# Character Creation Challenge 2024: Day 12 - Action 12 Cinema :: Nick Michaud, Suspended Undercover Cop tags: #thoughts/CharacterCreationChallenge/2024 #game/rpg/action-12-cinema > [!quote] [[Character Creation Challenge 2024]] > > ![[Character Creation Challenge Image.png]] There have been a few games in the last couple of decades which explicitly took on an appreciation of the tabletop RPG as a mechanism for expression of genre movies. Genre movies specifically. One of the best examples was the first edition of **[[Hong Kong Action Theater]]**, which was fabulous (and which the second edition ruined by dropping the conceit), there was the more story game-forward **[[Primetime Adventures]]**, which shifted a character's abilities to achieve things based on whether they were the spotlight character of that episode or not, and a small number of other examples. Let's have one more, something literally published yesterday. Hot off the presses. While sneering at forgiveness is really more my speed, I asked the author if you would mind me using it in *[[Character Creation Challenge 2024|Character Creation Challenge 2024]]*, which he graciously acquiesced to. What he *didn't do* was point out the several already extant YouTube actual plays up on the Internet. I think he was trying to be kind. Regardless – today we do **[[Action 12 Cinema]]**! ![[Action 12 Cinema (cover).jpg]] Mechanically, I would say that it has a little bit of DNA taken from the [[Blades in the Dark|FitD]] bloodline, building dice pools from stats, skills, and other traits, rolling against a set range of target numbers to build successes. There's also a splash from one of my favorite TTRPGs of all time, **[[Wushu]]**, in that the core oppositional mechanic is the creation of Obstacles which require a certain number of successes in order to overcome them – or just resolve them – which are built up by players rolling dice over a series of rounds. Play is broken into two sections, preproduction and production. In preproduction you do most of the traditional Session 0 things: decide on your world, put together the general themes and forces, creature characters. In production, you actually play it out. But here's the thing. *One of the truly compelling and interesting things that it brings to the table is something I would never advise under most conditions:* Sit down, choose the plot, then work out *all* of the Obstacles that will occur during the movie/game and organize them into Act I, Act II, and Act III. Explicitly. Then come up with Locations for the Opening Scene and Final Stage. Yes, you build the structure for the game – the whole game – in Session 0. The reason this works is because the underlying expectation and theme of the game as a whole is *over the top, ridiculous action movie*, and if things seem formulaic, if things seem a little driven by the plot from the character point of view, that is just as it should be. That's exactly the feel we're going for. Why does this work? Did I mention it's GMless? There is no GM. *No one* is railroading your characters to match their personal vision of what should happen – you're largely rolling up semi-randomly generated briefly described Obstacles and putting them into place as a group (or alone; you can play this game solo). This can be very, very cool. A little bit of constraint gives you a lot of inspiration and a weird freedom to make sure that the next thing happens because you know that the next thing will happen. You don't necessarily know *why* it will happen or *how* it will happen – but you know it *must* happen. Your job, as a player, then becomes partially to push things into position narratively, in the fiction, and have a good time doing it.^[This also puts me in the mind of **[[Microscope]]**, where you always know what is going to be at the end of any Period, Event, or Scene but you decide how it happens.] Enough talk about mechanics; let's walk through the preproduction phase and see what kind of trouble that we can get into. ## Chargen Organizationally, you guys know I'm a fan of putting the mechanics before the character generation process, and this text doesn't do that. It does provide a beautiful step-by-step page that shows exactly what you'll be doing in the process of play and then follows that with a breakdown, along with all associated tables necessary. Convenient and flexible. ![[A12C How to Play.png]] Sheets in hand,^[Thanks, **[Two Minute Papers](https://www.youtube.com/@TwoMinutePapers/videos)**!], what's next on the list? ### Set the Rating and Cover Safety Tools Look, this is me. I love the most ridiculous and horrifying media on earth. We're not fucking around. Not only is this rated R, it's a hard R for violence, drug use, and everyone's favorite softcore Cinemax experience, sex. You'll probably be watching this movie through cable distortion. [You guys out there in the audience older than 30 know what I'm talking about.](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXTibPqCx29GEFC7e9pPn3Ct3gVXwvU7i) ### Genre and Eras This is where the tables kick in. As the text says, **A12C** is about playing Pure Action movies. Movies like diehard or effectively any late 80s or early 90s action movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone. If there are sweaty men carrying sweaty guns and… Actually, I have to be careful here because that could describe an entirely different kind of movie. Pure Action. Now, I could *choose* something from the list. But this seems like a really good moment to let the dice speak. Did I mention that every die used in this game is a D12? The author loves D12s and I think that is perfectly reasonable. 