A: I will look that up too. Sorry, guys. Too many, too many. Too many games in our heads. So you have a 60 and you roll 33. So Delta Green has that critical doubles or criticals, both bad and good, depending on whether you're below or above your skill rating. Right. 33. And I think, I think most of the lethality ratings are in the 10 to 20% range. I think 20 is pretty high. Your 10% for your, like, you know, your, your MP5 would go to a 20. So it's, it's doubled. So pretty, pretty nasty. Normally, I think damage is also doubled, isn't it? [00:39:41] Speaker B: The lethality rating is doubled. If that doubled lethality roll still fails, the resulting HP damage, the sum of the two dice is doubled. [00:39:52] Speaker A: Yeah, you're so 4d10. Basically. Basically, you're, you're, you're done. You know, you're done. So this is why, like, like we mentioned, like, you don't want to get into these combats. Like, if you're, if you out, if you, if you outgun the other side and you guys have all the, all the, the kit and the tack gear and everything, you're in better shape. You can still take one in the head without, you know, and put you down, but you'll have quite an advantage. But one of those, one of these sort of battles where both sides are heavily armed, it is a, it's, it's a blood. Blood fest. It's terrible. Absolutely terrible. [00:40:25] Speaker B: There's an option optional rule, I think, where if a handler prefers to roll traditional damage dice instead of using the. The percentile system, they can convert the lethality rating by rolling 1d6 of damage for every 3% of the weapons lethality rating. [00:40:48] Speaker A: Yeah, there you go. [00:40:51] Speaker B: Booyah. [00:40:51] Speaker A: Crazy. Yeah, I like the lethality rating a lot. Yeah, it's cool. And remember, as well as, as brutal as it is, when you either get to zero hit points from losing earth, zero health from losing, you know, taking damage, or the lethality rating just says just like that, you're down. Right. You've caught a bullet and you're on the ground. There is the resuscitation thing. There's a whole like CPR last minute, say paramedics arrive. There's that part of the game too. So it's not quite as brutal as like, you know, BX dead at zero, you know? You know, like as soon as you take that last hit, point of damage, you are stone cold dead. And you know, now you need a cleric to resurrect you. [00:41:30] Speaker B: Well, I think at Delta Greed you are at zero. Two is when you're down, right? [00:41:35] Speaker A: Yeah. No, no, if lethality takes you to zero, you're in fact, technically you're dead. [00:41:40] Speaker B: Yes. [00:41:40] Speaker A: But you can be, you can be brought back. Heart, heart, gut beating again. That's what I'm getting at. [00:41:46] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:41:46] Speaker A: You're dead. You're dead. But. And if no one gets to you, you're. You're dead dead. [00:41:51] Speaker B: Right, right. [00:41:52] Speaker A: You know, not mostly dead. Hold on. Anyway, it's cool, man. It is cool. [00:42:00] Speaker B: Yeah. If your percentile role is equal to or lower than the lethality rating, human target instantly drops to zero hit points and dies. [00:42:11] Speaker A: There you go. [00:42:11] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:42:12] Speaker A: They're dead. [00:42:12] Speaker B: Yeah. And then of course, with the lethality rating component, if you're like shooting an obstacle or something, that doesn't, doesn't affect it the same way. It's really against an individual, an armor and things of that nature. So for body armor provides a protection against the lethality role, but it does reduce the HP damage if the lethality roll fails. [00:42:38] Speaker A: Do you say the body armor does not affect the lethality rating, it provides [00:42:42] Speaker B: no protection against the successful lethality roll. [00:42:47] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. [00:42:48] Speaker B: So you gotta still hit them and then you gotta roll. [00:42:50] Speaker A: That's still the. So even though you have your vest on, sir, and in your helmet, sorry, you caught one in the face. [00:42:55] Speaker B: Right. [00:42:55] Speaker A: It's what that is. Yep. [00:42:58] Speaker B: And then if a target is behind cover, the lethality roll automatically fails. [00:43:03] Speaker A: So you're only doing the Abitude 10s together. And then you probably take off the structure points or whatever they're called for. Whatever the COVID is. Right. If you're trying to shoot through it. [00:43:13] Speaker B: Yeah. It says the target simply takes the sum of the dice as HP damage and then you. Minus the cover's armor rating from that. [00:43:21] Speaker A: That's it. That's. That's what I'm going for. Yeah. Which is again pretty cool. [00:43:24] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:43:26] Speaker A: Depending on what your opponent is armed with, certain types of COVID is not cover. Right. Like if you, if they have pistols, you can get behind, you know, a car and everything's fine. If they have rifles, rifles will go through major portions of a car or certain types of COVID Like if you had a concrete barrier. Great. And I think that's kind of what this is. This is kind of modeling, which is pretty cool. Yeah, Pretty sweet. [00:43:48] Speaker B: Yeah. That's kind of combat in a nutshell. Now somebody might write in and say, oh, dude, you totally missed this one component. But I think that kind of sums it up up. You know, it's got to make sense. Like one thing. Harrigan mentioned a combat that had happened in a scenario that I was running and it was all over the place. They were like kicking weapons out of people's hands and scrambling on the ground and like one person had another person in a chokehold and it. Yeah, it was all scrapping. It was like, what are they doing? Well, I'm going to do this. I'm going to. [00:44:16] Speaker A: It was very visceral. [00:44:17] Speaker B: Yes. [00:44:18] Speaker A: Was. [00:44:18] Speaker