The Dirty Apes, They Blew It Up...

XDM's see things very much differently from this side of the GM Screen. I've been nursing this "Universe" along for years now, taking notes and learning volumes from my players.

At the moment, this is more a set of notes (transcribed from several other locations) pulled together in one place for me to read, re-read, and perhaps glean additional lessons (in human nature, for one thing) from them. It couldn't hurt!

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There is such a thing as giving the players entirely too much leeway in weaving their own storylines. In GURPS, it is quite possible to get some incredible depth - both in storyline and in character development. Only you've got to guard closely the calibre of player that joins your table and make sure they're at least lightly compatible before you get things rolling.

Let me try to sum up:

The [First Generation] of players were four strong and utterly convinced that they could not be stopped. Untouchable. They became legend because of their heroic failure to attain the (lofty) goal they had set for themselves; they were being used by a TOG Lictor to undermine a largely political situation and it blew up, leaving the PC's holding the bag. They were chased, backed into a corner and summarily executed as "enemies of the state" thus allowing TOG to place some heavy hitters into positions of the Terran Confederation to allow them to topple the local (TCON) government. Oh, and shortly thereafter, the TOG's insurrection was unbelievably successful. (Think of ancient Rome as guided by Adolph Hitler and the Third Reich...) Would probably have failed had the players not been so darned successful...

The [Second Generation] of players couldn't get it together to save their own lives. Each had their own plot-lines, and each decided to interfere with the other players' plot-lines as well. A sort of "who's who" list of (player) primadonnas. So they spent every gaming moment carefully watching each other, and doing everything they possibly could to foil each other. This particular game ended abruptly when the Pilot had figured out where an ancient ranger station (from the TCON age) was rumored to be located and had shanghaied the ship's computer to assist him in "mis-jumping" to it upon their next hop out-system. Two of the other players temporarily proclaimed truce (this happened more often than I would've predicted) and - not knowing what the Pilot was up to - went down to the Engineering deck to arrange a misjump of their own. One critical failure later and they dispersed back to the bridge, chuckling under their collective breath about the new opportunity they were about to experience. (That's the problem with critical failures; sometimes you don't realize them until it's entirely too late!) The Communications officer got their new orders, the Pilot "laid in a course" and prepared the ship's computer for the hop, and everyone on the bridge watched the forward viewscreens intently. At the moment of 'misjump' the ship skipped outsystem a few light-years, then abruptly exploded, and at those speeds left a brilliant stroke of light to mark their passage into oblivion.

The [Third Generation] players decided they had to have their own ship, regardless of how expensive it might turn out to be.