Paramilitary Training

[Hell knight]

Hello i am working on a session for my rifts campaign , Mutoid uprising but i am looking for a paramilitary or militia type occ . Or is the Merc occ the best way to go for what i am looking for.

[Nekira Sudacne]

The best Paramilitary OCC I can think of as a baseline is actually the ISS Peacekeeper OCC in Coalition war Campaign. They are not regular soldigers, they use surplus old army equipment and gear, and they are part cop but mostly in the SWAT sense, first response against any supernatural (or non supernatural) threat that's detected before the regular Dead Boys can be deployed. They're basically the definition of a Paramilitary organization. And the skillset represents they are only lightly trained in combat but mostly civilians with a more investigative bent. Just swap out the Coalition gear for generic Northern Gun light-medium armor and weapons and you can have the OCC work as the local paramilitary anywhere in North America.

After all, in Rifts, especially in smaller city states, there won't be the money to afford an abundance of Megadamage armor and weapons, so the Militia/Paramilitary is by default going to double as the local law enforcement whenever there's an MDC problem to deal with.

[Hell knight]

Thank you very much .

[Colonel_Tetsuya]

I think there's a cop OCC in NG books too, that would probably work.

[Pepsi Jedi]

Yeah I was going to point out the cops in the NG books. If memory serves they have a few different MOS type things. "Normal cop/Swat/ medic" but it's been a while.

[eliakon]

In the Dead Reign and Systems Failure books you have some OCCs for Militia Members and Gun Nut hoarders and stuff if that helps

[Hell knight]

In the Dead Reign and Systems Failure books you have some OCCs for Militia Members and Gun Nut hoarders and stuff if that helps

Thank you very much totally for got those. and thanks to every one else .

[RockJock]

The first Triax/NGR book also has a Police OCC geared towards civild defense. If you are looking at other books/settings for inspiration there are many in the Master Saga Robotech book.

[Nekira Sudacne]

I think I should note that while Militia and Paramilitary double as law enforcement when necessary, the reverse is not usually true. Regular police O.C.C.'s are not trained as paramilitary but purely civilian affairs, even if they sometimes have mega damage gear issued, their training is purely in the Peacekeeper role. While a Militia is for city defence first, stopping a rampaging burster second. It's not just the lack of military style skills, their basic outlook and training will be very different. They'll act differently. SWAT may be a bit closer, at least they'll be better at unit scale tactics. but it's still a very different oreintation.

A Sheriff and his deputies might be able to fight off a band of disorganized raiders, but they won't be much good at aginst any organized military force. A militia is a poor substitue for a professional army, but they at least know enough dicipline and stratagy to not simply get run over the way a military does to police forces and can even make life difficult for an invading army, if not win if they happen to have a sufficent numerical advantage or some other edge the attackers were not expecting.

(In a prolonged fight, a professional army will almost always come out on top barring the general making some kind of blunder, which can happen, but a strong and dicplined militia can make the effort costly enough that the attacker may decide the price of victory is not worth paying, which is the usual goal)

But you've likely never heard of a single case where the police tried to muster a defence of the city on their own. Sometimes the police were also the milita, or part of it, but cops on their own will generally never try to stop a serious attack by an enemy army. It'd be suicidal to try, they litterally are not trained in what to do or how to do it. the entire mindset is wrong. At most individuals officers may take off the uniform and become Gurilla's, but that is in and of itself yet another thing. Some militias are trained in gurilla tactics, some are not.

After all, if police were also paramilitary, we'd just call paramilitaries police forces and countries wouldn't need seperate paramilitary law enforcement divisons.

I used ISS Peacekeeper as an example because they're a police force that's explicitly paramilitary in nature. Most police OCC's are not.

[RockJock]

I agree with what Nekira is saying, but I also put the NGR Police OCC I mentioned into the same grouping as the ISS. A military/paramilitary organization that does law enforcement.

The NGR Police OCC has Power Armor, works as a cop/investigator, and is consider "military". A human pick pocket or vandal gets sent to a civilian court, a D-Bee doing the same crime may easily be thrown into the military side of the court system. All of this is basically in the OCC description.

[eliakon]

One issue is that a lot of "police" in Rifts would be considered para-military police forces in our world.
Which makes sense really.
When your lawbreakers are likely to be rocking battle armor, energy weapons, magic items or be demons and dragons... then you need police that are up to the task.
Thus they get training in things that we wouldn't bother training our local police for.
Think of them more as military MPs or a one of the various other Para-Military forces (SWAT teams and Hostage Rescue teams are good examples from our world of para-military police)