B: Yeah, fight back. And there's one behind a cover and something, you know, a cop arrives and he gets behind his door with a, with a pistol. But then you got shooting into melee, which is like also a component of that. So it all kind of makes sense if you get this kind of in a nutshell and you think it through on what's happening in the moment. Just like anything in a. In a complicated combat scenario, you just as a game master have to narrate it. And the players have to understand what they're attempting to do at any given point because they're either reacting to something that's happening to them or they have their own turn in the initiative to act. And when you pin well, then you got to do opposed roles for keeping the pin. You know, essentially somebody's got you on the ground and you're on top of you or in the chokehold, then you're doing opposed roles to break that out. So you can make this make sense very easily. Is the. If it's not spelled out in a step by step process, in my humble [00:45:22] Speaker A: opinion, I found it did a great job supporting like an exciting action scene. It felt like the opposite of picture old computer or video games where you have the two sides that line up on the left hand side and the right hand side and they take turns shooting at each other. It's so far from that. It's so much more integrated into the fiction you're describing. Like you said, someone's coming at you with a pistol or razor pistol, but you have better initiative. You can close the ground and fight back and disarm them if you win the fight back. And I think that's what, what happened and then that turns into a scuffle, a physical scuffle. And then I think we hit the ground and we're doing the pin. Like it's just very natural flow of how the combat sort of went is what I remember now. Maybe it's not always like that but I think if you have the right, everybody's got the right sort of attitude and vibe and, and thought process, you can make the combats pretty exciting in this game. And they're not slow, they do not, they're not going to drag you down. You're not going to be like, oh, here comes a two hour combat. Because as we described it's just far too deadly for that to be the case. Right? [00:46:22] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. [00:46:23] Speaker A: Won't take that long. [00:46:24] Speaker B: No. [00:46:26] Speaker A: And maybe the, the, the little bookend here. Recovery periods are long in this game. Like if you're down to like three health. So in other words you're not crawling, you're not on the ground. You have like, you're going to be in the hospital. You've got, you know, if you want to, if you want to heal quickly. The healing rates are not, not quick. So they take the injury part of it pretty seriously. Yeah, one thing I probably could have, there's no, I don't think there's a formal injury system or anything like a, like a lasting injury kind of thing. You know a lot, a lot of games are, are sort of bringing that to the fore these days. I'd like to see something that, something like that in Delta Green you can easily bolt on something where if you get down to zero, one or two hit points you've got some kind of scar or permanent injury or something like that. There's, there's things you could do. [00:47:11] Speaker B: Permanent injury. Anytime an agent has reached a reduced to two or fewer hit points, they fail. They fall unconscious and make a con check or con times five test. So if the test fails, the agent sustains a permanent injury. So I thought there was one. But to your point, I don't. There are components of it. So for example, I don't know if it like you know, what does that mean? So if you get shot in the arm, then your arm is debilitated by, by all means. But the handler selects one of the agent's core statistics to permanently reduce by the number showing on the lowest 10 sided die of that role down to a minimum score of three. So you're to automatically take three to the chin on one of those core abilities. So if you're like, you know, strength times five and you've got a 12 strength. Well, and then it goes down to nine strength goes from like 60 to 45. Boom. And then if the injury reduces the agent's strength or constitution, you must also permanently lower their maximum hit points accordingly because those are hit points are derived from, from those stats, which is I believe the average right of those two. So some of the optional rules, that's at the handler's discretion instead of direct stat loss. A permanent injury can result in a specific physical trauma that cannot be corrected with surgery. And it usually imparts a permanent -20 penalty to related actions. So for example, partially blinded -20 on all things requiring sight. Partially deafened -20 to all checks that require the sense of hearing. Arm. You know, arms like an arm or a hand. Anything that uses your arms or hands could be at a minus 20. And then of course, legs, same thing when it comes to movement. So that is. There's also a gritty combat trauma component. So if your handler is using that optional rule. More dangerous combat trauma rules. Certain extreme injuries can also cause long term conditions. So a severe concussion from a blow to the head could lead to permanent deep brain bleeding, resulting in permanent mental impairment. So you can even get into the mental capacities of an agent. And then similarly a blast overpressure from explosives could rupture eardrums, causing vertigo. So not even just deafness, but like dizziness and things of that nature. So yeah, it can get pretty crazy. But to Harrigan's point, I don't think there's like a list of these where you're like rolling and then determining. But it kind of whatever makes sense to the. The narrative. [00:50:02] Speaker A: Yeah, I'm looking at it right now as well, the optional, optional rule around it. So there's actually a few things here we don't need to dive into deeply. But there are also suppression rules for if you have automatic fire, that