Die Hard — Transcription

Um.

Shall we, uh, would you like to tell us what we're doing this week?

So what's die hard?

If people have somehow not seen die hard, what is die hard?

Yeah, I think really the core of Die Hard for me is that John McLean is having just a really bad day.

Like...

Like, that's really, really the, the, the thing that happens in Die Hard is just this poor bloke in the middle of it all, just like, keeps getting tortured and keeps having to like grit his teeth, often literally and and push through, sometimes also literally push through things.

And it's, it's, almost torture porn for like watching how much punishment this one poor guy can take.

Yeah, so Die Hard fundamentally is a film about John McLean having a really bad day and pushing through anyway, and us as the audience like really getting in on the empathy of that.

I think there's probably 2 things you need to know about John McLean, which is that he is a tough cop, but with a heart of gold.

There's kind of just like 2 aspects to his character.

Um, and that's really the only 2 things that we we get. We uh, we get his tough cop side, which is when he's doing all of his tough cop stuff.

Um, and then occasionally it's punctuated with his heart of gold, which is that he really cares about his ex-wife.

And I suppose we're getting into the bits of the film that make it the film now.

Um, John starts with nothing.

I was literally about to say he doesn't have a Batman like utility belt full of stuff.

He doesn't even start the movie with shoes, which they just make so sure to take advantage of when they do, where they do the whole scene where he has to walk across the broken glass.

Um, Like, it really is just him and everything he picks up along the way.

Uh, the no shirt, no shoes, yes, gun, load out.

It's a it's a controversial setup.

It's a controversial build.

Yeah, so he starts literally with nothing.

And so I guess that's probably the 1st the 1st thing to kind of note as we start to pull together the pillars of this film is that it is not a show about the gear.

There you go.

I'm sure I'm not the 1st one to think of this, but a fascinating inversion of that is like,

If you are playing Die Hard as Gruber, Like, that movie is like alien.

I have a machine gun now is a, it is a perfect like, oh, from the other point of view, like, that is like a full antagonist move to like try and stir up the, the, protagonist party.

Like.

I think, for me, the really key pillars are, yeah, you've got the titular John Diehard.

Um, I think probably the one thing that you've missed and it's.

Mm.

Yeah, it is.

Um,

Yeah, like it's almost like prep a whole heist and then figure out how to break it, but yeah, let's dig into that a little bit more.

I want to dig into maybe a little bit more the, the guy in the chair trope, like, right, like John's guy on the outside.

And what getting help from the outside in terms of just moving information back and forth looks like. That's either John moving Intel out.

So about what he's doing and what the bad guys are doing, but also you've got your guy on the other end of the radio moving Intel in.

So that's about knowing what's coming next, I guess, from the, like, the other cop's point of view.

We see this used, I think, in a couple of ways.

So you can use it to sort of ask directly for things to happen.

Um, so you can say, hey, send the send the dudes in or don't send them in, um, and whether or not that request actually gets actioned is kind of depends on the relationship that you've built up there, but you also have the cops outside kind of making plans based on what John is telling them eventually, once they kind of learn to trust him.

And so I think it's really interesting that a part of what John is doing is he's not necessarily just trying to disrupt the plan.

Um, but he's also playing the role of like feeding information to the rest of the good guys who can't necessarily come or the good guys.

Feeding information to the rest of the, I guess, rescue forces who are outside, who don't necessarily want to uh, act just yet, who are maybe a little bit too obsessed with negotiating, uh, to get the hostages free.

So, yeah, a huge part of what Johnny is doing, or at least a significant part of what he's doing is trying to feed these guys.

I think so.

I think those, I think that does 2 things.

Firstly, it gives the the film a way for John to have a conversation with someone who's not a villain.

Is it a crucial part of like, what you would want from a die hard, like, experience?

Hard to say, whether that is like totally essential, but I suspect no.

I think primarily, and that was the 2nd thing I was going to say.

It's like it's an emotional thing or an emotional release for John, but it's also like, it is the driving source of like time pressure throughout the film.

Not necessarily just the cops, but the like, interplay between the cops and the hostage negotiator and Gruber and like, whether or not they're through the vault yet or not, like, I think just getting into the vault is not enough of a ticking clock to push the plot along.

