LifeP.A.T.H. Starts With a Real Life

Before I ask what a Soldier carries into Vietnam, I want to know what he was doing before somebody handed him the equipment.

That has stayed with me through the different versions of P.A.T.H.: Vietnam (Pivotal Actions Through History). I can change a screen, throw out a prototype or rewrite a dice procedure. I still come back to the person arriving at the beginning. He had a life before this game became interested in him.

LifeP.A.T.H.—Previous Activities, Training, History—is how I bring that life into the rules. The name is doing actual work. Previous activities tell us what he learned before service. Training records what the institution taught him. History is what continues accumulating as he lives through the campaign.

Start with a few ordinary sentences

I do not need a ten-page biography before we can play. Where did he grow up? What did his people do? What was he doing when the letter came?

A few specific sentences give us more than a heroic résumé. He helped in a garage after school. He worked on a fishing boat. He cared for a relative. He played school sports, kept accounts in a shop or spent a great deal of time finding his way around somewhere.

Those details raise questions I can use. Who taught him? Did he enjoy it? Was he any good? What responsibility did he have? What did he think he would do next?

The record begins with 2 in each of four Stats and 0 in all sixteen Proficiencies. That is a starting position, not a verdict. Now we find out what this particular person has actually learned.

Three periods, three sets of experience

Previous activities cover childhood, school and the years before service. Each contributes 64 Experience Points: 192 EP altogether.

Name a repeated activity. Raise the Stat it genuinely built and allocate the period’s EP across two to four Proficiencies it actually taught. Keep the pre-deployment Stat ceiling of 4 in view as you follow the creation procedure.

I want you to be able to explain an entry without an elaborate defence. Working around engines can teach mechanical habits. Helping in a hospital can give relevant experience. Merely writing “grew up somewhere difficult” does not distribute expertise around the sheet.

The distinction matters because it keeps identity from doing the work of a stereotype. A region, ethnicity, religion or family label does not tell us what one individual practised. An activity gives us something concrete to discuss.

And please let him have gaps. If every childhood memory conveniently prepares him for a different military emergency, we may have started shopping again.

Experience is not an Army permission slip

Someone can arrive with real capability and still need training for a particular procedure.

A young man who repaired cars has useful experience. He is not automatically qualified on every military vehicle. Somebody who helped with first aid is not thereby trained for every medical intervention. A good shot from civilian life still has military training and qualifications to complete.

That separation is deliberate. Ratings describe competence. Qualifications open named attempts. A Specialty is a completed school package that supplies EP and Qualifications. I want those things connected, but I do not want them quietly substituting for one another.

It gives us a more interesting group. A person can be useful before he is fully prepared, and he can need somebody else without becoming useless. That feels much closer to the sort of campaign I want to run.

Then the Army changes the sheet

Basic Combat Training contributes its printed 128 EP package, one Stat increase and the Assigned Service Rifle Qualification. Advanced Individual Training contributes another 128 EP and the Qualifications for the Soldier’s MOS.

Add that to the 192 from previous activities and you reach 448 EP at deployment.

That total is distributed experience, not a purse to spend wherever you like. BCT teaches its common foundation. AIT then takes people in different directions. An infantryman, radio operator, mechanic or medical aidman should not finish with an identical record, because they were not sent through identical training.

I find that much more useful than choosing a class and adding a backstory afterward. Two people can come from the same street and arrive in the Army with similar beginnings. Their training starts separating the sheets before the campaign has added a single patrol.

The numbers need somewhere to come from

Experience accumulates separately in each Proficiency. The rating ladder uses cumulative totals: 16 EP for rating 1, 32 for 2, 64 for 3 and 128 for 4, continuing to double at each step.

Someone at 64 EP needs 128 total to reach the next rating, not another 128 on top. I want that stated plainly because this is exactly the sort of small sentence that can make a character sheet much harder than it needs to be.

Later awards have dated entries saying what happened and which work they exercised. A rating should leave a trail. When you look back at the Soldier after months of play, you should be able to remember some of the days that changed him.

That does not mean every improvement needs a speech. It means the game keeps its part of the bargain: if experience matters, we record the experience.

Write what he cannot easily leave behind

There are a few more lines I want before the first day: why he is here, what he means to do afterward, his Moral Code and who is waiting for him.

These are the lines I expect to become awkward in interesting ways. An easy promise at the beginning can become a difficult choice later. A future that sounded obvious can stop fitting. Someone at home may understand the official record very differently from the person living it.

The Moral Code also has a stated relationship with FUBAR. Breaking it for an advantage can cost FUBAR; keeping it at real cost can relieve one under the rule. That needs a specific commitment, not an all-purpose “be good” written where nobody can test it.

I am not asking you to solve the person before play. I am asking for enough of him that the tour has something to affect.

Leave room for the campaign

The enjoyable part of character creation, for me, is reaching a point where I want to know what happens to this person next.

He should arrive trained, imperfect and recognisable. He can be confident about something he has barely tested. He can underestimate a skill other people will need. He can have a practical plan for home and absolutely no idea whether it will survive the year.

That is the beginning I want LifeP.A.T.H. to give us. Previous Activities, Training, History. A person, a record and plenty left to discover.