kind of thing. Right. Healing is actually pretty cool. Where there's the resuscitation piece that I mentioned, which is the whole like if some, if someone. You can resuscitate a dead character. So the whole like either a le lethality rating or they got to zero health, you can resuscitate them. But then there's rules for stabilizing, trading, recuperating. And this is just. It's very realistic, it's very grounded. Which just gets back to that whole, remember, remember Sean and I have talked about before, like open the front door of your house and walk outside. And that is the delta green world with the underpinning of the you Know the writhing cosmic horror beneath what you can see. This is just very similar. Like if you take a bullet in real life. That's what they're trying to model here is that that's, you know, you could be saved, but you also may have some hospital stays and you may have some permanent injury, which is modeled by the statistic damage or the attribute damage that Sean's talking about with the associated penalties. Last thing I want to say on this, Sean, I love the penalty system. We covered this, I think, a couple of weeks ago. But the fact that it's just plus 20, plus 40, minus 20, minus 40 makes it so easy to say. I aimed, but they're undercover, but I ran. You can just easily pile those together, get your number and roll it. There's not a lot of like plus 5, plus 10 and then a plus 5 from that. It's a quick resolution. The handling time is low for this stuff. [00:51:34] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. And I think that's what helped with the combat that I ran for for you and the group. Now it's going on a couple years because you just kind of make sense of what it. What it is. And sometimes it involves a dialogue like, oh, hell, you know, I think it would be this because I'm trying to do that. Oh, that makes sense. Great. [00:51:53] Speaker A: There's not a lot of, like, I mean, a little bit of rulebook maybe flipping in the beginning when you're trying to figure out exactly how Fight Back works and what your options are and that kind of thing, but, man, it comes to you quickly. You start to get it. Yep. [00:52:06] Speaker B: So that's combat in a nutshell. And there are some more nuances to it, but that's the high level overview that I think will get you into the neck of the. Into the weeds of things and how we kind of enjoy it. It's simple and quicker to understand. I mean, you put a cheat sheet together, it's like, here are the actions you can take. What can I do when you got one action, Like, I think that's really huge. It's just not. Yeah. [00:52:36] Speaker A: Do you have the older or the newer GM screen to either cover this? [00:52:40] Speaker B: Well, you know, I have the old one, I do not have the new one. And I don't know if they've changed anything to the new one, but I have the old one and it does break. I think it literally Harrigan copies the penalty chart and pastes it from. [00:52:57] Speaker A: I can see that. Yeah, Those gray and white tables that are all through the book. [00:53:00] Speaker B: Yes, it's very much that way. And Then I don't. I think it does. So, yes, it takes that table, which is pretty straightforward. The table we're referring to, folks, is in the agent Handbook where it talks about, you know, if you're behind cover, minus 20, if you're, you know, doing a called shot, it's plus 20, I think it is for that. And it highlights some of those conditions. [00:53:23] Speaker A: Yeah, it's one of those funky things where I think, going back to, I don't know, early days of the hobby, it's weird to have so many rules of the game's rules in the agent's handbook. When you get right down to it. Like, the whole combat system is in there. It's not in the. It's not in the Handler's Guide. It's in the Agent's Handbook. [00:53:38] Speaker B: Like, all the rules are in the Agency. [00:53:39] Speaker A: Yeah, that's what I mean, though. All the rules are in there. It's like. I mean, I get it, but it's more like. It's the core book. It is with the agent stuff. [00:53:47] Speaker B: And there's guide is just so full of flavor. Stuff, setting. There's. [00:53:52] Speaker A: It's more than just flavor, though. There's also spells, monsters. [00:53:55] Speaker B: There are. Yes, you're right. [00:53:56] Speaker A: There's a bunch of stuff in there. Yeah, it's a good book. [00:53:58] Speaker B: Yes. [00:53:59] Speaker A: It's not all just fluffy. [00:54:00] Speaker B: That's true. A bunch of them. There's a lot, though. [00:54:03] Speaker A: There's a lot. [00:54:04] Speaker B: There is a lot. [00:54:05] Speaker A: Hundreds of pages, probably. [00:54:06] Speaker B: Yes, probably. [00:54:07] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:54:08] Speaker B: All right, enough about combat trade craft. [00:54:13] Speaker A: Let's talk tradecraft. So the trade craft part of this game is, frankly, why we can. We feel like we can talk about it on a podcast that's about espionage games. You know, some people have expressed, you know, how come you guys are going to spend so much time on just the one game kind of thing? And it's not even really a pure espionage game. It's more of this cosmic horror kind of game. Well, Tradecraft features so centrally in Delta Green. It's. It's like the dominating part of the game. Maybe beyond the. The PC's relationships disintegrating and the cosmic horror that under. Underpins everything. Right. But the tradecraft part of it. If you're going to exist in this space in between, like your home life and what the government or the program is wanting you to do, you've got to use Tradecraft. So I want to spend a bit of time, Sean, sort of breaking down what. What do I mean by that and how does it apply to the game? The game has an appendix in Handler's Guide again about where they break down some sort of categories of tradecraft. And they actually get very explicit with, hey, if you're gonna try to follow somebody on foot, roll this. And they're going to oppose that