5. That makes this an Action/Horror gig. **Fright Night**, **Pitch Black**, **The Predator**, **The Thing**, Even **The Stuff**. I feel good about this. I don't know anything more than the genre right now, but I like it. Now for the era – or eras, because technically there are two for every movie. There is the era that the setting exists within and the era in which the movie was made. If you know your movies, you know that the latter can have a huge impact on the feeling, the special-effects, and the acting, which is why we think about it and set it out. I'm feeling very classic so this is going to be an action/horror movie made in the modern era but set in the 80s. The pre-cell phone 80s. I made a Cinemax and cable reference earlier. I'm old. Get over it. ### Choose the BBEG You know, the Big Bad Evil Guy. We're going to roll a couple of times and check the tables because I think we can do something insane with whatever answer it gives us. 9,11. That puts us on the third chart, number 11 down – Fanatic. We've got a fanatic over here! It could be a cultist, it could be an obsessed fan… We don't have to decide that quite yet but we're making progress. I think it'll start coming together in this next section. ### Choose the Plot This plot is not going to be deep, meaningful, or emotionally resonant. It's an excuse to get our actors on the screen, probably see some boobies, definitely see some blood and some [Tom Savini](https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0767741/) viscera – if we could wrestle up that kind of budget, and look badass the whole time. Back to the tables! 2, 12. *Create Earthquakes*. We have a fanatic who wants to create earthquakes in an action/horror movie. Okay, this might be a little more challenging than I was expecting. That's okay, we can work something out. Let. Me. See. This is an action/horror, not action/disaster, so the focus isn't on dealing with the earthquakes. It's dealing with the fanatic who wants the earthquakes. And the horror that comes with doing so. I think will go for something unusual. This will not be a supernatural horror movie but the creeping dread of a threat by a terrorist (who is *not* a mad scientist) and dealing with the horrific scenes that come from trying to get through the earthquake zone to the place that he is set up, and stopping him. Or I could just lean into the disaster porn; it's my game. But we'll try not to. ### Choose the Six Primary Obstacles And Place Them in Order This is where things could get a little spicy, because we're going back to the tables for six Obstacles and then putting them in order of appearance, one in Act I, two in Act II, and three in Act III. We're not actually going to specifically reify what these Obstacles are; we'll do that as we go through play (or would). But first – the tables! - Pirates - Wizard - Goblins - Scarecrow - Someone / Something Must Be Found - Cosmic Horror I never promised it would make sense immediately. Right, let's scrap that idea about it not being a supernatural horror at all because there are clearly supernatural elements all over the place here. Let's revise our plot to being: > An obsessed occultist intends to breach the walls of reality and has already begun his sorcerous invocation. As a result, Martel Stone, Maine is experiencing very unusual seismic activity. I think we can make this work. Now let's structure the text. | Act | Element | | ---: | ---- | | I | Wizard | | II | Someone / Something Must Be Found | | | Pirates | | III | Scarecrow | | | Goblins | | | Cosmic Horror | You know, I think I can work with this. Even though I don't *have* to describe what's going on here until it's time to play it out, because I'm not actually going to get around to the Production Phase, here are my thoughts. > In Act I, an ancient occultist gathers the protagonists together and test them to see if they are worthy before sending them off on a quest to stop our fanatic who wants to rip open space and time. > > In Act II, the protagonists are searching through the zone of destruction for a fragment of the True Cross, which is actually a portion of a 2000-year-old cosmic horror, which will guide them to the fanatic. Along the way they are opposed by looters who don't appreciate our heroes interrupting their good time and free TVs. > > In Act III, they first have to deal with a terrifying horror – which