DESTROYER

This is a post with an odd pedigree. I originally dreamt up this ruleset when I was 16 or 17, during one of Melbourne's summers, and it has a hallucinatory and incoherent quality which I associate with that time in my life. It has been dormant since then, but recently reemerged while I was listening to some of the music that originally put the gears in motion. Amazing how music can do that.

Without further ado (except to give some CWs for teenage death in the style of The Hunger Games or Battle Royale, and for police violence): DESTROYER

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You are a high school baseball team. It is summer, the concrete cracks in the heat, the air is heavy and still and shrill with cicadas. Blue skies and tiny white clouds and green grass and trees that bend down tired in the hot air.

Your captain is a perfect being - the way that saints or teenage crushes are perfect. They deign not to destroy you, and tolerate your presence with infinite kindness and magnanimity. All of you are in love with them, and all of you keep this secret from one another (many of you keep it secret from yourselves). The captain is genderless, beautiful, tactful, intelligent, and always makes the right decisions. 

There are no parents anywhere. 

One day, armed police arrive at the pitch where you all practice together. They refuse to explain, but they draw weapons and abduct/arrest the captain. One of you, hotheaded, angry and incredulous, tries to stop them, and is beaten badly. They drive away. 

None of you know what to do. Two more cops arrive and tell you to forget about the whole thing - anger flares into open hostility, they warn you that they will kill you if you give them a reason to.

The essence of the game is a point crawl, with each point representing a pitched battle against the cops who are trying to stop you finding out what happened to the captain.

Battles are more like xcom games than dnd, you have a 'squad' of soldiers, and so do the enemy, and you take it in turns to move and act. The point of difference is that your 'squad' are a teenage baseball team, and your enemies are armed police. 

The basic idea is that, if you get caught in the open, you will be shot and killed easily. You can't go up against the cops in a straight fight. Your players will need to seek cover and stick to it like glue to have any chance of surviving.

YOUR TEAM

What you have: baseball bats (4 of them), baseballs (6 of them), baseball mitts (6 of them), helmets (2 of them). There are 12 members of your team, and if they get killed they stay dead, no reinforcements.

On your turn your players can move + action, or sprint and slide home into cover. An action is a pitch (of a baseball), a throw (of equipment or similar), or an attack. 

To pitch, you have to have a baseball. You can pitch to someone with a mitt, to someone with a bat, or at an enemy. Someone with a mitt will catch the ball, someone with a bat can hit the ball, and an enemy struck by a pitched baseball will have their focus broken.

If you pitch to someone with a bat, and they hit the ball, it is now travelling fast enough that it can be used to knock out an enemy. Pitching and batting like this are a single action, taken by the pitcher. 

To pitch, bat, or catch, you will need to pop out of cover, which gives an enemy overwatching you a chance to shoot you.

If you're holding a bat you can use it for batting, as above, or for attacking, by moving towards an enemy and swinging on them. If successful, this will knock them out. You can also use a bat to kill an unconscious enemy. 

You can throw bats, mitts, and helmets to one another. 

A helmet gives you a flat 1 in 6 chance to survive being shot. 

What this hopefully means in play: you play your team by trying to manoeuvre into positions where you can take shots (a two part process, made up of a pitch and a bat) at the cops, without exposing your players to danger. When there aren't many cops and their cahnces are low this shouldn't be too difficult. When there are lots of them and they have more and better tools, the difficulty ramps up quickly.

Emphasis on leapfrogging movement, positioning, setting up trick shots/distractions/ambushes, and conserving and sharing/moving around limited resources. 

THE COPS

NB: All firearms and grenades are biocoded. You can't use anything you pick up from downed cops. 

Cops can move, focus, or shoot (past a certain point, they can also throw various kinds of grenades), and can do any two of these things per turn. They will usually try to move to flank any cover you are using, and must focus before they can shoot. If they focus + shoot on one of your players in the open, that player is killed. They cannot shoot against a player in cover, but they can focus on them, readying a shot. If that player moves out of cover, or pops up to take an action (a pitch, bat, or catch), they can be fired on, with odds of success dependant on the level of the cop:

• Cop: 2 in 6 to kill.
• SWAT: 3 in 6 kill.
• Army: 4 in 6 to kill.
• MiB: 5 in 6 to kill. 

