# Character Creation Challenge 2025: Day 19 - Red Ops 5 - Andre LeBlanc tags: #articles/CharacterCreationChallenge/2025 #game/rpg/red-ops-5 > [!quote] [[Character Creation Challenge]] > > ![[Character Creation Challenge Image.png]] ## Game of Choice Sometimes things get weird in the field of tabletop role playing games. I've maintained for over a decade that the tabletop RPG publication field is not an industry; it's definitely a hobby, half welded to a vanity press. For the most part, publishers barely squeak by if they get by at all, and print runs are often in the tens, except for a lucky few who see more than 250 in a year. There are a handful of publishers who put out product regularly and see sales in the thousands. That's it, which means there are a lot of products which have an extremely niche market, whether it be because only a few people will be interested, or in the modern era, only a few people will have seen the Kickstarter and sent them their money to receive a product, which then may or may not ever see a storefront, digital or physical. That's more than a little awkward when you get down to it. Do you tell people about these products which seem to have fallen off the planet once they were published, even though it may be difficult to impossible to get their hands on them right now? Or do you talk about them because the publisher has other products out there which may or may not share a system underpinning and curiosity about the thing you're talking about might lead them to those other interesting products? ![[Red Ops 5 (cover).jpg|400]] That brings us around neatly to **[[Red Ops 5]]**, a title that I would be comfortable putting in the Adventure Wargame category. Like much of the output of [[Two Hour Wargames]], including **[[All Things Zombie]]** and **[[5150 - New Beginnings|5150]]**, both of which I have spoken about on more than one occasion and both of which I love enough to have run at RPG conventions with more than slight success, I'd say that they have led to some of my most successful stand-up sessions. **Red Ops 5** puts you in the shoes of a SWAT team (Special Weapons and Tactics for those who have never watched a cop show on TV), a police tactical unit that uses specialized or military equipment and tactics. There are no zombies, nor are there aliens — but there are drug-enhanced military super soldiers which are out there doing their own thing.^[Frankly, the fact that Prosperity Corporation is using a super soldier drug originally designed to rehabilitate physically impaired people fills me with so much joy it's difficult to express. I've always maintained that cripples would make the best corps of your paramilitary force. Come at me, bro.] Like the other new THW games, there is less focus on maneuver and more on working the mechanics with other choices on the Battle Board, which I'm not entirely thrilled by… We'll get there. ## Acts of Creation Like character generation in most adventure war games, this is going to go *real fast*. In fact, it'll go so fast that we'll end up generating our entire SWAT team. That's how fast it's going to go. ### Do I Star or Do I Grunt Now? Is this character a **Star** or a **Grunt**? That is, do they have the ability to reroll any d6 once per assignment and start with a Reputation of 5? Yes, it's going to be "our" character so it's definitely a *Star*. ### Classless Society? There are four classes to choose from, but they aren't classes in the sense of a classic fantasy RPG. Rather, they simply define the spread of starting Reputations and Attributes. The choices are Civilians, Gangers, SWAT, and Wired. Everything is exactly what you think it is, except for the Wired, who are the aforementioned chemically augmented supersoldiers. When you run into them, they'll probably be doing their own thing. This may be illegal. We are going to be **SWAT** because as much as I would enjoy playing a Wired leader of a SWAT team, it's not exactly what I'm looking for right now. (A great idea for another game; however, we'll stick a pin in it.)^[For the record, the game is perfectly okay with you doing that. You could even be the ganger head of a SWAT team. There's plenty of good story to be had in there.] For Attributes, we have **Crack Shot** and **Quick Reflexes** because all SWAT team members have those. Effectively, our Rep is one point higher when shooting, and we can reroll one failed D6. This sounds like a huge bonus. It's fairly hefty, but the guys we go up against don't have to worry about surviving until the next session. ### I've Got a Bad Reputation Normally, we would have to roll to determine this, but since we're a star, we start at **Rep 5** no matter what. A Rep 4 character is experienced but not totally confident, and Rep 3 are the new guys. As we play, we will gather both Increasing and Decreasing Rep D6, which are like positive and negative experience. You get Increasing Rep for going on successful assignments, putting down the bad guys, and getting the bad guys to surrender before you have to put them down. You get Decreasing Rep for failing assignments, running away with your tail between your legs, and having to use Star Power. Eventually — in a literal ten in-game years or so — you will retire, and when you retire you use your lifetime Rep level to figure out how well you're living. Everybody wants to live good in the neighborhood. ### I Can't Get My Car Out of Second Gear Being a SWAT team member figuring out what our gear is becomes really trivial. We get an **Auto-3** weapon, which means we can fire on up to three targets or put three rounds