#ipod dog

In A Pilot’s Purpose, the tactical game is only complex enough to sell you on the stakes and drama of the social game. Whenever the tactical game stops supporting that other half, we stop playing it!

iDog

This section serves not just to inspire you, but outline the work the Director is expected to do before the game begins. Setting up a list of Missions, their Goals, Challenges, Environments, Twists, the campaign’s NPCs and Intrigue Tracks… well, it may seem like a lot. But the intent is to make it clear what you need to do.

If you follow these steps, I posit your friends will be impressed, and you will all have fun.

If you don’t know, anon is asking about A Pilot’s Purpose, the tactical, mechsploitation TTRPG!

In between missions in A Pilot’s Purpose, pilots take three “downtime actions,” which all do something discretely beneficial for the players, such as lowering their Frenzy, affixing new parts to their mech, giving them free Equipment, and so on. You can see this kind of mechanic in other games, namely His Majesty the Worm, Blades in the Dark, and Ars Magica.

Something cool about A Pilot’s Purpose is that in addition to the benefit, each downtime action has a small table of random events! For each action taken during that period of downtime, the player rolls on that action’s table and writes down the result on an index card. Then, they hand it to the GM (or, as we call them, the Director.)

Here's an example~! You can see the Pilot's name and callsign at the top, the downtime actions they took, and the results they rolled!

The GM then lays out each player's card before them, and, reading the results, decides which scenes to play out, which to pass over, and in what order!

For a real example that occurred in one of my games: a pilot named Angel decides take Digging action as part of her Downtime, which allows her to progress one of the campaign's Intrigue Tracks. Having seen something curious at her Handler's apartment earlier in the campaign, she chose to progress the "Personal" Intrigue track, hoping to reveal more about her Handler and the rest of the HQ's staff. She notes down the benefits she gets for taking the action, then rolls a d6 for the random result: a 2.

Looking at the result, Angel's player tells the Director that Angel probably snuck back into her Handler's apartment to go through her things.

The Director agrees this is is dramatic, and describes how Angel finds sepia-soaked pictures of her Handler's father founding the Company and building the HQ. Not only does this reveal that the Handler is the heir to the Company, but family photos also reveal that the Handler is one of Angel's fellow pilot's sister. Frustrated that her teammate is rich and connected enough that she could have any life, and chose to be a pilot, Angel screams and tears up the photos. Only to realize her Handler is standing behind her, gun pointed at her head.

What follows is a brutal scene of the Handler leading Angel back to HQ at gunpoint, then throwing her around by her hair and forcing her to clean up the dead body of someone else who dug too deep into the Company's doings and origins.

Everyone at the table is engaged, afraid for Angel’s life. Then, the Director reads that the second Downtime Action Angel took was Chilling Alone, and she rolled a 3.

Not sensing much drama there, the players and the Director briefly describe what that looks like, how Angel is feeling post-body cleanup, then move on quickly.

Even without such a reveal, you can imagine how this mechanic drives fun and drama. Since the rules say that if two players are taking the same downtime action they are most likely doing it in proximity, and the story of the campaign is in part explored through downtime actions (ask me about that next), the game encourages novel, plot-propelling scenes with ever-changing combinations of player characters.

Downtime Cards allows the Director and the players to collaborate and create the most dramatic narrative possible using their characters and the rules of the game. The game uses randomness to suggest scenes, but players deciding themselves which scenes to explore, in what order, and in what detail, is SO fun. Speaking humbly, of course.

It wouldn’t really even be that hard. One easy change I’d make is to say the Mold IS the progenitor virus, i.e not a real virus but a fungus found in the rotting flowers, which serves as a breeding ground and fertile substrate for a TON of weird diseases, and the ARK/Elpis contains a kind of Antimold which was Spencer’s real lifelong project, and which can serve as a vaccine and zombie destroyer ANYTHING made with the Mold/Progenitor.

Then, wholesale replace Zeno and Gideon with Wesker, so you have you have a clean line from Miranda-> Spencer-> Birkin-> Wesker, with Wesker always being an agent of “the Connections,” and being a superhuman Mold baby like Rose Winters or Miranda herself. He could even have a Cadou, or be a successful outcome from “The Connections” copying Spencer’s orphanage research, allowing to Wesker jump bodies which could explain how he keeps coming back. But I’d probably stick with the Mold Baby thing, since it’s cleaner.

To clean up the rest of the timeline, it’s easy enough to change “The Connections” to just be “The Family” (which might explain Eveline’s fixation on Family) and instead of Neoumbrella, it’s just nakedly the Family from the beginning. Pepper every game with explicit mentions that The Family are funding Tricell and every other Umbrella competitor, OR just have it be like, Family Pharmaceuticals (tm), you know, make it clean.

That makes the story of the BSAA’s regulatory capture (as hinted at throughout the games, and made somewhat explicit in RE8 and RE9) a lot easier to pull off! You can even say that Ashley Graham was kidnapped because The Family wanted to threaten President Graham and keep him in line. But I still don’t really know why Leon is Graham’s choice to go.

Maybe Leon, Claire, Sherry, and the rest keep getting targeted by Tyrants to try to kill them to keep the cover-up going, so the President is like “hey you’re an unstoppable killing machine who hates these people and you’re kind of disposable anyway, go fetch my daughter under the table.”

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