Papaship - A familial sci-fi horror
Recently I signed up to run games at UK Games Expo - a first for me personally since I've always run for home games exclusively and a few times at a local pub - I tend to stick to games in the Old School Roleplaying style for those settings and as many in the hobby have run a great deal of 5e, with both my UKGE games being Mothership I've been preparing - but when sat down at my parents house one day a few months back, I made a passing inquiry to my Dad "Would you let me test a game on you?".
Papa, who are you?
A 70 year old cockney who loves Millwall football club, 'nobody loves us, we don't care' was a phrase drilled into me since youth, My Dad is a giant teddy bear of an individual - soppy and sweet - but with a hint of laddishness to him.
He grew up on the Isle of Dogs pulling around a cockle cart, sans the horse. He did this for his Dad whom stopped in every pub they went to sell at and would get progressively more drunk as the sales journey went on - a quick pint he was told. His father was a general labourer and toolmaker. Not in the way UK prime minister Keir Starmer likes to remind people.
He then spent the rest of his life working in insurance as an audit manager, I would tell people he sold 'insurance' since when he showed up in a suit to places they'd shift uncomfortably at first.
Another story he would tell me growing up was when he first started working at his company he was a little harder up and wanted to read Lord of the Rings, so every day he would go in WHSmith - a book seller and general tattery chain in the UK known in passing for their fiendishly horrible carpets - and read through the trilogy. He would do this by hiding the copies under the shelves and leaving business cards to mark where he was, then would return after work and continue reading. I have since bought him copies of the book - and let him know he doesn't need to hide them between readings.
I say this to illustrate - the concept of fantasy; elves and orcs, swords and shields is not foreign to him. I'd been explaining to him I'd been running a game of Dungeons and Dragons for some people I knew in Germany and Holland for about four-five years at this point. Whilst he understood the idea of "telling a story", he struggled to understand what the point was - how do you win? Is it against other people? "How do I chess".
Every game he has ever played with me, he has done either with uncertainty or to troll me in some way - we have tried Love Letter, Catan and many more and when younger and more from my side trying to bond with my Dad at the age of 10 - Fifa 96 on the Mega Drive which I bought for £3 on a market stall in that brief window I thought I might maybe care about football. I did not.
What does my Dad know about role playing?
Nothing.
He has never rolled a die, he does not understand the term 'advantage or disadvantage' in this context. He looked at me as if I had insulted him the first time I said "d6" instead of the "the dice".
The concept of character building was completely foreign to him, at first I handed him the Mothership player book and let him browse it out of his curiosity. he was perplexed but not by the thing I thought he would be. He asked how this would be played and I tried to give him a nice simple example - playing Cops and Robbers growing up.
Yet he looked at the context warnings and said to me dead in the eye serious:
Strong language? Do I have to swear? I don't really like to swear. I mean I can pretend to be your Grandad I guess.
I assured him, no, he doesn't have to swear if he doesn't want to. He immediately felt relieved.
...Sexual content? What does that mean? I don't get it
This is the point at which I have what I would probably consider the inverse of the Birds and the Bees conversation with my 70 year old Father and explain the difference in nature between some of the modules, and some of the games people play. This conversation lasted for 15 minutes. I mostly stuck to examples of perhaps more urban modules, where certain services would be available and that in essence it could almost.. maybe... be viewed as a means of healing in some situations.
This is when it turned out my Dad had role played before - and no, no it is not that kind of role playing.
He had in essence done a form of weekend LARP on a corporate repeat in 1981, they had sent them away for a weekend and locked them in a hotel. Every single person was given a name and a role to play, as well as a costume. The intent was to teach them to be empathetic to other people's points of view.
Given the role of a young woman who had been unfortunately knocked up by her boss, my Dad donning a mini skirt and a tube top had been given the moniker of Vicky Preggers and told to keep this up for the entire weekend, a lesser man may have bawked at this and said sod it - apparently my Dad began to sob and threw himself fully into his performance.
I don't think they'd let you do this anymore, but it was the 80s. Was a bit insensitive looking back.
With the primer of what role playing is out of the way, we began with the character sheet - part of the reason I enjoy using Mothership for less experienced players is that I feel the character sheets are fairly light to parse - and since I will be needing to write up ten of these sheets with the intent to have backups ready soon, I decided to print out a whole bunch of the advanced sheet.
Which meant for the first time in a very long time, I had to manually create a character by hand and not via the Mothership Companion with him.
The only thing I read to him before we started was the advice from the Mothership player book, that I quite honestly find to be some of the best advice for running the game and always make sure to reiterate it to players at the start of a new game
"Are Disney not coming after them?"
Alien is not an unknown license to him - he made this claim immediately after showing him the cover of the module we were going to run, as well as the Mothership manual. Luckily, this meant I could use some shorthand to skip some explanation, he could largely picture what a Marine, Scientist or an Android were - a Teamster took some wiggling to explain but he eventually got the idea.
For creating a character he really got stuck on the idea of a personality, so I made a point "What was Ridley's goal? Why would she throw herself into danger?" and something clicked, he was (unprovoked) just mercenary, there because he was a willing participant in this spiral of capitalism - he knew the risks and he needed to get out.
This confidence stopped when I asked him to roll 2d10 and begin filling in the sheet
A what?