role with this. So there's very crunchy mechanical bits that you can get to. I mean it's not, I shouldn't say it's crunchy, but it's very prescriptive. Stealth versus HUMINT or, you know, that kind of thing. But first I want to kind of lay a little bit of groundwork. So when you talk about tradecraft, you know, these are the techniques, means, methods. These are the things that agents and intelligence officers use to cover up their clandestine actions so that you don't know they're doing what they're doing to either gather information, plant evidence, steal something, you know, that kind of thing. Right. So all the core espionage stuff that we always talk about on the show is very present in Delta Green. This includes communications. Like how do you avoid digital footprints? You know, you're, as an agent in Delta Green, you're supposed to shun smartphones. You shouldn't have a modern car, really. With a GPS system that can be tracked, you can't send unencrypted emails or unencrypted comms of any kind. And one of the things that's kind of cool and they get to this in the book, I'm not sure which one of the authors was, was, was was getting into this, but there's a whole section on or not section, but there's paragraphs of text on use codes, dead drops, brush passes, like these old methods for transferring information to communicate with people. And then the last one I like a lot is make it a face to face meeting. Make it somewhere safe. And this is usually why in the beginning your handler meeting with you somewhere sort of off the, you know, off the reservation is kind of a cool scene to set up. Like, what's the opera going to be? Who's involved, what's going on? I don't love it. I see lots of people set those sometimes in like, and including it in the adventures. They'll set them in like an FBI office. And I'm like, nah, I don't think that would be in an FBI office, man. Put that in the abandoned railway downtown or the tenement building that's not, not occupied or, you know what I mean? Like someplace where you're not gonna, you're not gonna have, you're not, the room is not bugged. No one's overhearing you. You've taken the care to get there unseen. It's all that kind of stuff. Stuff. Know what I mean? [00:57:21] Speaker B: I know what you mean. [00:57:23] Speaker A: Okay, cool. So moving on from that, that's comms, right? There's also like, there's a lot of tradecraft around documentation. So this includes like false identities. The FBI or the NSA putting together sham task forces. Many of the operas you'll read about that are published include kind of a. You've got a cover of an FBI task force meant to investigate X, right? And they got some specialists on the team. That's kind of a classic trope that Delta Green uses. And it includes of course as well, like any fake credentials that you might have. But when you get into false identities, that's more than just a fake credential. That is like if someone does a background check on you, you show up as this other person, right? And they, for all intents and purposes, depending on how. How deeply they dig you, look like a real person. Your. Your fault, your false identity more than just a plastic card with your picture on it kind of thing. Right? But this also, there's tradecraft around how you destroy and erase sensitive dogs. Now you have to do that, like the cleanup aspect of it. And there also a whole thing around falsifying reports 1 and cleaning up after an incursion if there may be some materials left behind. One of the parts that I don't know that when you see Delta Green actual plays or the games that I played myself, I don't know if we focused enough on the whole tail end of the operation where there's this whole clean it, make sure no one can. A report for a reporter arrives. You're not going to find evidence. If the police detective comes to the hotel room where it all went down, they shouldn't be able to find evidence of what happened. Right? All that stuff is in this as well. And documentation can play a big part of that, where you either have to burmadocs or collect them or redact them or whatever. I would also say this is another piece that I'd like to have more experience with the whole thing, Sean, where someone gets exposed to the unnatural who was on the outside. And at the end of the op, you're supposed to approach them and do the whole. So tell us what you know, tell us what you think you're going to do. And this is a ramp towards onboarding that person as a friendly. Onboarding that person as a Delta Green agent, or letting them know that like you know, I saw where your daughters go to school, and if we see that you publish anything about this, you know, that would be sad, right? Like dark stuff you can get into. But that also includes publishing false documents and incriminating evidence. Like, there's all the. Again, this is where the tradecraft comes in, where you can discredit someone, even if they go public and say, I saw these tentacles come out of my sink and grab my wife and pull the. Pull her in. Right. Well, if he goes. If that person is on social media posting about that, the first thing you might do is try to discredit them before you eventually figure out how to get them quiet permanently. Right. That sort of thing. Cool stuff. Have you had much experience with those sorts of scenes? [01:00:17] Speaker B: Not as much as I should. And I think it's because of those four tenets that Delta Green is based off of. I think there's elements when we get into a game where it's like, oh, you're gonna. We're gonna blow up a. We're gonna blow this up, right? Everything's. Blow everything up. [01:00:34] Speaker A: Turn it down, blow it up. [01:00:35] Speaker B: And some of the things I think with tradecraft. And I just want to mention this, which is a little like you touched on it earlier. I. I am not an FBI agent. I'm not a CIA operative. And when we talk about embracing Delta Green, it can be very difficult to be like, wow, these guys just don't know what they're