Tabletop Tips from the Reacherverse

     Have you talked to your dad about Reacher? I haven't, but I have been talking to my mom. Mama Magnolia and I have spent the past two months or so watching Amazon's show Reacher and its spin-off Neagley, and it's taught me a lot about economy of storytelling. I think watching Reacher can make you a better player, GM, and person in general. It excels at making satisfying things happen.

    I'm going to be doing my best to avoid spoilers for any given season of Reacher, but viewer discretion is as always advised. 

I also have to shout out the show's best character, Reacher's Back

    If you don't know what Reacher is, I recommend watching it. If you don't want to, rincewind.run's Q&A will function as a quick primer on what the series is about. It is incredibly good and incredibly simple television, focused on , which leads me to my first point:

Brevity is the Soul of Wit

    Who is Reacher? He's a justice hobo who doesn't like when the little guy is treaded upon and is more than capable of solving his problems with extreme amounts of graphic violence. As I and many, many, many people have noticed, he's basically just a somewhat more autistic Conan the Barbarian. Pretty much every character in a given season has one personality trait, maybe two if they're lucky, and a central arc that's handled by the end.

    There is a pressure, I find, to make your characters the most detailed and intricate things ever. The meme of the 20 page backstory gained cultural traction for a reason, but I worry a lot of people feel they don't do enough. Starting with a single high concept, though, allows you to hit the ground running and then extrapolate from there. I didn't know who clone assassin Nico Vermillion was, but by the end of the first session I realized he had a fear of flying due to being transported in cryosleep for most of his life. In my current game, Rhiannon Redbelly has been around for two sessions, and has exactly three traits: liar, dumbass, and experiencing gratitude for the first time in her life due to events in Session 1. Where will she go? Who knows! But from humble beginnings come great things.

You'll be hearing variations of this phrase throughout the show.

    Similarly, as a GM, it's a lot easier to just jot out a few words to describe an NPC. (Redhead, Grumpy, Extremely Divorced) has a fantastic economy of information. You don't need to have the whole massive descriptions some published modules give, because you have an audience of one. You know how your brain works, so let it do some cognitive load.

It's Very Easy To Make Ontologically Evil Bad Guys

    In the ever-ongoing cycle of chuds being upset that there aren't species of sentient beings that is okay to murder and take their stuff, I've always been struck by the fact that that status quo is so boring. Like I mentioned when talking about turning our metaphorical swords on slavers, there's plenty of ways to make people despicable enough to be worth fighting. Reacher has solidified this for me-of the main villains for all four seasons, they are each driven not by ideology, bigotry, brain slug, but a single unifying purpose: money. And yet, they each manage to be unique through their means and locations. 

Robert Patrick in Season 2 is Mama Magnolia's favorite villain, due to just how bugfuck crazy he gets.

    I don't want to get too deep into it here because I'm trying to avoid spoilers, but Reacher's foes are everywhere across the Lower 48: from small-town Georgia to an adventure across the country, evil has many faces, and Reacher is larger than all of them. Even Neagley, despite looking to be set solely in and around Chicago, still manages to feature a vast (international!) conspiracy in its first season. 

    For GMs, I really do think Reacher's "Villain of the Season" structure is a great way to go about framing a campaign, letting you and your group change things up in the same way going through different modules did in the Olden Days.

Damn the Consequences

    If there is one thing I tend to find people seeking within the mainline D&D experience, it is a sense of stakes, of grit, of friction. The 5.X ecosystem does a bad job of this, to the point that individuals within the space are developing their own kinda crummy half-measures. Among a lot of my fellow bloggers, this tends to come about moreso from skillful play being defined in part by an abundance of caution. I say damn both. Step in the biggest pile of shit you can. While "drive your characters like stolen cars" seems to have originated as a bit of advice for handling NPCs, it applies just as well on the other side of the screen. Reacher does not ask if he is willing to suffer the social consequences of punching a motherfucker in the mouth. He already knows he is. So he does.

Reacher will spend most of Season 3 antagonizing this man who is much bigger than him. It is wonderful every time. 

Anatomy of a Conflict

    I often think TV is one of the better mediums to study from a tabletop perspective because it is largely designed to be consumed on a week-by-week basis, often dealing with a small core of characters who occasionally split up. Where I think the lessons really shine though, is in action scenes. Without spoiling too much, the first season of Neagley established a core cast of four, the size of your average party. Throughout the finale, they were split up and handling up to three separate objectives within the same area at the same time. What's important is that each character has their own stuff to do, and making sure everyone has stuff to do is the most important part of roleplaying games.

    If you're playing a game where you're designing elaborate combat scenarios, this is what one should be doing: offering diverse objectives that each have their own things worth doing. Games like Sentinel Comics and Spectaculars have this built into their mechanics, and they shine as a result. My beloved 7th Sea tried to do something similar where every check had these kind of oddball ride-ons, and it...kind of succeeded!

In the first episode of Season 4, Reacher kills a man with a library. This is the best show ever. 

Predictability is not a sign of failure

    If you are a GM, odds are your PCs will eventually figure something out they weren't supposed to. There is a temptation, much like what happened to Westworld, to change facts behind the scenes to help keep the surprise up. Setting aside that this is a crime against Blorb, I will point back to my own principle that aiming for surprise is a fool's game. If your friends figured something out, that means they're paying attention to the thing you put work into. Reward them for it.

    In (almost) every season of Reacher, the main bad guy dies some kind of ironic death related to their misdeeds. Sometimes they double-dip, sometimes this is instead part of an end to a hero's character arc, but generally speaking they are hoisted by their own petard. It is known, it is comforting, and it is wonderful. So roll with their punches, and honor their investment, just as they have yours.

When I saw this syringe container on the floor I hooted and hollered because I knew exactly what was coming next.

Always Loot the Body

    This one is simple. Whenever Reacher kills a guy, he always loots the body. Cash? Guns? Laptop? Doesn't matter, it all belongs to Reacher now. Much like in real life, killing people gives him access to an endless supply of new treasures. 

In conclusion, support your local library.