Early editions, first-gen, what have you

I am planning a ‘teach a bunch of new players Hero’ by running Danger Imternational set during the Vietnam War. Long Range Recons out on a long patrol go up against a Temple that man was not meant to know. Whoever survives will later be haunted by horrors unleashed in war during the early 80s. Sounds like fun, I will let you know how it turns out.

I ran it on Saturday, March 30, at GameStorm. Two of the players I knew; two others were old Hero hands (one of which was an old Danger International player!), and one signed up at the con. It was very helpful to have players who knew the game!

They apparently all thought it went well; I could have used another day to prepare. I could have differentiated the PCs better, and given some of them some more to do.

As it is, I ran them through a short shooting range drill, teaching them the dice math, followed by the mission proper.

Almost all of the PCs were SPD 3. One was SPD 4 (the martial arts expert) and the mooks were all SPD 2. I used extremely abbreviated stats for the mooks; DEX 11, SPD 2, OCV 4, DCV 4, 17 STUN to stun them, three hits to take down, and any hits to the head, stomach, or vitals counted as two of those; there were few enough of them that I kept track of hits against them mentally with no trouble. The mooks had rifles doing 1 1/2d6 Killing, with +2 OCV, and no DEF.

I gave each of the PCs an M-16 (2d6-1K, +2 OCV, -1/5" RMod), a .45 Colt Government model pistol 1d6+1K, +1 STUNx, +0 OCV, -1/3", 7 shots), and let them choose any other weapons they wanted. They had 5 DEF body armor as well. One (the old school DI player) swapped his M-16 out for an M-14. A number of the other players chose knives as well. Two of the players tried to take on the mooks with their silenced .45s; theirs were the only ones left standing, even with the mooks not having any DEF. Neither of them got more than two hits on their targets, and they were low damage rolls in extremities.

I used hit locations, which everyone seemed to enjoy. Several of them also enjoyed the fact that it was straight military action, which was different from most of the games that are out there. There were no head shots, two vitals shots (which I assumed were internal organs -- arteries and such, rather than what we always used to giggle at back in the day), a number of chest, stomach, and shoulder hits, and a number of arm and leg hits as well.

They took down maybe a dozen terrorists, captured two commandants, "disrupted" a massive trade of military vehicles from one organization to the other (by means of sufficient application of explosives) and flew home in their chopper leaving flames and explosions behind.

Mission success; seems like the game was a success as well.