[HOE] Biodome

["Russ Ruffino" <mobstyle@ucla.edu>]

A few brief words about the adventure, "Biodome" in the latest Epitaph.
Basically, it sucks, for two very simple reasons.  First of all, the posse
has (and I think this may have been discussed earlier on this listserv)
absolutely no reason to go there.  As a player playing a Templar, my first
instinct was to tell the people who asked the posse to go there to screw
off...but then there goes the night of roleplaying, since that was the
adventure the Marshall had prepared for that night.  How do you other
Marshalls handle that situation?  Is it the Marshall's job to provide an
in-character motivation for the posse to risk their lives?  Personally, I
feel that that question should be well-answered by the author of the
adventure, and for this one, it wasn't at all...Now that I think about it, I
recall that someone else brought that point up before, so moving on to
reason number two...

S
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Basically, the posse is drugged and then attacked in the middle of the night
by a very large force of company people armed with pre-war HI weapons.  All
well and good, but (and if you read the adventure you know what I'm talking
about) the only way for the adventure to progress according to the way it's
written is for the posse to surrender and then be captured by this force.
Well, our posse didn't surrender, and being crazy badasses fought tooth and
nail to get the hell out of there.  Of course, since the Marshall really
didn't have  any other choice, he just kept blowing us up with grenades
(extra-lethal thanks to the new Massive Damage rules :-(  until we
surrendered.

Now my point is this.  Authors of adventures MUST think of a better way to
advance the plot than beating a posse up until they surrender.  This HAS to
be the cheapest trick in the arsenal.  Any posse with cojones is going to
fight until they're blue in the face, because once they've given up their
weapons, what choice do they really have???  I mean do they want to
encourage posses to bitch out?  We could have fought our way out of there,
but the Marshall wouldn't let us because the adventure is simply written for
a posse that will surrender.  It just seems a lazy way to progress an
adventure to me, and our posse got their behinds kicked in a place they had
no reason to be, in a situation where the only choice was to surrender.  In
a word: LAME.

Any thoughts on this one?

Russ