actually proves no physical threat but only strikes fear into them, requiring a conscious struggle. Once that's disposed of, they face the Children of the Rifts, small twisted creatures which have climbed up out of the depths. Finally, they face the twisted bastard himself, consumed by the cosmic forces he cannot control and he must be stopped! You know, considering the inspiration for these movies – I think I'm in good shape! That actually is mostly coherent. ### Create the Opening Scene and Final Stage Locations Every story starts somewhere and ends up somewhere else. Sure, the Active Player can introduce Locations as they will, but we can kick things off in an interesting way. Locations have a name (which can be refined later), a brief description with a couple of points, and a Worst Possible Thing, something that could go horribly wrong in that location and introduce drama and conflict. You don't have to decide what it is beforehand and this is a thing that can be mechanically invoked, but we're going to because I'm that kind of person. #### Opening Scene While I am tempted to make the Inciting Event take place inside a Maine lobster restaurant overlooking the beach (because it makes me laugh and it's thematically appropriate), it's probably a better idea for the location to be the beach itself. > EXT. COLD ROCKY BEACH IN MAINE - LATE AFTERNOON > > It's late September and this is no comfortable place to be. The wet wind whips off the ocean and there's no sand, just uncomfortable pebbles. > > - A huge driftwood log > - The Lobster Cracker, a lobster restaurant, overlooks the beach > - The relentlessly cold ocean > > *Worst Possible Thing:* The earthquake rifts begin to open a sinkhole beneath the Cracker. #### Final Stage We know who the bad guy is, we know what the plot is, we know what the obstacles are – let's do it! Let's scout a location for that final, climactic scene! > INT. HOT ROCKY CHAMBER BENEATH MARTEL STONE CITY HALL > > Hidden underneath City Hall, down endless spirals of cave, is the ancient ritual altar. Cracks lace the floor, in places wider than one can easily jump. > > - Dangerously wide bottomless cracks > - A constant chatter and unwholesome giggling > - The terrifying stone altar, older than man > > *Worst Possible Thing:* The skin between worlds is thin here; disturb it too much and much more could burst through. ### Create Supporting Characters No, not the heroes. Those come later. Right now we need to create supporting characters who give us reasons to do things, outrage to possess, or faces to mourn. Also other people to involve in our machinations. Luckily supporting characters don't really have much mechanically attached to them; they have a name and a brief description. Really brief. - **Sheila Pruitt** Shameless crack whore and surprisingly well thought of member of the local community. Hooker with a heart of gold – and an addiction. - **Michael Vandermere** Chad quarterback of the Martel Stone Fighting Lobsterbacks the local high school football team. Not as dumb as he looks. - **Ginger Hollister Smythe** Snobby coed up from Oberlin who enjoys telling everyone how socially aware she is. You know she's going to be topless at least once during this movie. - **Jason Kuester** Obsessive occultist and comic book fan. He looks like a 16-year-old slacker but is actually a 375-year-old sometimes-slacker. I figured we could probably use a few more supporting characters than usual for the story since I'm the only one playing. ### Holding Out for a Hero^[No, I didn't make that reference; that's in the book.] Now we know everything we need to know before we can expose our protagonist. In some of the best advice that I've ever seen in an RPG, we have this: > [!quote] **[[Action 12 Cinema]]** > > Good characters have a depth to them, a gravitas where what they don’t say can be more important than what they do. A single look can express a wave of information and deep emotion. Our story doesn’t have room for good characters. We get Action Movie Heroes, dammit, and we’re damn glad to have them! That puts us right in the middle of the thoughtful position that we need to come up with a good character – for a bad movie. Make no mistake, this is a bad movie, intentionally so.^[Better than most Disney movies and shows of late, but so were the worst excesses of the Sci-Fi/ScyFy Channel, The Asylum, and Roger Corman.] Creating a character in this game is fast, as well it should be. #### Name Something hard, something edgy. Something that shouts "I'm a protagonist!" **Nick Michaud.