doing as players. And then conveying that through their characters. And there are some reference sheets, like axioms. And then there's another one that I think Vince might have done from Black Gaming Project or Black Project Gaming, that had to do with, like, here's how an investigation works and what you should do as a standard. Like, if a detective showed up to a crime scene, this is what. [01:01:24] Speaker A: What do they do? [01:01:25] Speaker B: What do they do? What are they looking for? [01:01:27] Speaker A: What's the sop? What's the standard operation? [01:01:28] Speaker B: Exactly. The sop. And. And on top of that, the reason I bring this up is because the players don't know what they don't know. And one of the things, as GMs in this game that may come in handy is you. Somebody like Jeff would be like, dude, I'm an FBI field operative. I would know that this is part of my deal. Come on, Sean. And I think as handlers, if we are really rooted into that system and understanding that better, Jeff has a case for sure. And I think we have to understand that. Well, you didn't stipulate that. Right. You never said you wiped down the place, Harrigan. [01:02:07] Speaker A: Yeah, right. [01:02:08] Speaker B: Well, I would know that. So let's make the role like, then, you know, maybe it's, it's a negotiation. Ah, that makes sense. Or if there's a role that needs to be done with a particular skill check. Because one of the things I think that is downplayed in Delta Green, at least in my experience and how I run games is like, dude, these guys are getting away with tons of stuff. [01:02:27] Speaker A: That's. Yeah. Yes, that's part of it. Yeah, that's part of it. [01:02:30] Speaker B: Yeah. [01:02:30] Speaker A: There's also a. I think some, the way that some folks play, there's sort of a second cleaner team that comes in when you're, when you're done. And like, that shouldn't be the case. Like, it's meant to be a dirty job and they don't have enough operators, they don't have enough manpower to send some separate team and expose that other team to the thing that you were supposed to handle. You're supposed to handle it cradle to grave. Right. Is the way that I would like to. I'd like to play it. [01:02:55] Speaker B: Agreed, Agreed. And then you start getting into some nuances that I don't know if a lot of players really, you know, jam on or even handlers jam on, which is like, you know, let's say, for example, they're going to blow up a building. I don't know, somewhere in some scenario that never happened. Right. Never happens. But say they're going to. Well, how do they do it? Well, they get gasoline. Great. Then they get, you know, five gas cans. Okay, great. How are you going to pay for all that stuff? And there are elements. [01:03:24] Speaker A: Cash, credit card. Yep, yep. [01:03:26] Speaker B: And it says, is it funded by the program? Check, not check. Or is it done by the agent? Like, I take it as out of my personal credit card. [01:03:37] Speaker A: Great. [01:03:38] Speaker B: Then what happens is when you go back to your bonds and your spouse goes through the credit cards and says, how come you bought like $2,000 at the local farmers co op for fertilizer? What is that about? [01:03:51] Speaker A: Right. [01:03:52] Speaker B: And your bonds get reduced from that as a mechanical component, which is also outlined. So not to steal all of arrogance thunder, but it is like a really, like, I don't know if we really get into the weeds as much as we need to on some of this component of the game. [01:04:10] Speaker A: Well, let's, let's put it this way. Let's. Let's take what. Everything you just described, it ties back into this. Like, are you any good at Tradecraft. Because if you're not, your wife will see what you're doing, your boss will see what you're doing. The cops will be like, you know, they're, they're at your door. Like we got your license plate on the CCTV camera down the street. And you know what I mean? So if you don't take these steps, you're accelerating your demise is what you're doing for sure. It's where you're burned out on all your bonds and you're now insane because of. Or because somebody catch up with, catches up with you that shouldn't or whatever. Like if you don't use these tradecraft things, things can get pretty bad. Right. And I do think it's amusing the whole like, you know, Jeff was a, was a detective because I think, you know, you know, I know this other guy, Fred was a police, is current police detective. [01:04:59] Speaker B: Right. [01:05:00] Speaker A: And most of us don't have that benefit of knowing how. You know, this isn't my day job. So it's one of the reasons why maybe that I'm okay with the BRP system being so skill heavy as it is because you lean into that trad structure of, I don't know, I roll forensics. Okay, cool. I don't know how forensics really work on a crime scene and neither do you. So let's lean on the game mechanism to get us there. Right. And it can be the whole like, you got a 40, you're going to 50. Ah, you just do it. Or what I would probably do is along the lines of, you got a 40 or 50, I'll give you these three things. Roll and maybe we'll see what else you can learn. If you can, you can succeed, that kind of thing. Right. So it just. Dude, it's all right there for the taking. It's cool to keep going on tradecraft. I just want to run through sort of the big picture items here. There's a lot of tradecraft around crime scenes themselves. So the sanitiz of like blood evidence, you know, cosmic spooge like. Like there's. There's so much stuff that's probably in the room that you need to clean, [01:06:01] Speaker B: you know, don't fire up that ultraviolet light. [01:06:04] Speaker A: Whoa. Exactly. Not let these scientists or the forensics experts come in and find there's a lot of that that goes on in a crime scene. You have to dispose of bodies. And the book is hilarious. The book, the Agent's Handbook has this like, cut it up into small pieces and bury them separately in the