3:16 - Carnage Amongst the Stars

[Bang!]

I don't see a thread on this game, and I've heard good things about it.

3:16 is a game where the characters are space marines. They get into spaceships, kill hundreds of aliens, and do it again. The rules of the game are designed so players flesh out their characters' backstories through flashbacks as the game goes on, giving brief vignettes of moments of strength or weakness in the character's past, which eventually develop into a hatred of their homeworld.

The premise seems fantastic - a group of people who've for one reason or another chosen to kill and die in unnecessary land wars instead of living indefinitely as immortals on their homeworld - and the mechanics seem flashy in a Sergio Leone sort of a way.

Have any of you played this game? I'm going to try it this weekend and I was wondering if there was anything that really stood out about it, good or bad.

[LibraryOgre]

It's actually one of our favorites... it's violent and silly, but you get to play such outrageous caricatures that you can't help but have huge amounts of fun.

[UserClone]

Is the system perhaps too light for any meaningful amount of campaign-style play? I mean, Combat Skill and Non-Combat Skill are the only two stats off of which you roll.

In other words, it seems mainly suited to beer-and-pretzels gaming, and unsuited for a lengthy campaign.

[LibraryOgre]

We've been playing for a bit more than a year, off and on. It's pretty beer-and-pretzels, but you could run it a lot more serious if you wanted to.

[Bang!]

It's good to hear that, Mark!

I'm a little boggled about using the Threat Token budget in a game this structured.

I'm not sure whether I should reward player shortcuts or ingenuity. If they come up with a clever plan that would avoid direct contact during their alien-massacres, would it be a bad idea to cut the planet's TT budget by a couple points?

Agon uses a similar mechanic, and challenges GMs to retain as much Strife (its TT analog) as possible, but 3:16 seems based around the idea that all Threat is to be used. Is 3:16 too easy on the players if the TT budget is cut a bit as a reward? And, I guess the opposite approach to that would be: would 3:16 be too hard on the players if I added a couple points to a planet's TT budget and expected them to be clever somehow?

Or is the point just to roll a bunch of dice and count up alien kills regardless of details like plans or strategies?

[LibraryOgre]

I'm on the player end, so I can't say much about budgets and the like, but I've encountered a lot of "Blow **** up and not care about tactics"

[Bang!]

I'm on the player end, so I can't say much about budgets and the like, but I've encountered a lot of "Blow **** up and not care about tactics"

Thanks. That sounds good enough for me.

[UserClone]

How different is the finished product from the original 24-hour version, which I have downloaded and read?