** Yeah. #### Description Pointedly *not* "an anthropomorphized swarm of telepathic squirrels in a trench coat" as the text might suggest. Maybe a different movie. In this case, Nick is a hard-nosed, hardheaded cop on temporary suspension from his undercover job in Toronto. He's down in Martel Stone to waste some time until the hearing, thinking he'll just eat some lobster and stare moodily at the gray overcast for a couple of weeks. He's got the ragged, messy dark hair of a junkie and the build to go with it. (He's not a junkie; he's just done a lot of undercover.) #### Attributes This structure is going to feel very familiar: *Brains, Brawn, Charm, Moxie*. The last is your catch-all category that covers grit and luck. John McClain? That's his big stat. For assignment, we get one +2, two +1s, and the last one is a 0. | Attribute | Dice | | ---- | ---: | | Brains | +1 | | Brawn | +2 | | Charm | +1 | | Moxie | 0 | Nick doesn't look like it, but he can seriously lay the hurt down on you in a hurry, whether it be with his bare knuckles or a gun. He's not bad at the rest of being a cop either, whether it comes to investigatory skills or a little bit of fast talk. (The latter comes in quite handy when you're talking up the bad guys.) Luck – well, that he doesn't have. Which explains the suspension. #### Skills Every hero can have five skills, two at +2, three at +1. You can only use a single skill for each dice pool, which basically means you only get to use one skill each round to deal with an Obstacle. That makes sense; keep it simple. The fun thing is that you only need to define *two* skills at the start of play. You *could* define all five – but then you can't bust out something perfectly targeted to the problem at hand, pull off a miracle, then make a smart ass comment that fills in your back story as to why you know something so bizarre. Why would you pass on that opportunity? What's a skill? Pretty much anything. It's the sort of broad or narrow fiction-forward trait that I love in character generation. Let's grab a couple for Nick! | Skill | Dice | | ---- | ---: | | Undercover Cop | +2 | | You Never Notice Me | +1 | | | +2 | | | +1 | | | +1 | Shockingly, Nick is a really solid undercover cop and good at all the stuff that undercover cops do. Lying to people about being someplace they shouldn't be. Looking like a criminal. Hiding bodies awkwardly. Knowing where other people have hid the bodies. You know, cop things. He's also weirdly easy to overlook. When he hunches down, never makes eye contact, shuffles along, nobody takes a second glance. They don't want to. You don't look at those guys. They might panhandle you. Nobody wants that. We'll save the other three for later but I was terribly tempted to take "Loose Cannon" just so I could have an excuse for the police captain to call him up and say, "I'll have your badge!" Except in French, because it's Toronto. Maybe we'll save that for the sequel. (We'll talk about sequels.) #### Relationships Heroes start the game with at least one defined Relationship between them and another Hero or Supporting Character. If you bring that Relationship into a Obstacle, you can add another die. We're going to start with two because you can have up to four and that's what I feel like. If you want to change Relationships or add new ones during the game, no problem; you can just have a maximum of four that make a mechanical difference. - *I've been banging Ginger Hollister Smythe but she has no idea who I really am, she just wants a bad boy to piss off her parents.* - *Michael Vandermere just keeps trying to fight me every time he sees me to show off, I guess. Too easy, coach, I'm not laying a finger on him.* You knew it was inevitable. Come on, you knew it. And now we have some opportunities for great sex scenes! Or at least boobs. ### Heroic Trait What sets your hero, your protagonist, apart from all the other characters? Why are they special? You can use this to reroll the dice pool to get better results. Nick is a materialist. He's *Completely Unflappable*. No matter what insanity he gets dropped in the middle of, he can keep his head, can keep his cool, and definitely keeps his head on a swivel. #### Achilles' Heel Not quite the opposite of your Heroic Trait; it's the thing that gets in your way, can screw everything up, can blow the lid off of everything – but it's also sometimes useful to bring into a scene if things are looking dicey. You can use it up to three times per game to add two D12 to your pool. Of course, it can't be re-rolled by your Heroic Trait and if you roll a Setback (failure) it counts as two instead of one. Nick *Used To Be a Druggie* before he got clean and off the streets and became a cop. Motivating but there's all sorts of ways that can go bad. #### Personal Crisis I'm just going to drop the text from the book here because it's perfect. I can't do better than this. > [!quote] **[[Action 12 Cinema]]** > > A staple of bad (but fun!) Action Movie Heroes is that while they are, without a doubt, the right person to be an action hero, their personal life is a mess. They’re about to lose their job, their house, their spouse, or all three. Their parents don’t understand them. They’re battling some sort of an addiction. Their kid hates them, or they’re not ready to have kids, and it’s straining the relationship. > > The good news is that, during the course of the movie, they often get a chance to examine their life and maybe - just maybe - solve their own