Re: OOC : Relaxation room
haha, I mean you could have just let it go as Sarah was leaving. You'd basically "won". Seems like a man like Kaspar could easily have been more than happy with his "foe" just peacing out.
As for the alien experts being against him, Gavan explicitly said he prefers Kaspar stay in command, but that he'd like to stay and finish the mission instead of taking the whole team home. Freyda seems to be against him, but hasn't really done anything to enforce her will, so she could be basically ignored/overridden with majority consent. Naseem has directly defended Kaspar's retention of power. Basically all of the uniformed military have agreed Kaspar's in charge. There's no real challanege to his authority even if Sarah did stay. (Kaspar and her would just continue to dislike each other, but her "mutiny", though I question if it ever was that, would have been over.) There have been multiple points where Kaspar could have just shut up and smugly declared victory to himself as he regained command of the team, which would have still fit with a mildly arrogant and presumptuous Cold War veteran officer, without scraping the entire mission. (which is not to say that there weren't also multiple points where Sarah could have been like, "I don't like Kaspar, but I was only making a point before anyway, and this has gotten way out of control. Let the blowhard be a blowhard and I'll just keep being an effective and productive team member with everyone else, rolling my eyes whenever Kaspar is Kaspar")
As far as Tate is concerned, in character, military protocol made Kaspar in charge, and he certainly doesn't care about national heritage, cause he kind of hates the American military command structure anyway. So much so that he was willing, if forced, to zip tie someone he sees as a civilian chaffing under the relatively crappy military command structure that explicitly promotes jack asses sometimes because they're effective leaders of groups of men who have been efficiently broken down by basic training, though really bad leaders of civilians who have not been crushed by years of military procedure.
However, threatening to suicide bomb the entire team if they don't acquiesce to a drastically excessive and clearly spiteful "final" order, when there's no reason for it to be a final order anyway, is basically grounds for a summary field fragging if it means saving the rest of the team. Which is why it's important to know if he's in the room or not. Not because Tate would kill you, because that would be an excessive, party breaking action for the sake of playing IC. If he's in the tunnel he won't hear the crazy crap Kaspar just said and let the others deal with it, but if he's in the room he'll basically call Kaspar's bluff in the hopes that even if he does try it the hologram would be advanced enough to only kill individuals threatening violence instead of flaming the entire room. Because a commanding officer that responds to insubordination by threatening to intentionally kill his entire team deserves to eat a bullet. (or a flame ball as the case may be.)
OOC - I dig the Commando reference. ;)
just in case it's not obvious, what the GM posted not a few posts ago is totally correct. It is absolutely about how you play your character.
When you play RPGs it's not solely about being "in character". GMs have to maintain a world in which the players can enjoy themselves and at least FEEL like they have a say in what's happening. But that doesn't absolve players of responsibility for the continuation of the game. You don't do game breaking crap for the sake of remaining "In Character", you warp your character as gently as possible around IC drama so that everyone can continue to have fun. ("Have Fun" here meaning "staying in the game", not "Being totally free of IC conflict".)
As an example, (skip this if it seems too long) when I was just a baby RPGer relative to my current self, I was playing a monk in a Kingmaker D&D campaign. My character was explicitly devoted to allowing captured opponents to live if they promised to be better people/kobolds/whatever. However, another player had made a hunter whose past made him a brutal executioner of anyone who crossed the line between legal and illegal. In the first few sessions he shot every prisoner I released, right in the back, as they walked away from me. I got tired of it, but instead of going OOC and asking him to be a bit more lenient with his executioner shtick so that I could continue playing my character, I decided that, when I captured a bandit captain and her trial found her guilty, I tried to convince the guard captain to give her freedom on the condition she swore to basically become my follower. The Captain almost agreed, but the hunter stepped in and convinced him to maintain the death penalty. I then took it even further by trying to break the prisoner out in the night. (This should have worked, but it was an in person game, and the hunter used meta knowledge to position himself to notice my break out attempt.)
I was so mad at him that my monk just started attacking his character, an while I would have one a straight up duel, the guards woke up and just saw the monk beating on a fellow party member, and the bandit captain freed and trying to run away.
Eventually I just retired the monk and made a new PC, and while I am in no way absolved of guilt for that confrontation, I still never really forgot the other player's absolute, game breaking desire to enforce his IC will upon everyone else at the table.
TL;DR - It's as much the responsibility of the players to help the other players have fun as it is the GMs. We're not absolved of our own crappiness just because we don't control NPCs. Arguably we're MORE responsible because our PCs are the main characters of the show, and our actions have more of an effect on each other than any NPC that can just be ignored/killed/knocked unconscious/charmed out of relevance.
This message was last edited by the player at 06:38, Mon 03 June 2019.