[OOC] Sudden Payback

Happy New Year, everyone!

As it's the beginning of the month, you all get +5 XP. Feel free to spend it immediately if you wish, or to bank it for later use. Just drop me a line here to let me know what you're doing with it.

I'll bank mine

Same here.

Hoping we can do a bit of strategizing before our next turn for pc order. Whether it is better for the inside ppl or alley ppl to go first largely depends on which npc go when. I think it makes sense for either Hank to go first in the alley (I bet your chain will do more dmg than my knee) or for Max to go first inside to keep shaking the goons loose. What do you guys think?

If the baddies inside can fall off that would be fantastic. Kind of a tough situation since all the goons have consecutive initiative.

Also banking the xp.

Just to clarify the shake-the-rope strategy: There are no hard-and-fast rules for such a thing, so I decided that each uncanceled success equalled one minion taking a tumble. At medium-range height, that's likely going to equate to an insta-kill per minion. With that in mind, Max could certainly take another go at a Hard (PPP) Athletics check to shake another few loose. There are six up there (two groups of three).

That sounds like a really good next turn to me. Insta-killing the minions on the roof before they come in will likely be more effective than either the chain or kneeing in the alleyway.

I was having serious second thoughts about another chain strike. The three automatic setbacks make that much less tempting, so I was considering trying a Takedown.

Bob, rules clarification question: the Takedown is an attack, but it's a grappling attack. Does that mean that a successful Takedown has the potential to activate Disorient/Knockdown weapon qualities given enough advantages, but you also automatically ensnare the opponent AND place yourself in an advantageous position?

I agree, shake the rope is probably our best next bet. I say take the back to backs, Max!

I'm more likely to try and get them to not cause any more property damage and just stop. Mr M is probably going to go full Dark mode and grab them by the spine for trashing his place. XD

Good question. From what I understand, and from what the author of the "Ready... Fight!" supplement has said, it sounds like you can use a Brawl (Grappling) attack in two ways. The first just uses the standard difficulty of Average (PP) for melee combat, but it doesn't let you get a superior position and any of that kind of stuff. You'd have to get enough Advantage to activate the various weapon qualities (Knockdown, Ensnare), and you'd need to use one maneuver to Prepare the attack.

The second way is to try to throw the guys and maintain your position over them. This version would use the grappling rules, meaning your attack would be resisted by their Brawl (Grappling) skill. (In this case, that would be Hard [PPP], but since there are three of them, I think two setbacks would apply). If you succeed, you can get an advantageous position and so on.

So, yeah -- grappling isn't ideal for minion groups, which is why a striking attack might come in handy.

Makes sense. That's cool that they're two separate types of attacks. It actually makes the Takedown more useful against minions, because it's not as cripplingly difficult. But it's also better for an early-fight move to make effective use of disorient and Knockdown.

I think any of the inside folks make sense to take the top of the order slot

Hey, folks! I wanted to touch base about the roles I see fighting and mortality playing in this game. The Medicine checks we just did were to bring a Minion back to consciousness so that you could interrogate him about the attack (who ordered it, what the goals were, etc.). Since we're going for a 90s Action Movie / 90s Beat-em-Up Game feel here, the fuller humanity of your enemies isn't really part of the scope as I envisioned it. Rather, Butt-Kicking and Thwarting Bad Guys are.

With that in mind, my intention with having the minion die wasn't to shock anyone or to bring this game out of that Action territory, but rather to give a natural consequence to a pair of failed Medicine checks that generated Threat. If that was a miscalculation, I apologize! (Clearly, one of you may want to invest in Medicine, or you need to make a friend like Nurse Claire from the Marvel Netflix shows!)

With all that in mind, note that if your character(s) are adverse to killing, Brawl checks can always be targeted versus Strain instead of Wounds and therefore be considered non-lethal. With Minions and Rivals, there's little distinction, since these types of enemies don't have a separate Strain Threshold. But for Nemeses, you can always declare that you're targeting Strain and using non-lethal means.

Finally, if a situation ever comes up where you think you'll want to interrogate an enemy after a battle, that's where you Grapplers come in. If you can get an enemy to submit through opposed Grappling checks, you'll avoid the Medicine check altogether. In my mind, an enemy felled by a Striking attack is probably unconscious and will need to be revived.

Let me know if you have different expectations on any of that.

No worries as a player man I was trying to play the scene. Maybe I should put more add some inner monologue.

With the meta, at least to me, Max is probably younger than most since he's a Student (which is why there's a lots of Misters and Ma'am tossed out). So if asked someone died and he couldn't stop it, didn't matter if they did bad or good it was a needless death (Looking at Medicine Ranks and possibly Apothecary if it carries over to try and rectify that). The heavy moment would be he thinks Collisto might have accidentally killed a man out of combat. Should he say something about that? Which leads to where Max's slumped now. No mood brought down for me personally but all the old hats might realize after words younger people look up to them and their actions hold definition and meaning.

Might even lead to Max looking for a custom item 'Smelling Salts' if we don't have something in system/lore to bring someone around 'safely'.

Flip side yall realize Max might have realized he just killed several rope a dope thugs too...

Marv'll stick around to be treated for his concussion and maybe a bit of wound heal if he can get it. He has enough strain that he's not totally against going out again tonight, but he would definitely be stronger with a good night's sleep.

Ditto for Hank.

We've got a few leads:
1. Ivanovich in the Sticks
2. Go to the warehouse district (that may not even help if they're expecting Lance)
3. The map of the drive-in
4. Harry's Holiday Haven (a bit of a weak lead)

I don't see any reason that we'd need to hunt any of them down tonight, other than it being a bit more badass to do so in the middle of the night.

My vote would be the drive-in first, in case there's another attack planned for there that we could prevent. But I'm open to other suggestions as well.

That description makes perfect sense, Remnant. It's like one of those scenes in a martial-arts film where one of the characters realizes the power they wield for the first time and has a reckoning. Glad we cleared all that up.

Regarding leads: There's the partial plate, too.

Appreciate the list, I'm eyeing up the drive-in followed by Ivanovich.

In a game with a lot of delightful posts, this one is probably my favorite.

I like the drive-in as a first point of investigation as well, especially since we don't have a specific warehouse to sneak into and do some poking around. I think going straight to Ivanovich tips our hand a bit early and maybe puts Lance in danger. It might be interesting to find out what our characters know about the drive in, or if we know somebody who knows about the drive in. I don't have any ranks in any knowledge skills but maybe somebody knows a little something about the city?

We could always go buy some Lance masks as Harry's and show up to the warehouse doing our best impersonations (kidding, but would also be hilarious in a comedy-action movie)