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CRMcNeill
Director of Engineering
Joined: 05 Apr 2010
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Location: Redding System, California Sector, on the I-5 Hyperspace Route.
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 Posted: Fri Mar 08, 2019 5:09 pm Post subject: Secret Identities |
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Has anyone ever played with a character who had both a public and private identity, as in one that the other PCs knew about, and one that only the GM is informed of?
For instance, say you have a Smuggler character, but what only you and the GM know is that he's a deep cover Sector Ranger.
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"No set of rules can cover every situation. It's expected that you will make up new rules to suit the needs of your game." - The Star Wars Roleplaying Game, 2R&E, pg. 69, WEG, 1996.
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Pel
Line Captain
Joined: 10 May 2006
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Location: Texas
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| Posted: Sat Mar 09, 2019 2:35 am Post subject: |
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Not in Star Wars. Pretty common in superhero games, though.
What would be your motivation for keeping the true identity secret? Seems like it could cause a lot of strife between players.
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CRMcNeill
Director of Engineering
Joined: 05 Apr 2010
Posts: 16282
Location: Redding System, California Sector, on the I-5 Hyperspace Route.
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| Posted: Sat Mar 09, 2019 12:22 pm Post subject: |
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| Pel wrote: | Not in Star Wars. Pretty common in superhero games, though.
What would be your motivation for keeping the true identity secret? Seems like it could cause a lot of strife between players. |
Well, depends on the game, really. I posited one example, but what everybody in the group had their own secret that they were keeping, something known only to the GM? I'm mostly just curious is if anyone has ever done something like this in Star Wars?
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"No set of rules can cover every situation. It's expected that you will make up new rules to suit the needs of your game." - The Star Wars Roleplaying Game, 2R&E, pg. 69, WEG, 1996.
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Whill
Dark Lord of the Jedi (Owner/Admin)
Joined: 14 Apr 2008
Posts: 10406
Location: Columbus, Ohio, USA, Earth, The Solar System, The Milky Way Galaxy
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| Posted: Sat Mar 09, 2019 2:09 pm Post subject: |
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| CRMcNeill wrote: | | Well, depends on the game, really. I posited one example, but what everybody in the group had their own secret that they were keeping, something known only to the GM? I'm mostly just curious is if anyone has ever done something like this in Star Wars? |
Secrets? Yes. I ran a Rebel Spec Ops campaign that started out with a Bounty Hunter, a Pirate, an Outlaw Cyborg Engineer, a Retired Imperial Captain from Alderaan, and three other PCs. The Pirate and Bounty Hunter were both orphans that grew up together on the planet, but the rest of these four characters did not personally know each other. However their backgrounds were tied together in unfortunate ways.
The Outlaw Cyborg Engineer ("Wendell Grossman") had been mild mannered medical droid engineer with a wife and kids. For unknown reasons the Empire hired an assassin to kill the engineer. The attack had killed his family but two advanced prototype medical droids and the group's Force PC had salvaged the engineer's brain and successfully integrated it with a humanoid droid body, thus creating the outlaw cyborg hell bent on revenge against the Empire. The Empire and assassin did not know that Grossman survived. The cyborg considered Wendell Grossman to be deceased with his family and adopted a new identity, "Vendetta-X7". However most of the time he posed as a simple mild mannered droid "V-X7". He kept a blaster in a scanner resistant leg cavity. (The player and I were influenced by Robocop when we created this character.) He rarely talked about his former life to his teammates, but when he did he spoke of Wendell Grossman as a different person. In the Bounty Hunter's background, he had been hired by the Empire to kill Wendell Grossman for reasons he did not know, and after he did the job the Empire never paid him, and they even pretended they hadn't even hired him. The Bounty Hunter eventually figured out that Vendetta was the man he had been hired to kill, but kept the secret that he knew for a while. It eventually came out and drama ensued. The Bounty Hunter PC eventually ended up sacrificing his own life to save the the Cyborg (and the entire team).
The Captain's last assignment before he retired was as part of victory-class SD task force that utterly destroyed the pirate's pirate fleet, leaving the Pirate PC (a gunner) as one of the only survivors. When the Rebel team formed, everyone knew the Retired Captain had been an Imperial Captain and the Captain became the team leader, but the pirate kept a tight lip about his background because he knew the Captain's role in destroying his pirate "family" and held a grudge. So the Pirate player acted like he didn't trust the Captain, questioned his authority, and insulted him at times. The other players were shocked and surprised at this behavior but it never was detrimental to the game. It eventually came out and the PCs made their peace with it.
Yes, it was quite "coincidental" that these PCs ended up joining the Alliance together and forming a team, but it was played as a destiny/will of the Force type of thing.
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CRMcNeill
Director of Engineering
Joined: 05 Apr 2010
Posts: 16282
Location: Redding System, California Sector, on the I-5 Hyperspace Route.
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| Posted: Sat Mar 09, 2019 3:45 pm Post subject: |
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Good examples. I'm also reminded of Lara Notsil in the Wraith Squadron novels, where her secret turned into a major plot point across the whole trilogy. It's definitely something that would fit better with a long-term group where the secret can be teased out over the course of multiple gaming sessions.
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"No set of rules can cover every situation. It's expected that you will make up new rules to suit the needs of your game." - The Star Wars Roleplaying Game, 2R&E, pg. 69, WEG, 1996.
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Sutehp
Commodore
Joined: 01 Nov 2016
Posts: 1797
Location: Washington, DC (AKA Inside the Beltway)
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| Posted: Sat Mar 09, 2019 4:59 pm Post subject: |
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Damn, Whill, I think I would have loved to have been in that SpecOps game. It sounded really fun. No shortage of drama (the good kind).