Cops don't have grenades. SWAT have flashbangs and teargas. Army and MiBs have frag grenades. Grenades of all kinds follow the same logic as baseballs in that they can be caught, pitched, batted away, used to knock out enemies, etc. If none of these things happen on the turn that they are thrown, they detonate. Flashbangs non-fatally incapacitate your player for the rest of the battle, teargas forces them to move, frag grenades kill everyone in a wide radius who doesn't have interposing cover.

You are moving to The Station House > The Military Compound > The Underground Lab. 

It becomes obvious as you progress that the captain is something inhuman, and the focus of military research attention. Cops turn into SWAT teams, turn into Army regulars, turn into Air Force Base Deniable Assets (MiBs) who are basically Pyramid Head in a suit, and who can't be killed with anything short of a frag grenade (which is something that will need to be thrown at you with intent to kill before you can make any use it). 

A cop who is knocked out has a 1 in 6 chance of regaining consciousness each turn. 

YOUR TEAM CONT.

Your team is made up of 12 individuals with stats in: Running, Pitching, Catching, Batting, and Keeping it Together. Each of these can be untrained, trained, or reliable. Untrained means success 4 times in 6, trained is 5 times in 6, reliable means always succeeds (for running, it simply defines how far you can move). You roll to Keep it Together whenever you see someone die, and if you fail you lose your mind and act irrational for d6 turns.

Most players will have one thing they are reliable in, and one thing they are untrained in. 

You have three Star Players on your team, a Star Pitcher, a Star Slugger, and a Star Runner. They have no unreliable stats, in addition to the following:

• Your Star Pitcher is reliable in Pitching and Catching, and can knock someone out with a pitch directly, instead of needing to pitch to a batter to set this up. Reliable, affable, consistent. 
• Your Star Slugger is reliable in Batting, and can kill someone (instead of simply knocking them out) by batting a baseball into their head. They also always succeed with bat attacks, and can kill people (MiBs included) with their bat, without first knocking them out. Teenage delinquent, hardcase, pyscho energy. 
• Your Star Runner can run twice as fast as your other players. Flashy, cocky, fast talking, charismatic. 

You also have 2 Youngbloods on your team, who are untrained in everything. If they manage to kill someone they are 'blooded', and upgrade their stats to normal (randomise which stat stays untrained, and which become reliable). If a Youngblood is killed by the cops, all your players gain a permanent, one step increase in Keeping it Together, and the other Youngblood is immediately 'blooded'. 

Rivals, Lovers, Best Friends

These are teenagers. Each member of your team has a Rival, a Lover, and a Best Friend on the team. Because they are teenagers, none of these things need to be reciprocated to function. 

• If a member of your team watches a Rival do something successfully, they have a +1 on their next attempt to do that thing. 
• If a member of your team can see their Best Friend fail to Keep it Together, and they have not yet acted themselves, they can sacrifice their own turn to turn this failure into a success.
• A Lover functions identically to a Best Friend. In addition: if a member of your team sees their Lover get killed, they will immediately charge the nearest enemy and attack them with the intent to kill. They are no longer under your control, and will continue to act this way for the entire mission. They will take three shots to kill, and count as carrying a bat for the purposes of attacking someone, even if they don't have one. If they are shot even once during this rampage, they will die at the end of the mission. A team member can always declare that their Lover is the Captain, and forgo this choice. 

It should be very apparent that I don't know or claim to know anything about baseball. 

Very Rough Appendix N:

• Tomorrow When The War Began
• Battle Royale
• FLCL
• Shade's Children
• The Hunger Games
• XCOM
• Silent Hill 3
• The mood this was all composed in.
• Your soundtrack should probably be whatever you were listening to at that age that made you feel like your chest was coming open. The captain looks like the person you were in love with in highschool.