The silence speaks volumes... ;)

I really enjoyed the game, especially the veil aspect coming out as we create chaos then try to wave it away as a perfectly normal occurance.

I, personally, have a problem with a small group of coalition troops wandering randomly around the Afghan countryside in a huge-arse armoured vehicle. We would very quickly become an IED or ambush magnet, but that's me being picky rather than complaining about the game.

John

I think it was good. I was a bit under the weather so didn't join in, in character, as much as I would have liked. We probably should have yomped it but as an American, my PC doesn't walk anywhere he can drive.

Also, a Predator Drone is 27' long and weighs a ton. The thing in my back pack was not one of them. Mini-UAVs are man portable and are indeed launched by hand.

I'm really enjoying it. The combat rules work well: you don't need to bother with the extra complexity, if you don't want, but it's there if you like it.

I do recommend reading a page of Wikipedia before playing. I know little about snipers, but five minutes of Wikipedia gave me enough jargon to get me through the session.

Graham

And here's a Reaper drone in Afghanistan.

Sorry Simon, I've been a little too busy to knock your game. Also I'm enjoyng it too much to think of anything negative to say about it. But there is one possible criticism of the game. Our characters are not shocked or alarmed by all the horror, which is fun for a change. But perhaps we should be acting out whatever dysfunctions we have that allow us to operate in such a hostile, at least psychological, enviroment.

W'K' sez:
"What did you expect? We are supposed to be anti-esoterrorist agents..."

I do take that point but what I'm talking about is that our charcters have all lived through awful things. Our characters are poking around dead bodies, often of children's, used as explosive devices with less tension than a bunch of drunks watching footie on T.V. From this I take it that our characters are slightly innured to horror because we have seen horror before. But in this game/genre/mythos to do such alters you. And if our characters have dysfunctions that allow us to operate in such psychological hostile enviroments perhaps we might get a little fun out of role-playing said dysfunctions. I believe KULT did something similar. Your character, for instance, might have a taste for longpig but being, otherwise, completly normal hides it. This may never reveal itself but your character may seem a bit keener to get into action and the fleshpots of the thirdworld where the chance to indulge his inclination can be indulged without attracting attention to him.

You're missing the Bakewell Tarts John...

I didn't think enough about Stability loss, and should have passed it over to a player. There should certainly have been loss for the initial suicide bombing attempt, for example.

Does Stability loss do anything interesting in Esoterrorists? I was being defensive about Stability, whereas in Trail of Cthulhu, I would have thrown it away for the chance of going mad.

It was rather disconcerting to spend all my Shooting points on the Armoured Slug, then realise they'd hardly done any damage. Some more definite warning would have been good: "It's armoured. You won't do as much damage". (This all comes under the heading of Getting Used To The System).

I'm not sure about Shooting points refreshing when there's a quiet scene. It makes it very, very tempting to manufacture quiet scenes, because the difference in effectiveness between 0 Shooting and 28 Shooting is so high. This makes it very unlike an action movie: "Hang on, I'm just going for a cigarette before we carry on."

Admittedly, the obvious cure for this is GM power: no, you can't take a break now. But that's rather unsatisfying. How would you feel about something like this? Brief breaks in the action are a staple of action movies: a quick shared cigarette before continuing; a whispered conversation before you go in with guns blazing; a moment where you admire the villain's base, before the next wave of monsters bursts in. I think those moments should be enough to effect a refresh.

Graham

Just as in ToC, it causes a weird insanity.

It wasn't so much that you weren't doing a lot of damage, more that the thing touch tremendous punishment to kill. I assumed it has about 150 Health points, and armour took 2 points per hit off each instance of damage (about the same as your Kevlar). I will certainly make it clearer in future.

The rules for rapid refreshes suggest I was being over-generous:

The GM decides what constitutes a dramatically distinct scene. A brief break while combatants regroup or a second wave of reinforcements creeps up doesn’t count as a new scene. As a rule of thumb, a dramatically distinct fight scene takes place in a fresh location or after more than an hour has passed without exchanging blows or shots with the enemy.

In other words, rapid refreshes change pool points in Scuffling and Shooting so that they no longer measure the number of cool combat things you can do over a series of interconnected scenes, but rather the number of cool combat things you can do during a single fight.

I think that allowing full refresh for a brief break would be a bit much - it would undermine the resource management aspect of the game. But I do take your point about a lull - perhaps once in a scene in addition to techno-macho utterances, you could do a brief break refresh, which involves a quick toke on a cigarette or a chat, refreshing either a fixed number or a proportion of a pool. This wouldn't then be a GM judgement call.