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Whill
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Mamatried
Commodore
Joined: 16 Dec 2017
Posts: 1855
Location: Norway
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| Posted: Sat Mar 09, 2019 6:22 pm Post subject: |
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I had an imperial agent who infiltrated one of my groups. He was good at his job and no one caught his acting, however as the campaign progressed his personal alegiances changed.
basically the empire was alway too close for comfort, a target was suddenly too hard to get to etc etc, he never directly went against the group, but he did leave stuff behind etc things that could be tracked.
He sliced a computer, leaving clues to the empire behind and the like, but as things went on he began to be less and less "loyal" to the empire, and when he fianlly truned full rebel non of the others ever suspectd him of anything from the past missions. |
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Sutehp
Commodore
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| Posted: Sun Mar 10, 2019 2:09 am Post subject: |
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| Mamatried wrote: | I had an imperial agent who infiltrated one of my groups. He was good at his job and no one caught his acting, however as the campaign progressed his personal alegiances changed.
basically the empire was alway too close for comfort, a target was suddenly too hard to get to etc etc, he never directly went against the group, but he did leave stuff behind etc things that could be tracked.
He sliced a computer, leaving clues to the empire behind and the like, but as things went on he began to be less and less "loyal" to the empire, and when he fianlly truned full rebel non of the others ever suspectd him of anything from the past missions. |
Damn, it's like having Kallus in the party without ever realizing it. 8)
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Naaman
Vice Admiral
Joined: 29 Jul 2011
Posts: 3190
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| Posted: Tue Nov 05, 2019 4:27 am Post subject: |
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I played a character whose "mother" had killed her real parents when she was born and then gave her a name. Being force sensitive, she was eventually discovered by a Jedi who trained her under her given name. But eventually, in a force vision, she learned that her "mother" was anything but, and discovered what her true parents had wanted to name her. She adopted the name given by her true father, but officially, her birth/legal records retained her "false" name. After surviving Oeder 66, she resumed her old identity as a civilian.
The GM gave her a unique force power that she herself was not even aware of: whichever identity she chose to assert overrode any knowledge that a person might have of her other identity. In other words, merely by lying about her name, she caused the force to block a person's access to any direct knowledge (or, more often suspicion) they might have about her true (Jedi) identity. Since she didn't know she had this power, she never tried to use it on people who already knew her as one or the other, so it's effects were never tested in such a case. |
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CRMcNeill
Director of Engineering
Joined: 05 Apr 2010
Posts: 16282
Location: Redding System, California Sector, on the I-5 Hyperspace Route.
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| Posted: Tue Nov 05, 2019 1:43 pm Post subject: |
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Interesting. I’d considered something along those lines whereby a Jedi could conceal their mental identity behind a false persona, to such an extent that the false persona wasn’t even aware of the false identity, even under Imperial interrogation.
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"No set of rules can cover every situation. It's expected that you will make up new rules to suit the needs of your game." - The Star Wars Roleplaying Game, 2R&E, pg. 69, WEG, 1996.
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RyanDarkstar
Commander
Joined: 04 Dec 2014
Posts: 351
Location: Chambersburg, PA, USA, Earth
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| Posted: Tue Nov 05, 2019 1:57 pm Post subject: |
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I had a player in my first campaign 25 years ago who was an Alliance X-wing pilot who got shot down on her first mission. She hid out in the Minos Cluster piloting a freighter for a smuggling crew, searching for a Rebel cell to bring her back to the Alliance.
She was also Force Sensitive, but the game petered out before we could explore it.
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garhkal
Sovereign Protector
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Location: Reynoldsburg, Columbus, Ohio.
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| Posted: Tue Nov 05, 2019 3:07 pm Post subject: |
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The closest i've got, was a spec force guy, who 'acted just like a regular merc', to get into a fringer group who cause of their fringer status, had an easier time getting in and around a local planet's moff.. Lasted all of 8 sessions, before we had the 'big bad end guy' fight, and i died.
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Bren
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| Posted: Wed Nov 06, 2019 2:04 am Post subject: |
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Yes. A fair number of PCs had secrets to their backgrounds. Some that other PCs didn't know. Others that the PC themselves didn't know. These are the first few that come to mind.
Young Jedi who didn't know who his father was. His dad had turned to the Dark Side (what a suprise  ). And eventually the PC ran into a clone of his own father.
Bounty Hunter with a secret that he was actually a disgraced Sector Ranger who'd been set up by corrupt coworkers.
Failed Jedi who had Captain Tanda Pryl as an identical cousin. Kind of a surprise when some other PCs ran into Captain Pryl.
PC who was an android (think Guri in Shadows of Empire), but didn't know she was an android nor (at first) did the other PCs.
But for the most part, we tended not to keep those secret from the other players. |
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Naaman
Vice Admiral
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| Posted: Wed Nov 06, 2019 11:20 am Post subject: |
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| Bren wrote: | Yes. A fair number of PCs had secrets to their backgrounds. Some that other PCs didn't know. Others that the PC themselves didn't know. These are the first few that come to mind.
Young Jedi who didn't know who his father was. His dad had turned to the Dark Side (what a suprise ). And eventually the PC ran into a clone of his own father.
Bounty Hunter with a secret that he was actually a disgraced Sector Ranger who'd been set up by corrupt coworkers.
Failed Jedi who had Captain Tanda Pryl as an identical cousin. Kind of a surprise when some other PCs ran into Captain Pryl.
PC who was an android (think Guri in Shadows of Empire), but didn't know she was an android nor (at first) did the other PCs.
But for the most part, we tended not to keep those secret from the other players. |
Patty Duke reference?  |
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