Yeah, they learn more about each other, they, they kind of needle each other more and more, um, and by the end, they are, I think, truly hate each other, where at the start, they, they kind of didn't.

The villain is running some kind of heist.

They're running a job, and the hero is essentially trying to disrupt that job.

Look, I think you could construct something that would work?

Instead of a hostage situation?

So that's kind of a two-person dynamic.

I feel like they almost take the place of the guy on the outside.

Um, the guy on the radio.

I struggle to think of how you run this for a party of players, and I have an interesting thought about how you might do that, or how you might turn this into something a little bit unique and interesting.

I think that actually could be quite effective.

So it starts to make me think of things like zombie apocalypse, uh, media where the party grows over time, as you find new survivors who are kind of holed up on their own, and everyone kind of joins the crew one at a time and and each little like accumulation is kind of a big moment.

It's not exactly the same thing, but it's a similar kind of dynamic where you have people who are maybe having the short term come, become used to being alone and you have them sort of coming together for these like moments of these like really great moments of initial distrust to working together.

How do you deal with the information imbalance there?

Because you don't necessarily want to start everybody out with, I guess, radios, um, but you still want to engineer a way for them to end up meeting other people without necessarily having this like meta game thing of zooming out and looking on a map and and them making their way towards each other on purpose.

And that almost becomes a, like, a starting question for each character, right?

I think you start with.

Yeah.

I think we're both coming at this from the same, or both coming at, like 2 different ways of of doing the same thing, which is that we have a couple of questions that we want to answer, and we can either answer those on the character sheets and kind of do that in a format.

Maybe that's a format that suits itself better to like pregens or con play, where you can just be like, here's your character sheet, just like read through the answer so everyone knows who you are, um, or we can play through that, but in a very, very lightweight way.

But I think the questions that we want to answer are like, why are you here?

And then almost like, why were you not there?

Like, why are you there?

Why were you not there?

Like, why are you at the party?

But why were you not in the room when the hostages were taken?

All right, so our 1st phase of the game for the players is to find each other.

Are you gonna?

Yeah, are you going to save the hostages and let the villain get away or are you going to stop the villain from escaping and going under the future nefarious deeds, but at the cost, maybe, of some hostages?

Maybe there's a way you can do both?

Maybe that's an opportunity where maybe things haven't gone entirely the player's way over the course of the game.

It's a great, like, success with consequences moment for the scenario as a whole.

But yeah, I think that's, I think leaving that open is really important.

I think liminal horror does something really interesting in that space where it gives you a something that is a lot like a fire escape type map that's completely blank, and it gets filled in as you go partly kind of by DM, Fiat, partly by like some player input.

And I think you don't necessarily have to, because this is the kind of thing that liminal horror does quite well, it's kind of an exploration game.

You don't necessarily have to know what goes into that room from the start.

You can do the thing that we talk about a fair bit on the show where you, like, have your structure, and in this case, it's perhaps the floor plan of the building a very rough floor plan of the building.

And you can have your content, which is like, in this room, there is broken glass on the floor.

In this room, there is like a mook and a tech, like trying to work on the building systems, like you can almost slot those in as the players sweep rooms and clear rooms.

Um, and the other thing that liminal horror does that's quite good is that there is kind of a penalty for backtracking.

So if you backtrack, there's always a risk that that room has refilled with a fresh challenge.

It hasn't fundamentally changed, but like something else might have moved in.

It can be a little closer to, I think, what you were talking about where we've got all of these spaces and them.

don't have to necessarily have them narrating every stairwell, right?

Yeah, I think that's kind of how I would be structuring it is a map and a series of challenges and you are matching the challenges to the points on the map to kind of moderate your pacing and tension as you go.

So you have your like stack of things sort of prepped.

Um, and then you're almost, it's that, it's that thing where it's like, you almost want to imagine the, the game master with like a hand of cards and these are the cards that you are gonna play in any particular situation like, aha, I'm gonna play the 4 mooks and uh, construction site, like down in this space, like off you go.

And so that kind of lets you as the game master think about like, where are we at in our storyline?

Is it time to throw down a villain?