Take two of those dice
But ones got ten on and ones got..
Yeah, that's fine, roll them together and then add the face values...
Oooooh
Right, each time enter the number you roll into those bubbles
So I gotta roll above these numbers?
No, below
Wait, but that's...
This is the point at which it clicked that his survival rate was quite low, even for a Teamster - the class he chose - who have a reasonable number of boosts he immediately understood what the numbers were saying to him.
Even more so when I asked him to roll his credits (more to prove a point) and then on top of his starter gear, spend them. He realised how expensive the means of protection actually were in this game, be it armour, guns or otherwise - your survival is dependent potentially on your available resources. So as I had iterated to him before - be clever, plan and be aware - violence is punishing.
At this point, he would repeatedly say to me whilst filling in his sheet and looking up at me
Nah, I'm gonna live. You're not gonna kill me son.
Reassure him that I wasn't aiming to kill him... at least maybe not at first
Nah, nah. You are. I know what this is. Its a setup.
In part this section took quite a while, largely because I needed to explain some terminology and me in general maybe not being clear enough - my Dad is a do-to-learn type as well, so no matter what I tried the concept of a "save" meant little to him - I frontloaded a bit out of fear and we agreed to save most of it till it came up.
What did I actually run?
I went pretty straight forward and tweaked only a few things, I dropped a gun a bit earlier on and I also made the Carc move around the building a bit earlier, in their still human-encased form. This will make sense a bit more why later.
I told them as long as they got the samples out, that was enough.
I use only a few things to help at the table, since I know theatre of the mind can be a bit much for a new player sometimes - we stuck to using a whiteboard and marker to draw out maps, everyone got the Nice Official Tuesday Knight Games standee figures and we continuously redrew maps - in a ways to get him to track where he was going.
Landing on Samsa VI
You want to know the really great thing? My father may be one of the best players I have ever had at a table.
My Father, completely without the expectation of being fed a story, sought out and explored the situation he was presented without the intent of trying to win the game but literally as a means to explore it and engage with it.
He was asking constant questions, wanting to know what we would know versus what he as a player could reckon - I did not feel the need to correct him since I just gave him the reminder "How would the person in this situation feel?".
This took some getting used to from me in all honesty, I frequently encounter newer players who take the position of chaos goblin, they try to test the boundaries of what is available by being silly or trying to tease the dungeon master (or warden in this case I suppose!). Or, in the case of Mothership - refuse to engage with the threat at all.
Yet, my Dad - apart from a few reminders to talk to the other players at the table - not me directly - when planning, was noting everything. From little sounds he heard, to the tracks in the dirt, the state of the emergency lighting making it hard to see. Crawling his way around doorways and all.
Introducing the panic table had me getting him to roll on it after finding a decapitated head - getting the result jumpy - I asked him "How do you respond to this situation? Given this as a prompt" to which he stayed quiet for a few seconds and suddenly shouted
OH JESUS CHRIST
A good way to get my partner to also, literally jump.
Slowed down a bit by explaining the dice, fear saves and panic and stress, he racked up stress after stress after each failed roll but with a fail forward attitude he kept plugging away.
He kept looking in his tool kit, looking at his skills, making arguments how they could apply - desperate to use his trinket, a deck of cards in some way - discussing with my wife (one of the other players) about the safest way he could get her out of a situation or himself.
This was, however, his downfall. He wanted to heavily workshop every situation - which gave me as a warden a great chance to tease out and introduce threats, the carc off in the distance, skittering around, waiting. A single soldier waiting at the doorway for them, wobbling on the spot as lights flickered behind them showing only their silhouette - silent until they approached.
Cornered by the Carc, spooling out of the body which it now dragged around like a tail - he was struck by a claw when trying to slip past it out of the room
Oooh am I dead? I'm dead right. Come on I'm dead. A wound? What's a wound? I'VE HAD MY SKIN FLAYED OFF PARTIALLY WHAT?!
He immediately asked to review the wound table
well I guess at least I didn't lose an eye...
This is when my Dad started a fire in the med bay with a flare gun and tried to smoke the carc out - this did not go in their favour, he crawled through the vent - tried to distract it with glowsticks, fire shot after shot until eventually they ended up back outside - realising they had left the very place they needed to be in to get the samples.
He came up with more plans - break in via the outside through the vents. Create an IED and use it to blow a hole, sneak in and then retrieve it.
Yet this is the thing, all his plans were so reasonably thought out - and much in the spirit of it, so long as he was thinking things through and not in immediate danger I wanted to encourage it.
After eventually retrieving everything they tried to get to the garage and escape by stealing the ATV - to be taken out by a stray grenade from someone waiting within - not before he tried to talk him down, unprovoked, giving us our first instance of actual NPC dialogue in the game as he begged and pleaded with Demar to just slip up at the last moment and try to snatch it out of his hand before he was willing to give the grenade up.
He held his death cup - my wife's character holding the samples said
i mean i want to live
My wife fled the planet. My father sat at the table looking her in the face
You judas! I saved your arse so many times, ditch me will you. Divorce her son, divorce her.
So what next?
He wants to play Mausritter. He loves the art of the starter box and he wants to find out why the honey is cursed.
I think we'll do that next.