problems, while also solving the world’s. You know the drill here. You've probably already figured out Nick's. Nothing says you have to go with the obvious one – except that this is not actually intended to be a *good* movie and the more obvious, the better when it comes to playing to the formula. > I'm on suspension from my job as a cop with the Toronto PD; will I have a job in two weeks? #### Action Hero One-Liners We don't actually have to create one right now but it's definitely worth noting that if you drop a perfect one-liner that cracks up the table or makes them pump their fist, all the Heroes get a free Healing. Why? Because it's cool. That's the only reason you need. And write it down because you might want to say it again later. ### Tropes While I am reluctant to send you off to **[TV Tropes](https://tvtropes.org)** and thus risk you never making it back over to this page for a couple of days as you open trope after trope in tabs and get lost in the labyrinth, we have to create a list of tropes. Why? Because if you're able to leverage one of them you can get another die for your die pool, up to the natural maximum of five. Any tropes that you don't use get moved to the next Act and replaced from the table. If you don't like the ones that get transferred over, you can kill them and create a whole new set. Let's see what we start with. - Midair Repair - Your Shoe is Untied - My Name is Inigo Montoya - Punched Across the Room - Shoot the Fuel Tank The tables have two entries for each role, of which you pick one. I've generally chosen the more combat oriented ones here because – they seem like they would be easier to bring into play. You don't have to make that decision. You can choose really difficult to leverage tropes just for the fun of it. We aren't talking about the best screenwriters in the business here. All of these tropes are described in the book, by the way, so you don't have to go get lost in the wiki – but if you're interested, feel free to go look *this* list up and think about how you would bring them into a given scene. But that's it! We are done with the preproduction phase. The protagonist is forged, supporting characters are standing around, a couple of locations have been scouted, conflicts have been story boarded… We are just waiting to roll the cameras and start shooting! Let's fill out a couple of sheets. ## Character Sheet ![[A12C CCC2024 Prod Sheet.png]] ![[Nick Michaud, Susdpended Undercover Cop (character sheet).png]] ![[Nick Michaud, Susdpended Undercover Cop.jpg]] You had to get a close-up of the headshot. You know how this goes. And yes, he looks entirely too young and good-looking to "look like a junkie." So perfect for a cheap action movie who would rather cast of the pretty boy than someone that looks exactly like the character as described!^[I didn't do the lobsters; that just fell out naturally.] ## Exunt That's it. Totally ready to play. I suppose if I had some other people around we could all be ready to play the same time but there's no reason that I can't play this solo. The mechanics work perfectly reasonably, and I suspect there's a time in the future that I'm going to want to throw down with some kind of insane mockbuster all by my lonesome, write it down, and post it up. It's that kind of game. Oh yes, I promised to talk about sequels. Did you notice that we didn't actually *name* the movie at the beginning? The name comes last. Once the action's in the can and the actors are all paid, then you figure out what you're going to market this turkey under. This is exactly the right time to figure it out. Once you know what it actually involves. The more observant among you probably noticed that one of the last steps of the production phase is *"Post Credits Stinger (optional)"*. Exactly what you think it is. One last chance to pop on-screen, say something cryptic, do something silly, and set up the sequel. Is there any character growth in a mechanical sense in this game? *Hell no!* What would you want that for? If you want to change your numbers around between movies, have fun. It's a movie role. You have exactly the stats required. The author plays around with something that **HKAT** also did very well, deliberately and consciously playing the character as an actor playing the character. Bringing in the meta-text of "this is a film shoot" can be a lot of fun and I probably could have done more of that in this write up but I was already pretty loaded. No, not drunk, just have a lot of things to convey. I'm really impressed by **A12C** and I'm looking forward to having a physical copy in my hot little tentacles. I'm not getting any freebies, I actually backed this thing on Kickstarter.^[One of these days I'm going to have to get around to working my contacts for free stuff like everybody else. Why am I not doing that?] Get out there, plan your movies, play your movies, and get back to me to tell me about your movies. Tell me about your character! I want to hear. Truthfully. Until the lens falls off your camera… Out!