Have we had too many combat encounters in a row and we're ready for something environmental?

Is it time for?

One of those kicks that we're talking about where like they're about to make it through another vault door to come up.

And so, okay, whatever they find in the next room is going to be something related to that.

Like, oh, this is where the conduits run through.

Um, or this is, you know, this happens to be above and they're going to tunnel through the floor into, into below, like, I think thinking about it like one room at a time or one location at a time as your kind of ticks on your pacing timing clock.

Yes.

But also wounds take up an inventory slot.

I have to think about whether that is going to match the like arc of the story if like accumulating injuries and ending up maybe in a worse place at the end than you are midway through.

Yeah, I think I think that's correct.

Um, so yeah, we have that 1st intro phase.

We have the the, everyone is out of the room when the hostages are taken.

We have the players over that next sort of phase working to come back together and make a plan and then we have them kind of executing that plan.

Whether that plan is saving the hostages or defeating the villain or foiling the plot or letting the, like whatever it is, that's, you know, where we have room to play, where the players have room to be creative about what it is that they want to sort of set their objective to be.

probably the stuff we've described around.

Yeah, the maps and the rooms and the encounters and the points that's, it's, um, flexible enough that you can be like, okay, well, the players have decided that they're, they're gonna focus on foiling the heist.

I think this is a, we need a mechanic to resolve conflicts situation.

I don't think we need a hugely heavy game to operate this, and I think that I think most of the game.

We've actually already described and it is in kind of the scenario design.

So I think this is one of those scenarios where we just need something with a nice, easy resolution mechanic, you know, a way to structure the scenes, give them some like ebb and flow back and forth.

But I don't, I don't know that we necessarily need a full, a full catastrophe.

My favourite go-to for when I'm like, I just need a core mechanic because I've already come up with a system is a tiny one page RPG or, I think it's about, I think it's actually 6 pages.

Um, but a tiny 6 page RPG called Reesus, which is like everyone has attributes, the attributes are ranking number of dice, and when you roll your attribute, when you like roll a contest, you roll that number of dice against a bad guy, um, and the loser loses one die from their pool. And that's like, that's it.

That's the whole game, which does make me wonder why it takes 6 pages.

Um, But something like that, something like I'm sure someone has done a one page RPG about this.

The other thing that I have thought of over the course of this app is maybe this would be a great liminal horror hack.

I think there's a lot of things that are to like about that system.

I think the inventory and wound system is good.

I think the mechanics that gives you for filling out rooms as you go is really good.

Yeah, again, the whole thing about like backtracking, I think, is right on point.

I guess the last step there is, this is one of those situations where we have a really strong structure and that's providing most of the jus, and we're just looking for a resolution mechanic.

I think this is one where you could write a one page RPG super easily.

And I think it's one that lends itself to like some fun one shot products or fun like riffs on the original movie that might play a little bit differently.

So there's there's 2 that I've come up with over the course of the show.

And one is, I think it would be a really fun one for, as we were talking about, like, laying down tiles.

I think you could do a really fun set of like dungeon tiles where you're like laying down like geoglyph type things on a map, um, and building the, the office tower out that way.

I think that could be super fun.

Yeah, so John, and again, you have 3 very asymmetrical players.

Obviously, the game master is almost playing like X-com, right?

They're moving lots of pieces around a board.

John is playing a like hero shooter, and the guy in the van, like the owl character is almost doing a like soft negotiation, like power play, politics, like trying to convince people to on the outside to act in certain ways.

So you have one player who's playing an action game, one player who's playing a like a and click like narrative adventure with a branching sort of story, tree, and influence system and stuff.

And then the, the, the gay master is like, in the back playing ex-com.

That's that would be great fun too.

Don't kill your players.

Yep.

I think I would consider it as a like Christmas special in an ongoing campaign where we don't really care about providing a super authentic diehard experience.

It's really more about like seeing how these characters do it, but no, if I'm sitting down for Die Hard Night, I'm not busting out the, The player's handbook.

I think this one is ripe for like a convention game because I think you're right.

I think it's it's easy to power through in a couple of hours.

It's at its best if it's short and sharp.

It's like, it's, it's now a genre that, it has become a genre unto itself.

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