Guest Post: Making Special Operators Special

The Problem
For right or wrong the special operator profession in the Agent's Handbook has got rather a bad reputation. Put simply, when players show up with an operator there is a fear that they are nothing more than a disruptive murder machine. In my experience this fear is far from ungrounded and sadly quite a few special operators really are just one trick ponies. My suspicion is that much of this comes from the players' lack of knowledge about special operations and a misguided belief that they aren't allowed to make their characters anything more than gunmen while staying realistic.

The Solution
While often relegated to the role of action heroes or the cavalry that rushes in to save the main characters, America's special operations community do a lot more than just shoot people. In fact, after twenty years of unprecedented expansion, the range of missions that fall under 'special operations' is truly massive, as are the capabilities of the units tasked with them. This post will offer a few examples of how the reality of special operators can make your characters and your game more interesting.

A History of SWORDS (and how to fix them)

Chainmail, OD&D, and Magic Swords

One of the classic tropes of D&D, for good or ill, is the magic sword. A sword that is just magically better at doing its job of hurting and killing people. Maybe it has a few other properties like glowing blue in the presence of orcs or evaluating the "alignment" of the person holding it. But at the most basic level, it's a +1 sword. When you make an attack roll, you add an extra +1 to the D20 on top of whatever you would add from your class or ability scores, and you add an extra +1 to your damage roll. However, in OD&D, the latter was not the case and magic weapons only improved your chance to hit.

Unsurprisingly, this is not incredibly impactful. You're increasing your chance to hit by 5% and your damage by about 20%. However, players mostly care about their hit-chance as that's what they get immediate feedback on. Additionally, the damage boost is not as impressive as it might seem once you realize its goal, reducing the enemy's HP to zero. Against an enemy with 1 hit-die (HP rolled randomly), the chance for a single sword-stroke to slay them only increases by ~10% when you add +1 to your damage roll. This conflicts with the supposed idea of magic swords as presented by both Chainmail and OD&D. Each one was supposed to be a rare thing with its own personality and name. That's a level of importance that doesn't seem fitting of such a slight increase in fighting ability. However, this makes more sense when you realize that OD&D was initially supposed to use Chainmail's combat resolution system.

Guest Post - The Green Mafia

In just about every power structure one of the surest ways to get ahead is to have friends who are already ahead. An Ivy League education isn’t just valuable for its curriculum after all, it allows for networking with people who will almost certainly end up in positions of power. Similar patterns can be seen within specific organizations. In the British Army, The Rifles were represented among the highest ranked generals almost nine times as much as they were in the wider army, leading to their nickname — The Black Mafia. In the Russian Army a similar phenomenon, this time with the VDV, is commonly referred to as the Air Assault Mafia.

These are more often than not simply cases where implicit bias and favoritism enables a concentration of power, but Delta Green — both the Program and Outlaws — is a conspiracy made up of long term careerists and deeply driven to accrue power. So, why not a Green Mafia?