woods, fill the bathtub with acid. And like, there's these very. [01:06:26] Speaker B: Take a note from Breaking Bad. Yes. [01:06:29] Speaker A: There's these very explicit ways to dispose of bodies. It's. It's. It's pretty funny. Yeah. [01:06:34] Speaker B: And then. [01:06:34] Speaker A: And then just kind of rounding out on the tradecraft side of things, there's all the stuff that's classic around surveillance, losing tales, following people without being seen, bugging their rooms, putting wiretaps in, finding. Finding those things that have been done to you, you know, those sorts of things. And then the sort of. The classic stuff that Jeff or my friend Fred would do is like how to find someone. Like, you know, and I'm talking about. You're. You see them and you're following them through the street, but rather following their credit card receipts, following their last known address, interviewing their neighbors. Like all that crap as well, right? That's all trade crap craft. That's all like bring in how you. How you do the job and get to that next sort of piece of the puzzle, that sort of thing. Right? And then there's. There's also a whole piece. This is kind of cool because it's in Last Things Last. There is a forensic accounting practice that you'll go through. This is the whole, like, give me your tax records, open that filing cabinet and you can pour through there and figure out, oh, he's got a second home. Oh, he's. He's got. Look at these credit card receipts. The guy has a girlfriend on the side. And we can contact the girlfriend, right? Again, it's this word. Like tradecraft is bright light in your face if you use it the right way. You don't have to be an expert in this stuff. You just have to be able to wrap the mechanics around it so you can kind of mobilize these ideas, I guess. And then the last piece is all of the. What Delta Green calls human, but all the people stuff, being a social chameleon, being able to integrate yourself into someone's social circles if you're playing the long game. Being able to groom or cultivate informants and agents. So kind of the creepy side of this, where you're not telling them the whole truth, you're gaslighting them, etc, and then finally there's like a whole, like, psych profiling thing as well, where, you know, there's. There's. There's tradecraft around understanding people's motivations and what their backgrounds tell you about them and all that kind of stuff. So just without even going into the. Like the book's chapter on tradecraft that's why I. I think the game is. The topic for Go Bag is because of all this stuff. But what do you think? [01:08:38] Speaker B: Yeah, agreed, agreed. And going back to the character sheet and some of the skills, like you were saying, is like, that's why I think it's important in this game to just literally look at your character sheet and see what you can do, which is a little odd. Like, some games are like, all right, let's put the character sheet aside. What are you doing? Tell me what you want to do and we'll figure it out. But don't look at your skills. It's just a skill list. Well, in this game, it can absolutely help. Like accounting. Boring. Why do I got accounting on this thing? This is really dumb. Well, accounting goes to tracking all the numbers and documents and tax records and receipts and all that. And not only that, but manipulating them. Forging, you know, potentially forging them. [01:09:22] Speaker A: Exactly. If you're planning, planting information or making. You're making someone look bad in front of front of his boss or whatever. Right, yes. All that stuff. [01:09:28] Speaker B: Yes. You know, expense records. Well, I would know that they're going to look at this for an expense record. I got to change that or, you know, adjust it. But even going back to like, requisitioning stuff, like, how many times have we run this game where the agents. Well, I'll just get that from the program or I'll get it from the department. Whether they are funded well or not. If you run that and you roll a bureaucracy check, even if you make a formal request, then they can give it to you. How. That's. There's a paper trail, things are being filled out in triplicate. And so how does that. What is listed on those forms and, you know, and what does that. How does that work? [01:10:12] Speaker A: And I would say a failure can manifest either immediately. No, you can't have that. Or. Right here it is. And during your next home scene, you get a visit from the internal auditor. [01:10:23] Speaker B: Right, right. [01:10:25] Speaker A: Yeah. Like, there's. There's. Oh, Joe, man, there's so many cool ways to take this game. When you combine everything that we've been talking about the last, like, three episodes, probably when you put it together as a whole, I don't know. It's pretty cool, Sean. I would say, like, on the. Because you put your finger on something, I think that's key here. This is so far from an OSR game that is, like, about player skill, where you don't look at your sheet and you instead just. You take in everything GM is describing. You apply your own knowledge, you make smart decisions, you investigate kind of in cool ways by asking questions. You can't mimic all of these things by doing that, which is why you have these skills. So ripping them off quickly, I would say like there's an accounting skill, an art forgery skill for making IDs and whatnot. Bureaucracy, computer science, criminology, disguise, forensics, human law, persuade search, SIGINT, stealth, everything I described like 10 minutes ago, the last 15, 20 minutes or whatever, these are the skills that you're using to do all that stuff, right? And then there's this also this kind of cool thing which we have, we've talked about briefly before around special training. And this is where you don't get a rating in the thing, but you basically have a box you can check. Yeah, I know how to pick locks. I have a lock picking training. I have, I have, not only do I have a law skill that gets a