Out of the Mouth of Babes

Recently, while cleaning out the garage one weekend, one of my sons found a copy of the Deluxe Revised Recon® by Palladium Books. RECON was the first Role Playing Game that I was a game master for and spent countless hours hosting games.

The boy was interested. Having played many so-called console “RPG’s” and a year of D&D3.5 under his belt he felt he was ready to give a modern RPG a try. So I flipped through the book to brush up on the rules then set about looking for ideas for a few missions to like together for a campaign.

RECON is a violent game that doesn’t forgive mistakes easy, just as the real Viet Nam was. Saturday night the players found that out when they became bait for a NVA sniper team.

One of the things I noticed was how much more attention the boy is paying to history in general and Viet Nam specifically. After viewing a few shows on the Military Channel and some research he did on the internet he pointed out to me that every time the military was allowed to do the job such as Line Backer II strikes that North Viet Nam was almost beaten and had the US just pushed we could have won. He then asked why are we not allowing the Military to fight a real war in Iraq. All I could offer was that he asked a good question.