in the same poor bastard. We also get **body armor**, which is taken into account on the Shooting Table. ### Get Ready. We Go Airborne in 15 Minutes How many are in the team? Let's roll 1d6 and figure it out. > [2] Cross-referencing that on the handy table, it means our team will be one fewer than our Rep. Including ourselves, which is a nice bit of verbiage to make sure is clear. That's four other SWAT team members. Generating them is really easy we go to the SWAT lists and roll 1d6 to determine which one we use, then we roll 1/2d6 and get a result from 1 to 3, drop down to that line on the list and that's the first NPC on the team. The rest are just the ones beneath that. We are the team leader. Let's go. > [6] For a change, it looks like we're not going to get completely boned. On page 35, we go to the number 6 SWAT table and figure out our offset. > [5] That maps to a 3, so we drop to line three and take four officers. That's it. That's character generation. That's the lot. We are ready to go out on our first assignment and have a bad time of it, given how much dice like me. ![[Red Ops 5 - CCC2025 - Andre LeBlanc, SWAT Leader.webp]] You'll notice that the entries for your team don't even give them a name. They just have a number. It's not because they are completely disposable, though they are fairly disposable. It's because the game comes with tokens, which can be used on the battle board to represent your characters and they don't have names on them, of course, they just have numbers. This being me, I have generated names for them. I wouldn't want anyone to go without some characterization. This seems a little scant otherwise. | Position | Name | Notes | | :------: | ------------------------ | ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ | | 2 | Beau Guidry | Second in command of the squad and lead of the second fire team. Big guy spends way too much time in the gym. Wants to tell you about it. | | 3 | Isabelle Theriot | Fascinated by intelligence. Always looking to learn more about the criminals the team faces. Sometimes uses questionable methods to do so. Occasionally, that involves pliers. | | 4 | Jean-Baptiste Thibodeaux | "Tippy" to his friends, of which there are few. Proud of his Cajun heritage and often attempts to get his teammates to eat things which might otherwise be unpalatable. Comes across as creepy to criminals. | | 5 | Claude Moreau | Perversely is a real doctor with a PhD in criminology. He jokes about buying an island one day and loves animals. | Did I mention I decided this would be located in [Houma, Louisiana](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Houma,_Louisiana)? [Bayou Cane](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayou_Cane,_Louisiana) is considered part of their area of operations. ![[Red Ops 5 - CCC2025 - Bayou Cane.webp]] For the record and possibly because you're curious, no, I didn't use any kind of randomizer to come up with the team members' personality or our location. I will admit that I used an AI to generate a list of names to choose from. There's no shame in properly deploying tools. I've always thought that a serious near-future crime story could and should be set in southern Louisiana because there is such a ton of opportunity to talk about creepy waterways, smuggling drugs through the swamps, and all of the off-the-books rural stuff that you imagine goes on in Cajun country thrown against the surprising amount of urbanization, which you almost never see in media. Yes, I spend a lot of time thinking about ways to tell cool stories in the southern United States, aside from Matlock. Why do you ask? ## Exunt There you go, a quick little in and out, and Bob's your uncle. This brings us right back around to the stuff I was talking about at the beginning of the article, namely that as far as I know, there's currently no way for you to get your hands on **Red Ops 5** in order to play it. The Kickstarter funded, it went to production, I have the physical book right here in my hot little tentacles - but it's not made its way into any digital storefront that I can find. I *believe* I know the reason why. Most of the publishing for the THW catalog has moved to Rebel Minis, which produce fantastic miniatures for a broad swath of games, particularly figure agnostic ones. [Rebel Minis Press](https://rebelminispress.com) is their business unit specifically devoted to and providing the sales front end for those books. Rebel Minis already had a game named **Red Ops 5** in their catalog that has been there for a not inconsiderable amount of time, and just for extra spicy confusion, it involves the military going up against zombies - something directly covered by another THW title, **All Things Zombie**. My gut feeling is that the title makes it almost impossible to get RMP to list this game — maybe not the best possible choice, but here we are. Hopefully, they'll get that straightened out. I would imagine that eventually the solution will be a slight name change. It wouldn't be the first time. If you are interested in and excited by this game, let me direct you to **[[All Things Zombie]]**, which *definitely* will let you do everything that **Red Ops 5** does and more, including SWAT versus ganger. In fact, you can easily get the Wired in there as well. They just always have the attributes Rage and Hard as Nails. So far, so good. That covers the requisite law enforcement organization content for the day. Tomorrow, we do something much, *much* creepier. It's hard to be creepier than a crackhead on the subway, but we're going to go at least one step beyond.