Necropolis - Day 2

[ZeroPants]

Day two:


With the help of a few members of the US military, the survivors managed to clear out a hospital inhabited by other hostile survivors. During this assault, two Vortigaunts unexpectedly came to aid the survivors, but the military quickly turned on the Vortigaunts after the hospital was cleared out, and the survivors were ordered to kill or apprehend the Vortigaunts.

However, they didn't listen and allowed the Vortigaunts to go free.

By the time the hospital was cleared out, only one soldier remained, and he was no match for the Vortigaunts. None of the soldiers were able to communicate that the Survivors let the Vortigaunts go.

Later on, the survivors moved their base from the fire department to a night club at the opposite end of town, the Vortigaunts joined them in this new settlement.

During this time, one of the survivors within the main group used a radio to reach out for support from the military, even providing the location of the club. A scout squad was sent to investigate the club after hearing this broadcast.

Upon arrival, the military scouts discovered that the survivors were harbouring two Vortigaunts; an act of treason against the United States.

A firefight broke out after the soldiers opened fire on the Vortigaunts. By the end, none of the soldiers were left alive, and the survivors were marked as terrorists.

The survivors fled the club as the military began to bombard it with artillery. Armored Personell carriers pursued the survivors as they fled across the city, managing to capture three of them alive.

Currently, the majority of the survivors are hiding, scattered across the city, three of them remain in military custody.


I hope you all enjoyed the first day, the GMs we had helping were:

Rad-X
Brickwall
Alexguinea
Eski
Creekmando
And myself



Feel free to write any feedback below​

 

[RedHotGinger]

alot was mentioned in discord, but the one key point I want to make clear, here:

Make the aliens the primary threat. Looters is fine, but for the majority of the event, we just haven't had much reason to be scared of aliens. Grunts and bullsquids are about all we have to worry about as far as I can tell. Zombies are not remotely cutting it, sadly. The pathfinding is making an already meek enemy basically inactive in alot of scenarios.

So, we just need more meaningful, intact, alien opposition. The lack of it, during the height of the cascade is a missed opportunity.

 

[Emi]

To condense a lot of the feedback i've given throughout discord and other conversations.

Ultimately, my predominant critique of things from the event-running perspective is the same as RedHotGinger's, ultimately the Xenian enemies we've encountered so far just haven't been as threatening as they could be in all but the select few cases where we ran into very particular NPCs like the Grunts. The bulk of them, as zombies or otherwise, being functionally non-threats. The alien invasion should ideally feel like the largest threat.

In a more retroactive sense, I feel like the actions of HECU were reasonably fine, in the context that I understand them, up to the point that massed NPCs were sent to respond to them. It was kind of bizarre to go from, narratively, not having a single man to spare for most of the day, to quite abruptly sending a full battalion to headhunt civilians in an area that already had bombing sorties going into it.

As far as positive notes, I feel like the GM team, for as small sized as it was, did an excellent job keeping up with players in so far as I could see. Overall it was a very fun day.

-Addendum:
Please get a consensus on where we are. Everything in the tabs says Brooklyn, day one said Newark, and now we're in New Jersey?

 

[MCG]

Extremely minor nitpick but after raiding the armory and realizing we're either in New York or New Jersey, I was wondering why the cops were packing Berettas instead of the Sigs and Glocks that were issued at the time.

 

[Lost Coast Chanties]

I'll just list stuff I didn't like, but keep in mind the experience was still mostly positive.

• HECU. This is the biggest off-putter of this whole ordeal. Why the hell did the guys getting covertly killed by the Government in New Mexico have both the authority and the numbers to be on the opposite end of the country? Why was their general taking over the entire national guard in the region when, in reality, the guy should be getting investigated to shit for the whole incident? Them showing up in any capacity is just extremely stupid - not even Hunt Down The Freeman went that way. Hell, if you want to use HL1 groups, having Black Ops for vort capture would make more sense, although it'd still be extremely fanfare-y.
• The Bank stuff was also extremely silly. There's an alien invasion around and the army is seriously being commanded to protect a bank? This whole day just ruined whatever immersion I had in the circumstances we were in. It feels less like an apocalypse and more like a Black Friday sale gone wrong. In a setting where aliens are supposed to be main threat, we were getting chased by tanks and APCs while everything Xenian was just basically just chilling (apparently the army cares more about blasting New Yorkers than firebombing the literal infestations growing on the streets).
• Alien Grunts. These guys shoot through walls and windows. Please don't use them next to buildings where you would realistically be protected from the bee spam.
• Location, but that was mentioned above. It should be all means be Brooklyn - that's what the application post said originally. Thus, we have NYFD and NYPD, geographical features be damned.
• Meat harvesting. I think we really shouldn't have been allowed to do it, because realistically nobody in their right mind would try harvesting meat off a literal head parasite unless they were really desperate. The fact we were all allowed to do meant that we immediately went to eating headcrab fillets - which really shouldn't have been the case and just took away from the experience. It also meant there was little point going looting for food, since you could just go and hunt some zombies outside.