rating, I also have expertise in foreign law and criminal code. So if I'm in Canada or Mexico or the uk, I know the legal system. So we see special things you can kind of add to your skills. A lot of electronic security around. This one's kind of cool. This came right from the book. You can even have conspiracy or group knowledge. So if you study a cult or study a, like a fringe group, you're worried about the GMs just going to give you information because you know that stuff. So you can, you can know who the players are, you can know where their compound is, like all that kind of stuff. Just pretty cool stuff. To close this out, Sean, I'll, I'll talk briefly about the materials that start on page 165 in the, in the Agent's Handbook, which is all the much more sort of granular view of escaping from a tail and planting a bug. It gives you these tables, two pages of tables, and then a set of descriptions that go with those that tell you what they mean. And these include going unnoticed, creating false identities, surveilling by planting mics and decrypting comms, pursuit, breaking and entering, sneaking past security, covering your tracks, searching and arresting for, you know, people, interrogation, evidence tampering, etc. So there's some really specific things that are in the book that's, it's worth a peruse. And then the final thing that is also in that same chapter and maybe doesn't get the call out that it should. And I actually went through Sean and looked in detail in the Agent's Handbook. I looked at the index and I did searches in the PDF's agent's handbook and the Handler's Guide. They don't do a great job getting into the green boxes in like gory detail. They are referenced. There's some sections that describe them in a good way. But speaking of tradecraft, like, there are these locations that the program has all over the country, probably all over the world, which are meant to be drop boxes and pickup boxes for the agents that are used like in the moment when you need them. So in other words, if the handler needs to get specialized gear to the agents, they're probably going to use a green box. It's the preferred way of doing it. This is a storage container that's been rented for 20 years from somebody. It's a property they own that has a locked trunk in the basement. It's a. You name it. The green box is meant to be this sort of. And this is the part that's so cool, quasi mysterious, like what the hell is in the box? Like when you open up the green box to get your gear, there may be things that other agents put in there from prior missions. There may even be. We've talked about how the. Maybe not in detail yet, but we talked about the different eras of Delta Green where you have the formal program shuts down in the, I think early 1970s, runs as the Outlaws till the mid-90s, and then the mid-90s and other things start to happen where they're trying to get organized. And then the new program starts in the early 2000s. These different groups, the Outlaws, still have access to some of those Greek boxes. They still know where some of them are or they may have their own. So there's just. And these green boxes you can, as you can picture might contain like a mask or a book that no one should have. Right. Like if we're talking the cosmic horror angle. So I don't know. It's a combination of where the tradecraft part of this, where you're communicating, you are able to give items to people essentially like a, like a, like a customized dead drop sort of thing through this mechanism. But the mechanism can introduce all sorts of horrible complexity. Oh, why is there a folded up body in this green box? And why is it my best friend? You know, like there's, you know, the, the guy I went on the last mission with, another Delta, Delta Green guy that I like and he's in the box like the. Oh man, there's so much good stuff in the box. [01:15:19] Speaker B: Write that down. Oh, that's a good one. But all great stuff. But, you know, somebody would say, why? Why do I got to cover all this up? [01:15:31] Speaker A: What. [01:15:31] Speaker B: What's the big deal? And then who's going to even find out? And then you get into Delta Green and the consequences of not being able to successfully pull all this off. And there is mechanics around prosecution. [01:15:46] Speaker A: Yeah, we covered that last week. Yeah, it was great. [01:15:49] Speaker B: And so there is those components. And then, you know, if you get prosecuted, you lose sanity, your bonds go sideways and it's a mess. [01:15:58] Speaker A: And you can get fired, which also hurts your sanity and your bones. Yes. [01:16:02] Speaker B: On top of it, it's this horrible vortex. Yeah. You could literally have a campaign around one operation and then one. Like something very simple, and then it goes sideways. And if you don't make the right rolls and all that, and then it just one thing after the other, you [01:16:19] Speaker A: know, I, you know, you can also start to wire some of this together, Sean, with what we talked about last week around bonds. And you recall that I have long struggled with, you know, do I. Do I reflect any of the bond damage in the moment or do I wait for. Do I wait to see the. The scene later? And typically it's just wait to see the scene later. Right. Well, if. If you can tie that into some of your, like, failed tradecraft things, those can appear just like you're talking about where your, where your spouse is. Like, what were you doing in Zurich? I thought you were going to be [01:16:48] Speaker B: in New York City. [01:16:49] Speaker A: Like, you know what I mean, from. Because of the credit card bill or. Or immigration has contacted or for whatever reason, because you failed a role or, or not even just a role, but you just didn't think to dot the I or cross the T. That all can come rushing back into this other part of the game. The home scenes, the bonds, your sanity and all that sort of stuff. So it's not literally just you were noticed, but you were noticed, which is what you're talking about, like, the repercussions, the consequences of all this. Right. [01:17:18] Speaker B: Yeah. And on top of that, so having, you know, with that component, it's like it is a game that was created back in the 90s as a supplement to Call of Cthulhu. And, you know, people are talking about failing forward, and it's not fail forward, I don't think is even mentioned as a phrase in Delta Green, the game, because it came out before it was very popular and a lot of Powered by the Apocalypse games as a mantra. And with Delta Green, it's like in spades, because you may not be Doing it in the moment and they fail. So they may not even fail what they're trying to achieve, but the fact that they failed the, the forensics piece means they forgot to wipe their fingerprints off the doorknob. And during an investigation, during an investigation, they said, well, that's fine, but my fingerprints aren't on file. And I go, huh, were you in the military? Not only are your fingerprints on file, you're probably DNA's on file. [01:18:16] Speaker A: Like, yep, yep. [01:18:17] Speaker B: You know, and this is just where [01:18:20] Speaker A: I think handlers have to get. Failure doesn't mean the door closes. [01:18:24] Speaker B: Correct. [01:18:24] Speaker A: Right. It doesn't mean that that's end of scene. It can mean that the, the coroner is like, okay, I'm into the basement to see the body. And then he goes and makes a phone call right away while you're looking at the body. So you get to look at the body. But you know, the men in blue now arrive or, or who, whatever can. It doesn't have to be that dramatic, but you know what I mean, like, there's so many angles to take for what the, the, what you're getting at is that you didn't get the outcome you wanted, which was, let us, let us inspect the body unaccosted and you're not going to bug us anymore and you're not going to introduce any, you know, any, any issues. Well, here comes some issues. There's a way to look at it, right? There's just so much, so much you can do with it. You're right. The game was not written at a time when people were thinking, as in, as clear, as clear headedly as they are now about these things. Right? But there's no reason you can't apply that stuff, man. [01:19:15] Speaker B: An agent's life is a freaking mess. And sometimes I look at it and think of the group I'm running for. I'm like, they are going, they're getting off way too easy. Way too easy. Like, yeah, dealing with an upset spouse as a bond is one thing, like, oh, you missed the person's birthday. But there's so much more hurt that you can put on player characters now. Of course you got to be careful that you're not just dropping the hammer on their head every single moment of every single game of, of every single session. But it, there is a lot of things, things that just like, oh my God, now I got to deal with this, man. [01:19:54] Speaker A: I don't think the GM needs to be adversarial or needs to be like, out, out to get the players because the system does that the actions are gonna. Their own actions are gonna do that. And the horrible situations are put in are all going to do that. You're gonna get that anyway, right? Just let it. Let it happen. Let those bones dwindle, like you say you're being. You're going easy on them kind of thing. There's no reason why it can't build to a. You know, build to a head. And suddenly the pressure releases though, right? And you come home and your wife's gone. Like, she left. You didn't even say there wasn't a lot of, like, you know, a lot of fighting and a lot of, like, back and forth on this isn't working. It's just like, you know what? I give up. That's enough. I'm going to live with my sister, you know, that kind of thing. [01:20:36] Speaker B: My argument is, I don't know if I give enough checks around that just to see. Yeah, but I think to your point, like, getting the mechanics in there so that you can. That can or could not happen. And I think sometimes I just. Oh, it's out of sight, out of mind. And it's only this one thing when it's very much multiple components, if the situation presents themselves. [01:21:03] Speaker A: Yep, yep. Summing up, I'm not sure if you have more. More to cover on this, but summing up from my side, I would say without tradecraft, like, you can't complete the operations in a way that you'll be around for more than one or two operations, one or two operas. Like, you can't. You have to hide evidence. You have to hide your traces. You have to misinform people. You have to lie to people. It's. It's all this stuff, man. And it's good. It's so good. What do you got to say about that? [01:21:36] Speaker B: That's it, man. That's all. That's all. That's it. I don't have anything else to say. [01:21:41] Speaker A: All right. Our Delta Green journey continues. [01:21:44] Speaker B: It does indeed. Thanks for tuning in, everybody. On behalf of Harrigan and myself, thanks, and we'll catch you on the next one. 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 Freudlich, Tony Sugarloaf Baker, Polish Ogre hus Carl Farty McMutterpants, Laramie Wall, Eileen Barnes Hepta Lima, Aaron Railia, Wayne Peacock, Jeff Walken Yerkis Rex Eric Salzweedle Phil McClory, Jason Hobbs Michael Holland, Remy Billido Crystal Eggstad, Eric Avia Bornak Brian Kurtz, Chad Glamen, Jim Ingram, Orchis Dorcas, Chris Shorb, Brian Rumble, Victor Wyatt, Kevin Keneally, Andy Hall, Jason Weitzel, Saltheart, Tad Lechman, Nicholas Abruzzo, Matthew Catron, Curtis Takahashi, Angela Murray, Mr. White 20 Jason Connerly, Shannon Olson, Ryan West, Kristen McLean, Larry Hollis, Glenn Seal, Jake at Faded Quill Green Jake at Faded Quill Gaming Tess Trekkie, Tim Jensen Nubis, Christopher Lang, Karla Peter Skaines, Wendy Forkon, James Fraser, Ronald Dirigible, Chaplin, Grimaldis and Mark Mequez. Thank you, operatives. This transmission is audio only, but if you want the full dossier, Go bag is on YouTube. Video episodes, deeper dives, all of it. Your next mission. YouTube.com forward/gobagpod.